Manohla Dargis

Jacobs’s women are at once clinging to the past and looking toward the future. It’s the present that proves so extraordinarily difficult for them, a truth that Jacobs beautifully conveys in a movie that is very much about agonizing loss yet is also, fundamentally, about what it simply takes to keep on living.

There is evil and it helps keep the world running, our clothes and food coming. This is the greatest, most difficult, most unspeakable violence laid bare in Rathjen’s measured, insistently political movie.

Presence is another ideal trap to trip for a filmmaker who enjoys challenges and changing it up artistically as much as Soderbergh does.

The Host is a cautionary environmental tale about the domination of nature and the costs of human folly, and it may send chills up your spine. But only one will tickle your fancy and make you cry encore, not just uncle.

Gálvez’s work here is by turns blunt and subtle, and very assured.

Ashe is using a familiar, long-derided film genre both affectionately and critically to explore the gleaming surfaces of life as well as the anguish that lies beneath.

The woman in Christopher Munch's lovely, delightfully idiosyncratic Letters From the Big Man, resplendent with its own dense forests and cloudy Oregon days, has already fallen to earth and is looking for a way back up or maybe just forward. She gets help from a sasquatch.

Has the glorious look and immaculate technique we expect from Mann, along with a wealth of superb secondary performances.

Mr. Bujalski, who wrote as well as directed, doesn’t lean on shocks and big moments to spark tension or spur the narrative. A fine-grain realist, he creates modest, layered worlds and identifiably true characters, filling them in with details borrowed from life rather than the multiplex.

Ms. DuVernay, from start to finish in this very fine movie, works to make sure that Ruby is a woman to remember.

It's a gift for moviegoers to have this much freedom, and exhilarating. In Holy Motors you never know where Mr. Carax will take you and you never know what, exactly, you're to do once you're there.

A taut, unnerving, forcefully unromantic fictional film.

It's an exasperating, irresistible, must-see mess of a movie about life in the modern world and so very good that even when its story finally crashes and burns the filmmaking remains unscathed.

The film was written, directed and somehow willed into unlikely existence by the extravagantly talented Carlos Reygadas, whose immersion in this exotic world feels so deep and true that it seems like an act of faith.

Mr. Chappelle looks and sounds alternately ebullient and weary. It was directed by Michel Gondry, the madcap genius behind "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," but in its tone and vibe feels like Mr. Chappelle's all the way.

With visual precision and emotional restraint — and aided by Mr. Driver’s tamped-down, sober and gently endearing performance — Mr. Jarmusch creates that rarest portrait of the artist: the one who’s happy being hard at work.

No matter how distinct the elements — and how differently arranged — they are of a feverish, profoundly uneasy piece.

The low-key charms of the coming-of-age story Holy Cow emerge gradually but steadily.

A potent, persuasive and quietly furious documentary.

It’s a serious movie unburdened by self-seriousness, its own and that of the profession it explores with cool, analytic dispassion.

By the time Pierce Brosnan shows up, you may find yourself giggling at the whole meta deliciousness of this enterprise. You may also find yourself feverishly hoping that when it comes time to revive the Bond series, someone has the brains to call Koepp and Soderbergh.

Pugilists and philosophers of all kinds converge in Frederick Wiseman's mesmerizing documentary Boxing Gym.

In classic narrative fashion, Mr. Mundruczo works the setup like a burlesque fan dancer, teasing out the reveal bit by bit.

There are several genres nimbly folded into The Skin I Live In, which might also be described as an existential mystery, a melodramatic thriller, a medical horror film or just a polymorphous extravaganza. In other words, it's an Almodóvar movie with all the attendant gifts that implies: lapidary technique, calculated perversity, intelligent wit.

20th Century Women is a memory movie, one in which people are conjured up to bump against the larger world, exuberantly and uneasily.

If you let it, No Home Movie invites you in first with its intimacy and then its deep feeling.

One of the other pleasures of Challengers is that despite some tears, tightened jaws and its fussy chronology, the movie isn’t trying to say anything important, which is a relief. It wants to engage and entertain you, and it does that very nicely.

At once an emotional thriller and a domestic horror movie -- a woman's picture with a vengeance, in which the bloodletting is kept to a minimum, and ends up all the more powerful and profound for it.

Tim isn't super anything (though he proves heroic), and what makes Cedar Rapids a low-wattage pleasure is its insistence that his ordinariness - with his decency and sense of wonder - is pretty extraordinary.

A sun-kissed German film about a young couple in love and in doubt, might not be perfect, but so much is right and true in this lovely, delicate work that it comes breathtakingly close.

The movie is best understood not in banal docudrama terms but as an impressionistic portrait of a man who, stripped of power, is revealed as grotesquely human.

What gives the film a formalist kick is that the story unfolds piecemeal as a series of nonlinear moments. What gives it soul are the three lead actors who pull the pieces together with devastating power.

Both newcomers to Mr. To and longtime admirers should be prepared for a master class in directing.

By far the most approachable of the director's recent films, with an emotional depth that's true to life and a streamlined narrative that for long stretches barely contains a word.

