Lindsey Bahr

It’s not trying to pretend that it’s not exploitative on some level; that might even be the point. And anyway, you might be surprised just how quickly you commit to this once-in-a-lifetime ride.

It’s a tall task to follow up a smash like “The Worst Person in the World,” but “Sentimental Value” rises to the occasion: Mature, sharp, bittersweet and maybe even a little hopeful.

There is a precise sensation of out-of-body powerlessness and comic absurdity throughout that can only be described as dream-like. And the overall experience is a meditative and powerful one.

My Father’s Shadow is a gem, a deeply felt memory piece and vibrant portrait of Nigeria in 1993.

While it might not be a conventional history lesson, it is a necessary and utterly urgent one.

The film is a reminder of the transcendent power of cinema, even, and perhaps especially, when not all that much is happening.

The threads do come together, but it requires a bit of patience and giving yourself over to the film, which is both formally and emotionally eye-opening. Adapting great literature can sometimes send filmmakers running towards the conventional; Thank goodness Ross charted his own path instead.

The Ballad of Wallis Island is the kind movie that makes it all look so easy — filmmaking, performance, mood, chemistry. It’s not going to dominate any cultural conversations, and probably won’t go the awards route, but it’ll touch your soul if you let it.

That Anderson can still excitingly tell a new story within the structure of his unique visual language that we’ve gotten to know so well is just a testament to his incandescent genius. We don’t deserve Wes Anderson, but we should be eternally grateful he doesn’t seem to mind.

Maiden is simply magnificent storytelling and a must-see for all ages and genders.

Minari could not be more personal. Filmmaker Lee Isaac Chung based the film on his own childhood in the 1980s, when his Korean American parents moved to Arkansas to start a farm. And it’s the specificity of this delicate tale that makes it so universal and so great.

Women Talking is not melodramatic or desperate or exploitative. It is astute and urgent and may just help those previously unable to find words or even coherent feelings for their own traumatic experiences. And hopefully it might just inspire more works of wild female imagination.

Young fathers, especially the single sort, don’t get a lot of love from the movies and “Aftersun” is partly an ode to that very specific, very sweet bond between father and pre-teen daughter that both kind of understand will change into something else soon.

Cuaron is content to take his time with Roma, allowing the camera to linger on his subjects and the frustrating banalities of ordinary, everyday life that sneak up on you with poetic significance as the film goes on

Never Rarely Sometimes Always isn’t a flashy movie, but that’s part of its unnerving power. With her empathetic camera and transcendent storytelling, Hittman elevates their story — so ordinary-seeming on the page — to a great lyrical odyssey.

It’s simply telling a story about a man behind so many of our movie memories and making a new one in the process. And it is, without a doubt one, of the year’s very best.

All of the acting is terrific and so naturalistic that it’s easy to forget that these are actors performing lines that they’ve memorized in front of a camera.

The Banshees of Inisherin is a rich, soulful journey, full of agony, dry Irish wit and big, haunting questions. If it’s answers you’re looking for, however, you’re not going to find them on Inisherin.

There is a refreshing honesty in this script, penned by Trier and his longtime collaborator Eskil Vogt, that engages with nuance and the impossible complexities of life in a way that most “rom-coms” avoid like the plague.

And though the performances are riveting — standouts include Mahalia Jackson and Mavis Staples belting out Take My Hand, Precious Lord and the Edwin Hawkins Singers’ O Happy Day — it’s the shots of the all-ages crowd that makes this film come alive, with the vibrant fashions, the incredible faces, the excitement, the boredom and the humanity of it all packed into every frame.

This film is a small miracle and a uniquely meditative experience.

Sciamma is able to bring to life essential truths of what it is like to be that strange age and the sometimes frightening, sometimes wonderful vastness of a limitless imagination. And she even does it without a background score to manipulate our tear ducts.

The film is a heady, gentle and emotional journey, but Wang also packs the frame with layered conversation and funny background action. She makes the family dynamics feel universally familiar while also presenting an authentic portrait of China and Chinese families.

Marriage Story is such a perfect blend of writing, unflashy direction, spot on performances and score (by Randy Newman) that you hardly even notice all the individual ingredients making up the whole. Its triumph is that it just feels like life.

Wildlife isn’t just a great first film, it’s a great film.

