Justin Chang

This is a heartbreaker about mothers and daughters, the cruelty of repression and the slippery but revealing nature of performance. And to the end, it remains steadfast in its conviction that a woman’s truth and her beauty are never at odds.

A fastidiously grim ghost story that rattles the bones of the haunted-house genre and finds plenty of fresh (but not too bloody) meat.

Writer-director Sean Baker’s sun-scorched, street-level snapshot is a work of rueful, matter-of-fact insight and unapologetically wild humor that draws a motley collection of funny, sad and desperate individuals into its protagonists’ orbit.

One way to approach Spaceship Earth, Matt Wolf’s layered, absorbing and sympathetic new documentary, is as a madly inventive primer on responsible dystopian-hermetic living. But the film — which is being shown at drive-in theaters, in pop-up cityscape projections and on multiple streaming platforms — would make for fascinating viewing under any circumstances.

To some extent, Shirley delights in its own dissembling, but it also uses these complications to arrive at a place of startling truth. The sorcery in which Jackson claimed to dabble in real life finds a cinematic corollary in the movie’s bewitching late passages, which are by turns disorienting and illuminating.

Desplechin perfectly times the moment when drollery ends and anguish begins, and it’s that sense of vulnerability that lends the film an unexpected emotional force as it moves toward its return-home epilogue.

It’s marvelous to have Cronenberg back and to behold his undimmed, unparalleled skill at welding the formulations of horror and science fiction to the cinema of ideas.

[Hall] picks up on their contrasting energies, the way Negga eagerly draws the camera’s gaze while Thompson quietly deflects it. But what’s most striking about Hall’s direction is her visual acuity, her gift for composing images that are gorgeous, disorienting and strangely intuitive.

Faces Places turns out to be a road movie in more than a merely literal sense. It is at once a roving journey into environments we rarely see in cinema and an incomplete but invaluable map of Varda’s memories.

Malick, a Christian philosopher-poet whose meanings can often be vague and elusive, seems to have been stung into an uncharacteristically blunt response, a forceful denunciation of the complicity of church and state.

Saavedra is riveting as a servant whose unblinking focus on her routine masks a profound loneliness.

Shults’s approach craftily favors observation over exposition, and he proves as attentive to Krisha’s surroundings as he is to her inner life.

Till is more understatedly effective, and Deadwyler’s performance at its most powerful, when Chukwu resists and even undermines the template of the prestige biographical drama she only appears to be making.

Although informed by the busy workings of history, politics and personal affairs, Neruda proceeds like a light-footed chase thriller filtered through an episode of “The Twilight Zone,” by the end of which the audience is lost in a crazily spiraling meta-narrative. Who exactly is the star and author of that narrative is one of the film’s more enticing mysteries.

The brilliance of Beanpole is that it begins as the story of a collective horror, then becomes utterly, fascinatingly specific.

Maestro holds its contradictions in balance; it sees the complexity and the tragedy of Lenny and Felicia’s romance, and also its undeniable tenderness and passion.

George A. Romero shows 'em how it's done in Land of the Dead, resurrecting his legendary franchise with top-flight visuals, terrific genre smarts and tantalizing layers of implication.

Bleak, naturalistic and flawlessly acted, Graduation distills the mood and moral decay of a place whose gray skies and nondescript housing blocks feel like permanent reminders of its dark history.

It is hardly the fault of this breathless, incisive and thoroughly infuriating movie that it already feels a touch out of date. How could it not?

The geopolitical landscape has changed dramatically in the last few months since this sleek, smartly assembled and almost indecently entertaining movie premiered at the Sundance Film Festival (where it won two audience awards), and as a result, it can feel timely and outdated, relevant and redundant, disturbing and escapist all at once.

The invasion in this movie is neither an assault nor a threat; it’s an invitation to open doors and let fresh inspiration in.

Kawamura and Hirase seem to have perceived the immersive limitations of the movie medium—and, rather than fighting those limitations, adapted their story accordingly. What they’ve emerged with is the rare picture that feels at once true to and ultimately subversive of its source.

Perhaps it’s best to appreciate Demon not for what it implies but for what it simply and unmistakably is: A bravura testament to a talent silenced far too soon.

The individual stories that make up One Child Nation, the worthy winner of the Sundance Film Festival’s grand jury prize for U.S. documentaries, illuminate an entire history of institutional corruption, medical brutality and pervasive misogyny — a history that was both masked and advanced by a national propaganda campaign of near-Orwellian absurdity.

Mostly, Audiard leans assuredly on his actors, gently pushing each one toward a simple, ordinary, never-irrelevant question — what does your character want? — and coaxing forth an utterly unique answer.

The incisiveness of Hamaguchi’s ecological critique is matched by the vividness of his characters; you’ll remember the talking points, but also the faces of the people making them.

