Manohla Dargis

The Power of the Dog builds tremendous force, gaining its momentum through the harmonious discord of its performances, the nervous rhythms of Jonny Greenwood’s score and the grandeur of its visuals.

The result isn’t another ho-hum documentary likeness in which all the elements neatly and often flatteringly stack up. “Jim & Andy” is instead a complexly layered and textured Cubist portrait, one that’s been constructed from fragments of its two title subjects and their work.

The film's three leads are extraordinary, but what Moore does with her role is so beyond the parameters of what we call great acting that it nearly defies categorization.

So effective does it close the distance between you and Mr. Bernstein that afterward you may find yourself scanning the streets, hoping to catch sight of him, as if for an old friend.

Ms. Denis has an extraordinary gift for finding the perfect image that expresses her ideas, the cinematic equivalent of what Flaubert called le mot juste.

A sublimely nimble evisceration of that cult of celebrity known as the British royal family.

The result is an American masterpiece, independent to the bone.

A Real Pain is a fluidly blended amalgam of pleasing, approachable subgenres, including an odd-couple buddy flick, a consciousness-raising road movie and a charged family melodrama.

A masterpiece about life, death and everything in between.

One of the pleasures of Kapadia’s filmmaking is that she’s inviting you to discover her characters on their terms, which means embracing the inner and outer rhythms of their lives.

In “Never Rarely,” the hurdles to an abortion are as legion as they are maddening and pedestrian, a blunt political truism that Hittman brilliantly connects to women’s fight for emancipation.

In “Ex Libris,” democracy is alive and in the hands of a forceful advocate and brilliant filmmaker, which helps make this one of the greatest movies of Mr. Wiseman’s extraordinary career and one of his most thrilling.

Not just everything you want in a David Lynch movie, but damn near everything else you want in ANY movie.

The camerawork in Birdman is an astonishment, and an argument that everything flows together, which in this movie means the cinematography, the story, the people, even time and space.

My Golden Days is a memory movie, a story told through a glass darkly.

Preciado’s superpower in this warm, generous movie is that while he speaks brilliantly to the cages of identity, he sees — and shares — a way out of them. He talks and listens, he exhorts and confesses. He insists on pleasure, speaks to happiness, invites laughter and opens worlds. Here, joy reigns supreme, and it is exhilarating.

For Tian, who was banned from directing by Chinese authorities for a decade, it marks a triumphant return; for those who have loved the filmmaker's work in the past, few resurrections have seemed as welcome.

By turns intimate and expansive, Transit is a thrilling, at times harrowing labyrinth of a movie.

Soul-baring and furious, the documentary One Child Nation takes a powerful, unflinching look at China’s present through its past.

It’s far rarer when a movie, as this one does, speaks to everyday life and to the beauty of a world that we neglect even in the face of its calamitous loss.

Complex, stirring, timely and beautifully shaped.

Written and directed by Andreas Fontana, making a formally precise, tonally perfect feature debut, Azor is a low-key shocker.

Barbara is a film about the old Germany from one of the best directors working in the new: Christian Petzold. For more than a decade Mr. Petzold has been making his mark on the international cinema scene with smart, tense films that resemble psychological thrillers, but are distinguished by their strange story turns, moral thorns, visual beauty and filmmaking intelligence.

When Krisha stands in the kitchen, wild-eyed amid all these human sights and sounds, you see a woman overwhelmed by life itself, as well as a movie that is an expressionistic tour de force.

It’s a sincere, mesmerizing and admirably unorthodox film that, by turns, invites your love and tests your patience. It demands attention and generosity from you, including toward characters who can be tough to tolerate, much less care about. They and the movie can be maddening, even when it’s impossible to look away.

Cuarón uses one household on one street to open up a world, working on a panoramic scale often reserved for war stories, but with the sensibility of a personal diarist. It’s an expansive, emotional portrait of life buffeted by violent forces, and a masterpiece.

A triumph of modesty and of seriousness that also happens to be one of the finest American films of the year.