With a gentle rap-rapping, Mr. Eggers intensifies the shivers with art-film moves, genre shocks and an excellent cast that includes a progressively rowdy menagerie.

Franchises often bank on nostalgia, so it’s easy to fall for “Inside Out 2,” which works largely because the first one does wonderfully well. The new movie conforms to the original’s ethos as well as inventive template, its conceit and visual design, so its pleasures are agreeably familiar.

The English director Mike Leigh's best work in a decade.

Exuberant.

Part of the kick of “Master Gardener” is that the writer-director Paul Schrader manages to pull off this improbable movie. It shouldn’t work and, even after seeing it twice, I don’t think that it entirely does, which only makes it more fascinating and strengthens its power.

Bigelow’s work here is superb. She puts the many moving parts into coordinated place and keeps them coherently spinning even as she switches out some elements and introduces others; she doesn’t drop a single plate. The script occasionally gets in her way, which sometimes happens in her work.

Part of what makes Get Out both exciting and genuinely unsettling is how real life keeps asserting itself, scene after scene.

When We Were Kings is a wonderfully entertaining, at times thrilling, film. Ali is magnificent, Foreman oddly touching, and their fight, which is shown almost in total, makes for superb, nail-biting suspense--even two decades after the fact.

Like many of Mr. Herzog's movies, fiction and nonfiction, Encounters at the End of the World itself has the quality of a dream: it's at once vivid and vague, easy to grasp and somehow beyond reach.

An erotically charged, beautifully directed story of a woman preyed upon by different men and her own warring desires.

As with the greatest animated films, the triumph of Kon's work lies not just in its beauty and singularly sophisticated storytelling but in how that beauty and storytelling combine to give the films a sting so human you can forget you're watching a cartoon.

His film may be something of a beautiful lie, but what's true about Sollett's characters is that their dreams, their grace and their struggles are as real as it gets.

It is a great big swing about taking a great big swing, and while the film is more persuasive as a drama than the argument it relays, few American movies this year reach so high so boldly.

Flight is freakishly real; it's one of those big-screen nightmares that will inspire fear-of-flying moviegoers to run home and Google car rental deals and Greyhound schedules.

Memory is also, I think, one reason we watch movies like this, which with its lapidary narration and melancholic images — with its laughing children, its difficult smiles and its ghosts — movingly pairs you with Ernaux and with the world that she has so brilliantly made.

Generous, soulful film.

Rohrwacher’s digressive storytelling can make La Chimera seem unstructured, but she’s going where she wants to go and at her own pace. She likes detours, lived-in (nonplastic) faces and the kind of revelatory details that might go unnoticed, if she didn’t direct your gaze at them.

The most arresting way that Diaz telegraphs, though, is through the sheer beauty of his images. The movie is often visually intoxicating, at moments gasp-out-loud ravishing, especially in its presentation of the natural world, which can have a soft visual quality that deepens the sense of otherworldliness.

The movie is a curiosity cabinet of visual pleasures but so breezy and lightly funny that you may not realize at first how good it is.

Bridges turns a two-dimensional image into a presence so vital, so filled with breath and blood, that you uneasily fall in love with his character and abandon all thought of the artifice that's brought it to life.

At once specific and expansive, Dos Estaciones can be described several ways: as a drama, a character study, a meditative exploration of the ravages of globalization. At the same time, part of the movie’s pleasure is how it avoids facile categorization.

A pleasurably sly and involving puzzler - a mystery about mysteries within mysteries.

Gaudily vibrant, at times morbidly funny.

Filmmaker Kevin Rafferty makes the case for remembrance and for the art of the story in his preposterously entertaining documentary Harvard Beats Yale 29-29, preposterous at least for those of us who routinely shun that pagan sacrament.

[Mr. Garland] plays with visual contrasts — Mr. Isaac’s compact, muscled body and Mr. Gleeson’s long, drooping one, picture windows that look out onto an expansively lush landscape and windowless rooms that register as upmarket prison cells — that dovetail with the narrative’s multiple, amusingly deployed dualities: confinement and liberation, agency and submission, mind and body.

Few movies capture the surreal comedy and engulfing horror of the money-driven world as piercingly as “Stonewalling.”

The fury that radiates off Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border is so intense that you can almost feel it encasing you in its heat.

Rarely has a film with so much blood on its hands seemed so insistently alive.

It is undeniable in its poignancy, an ecstatic vision of what might have been, though as much for its story as for the fact that the whole thing dissolves like a paper fan in rain, an evanescent masterwork.

In the past, Coppola’s embrace of ambiguity could feel like a dodge, a way of evading meaning. But in On the Rocks, a wistful and lovely story about finally coming of age, there’s nothing ambiguous about how she makes us see a woman too long lost in life’s shadow.

The songs in Office aren’t especially memorable. But it’s hard to care too much when you have a director who knows how to create tension by moving the camera and characters even while he’s delivering a nimble political softshoe with filmmaking dazzle.

Rarely does pop come with such sizzle.

What the studio does, brilliantly, is preserve a hand-drawn look and feel in its work, as in the exteriors in The Secret World, where the characters pop against a painterly meadow.