The Tragedy of Macbeth is an immaculate vision: coldly efficient, aesthetically faultless, splendidly acted. I do wish it had a bit more blood in it.

The beauty of Bening’s performance lies in those marvelously suggestive layers — all the delicate, tendril-like emotional possibilities that she manages to tuck into the margins of any given moment.

Writer-director Robert Eggers’ impressive debut feature walks a tricky line between disquieting ambiguity and full-bore supernatural horror, but leaves no doubt about the dangerously oppressive hold that Christianity exerted on some dark corners of the Puritan psyche.

Familiar Touch, its title perhaps a tacit acknowledgment of how well-worn this terrain is, illuminates its protagonist’s condition with uncommon concision and grace, and with few of the formal and narrative strategies we’ve come to expect.

This is a lyrical ode to the glories of summer and the collaborative joys of filmmaking, suffused with the hope that we will never be deprived of either for long.

Luca is about the thrill and the difficulty of living transparently — and the consolations that friendship, kindness and decency can provide against the forces of ignorance and violence.

Its achievement is predicated not on novelty, but on modesty — the way it manages, using little more than a terrific cast and a few shadowy, sparsely furnished rooms, to populate your mind’s eye with ominous visions.

Its title a sly reference to what distinguishes men from beasts, Staying Vertical hinges on the tension between primal instincts and socially proscribed behavior. Guiraudie isn’t just trying to decimate sexual taboos; he is also taking gently comic aim at the overly rigid roles into which people tend to lock themselves.

At a little over 90 minutes, Support the Girls has the brash trappings, if not the longevity, of a “Cheers”-style sitcom, and its generous humor is always in productive play with a tough, flinty realism.

In lieu of poetry, [Ozon] has composed an exemplary piece of prose: clear, direct and quietly illuminating. At the same time, you would hardly describe this movie as neutral or devoid of anger. On the contrary, its moral outrage is all the more pronounced for being so controlled.

A visually arresting, politically forceful melodrama from Pakistan.

La Flor, as sweeping and addictive as much of it is, doesn’t have the structural predictability that a more conventional serialized narrative does. It’s too freewheeling, too experimental, too eager to carve out fresh avenues of meaning. At a time when duration is no guarantee of depth, it’s the definition of a must-see.

If the film has a governing principle, it’s that love doesn’t take root in a vacuum, and its path is never perfectly straight.

Red Rocket is both a laser-focused character study and a scrappy, scrupulously observed portrait of a tight-knit community.

Not for the first time, the demonstrative cleverness of [Nolan's] storytelling can seem too precise, too hermetically sealed and engineered, for a sense of raw collective devastation to fully take hold. That might be a rare failing of this extraordinarily gripping and resonant movie, or it could be a minor mercy.

If the characters’ quandaries at times feel overly circumscribed, they’re also advanced with a bracing emotional directness, devoid of either cynicism or sentimentalism, that touches genuine chords of feeling over the course of the film’s fleet 130-minute running time.

The world of The Salesman isn’t quite as intricately imagined as some of its predecessors, and the story’s sleuthing element, while absorbing, often feels more narratively expedient than germane. But if the setup is creaky, the payoff, when it arrives, is a thing to behold.

A wise and impeccably controlled drama that finds Russian helmer Andrei Zvyagintsev in outstanding form.

As signaled by the hilarious visual gag that opens the story, In My Room is a mysterious and surprising movie about the frustration of the unseen and the poignancy of paths not taken.

The tension is rooted in psychology rather than gimmickry, and evinces a command of craft that feels old-fashioned in the most refreshing possible sense.

To call this movie timely would be both an understatement and a bit of a misnomer, since the battle for women’s bodily autonomy has never not been a timely issue. It might be more fitting to praise Happening for its urgency, not just because it arrives in American theaters under particularly fraught circumstances, but also because of the gut-clutching suspense and the wrenching intimacy that the director brings to the telling.

Anchored by a fine and flinty performance from Mia Wasikowska, director John Curran’s gorgeously rendered adventure saga succeeds not only in capturing the harshness and wild beauty of Davidson’s journey, but also in mapping a delicate interior pathway into the heart of this most atypical explorer.

The writer-director's typically eccentric sixth feature is a sustained immersion in a series of hypnotic moods and longueurs, an imposing picture that thrillingly and sometimes maddeningly refuses to conform to expectations.

This is cinema that pushes beyond the medium’s usual representational modes, beyond the observational qualities of neorealism or the interior states of psychological drama. Complex histories and unspoken emotions are distilled into a series of carefully composed tableaus, each one proceeding with slow, ceremonial deliberation.

The fascination and at times the frustration of her achievement is that she has drained away some of the story’s juiciest, most suspenseful elements.... There is compromise in all this narrative subtraction, but there is also purpose.