Together with Thompson and Negga, Hall hauntingly brings to life characters forced to exist in that “not entirely friendly” space, with its cruelties, appearances, ambiguities and hard, merciless truths.

The filmmaker Sarah Leonor has a keen eye and a gentle, unassuming touch. In The Great Man, she discreetly changes moods and storytelling modes like a pianist sliding her hand down a short, soft glissando.

Stories We Tell has a number of transparent virtues, including its humor and formal design, although its most admirable quality is the deep sense of personal ethics that frames Ms. Polley’s filmmaking choices.

This is only the second feature from the sensationally talented Russian director Kantemir Balagov (who was born in 1991), and it’s a gut punch. It’s also a brilliantly told, deeply moving story about love — in all its manifestations, perversity and obstinacy.

Black Swan is visceral and real even while it's one delirious, phantasmagoric freakout.

The film is above all a consummate work of art, one that transcends the historically fraught context of its making, and its pleasures are unapologetically aesthetic. It reveals, excites, disturbs, provokes, but the window it opens is to human consciousness itself.

An effortlessly complex portrayal that relishes the contradictions and complexities of someone capable of both exalted and debased behavior, a shape-shifter it is possible to be fascinated, repelled and compelled by, all at the same time.

Mr. Kaufman’s gift for quotidian horror remains startling; he’s a whiz at minor miseries.

Marks the emergence of one of the more original and promising new voices to hit the international cinema scene in recent years.

Watching it again recently, I now saw a movie that, with humor, tenderness and flashes of filmmaking brilliance, looks at what happens when kindness is tested, masks are dropped and self-interest runs free. It’s all a mess and so are we, which I think is very much to Muntean’s point.

One of those rare films in which the moral stakes are as insistent and thought through as the aesthetic choices.

Love suffuses Pictures of Ghosts, a cleareyed, deeply personal and formally inspired rumination on life, death, family, movies and those complicated, invariably haunted places we call home.

There are moments in Earth Mama, a drama about motherhood at its most fragile, when the movie’s quiet intensity seems to settle in your chest, as if a heavy stone had been placed over your heart.

A masterpiece of indirection and pure visceral thrills, David Cronenberg's latest mindblower, A History of Violence, is the feel-good, feel-bad movie of the year.

The Death of Stalin is by turns entertaining and unsettling, with laughs that morph into gasps and uneasy gasps that erupt into queasy, choking laughs.

Sublimely beautiful and profoundly moving, it offers you the opportunity to look — at animals, yes, but also at qualities that are often subordinated in narratively driven movies, at textures, shapes and light.

In Boyhood, Mr. Linklater’s masterpiece, he both captures moments in time and relinquishes them as he moves from year to year. He isn’t fighting time but embracing it in all its glorious and agonizingly fleeting beauty.

In one of the sweetest ironies of the entire film year, Sam Raimi has made an A-movie with the soul of a B-movie classic.

If in Bresson's films nothing ever seems out of place or superfluous it's because he strove to find the essential truth of the image. Not an image or sound is wasted -- or offered up in self-glorification -- and from such seeming simplicity there arises a world of feeling.

There’s individual genius in the Troisgros kitchens, no doubt, but also enormous collaborative effort, which makes the documentary a nice metaphor for filmmaking itself. “Everything is beautiful,” a visibly moved Michel says of his estate; the same holds true of this deeply pleasurable movie.

A blistering fictionalized tale straight out of China, A Touch of Sin is at once monumental and human scale.

Part of what makes Nickel Boys striking is how Ross stays true to the novel but with his own voice, his own narrative and visual style, and how he uses moments in time and freighted images — faces, hands, flashing police lights, an alligator in a class, a mule in a hall — to build the story.

To say that Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York is one of the best films of the year or even one closest to my heart is such a pathetic response to its soaring ambition that I might as well pack it in right now.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is an exciting, goofy and deadly serious big-screen no — a no to complacency, to oppression, to tyranny. It’s a carnivalesque epic about good and evil, violence and power, inalienable rights and the fight against injustice; it’s also a love story.