A rebus, a romance, a gothic thriller and a woozy comedy, The Handmaiden is finally and most significantly a liberation story.

A memory play and a sleight of hand, Eternal Sunshine is more than anything else deeply sincere. Like Spike Jonze, who directed "Adaptation" and "Being John Malkovich," Gondry succeeds principally by balancing Kaufman's churning skepticism with unflinching hope.

Conceived in the shadow of American pop rather than in its bright light, this tense, effective iteration of Bob Kane's original comic book owes its power and pleasures to a director who takes his material seriously and to a star who shoulders that seriousness with ease.

There’s great pleasure in revisiting this series, seeing who turned out just fine and sometimes better than you might have expected or hoped.

The images are as delightful, unexpected and playfully uninhibited as Ms. Varda, perhaps the only filmmaker who has both won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and strolled around an art exhibition while costumed as a potato (not at the same time).

The world of My Joy is grim, though the experience of watching it and piecing together its fragmented story strands is anything but. It's suspenseful, mysterious, at times bitterly funny, consistently moving and filled with images of a Russia haunted both by ghosts and the living dead.

Yes, the latest “Star Wars” installment is here, and, lo, it is a satisfying, at times transporting entertainment. Remarkably, it has visual wit and a human touch, no small achievement for a seemingly indestructible machine that revved up 40 years ago and shows no signs of sputtering out (ever).

Like the convictions of some born into religious families, his (Carlos) Marxism seems more a matter of habit than faith. What seems to turn him on is power, which, the movie suggests, he nurtured alongside his luxe tastes.

The film's strength and its entertainment lie in John Myhre's production design, its generally appealing cast...and, perhaps most importantly, a canny degree of self-parody.

Powerful, infuriating and at times overwhelming, Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13TH will get your blood boiling and tear ducts leaking.

The family that fights together remains the steadily throbbing, unbreakable heart of Incredibles 2, even when Bob and Helen swap traditional roles.

A gorgeous riot of future-shock ideas and brightly animated imagery, the doors of perception never close.

What makes the material still feel personal — other than the yearslong investment and love that transform entertainments into fan communities — is the combination of Katniss and Ms. Lawrence, who have become a perfect fit.

The story’s ellipses and graceful structure are certainly admirable, but what elevates One Fine Morning is the texture of Sandra’s emotions, the revelation of her character, the hunger of her embrace, the wildness of her mouth, the stillness of her sated body, and the love that she gives and will movingly embrace once more.

Isn't just a pleasurable rethink of your geek uncle's favorite science-fiction series. It's also a testament to television's power as mythmaker, as a source for some of the fundamental stories we tell about ourselves, who we are and where we came from.

Eastwood has explored systemic injustice before, including in “Changeling” and “Richard Jewell.” This is a stronger movie than those two by far, and if this one proves, as rumors have it, that it’s his last as a director, he is going out with a bang.

Vox Lux is an audacious story about a survivor who becomes a star, and a deeply satisfying, narratively ambitious jolt of a movie.

A grave and beautiful work of art.

Because this is also a document of an actress actually at work, much of the movie's pleasure comes from watching another brilliant performance take shape as Ms. Streep tries out different line readings, gestures and poses in her search for Mother Courage.

Mr. Demange makes his feature directing debut with ’71, but he already knows how to move bodies through space and the complex choreography that he’s worked out in this movie is a thing of joy.

All the Money in the World revs up beautifully, first as a thriller. But while the kidnapping is the movie’s main event, it is only part of a story that is, by turns, a sordid, desperate and anguished tragedy about money.

Eschewing voice-over or any obvious trace of an on-screen or off-screen presence, she (Brown) lets her images, a little text and other people do the talking for her. Her quiet has its own force.

Chukwu revisits the past while doing something extremely difficult. She makes this grim American history insistently of the moment — and she does so by stripping the story down to its raw, harrowing emotional core.

Densely packed, the movie is a whirlwind of ideas and images, by turns heady, enlivening, disturbing and near-exhausting. It’s a work of visceral urgency from Peck, who’s best known for his 2017 documentary “I Am Not Your Negro,” about James Baldwin.

Colors and hearts explode in Belle, and your head might too while watching this gorgeous anime.

Love, death, cinema — they’re all there in Mia Madre, bumping up against one another beautifully.

This unassuming, insistently entertaining documentary has the virtue of a great subject.

It wouldn’t be a Marvel production without manly skirmishes and digital avatars. Yet in its emphasis on black imagination, creation and liberation, the movie becomes an emblem of a past that was denied and a future that feels very present. And in doing so opens up its world, and yours, beautifully.

Heart of a Dog is about telling and remembering and forgetting, and how we put together the fragments that make up our lives — their flotsam and jetsam, highs and lows, meaningful and slight details, shrieking and weeping headline news.

It’s a tough, smart, impressive movie, and one of its virtues is that Walker, a British transplant to Los Angeles, doesn’t seem to have figured it all out before she started shooting.

In Auto Focus, the strangely wonderful and weirdly touching new film from Paul Schrader, the comedy and the tragedy keep getting mixed up.