Leah Greenblatt

The interviews are their own historical document, though it's the visceral thrill of being inside all those archival clips — the flick of Simone's wrist, an ecstatic face in the crowd — that makes Summer of Soul comes most fully alive, somehow both as fresh as yesterday and as far away as the moon.

There’s almost no single moment in Portrait of a Lady on Fire that couldn’t be captured, mounted, and hung on a wall as high art. That’s how visually ravishing it is to experience writer-director Céline Sciamma’s arthouse swoon of movie — winner of both the Queer Palm and Best Screenplay at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

Courtenay is a gruff and gratifyingly knotty presence, but in the end it’s Rampling’s movie. In a quiet, beautifully calibrated performance completely stripped of actressy tricks, she’s a revelation.

It all becomes a sort of muddle for a while midway, one that’s not nearly as compelling as the acting itself, which is largely phenomenal, frequently surprising, and often more than a little bit heartbreaking.

It’s real life, heartbreaking and sublime.

Though it may not be an easy movie to watch, or even a particularly original one — there’s still Kramer vs. Kramer, after all — Marriage still feels like something special on the screen: a movie that somehow makes its intimacy seem like a radical act, one messy, heart-wrecking moment at a time.

Sciamma's elegant, melancholy fable captures something lovely and ineffable: a brief glimpse into life's great mystery.

Gerwig doesn’t trap her protagonist in the oblivious underage bubble that most coming-of-age dramedies inhabit; Lady Bird’s parents, played by Tracy Letts and Laurie Metcalf, are fully formed humans with their own deep flaws and vulnerabilities.

Lee's hand in all this seems to be a light one; aside from his intimate but unobtrusive camerawork, the show appears essentially unaltered from the live performance.

Kore-eda is working up to something else, steering the story he’s built so carefully toward an utterly unexpected detour. As much of what we think we know unravels, the film becomes not just an enjoyable, intermittently poignant portrait of imperfect people but a profound meditation on the meaning of family.

The movie belongs to Blanchett, in a turn so exacting and enormous that it feels less like a performance than a full-body possession.

The story begins to feel more like a series of strung-together anecdotes: an intriguing project, incomplete.

The story casts a spell, and Swinton Byrne is a milky, beguiling presence; it’s almost as if you’re watching her become a person in real time.

It tells a story as urgent and beautifully human as almost anything on screen this year.

If Gerwig’s woke Women-hood verges on anachronism, though, it also feels fully loyal to the spirit of Alcott, a woman always well ahead of her time. And like a sort of balm too, for an era when the novel’s long-held values — courage, kindness, strength in vulnerability — still feel a lot further away than they should.

Worst has no shortage of gorgeous-people problems — more than enough, in fact, to fill 12 cinematic "chapters" — but it vibrates with real life, a film so fresh and untethered to rom-com cliché it might actually reshape the idea of what movies like this can be.

Licorice (the title, never once mentioned or explained, remains a happy non sequitur) is a love letter to an era, and more than that a feeling: a tender, funny ramble forged in all the hope and absurdity of adolescence, one wild poly-blend rumpus at a time.

A bittersweet comic absurdity, told in the rhythms of real life.

Blue's raw portrayal of infatuation and heartbreak is both devastating and sublime. It's unforgettable.

Nothing in Souvenir Part II is obvious; one could argue it's even obtuse to the point of excluding most casual moviegoers. But surrendering to Hogg's slow alchemy still feels like a rare treat: a beguilingly meta portrait of the artist as a young woman learning to find herself not just in the mirror of others, but in her own hand behind the camera.

Wang’s story outline shares the familiar contours of other immigrant tales: the Babel tower of half-spoken languages; the ties that bind across oceans, and the physical and cultural gaps that can still break them. But Farewell also has the freshness of her own distinct voice, a dry humor and low-key melancholy that infuses even the most quotidian scenes.

Unless you're one of the few who's read Thomas Savage's 1967 book of the same name, on which the script is based, there's rarely a moment that doesn't feel racked with the queasy, thrilling promise of sudden violence or epiphany.

Like a sturdier Mr. Rogers who just happens to prefer red anoraks to cardigans, Dick comes off as both a kind of holy sage and an extremely good sport — a man whose gentle, pure-hearted exuberance swells to fill nearly every frame.

With its English subtitles and small-scale epiphanies, Girl is the kind of quiet film that could easily get lost in a noisy season; lean in anyway, and listen.

Despite the rich settings and crowded cast, the film can’t help feeling a little airless too: These players aren’t history’s masterminds, they’re wasps trapped in a jar, bumbling against the glass in sting-or-be-stung chaos.

A tar-black comedy so caustic it nearly burns a hole in the screen, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri banks a lot on the gale force of Frances McDormand, and nearly pulls it off.

It’s Cooper, in his directing debut, who ultimately has to carry the film from both sides.

The skillfulness of the telling, paradoxically, can make The Father feel at times almost too painful to sit through; as the story shifts elliptically in and out of time, Anthony's losses become our own.