The arc of the moral universe may bend toward justice. But as Collective lays out with anguished detail and a profound, moving sense of decency, it takes stubborn, angry people — journalists, politicians, artists, activists — to hammer at that arc until it starts bending, maybe, in the right direction.

Captain Phillips, a movie that insistently closes the distance between us and them, has a vital moral immediacy.

Mr. Loznitsa doesn’t lighten the mood with any familiar filmmaking tricks: there are, for instance, no musical cues to guide you over the troubling or ambiguous passages. Like the characters, you work through each surprising turn.

In A Thousand and One, [Rockwell] packs a great deal into her filmmaking, which bristles with looks, gestures, bodies in breakneck motion and expressionistic jolts of color that — like Gary Gunn’s gorgeous score — complicate and deepen the outwardly simple story.

Like Hitchcock, Mr. Wong is at once a voyeur and fetishist par excellence.

Mr. Bale, like some other stars who embrace playing ugly, feels as if he’d been liberated by all the pounds he’s packed on and by his character’s molting looks, an emancipation that’s most evident in his delicately intimate, moving moments with Ms. Adams and Ms. Lawrence.

In the past, Kore-eda’s delicacy has at times enervated his movies. Here, though, the family’s toughness, thieving and secrets, its poverty and desperation, work like ballast on his sensibilities. In their grubby imperfections, Kore-eda finds a perfect story about being human.

From the very first destabilizing moments of this movie, Park dazzles you with the beauty of his images and the intoxicating bravura of his unfettered imagination. And then, just when you think you have found your bearings, he unmoors you yet once more, blowing minds and shattering hearts, yours included.

While each event expands the narrative — filling in the larger picture with nods at sexual relations, class divisions and a riven people — they don’t necessarily explain what happens or answer the fundamental question that burns through this brilliant movie.

Bong’s command of the medium is thrilling. He likes to move the camera, sometimes just to nudge your attention from where you think it should be, but always in concert with his restlessly inventive staging.

It’s a pitiless, violent story that in its telling becomes a haunting and haunted intellectual and aesthetic achievement.

The tame and the wild roam through R.M.N., nipping at its edges, adding visual texture and deepening its themes.

For all its high-flying zaniness the movie has the sting of life, and its humor feels dredged up from the same dark, boggy place from which Samuel Beckett extracted his yuks.

The solitary man returns in The Card Counter, a haunting, moving story of spirit and flesh, sin and redemption, love and death about another lonely soul, William Tell, who, with pen to paper, grapples with his present and his unspeakable past.

Waves of melancholy wash over the story and keep the treacle at bay, as do the spasms of broad comedy, much of it nimbly executed by Mr. Baron Cohen.

It's the sort of unassuming discovery that could get lost in a crowd or suffer from too much big love, and while it won't save or change your life, it may make your heart swell. Its aim is modest and true.

Never before has a fiction film so clearly and to such devastating effect laid out the calculation of the Nazi machinery of death and its irrationality.

Modestly scaled and loosely plotted, it is an unusually tender movie and an ideal vehicle for Coppola’s gift for expressing the intangible and the ephemeral.

There’s much to love in this film, but what lingers are those lapidary details that often go missing in stories about great men, as if they had built the world alone and no child had ever raced down a road waving goodbye as a father disappeared into history.

Mr. Stevens’s watchful restraint gives the early scenes a slow burn and a sinister glaze.

Like Scott’s filmmaking in this pleasurably immersive spectacle — with its foreign ancients and mentalities, exotic animals and equally unfamiliar calls to human nobility — Washington’s performance has skill, intensity and absolute confidence.

Garrone doesn’t spare you much, but if the movie never turns into an exercise in art-house sadism, it’s because his focus remains unwaveringly fixed on his characters who, from the start, are fully rounded people, not props, symbols or object lessons.

Much like the Dardennes, Mr. Joachim holds to the truth that the personal is political, which is why this isn’t simply a movie about a woman and an unspeakable crime, but also an exploration of the power and cruelty that brought her to that very dark place.