Anatomy of a Fall may not be a film with many concrete answers, ultimately, but the truths it uncovers are irrefutable.

Hanks is such an obvious choice to play someone as beloved as Fred Rogers that his performance is something that could be in danger of being taken for granted or overlooked. He just makes it all look so easy — the almost uncomfortably slow way that he speaks. But it’s a testament to Hanks that you can’t “see” the work. But much like Fred Rogers, you don’t have to understand it to be moved.

As in Lord and Miller’s animated movies, their tone and pace remain singular. Project Hail Mary might blow past a two-hour runtime and yet there’s rarely a dull moment with all the problem-solving, earnest irreverence and unabashed commitment to imbuing life and wit into every molecule of the story. Daniel Pemberton’s unusual, buoyant score and Joel Negron’s sharp editing are key.

Harrowing, but with a wry humor, and utterly transporting, Paul Schrader has synthesized his complex religious upbringing with modern anxieties into a trenchant portrait of tormented souls in First Reformed.

Triangle of Sadness, which clocks in at almost two and a half hours, is at its sharpest before the symphony of bodily fluids and survival plots arrive.

Catherine Called Birdy is an unabashed delight for everyone. It just might run a little deeper for a certain age group.

Close is a crushing story of grief told with grace by Belgian director Lukas Dhont.

Like the infectious and haunting needle drops, from Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby” to local hits of the time, “The Secret Agent” is the best kind of personal film, imbued with so many things that Mendonça Filho loves, both resurrection and elegy.

It’s a pressure cooker and a wonderful showcase for three talented actors.

As in any Sorkin joint there are at least three lines of dialogue that might make your eyes roll into the back of your head and your body produce an involuntary groan so extended that you will likely have to rewind. But it just goes to show how good the rest of it is that a few clunkers could stick out that much.

Conclave is sure to ruffle some Catholic feathers — provocation is in its DNA. But for the rest of us, this juicy, smartly crafted thriller, is simply a great watch.

Payne, working with a sharp script written by David Hemingston, keeps The Holdovers grounded and real. Even absent your own memories of smoking indoors or handsewn outerwear, this is the kind of thoughtful, precisely constructed movie where you can almost taste the cigarette smoke and feel your fingers numbing through drafty wool mittens.

Thompson is truly better than ever and brings to life a complex and evolving person with humor, grace and a sharp edge. McCormack, meanwhile, is a star in the making. And together, the two are magnetic in this wonderfully adult film that is funny, sad, awkward, empowering and illuminating.

It’s pretty amazing just how compelling this is for being so simple, but it allows the viewer to really get wrapped up in the minutiae of it all: The performance, the landscape, the minor triumphs and major setbacks.

Brooklyn is a story for anyone who has ever left home. It’s a story for those who’ve waffled in indecision, for those forming their identities and forging their own paths. It’s a story awash in muted pastel nostalgia about family and love and ambition and heritage and goodbyes. And it’s one of the loveliest films to grace cinemas this year.

Kids deserve movies that are made on the biggest possible canvas. “How to Train Your Dragon” is one that’s worth the trip to the theater. It might just spark some young imaginations, whether it’s to go back and read the books or dream up their own worlds.

This is not a movie that will leave you feeling especially warm and fuzzy – it is often devastating. But it’s also bursting with hope for the future in this deeply human story of how one woman decided to devote her life to ensuring that her son’s would be brighter.

It’s a worthy story even without the coda of the fight for their civil rights. You never know where empowerment might stem from: Sometimes, it’s a hippie camp in the Catskills.

Based on Caitlin Moran’s semibiographical novel, How to Build A Girl is a wickedly funny, sweet and vibrantly told coming-of-age story that feels like a teen classic in the making.

There’s nothing terribly interesting about the way it’s told, it’s just a straightforward underdog story with a big beating heart.

It’s an Errol Morris film, right down to the Philip Glass score. And while the Interrotron and the reenactments might not be the revolutionary storytelling devices they once were, they’re almost comforting at this point and no less effective at creating a mood and an emotional experience around a sharp conversation.

Nyoni and her cinematographer David Gallego make this a transportive, stylish and unforgettable experience that powerfully transcends the specifics of its setting, while also taking audiences into an culture that’s likely unfamiliar.

