Katie Walsh

After Tiller is not an important film just because of its political and cultural relevance, but because of its humane and compassionate approach to telling the stories of these doctors, their work and the women that they seek to help.

Dead Lover, in all its stinky, sexy, queer and grotesque glory, is one of the grossest and loveliest films about love I’ve ever seen. This one’s for the horny, hopeless goth inside all of us.

A film like Sing Sing is a rare, precious achievement — a cinematic work of unique empathy and hand-turned humanity, hewed from the heart, with rigorous attention paid to the creative process.

McCarthy is exceptional as the irascible Lee, and her skill in a dramatic role should be no surprise. Her performance is detailed, nuanced and subtly affecting, while Grant brings the relief as the tragicomic Jack, who showboats in circles around McCarthy, who's in the straight man role for a change.

This madcap mockumentary works beautifully because Gordon, Lieberman, Platt and Galvin take care to imbue this setting with a real sense of culture and place, populated with wonderfully eccentric characters.

The love story that is The Eight Mountains expresses this ineffable relationship between those who know us best and the places in which we find ourselves with a rough-hewed grace and profound knowingness.

A cinematic delicacy as rare as the truffle itself.

It is startling, and sometimes disturbing, but hits a place that is intensely human — bittersweet and bloody and beautiful at once, and unlike anything you’ve ever seen.

It is potentially the most culturally relevant film of the fall, masterfully made and one heck of an emotional roller coaster. From moment to moment Boys State veers from exciting to troubling to amusing, and it's never anything less than utterly riveting.

In only an hour and 24 minutes, Glass has crafted a film rich in history, reference, psychology, spirituality, style and even some gore, but it never overstays its welcome, recognizing that less is more.

A truly inspirational, emotional and profoundly moving film.

Simply put, Samsara tells the story of our world, but onscreen, it is so much more than that.

Though it’s dealing with difficult subject matter, the film teems with life throughout every funny, bittersweet, and wild moment, slapping a smile on your face that won’t go away and you don’t know why.

Fargeat delivers a macabre, funny, tragic, absurd and grotesque Grand Guignol of butts and guts; a bonkers and brutal “beauty horror” that elevates the genre to a hysterically unprecedented heights.

This film is an important historical record, and an important reminder of an event in American history that could have changed everything, that should have changed everything. There’s no reason why it still can’t. Newtown is a crucial reminder of that.

Not that it was ever in question, but 28 Years Later is an invigorating reminder that Boyle, as a technician of dizzying, daring cinematic style, has never lost his fastball, and he employs it to great effect emphasizing Spike’s visceral emotional experience.

Zola’s authorship and Bravo’s respect for her storytelling make Zola a wholly original experience. It’s a brutally honest account of sex work, often dangerous and infrequently sexy, punctuated with Zola’s one-liners, observations and recounting of laugh-out-loud moments.

Kill Me Please acknowledges the dark and riotous physical energy of teen girls in this tribute to slasher films and coming-of-age comedies that proves to be a new classic from first frame to last.

This gem of a film manages to draw together our questions about the universe and ourselves into one single adventure story that hits every emotional beat. It’s what Pixar does best, and “Elio” is another knockout, a quiet but determined shooting star that earns its place in the galaxy.

While Another Round inspects the varying effects of alcohol on daily life, it’s far from clinical. Waves of ebullience, love, humor and sorrow crash on top of each other, as anyone who’s ever been overserved can attest to. It isn’t prescriptive about drinking, and doesn’t seek to impart any message other than that life is hard, and sometimes dark, and sometimes ecstatically beautiful.

Park’s mastery of tone reflects his mastery of cinematic craft, which has only become more surgically refined in the past few years.

What a wonder that the film adaptation of Judy Blume’s beloved 1970 young adult novel Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is as lovely, heartfelt and, indeed, deeply radical as the original text.

It's a moving portrait of sisterhood, a celebration of a fierce femininity and a damning indictment of patriarchal systems that seek to destroy and control this spirit.

Hadaway’s previous career as a sound editor is all over this piece, as is her personal experience as a collegiate rower. She has crafted this film as catharsis, and like her protagonist’s journey, it’s both harrowing and triumphant.

Short Term 12 is a roller coaster of every emotion, managing to be both heartwarming and heartrending at once.

Crafted with care and a distinct point of view, Between the Temples is the kind of film that bears rewatching just because you want to spend more time with its idiosyncratic rhythm and energy. Singing in its own key, there might not be a more authentic and purely entertaining film this year.

The film strongly asserts Ronstadt’s rock ’n’ roll bona fides as a trailblazing and wildly successful solo female artist in the man’s world of late ’60s and early ’70s country rock.

What happens in Night of the Kings is a piece of traditional oration and impermanent art, significantly marked by both its temporal and improvisational qualities. It’s both a power struggle and a ritual practiced by the collective within a microcosm of society housed under the oppression of the state, and a powerful demonstration of the transporting, and liberating, power of narrative.