Pitched at the divide between art and industry, poetry and entertainment, it goes darker and deeper than any Hollywood movie of its comic-book kind.

A terrifically clever film; has a soft-boilded heart.

At once an old-fashioned freakout and an environmental cautionary tale (mess with Mother Nature and she'll mess with you right back), the film combines two genre standbys -- lethal contagion and the undead -- and gives them a wicked, contemporary spin.

A metaphysical road movie about life, death and the limits of knowledge, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia has arrived just in time to cure the adult filmgoer blues.

Mr. Nichols’s most distinct aesthetic choice is the movie’s quietness and the hush that envelops its first scene and that eventually defines the Lovings as much as their accents, gestures, manners and battles.

Mr. Howard doesn’t just want you to crawl inside a Formula One racecar, he also wants you to crawl inside its driver’s head.

It’s comic and often wry, but like some of his other films, it has the soul of a tragedy.

Stuffed with zingers and zippy stunts, it comes with pretty young things of all hues and hair types - few prettier than its lead, Joseph Gordon-Levitt - and start-to-finish clever special effects, none more clever or special than Michael Shannon.

Mr. Jia’s approach means that you have to do a certain amount of interpretive work, though mostly you just have to pay attention and be a little patient. If you do, you will notice that Mountains May Depart is a movie of threes: its main characters, moments in time, narrative sections, historical symbols and even aspect ratio come in triplicate.

Does it matter that stretches of Miles Ahead — a gun-rattling, squealing-tire car chase included — came out of the filmmakers’ imagination rather than Davis’s life? (Mr. Cheadle shares script credit with Steven Baigelman.) Purists may howl, but they’ll also miss the pleasure and point of this playfully impressionistic movie.

An effectively creepy thriller about a 911 operator and a young miss in peril, The Call is a model of low-budget filmmaking.

Like the film itself, the performance (Giamatti's) is deeply controlled, played with restraint and with microscopic attention to detail.

The jokes would be funny even if they weren't perfectly timed, but what makes them come across as so poignant is the seriousness with which the director and his co-conspirators deliver their jabs and japes.

The actors in 24 City bring their own existential realities to their short, touching performances. In the end, the deep emotions they stir up -- the actress Lv Liping delivers a harrowing story about a lost child -- constitute another kind of monument to the workers of Factory 420.

Twenty-four years later -- digitally spruced up, with some scenes shaved and others padded with previously cut material -- Scott's film still shreds nerves.

Strange describes the world of “Resurrection,” as does entrancing, tender, surprising, mournful and, at times, mystifying; it too is a labyrinth of a kind, one that Bi has filled with abrupt turns, elusive figures and shattering moments.

Mr. Mooney, currently cutting it up on “Saturday Night Live,” manages the twists and tonal fluctuations in Brigsby Bear beautifully.

This restoration of German Concentration Camps Factual Survey is an extraordinary act of cinematic reclamation and historiography.

What’s energizing and exciting about Amy, especially when compared with the sexless cuties populating rom-coms, in which female pleasure is often expressed through shopping, is that her erotic appetites aren’t problems that she needs to narratively solve and vanquish.

However scary that world and however freaky Angela’s situation, Soderbergh never lets the movie get too heavy. Even as the vibe shifts and the atmosphere grows more ominous, he maintains a lightness of touch and a visual playfulness that keeps the movie securely in the realm of pop pleasure.

The writer and director Samuel Maoz (“Lebanon”) has an exacting eye. The framing is meticulous; soon it’s also very purposefully working your nerves.

I can't think of another good movie this year that's as tough to watch as Moodysson's, but, then, I can't think of very many movies that are as good.

[A] handsome, intelligently absorbing and stirring biographical portrait.

The Day He Arrives has real force and its experimentation is in the service of a moving story about a man who, as he says at the start, has nowhere to go. And so he returns to a bar, a woman and situations that are always the same and yet always different - snow falls during one kiss but not another - playing a director whose life resembles a movie he keeps remaking.