The film’s own style may feel more prosaic than the poetic, but it’s awfully irresistible prose; its most conventional element, a plaintively beautiful musical theme composed by Tommy Wai, is also its most emotionally effective. Yet Hui does infuse a wistful poetry into her filmmaking

The result is as grim and unyielding a depiction of the Holocaust as has yet been made on that cinematically overworked subject — a masterful exercise in narrative deprivation and sensory overload that recasts familiar horrors in daringly existential terms.

Gorgeously shot, lighted and scored, and acted by both leads with an incandescence that feels fully lived in, Cooper’s movie seduces you almost immediately. It doesn’t promise the shock of the new, but from the first frame it casts a spell, the kind that lets you know immediately that you’re in good hands.

Driveways, a movie that’s poignant now for reasons we doubtless wish it weren’t, shows us how unlikely people can come together under imperfect circumstances and fit together perfectly. It also shows us how fleeting that perfection can be.

It’s a film noir in much the same way that “Crimson Peak” was a horror movie: Feverishly and often magnificently overwrought, it treats its genre less as a template to be followed than a lavish funhouse in which to run amok. Its characters, tropes and archetypes, convincing enough on their own, take on even richer dimensions when placed alongside their antecedents.

Its most impressive achievement may be how easily it welds the mechanics of genre and the cinema of ideas. Garland's movie has its grisly flourishes, but unlike so many thrillers that preoccupy themselves with spectacles of death, it's more interested in pondering the strange, inextricable link between creation and destruction.

This queasily funny and suspenseful movie is more than a smirking exercise in ideological deck stacking, and to praise it for its political relevance would be to understate its subtlety and specificity.

Scene by scene, it pulls us into a world that coheres not just through plotting and dialogue, but through the sharp rhythms of Benjamin Rodriguez Jr.’s editing, the hard shimmer of Alexander Dynan’s images and the humdrum precision of Ashley Fenton’s production design.

The royal family’s travails have long been likened to that of a soap opera, but Spencer, even as it conjures the emotional extravagance of a first-rate melodrama, refuses to be hemmed in. It’s a historical fantasia, a claustrophobic thriller and a dark comedy of manners, all poised on a knife’s edge between tabloid trash and high art.

The story floats along like an intoxicating cloud of vice — an effect that Wood achieves with a throbbing, surging soundtrack and an alternately propulsive and hypnotic sense of camera movement. By the time the sensory rush dissipates and the hangover sets in, only Wood’s sharply observant social critique remains.

Cummings’ achievement is too singular to be reduced to a simple political reading; and in much the same way, Jim’s hard-won final scene is too ambiguous to be read as either celebration or damnation. If, by that point, there’s even any meaningful difference.

The movie may, in the end, frustrate your desire for straight-up thrills and clear answers, but its irresolution is masterful — sincere, generous and entirely appropriate to the deeply searching story it has to tell.

No filmmaker better understands the revelatory properties of small talk and soju, and few could make the art of repetition seem so rife with possibilities.

The ability to pull off that kind of moral reversal, to draw you into an almost Hitchcockian complicity with characters at their lowest ebb, is one of Farhadi’s signature strengths as a storyteller.

From first frame to last, the filmmaking exudes intelligence and control, with none of the chilly emotional distance those qualities can imply. Form and content are in near-perfect balance.

A sensationally entertaining old-school freakout and one of the smartest, most viscerally effective thrillers in recent memory.

The film’s refusal to tie up loose ends has already inspired comparisons to Bong Joon Ho’s “Memories of Murder” and David Fincher’s “Zodiac,” two of modern cinema’s great cold-case classics. Moll’s movie doesn’t leave behind the same deep, implacable chill of those earlier works, but its lingering rage and sorrow are no less easy to wave aside.

As much as Enyedi enjoys positioning her camera among the branches, Silent Friend is ultimately too invested in the power of human faces and bodies to adopt a purely plant-centric perspective; what it achieves is more of a hybrid gaze, which encourages us to marvel at creation in all its forms.

Riveting in its slow and steady accretion of details, its penetrating and richly textured gaze, A Woman’s Life is a bracing reminder that our experiences are often shaped less by what we achieve than by what we endure.

The Berlin-born director Mascha Schilinski, who wrote the screenplay with Louise Peter, is a bit of a prankster herself. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a filmmaker wield the tools of her craft with such an ingenious and committed sense of mischief.

Never one to shy away from unlikely sources of comedy, David O. Russell tackles mental illness, marital failure and the curative powers of football with bracingly sharp and satisfying results in Silver Linings Playbook.

Amusingly predicated on the romantic possibilities of phone sex, Easier With Practice pushes past its titillating premise to become a quietly provocative love story about emotionally stunted manhood and the risks some guys will take to connect.

With City Hall, his 45th feature, he [Wiseman] has composed another epic from a series of intricate, carefully arranged miniatures, a four-and-a-half-hour sprawl of a movie that will leave you admiring its agility and concision.