For as naturalistic and real as The Hate U Give is, it goes off the rails just a little bit at the climax to make its grand point about the effect of this kind of climate on innocents, but there is too much heart here to really nitpick at a little hyperbole.

In this little microcosm you see not only a portrait of some serious-minded youths, but how their world views, morals and political beliefs have been molded by what’s happening in the country. And it manages to be both hopeful and bleak about our political present and future.

Challengers is a drama, but a funny and self-aware one. It doesn’t take itself very seriously and has a lot of fun with its characters, all three of which are anti-heroes in a way.

A quick-witted and lively debut.

In some ways “The Dig” feels like its own artifact too, like a lost Anthony Minghella film made 30 years ago and buried until now.

Asteroid City, with its sprawling cast, beautiful hues, mumbled jokes, box-within-a-box setup, references that only the 80+ crowd may truly get and retro-cool soundtrack, actually makes you feel things even if it can’t quite make sense of itself.

A Star Is Born, is simply terrific — a big-scale cinematic delight that will have the masses singing, swooning and sobbing along with it.

Hard Truths runs just 97 minutes, but it’s the kind of film and character that will stay with you long after — especially and most importantly when you find yourself having a Pansy kind of day.

It is a powerful and artistic interpretation of an academic book that was anything but an obvious candidate for a narrative feature.

Ultimately, “Sundown” is more of a spiritual sister to “Melancholia” with shades of “Somewhere." It is a portrait of a body whose soul has long since departed.

It’s a testament to the actors and director that it remains riveting throughout.

It is simply terrific — an understated but smartly told crowd-pleaser about the legendary comedy duo in their last act, with wonderful production value, a sharp and surprisingly poignant script and brilliant performances from John C. Reilly, as Oliver Hardy, and Steve Coogan, as Stan Laurel.

If there is a big studio movie that’s more generally crowd-pleasing than Green Book this season, I have yet to find it.

Gray does a wonderful job painting a portrait of a moment of cultural upheaval through these two boys, their opportunities, their support systems (or lack thereof) and how it was an origin of sorts for the rot that festers today.

It is charming, genuinely funny and a breeze to watch.

Somehow, amid all the lighthearted anarchy, “Hoppers” manages to pull a few emotional strings too. After the heavy-handed “Elio” misfire, “Hoppers” might still feel fairly distant from the heights of peak Pixar; It’s also a big, joyful leap in the right direction.

Tuesday is ultimately a cathartic affair, whether death is top of mind at the moment or not. And it announces the arrival of a daring filmmaker worth following.

Samberg is predictably charming and funny here. But it’s Milioti, who may be best known at this point as “The Mother” from “How I Met Your Mother” or “that girl who was in that one ‘Black Mirror’ episode,” who is the big revelation, finally getting the spotlight which has been a long time coming.

The whole film in fact is something of a knowing contradiction: A small epic with a superhero budget, using technology like the oft-discussed de-aging process not for vulgar show or gimmickry but to add real heart and grandeur to a film that is trying to grapple with the scope of a life.

On the Rocks is perhaps more conventional and modest than Coppola’s other films, but it’s no less entertaining or profound.

It is sickly hilarious to make a movie in which so much consensual sex is had, often so gleefully, that is not the least bit sexy. Though Bella Baxter’s insatiable libido might be her guiding light at first in Poor Things, sexual liberation (or “furious jumping,” as she calls it) is only part of this fantastical, anarchic journey to consciousness.

It’s a perfectly crafted cocktail of vision, talent and script that will leave your mind spinning for days.

Scandalous fun and camp are, you imagine, relatively easy with performers like this. But to give it a soul, too? It makes it monumental.

For all the freedom and exhibitionism and sexual liberation that might be projected on social media, teens are still teens and people are still people and things still happen, casually and in quietly catastrophic grey areas. These are truths that are conveyed powerfully in “How to Have Sex,” a stylish, assured and moving debut from writer-director Molly Manning Walker.

Nitpicks aside, Shazam! is just a lightning bolt of unexpected joy that is certainly worth your time and money.

Amin’s attempts to get to the West with his mother and brother are harrowing enough to give you an ulcer.

