K. Austin Collins

Aftersun, which Wells also wrote, is for the most part a thorough depiction of a brief period in these two peoples’ lives. But its emotional canvas is far more encompassing than this implies.

Amazing Grace is a rare object: something truly mythical, something we’d only ever told stories about, that having finally arrived somehow lives up to its name. That’s saying something. The film is just as exhausting and beautiful as the recording sessions it documents, just as overflowing with those inexplicable qualities—that unquantified ability to reach directly into the soul that only the greatest art approaches.

Like the late Jonathan Demme, director of Stop Making Sense, Lee is here not just to document but to heighten. There are close-ups on Byrne’s face, his eyes, even his feet; dynamic roving views from onstage and off; a keen awareness of the audience. And, of course, there’s the thrill of seeing people standing up in their seats, clapping along, silhouetted against Byrne’s bright, inviting presence onstage. All of it lends a sense of alive-ness to this live performance.

Uncut Gems is a movie that lives in the gut, where shit makes a name for itself, where anxiety, folly, and instinct are borne out without morality or restriction.

Perhaps the best thing that can be said about Tár is that it is far more than a mere vehicle for one showboating performance. And even if it were, with a performance like this, who would mind?

Diop’s direction of Saint Omer is spare in style but dense in emotional intelligence, heavy with its own inquiries.

What distinguishes this documentary from other movies about mass incarceration is the novelty with which Bradley subverts the mass and trains our eye, frequently literally, on the particular.

It manages to be about a great many things—but above all, it’s a movie about two men, two bodies, and the masculine, economic codes of the West. Which, in retrospect, feel so much more moveable and introspective than our usual depictions of the period allow.

There’s something stealthy in its awareness, in the ways it accrues crumbs of insight and observation and dispenses them throughout the narrative without us even noticing. You emerge from the movie with an enriched, nearly felt sense of the Mangrove as a place, not just as a symbol.

The sense of enclosure, of these two lovers pushed into discomfiting, dangerous proximity when we see them together, is immediately striking. But so is the sense that the director has squeezed all the gritty, more specific sense of conflict out of his movie.

In a world full of images—full of people recording themselves and their friends doing dumb shit, or documenting attractive versions of themselves—Bing’s movie stands out for the complexity of its integrity, and its ability to reveal his own experiences empathically.

The movie is a film-length argument against our usual, overly personified, cutesy depictions of animals. It is also, not incidentally, a plea to stop eating them.

Martel’s sensibility is as oblique as it is sensitive, confounding as it is grimly humorous. It’s a movie that seems constantly to be spilling the secrets of this world, but without fanfare—there’s an unsettling banality to it all.

For all its playfulness, it’s the real, stinging, joyful, inconvenient reality of life that Dick Johnson Is Dead gives us. It’s a committed act of preservation: a looping, reeling, repeatable act of love.

The ending, depending on you, may come off as either too neat or appropriately revelatory. But the film’s emotions have a stark, memorable sheen.

What materializes isn’t a fresh way of understanding this event, but rather a new set of images for telling the same story. This is obviously the wiser choice, commercially; artistically, it proves frustrating, even as this method has its revelations.

What Jenkins gets most right—what astonishes me the most about this film—is Baldwin’s vast affection for the broad varieties of black life. It’s one of the signature lessons of Baldwin’s work that blackness contains multitudes.

The movie makes you wish you were there. Lights darkened, dots and rays and Reed flickering before us, we nearly are.

All That Breathes favors a poetic, almost dreamy style, filled with the kinds of ugly-beautiful images and thoughtfully dispatched voiceovers that can strip a narrative of outright propulsion in favor of mesmerizing us with ebbing ideas and moments of wonder. It occasionally strains. But the basic conflict at play, between the selflessness of these medics, the growing need for their work, and the utter folly of this mission — it can feel a little like standing in front of a moving train — gives it all an urgent undercurrent.

This movie’s primary strength is in Wilson’s words, his facility with ideas and symbols and attitudes, and what the actors do with all of the above. The movie, as a movie, has its limits. But Wilson’s material remains unbound.

With a single shot, Descendant ceases to be a story about the recovery of a ship. It rapidly morphs into something broader: a story about the land. Who owned it back in the 1800s, who owns it now, and what all of this means for everyone else.

One the feats of McQueen’s movie is that, by the end, the ability to read — proof of having been educated — is all the more powerful for seeming exceptional.

For all the majesty and naturalistic realism of its imagery, Nomadland is nevertheless full of sublime, uncanny details that lift it somewhat above the fray.

Happy as Lazzaro wouldn’t work nearly as well as it does if Tardiolo, whose innate openness and goodwill start to come off as the most surreal thing in a movie full of them, didn’t live up to the title. He’s the halo atop this film’s knotty, disheveled head.

Spider-Verse is a dreamy, funny, self-aware, visually explosive delight, with a sharper sense of humor than the sophomoric, wearying Deadpool, a keener, more kinetic sense of action than most of the live-action Avengers films (save maybe Ant-Man), and richer ideas than most of the visually muddy, self-serious DC films we’ve gotten to date.

The Tragedy of Macbeth is Joel’s first outing on his own but, in this regard, he’s made a movie that suits the broader world of his work. That he’s done so most cogently through a character most other approaches to this play have barely noticed only makes it that much more thrilling.

It’s interested in the continuum between then and now—and in the ways our own knowledge of community, and of ourselves in the world, can determine how we embody the lives of others. It’s the consummate act of empathy: restoring the past by bringing it to bear, in a real way, on our own lives.

What comes across is the ease with which a person can disappear in plain sight, for obvious reasons, and a government—committed to its hateful pogrom—can simply shrug it off. And the world lets them get away with it—even despite documentaries like this.