“Moonlight” is a hard act to follow, and while Beale Street might not quite reach the heights of Jenkins’ instant classic of a best picture-winner, it is its own kind of marvel, lovely, transcendent, heartbreaking and as smooth as its jazzy soundtrack.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years, from composer Terence Blanchard.

This should be a no-brainer for anyone who watched the saga unfold on television, but even those who weren’t glued to the screen in 2018 should seek it out. The Rescue is easily one of the best documentaries of the year.

Navalny is so taut and suspenseful you’d think John le Carré had left behind a secret manuscript that’s only just coming to light now.

Goldin might not have known it when she started photographing her LGBTQ friends, but her work has always been about looking at the so-called fringe cultures in society, about showing the problems that the masses would rather just ignore and making them so urgent that you can’t look away anymore.

Everyone knows this story and how it turns out. But “Cyrano” does a wonderful job of letting you cling to the hope that it might go differently, as agonizing as it might be.

It might not be masterpiece material, but it has a soul and is an undeniably beautiful, worthwhile addition to the canon.

Although the event and aftermath were widely, exhaustively covered, I don’t think I’m the only one who lost the thread early. This not knowing is part of what makes Ryan White’s extraordinary documentary Assassins, about the trial of the two young women, so compulsively compelling.

Honey Boy will break your heart. It hardly matters if you’ve never given a second thought to the circumstances of Shia LaBeouf’s life, his childhood or his rocky early adult years. But this is the kind of universally moving work that can only emerge from something immensely specific and personal.

There is something comforting about the fact that we are capable of intense, collective cultural whiplash. That “who cares?” can turn to uncynical amazement in an instant. Is that the magic of the movies? Of continuing to push the bounds of the big screen experience? Of betting big on weird-sounding stories about giant blue environmentalists instead of superheroes every so often? Maybe it’s just the magic of James Cameron.

It’s a subtle, affecting portrait of relapse, punctured by a wildly cruel embarrassment that is brilliantly staged and executed.

It’s a film that on one level plays like a melodrama, with wild twists and turns fitting of soap opera cliffhangers. But there is something deeper going on too, underneath the beautiful surface and base pleasures of plot and simply watching Penélope Cruz through Almodóvar’s loving lens.

Haigh dares audiences to meet “All of Us Strangers” on its own astral plane as we whiplash between past and present in a dreamy 35mm haze of nightclubs and ‘80s sweaters.

Despair is not quiet for a broken father (Aaron Paul) and his troublemaker sons in Kat Candler’s brisk, transfixing drama, which takes place in blue-collar southeast Texas.

The dance sequences, in training and performance, are magnificent. Fiennes is fascinated by the athleticism of ballet, and the granular details of the flexing muscles in feet and forearms.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about this whole sequined bell-bottomed experience is you might even find yourself getting a little emotional. But not too much, this is vacation after all.

The camera is the ghost in Steven Soderbergh’s chillingly effective, experiential haunted house drama “Presence.”

So many films are described as love letters — to places, to time, to people, to even the idea of cinema — that the phrase has almost been rendered meaningless. But Belfast really is the quintessential cinematic love letter.

Isn’t It Romantic stays pretty surface level, which makes for a fine and pleasurable viewing experience, but doesn’t exactly do anything to show that rom-coms would be better if the best friends had more of an inner life, for example. In fact, it just kind of redeems the formula in some ways.

This story is about two older white men fighting about a contract, sure, but Betts and Wright expand its scope with sensitivity and nuance. Like many good courtroom dramas before it, this case is bigger than just these two guys.

Raya is undoubtedly a visual feast. It’s also the best kind of feminist film in that it’s one that doesn’t clobber you with the message. Raya is allowed to be awesome without the script shouting about it all the time and it’s better for it.

There’s something comforting about the fact that Jarmusch is still doing his thing, exactly how he wants to, and that so many great actors are lining up to be part of it. He’s a singular voice in a landscape that’s always in danger of flattening.

I’m still not entirely sure what it all adds up to, but it is provocative, difficult and bleak and leaves you with a very precise feeling of despair and aloneness — just like the best of the space independents do.

While there is a case to be made for the final fight to, let’s just say, go a different way than it does, Creed III is still a knockout.

It’s a true triumph of storytelling and performance and a reminder that films don’t need to be flashy or big to be great.