Manohla Dargis

In its best moments, Leave No Trace invites you to simply be with its characters, to see and experience the world as they do. Empathy, the movie reminds you, is something that is too little asked of you either in life or in art. Both Mr. Foster’s and Ms. Harcourt McKenzie’s sensitive, tightly checked performances are critical in this regard.

No movie that I’ve seen this year has moved me as deeply, made me feel as optimistic about cinema or engaged me with such intellectual vigor as “EO,” whose octogenarian genius auteur and all the donkeys who play EO — Hola, Tako, Marietta, Ettore, Rocco and Mela — deserve all the love and the carrots, too.

To look at Apocalypse Now is to realize that most of us are fast forgetting what a movie looks like -- a real movie, the last movie, an American masterpiece.

There’s nothing remotely cool about Robert or, really, Funny Pages. That’s because cool is entirely beside the point. What matters is a sensibility, a worldview — what matters is art.

I fell hard for both Ms. Kazan and Mr. Nanjiani and The Big Sick, which tells a great story with waves of deep feeling and questions of identity and makes the whole thing feel like a breeze.

Ms. Martel is exploring the past, how we got here and why, but she is more interested in relations of power than in individual psychological portraits. The monstrous must be humanized to be understood, which doesn’t mean it deserves our tears.

A tour de force that is at once an affecting portrait of a people in flux and a soulful, generous-hearted autobiographic testament from one of our greatest living filmmakers.

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is a big-screen exultation — a passionate, effusive praise song about life and love, including the love of movies.

A comedy poised on the knife's edge of tragedy, the film is a gutsy, truthful, deeply rooted vision of contemporary American life, scaled to the size of an ordinary man. It's a humanist triumph strip-mined of bathos and confirmation that, after directing just three features, Payne has become the most gifted comic social satirist to hit our movies since Preston Sturges.

Rarely have I seen a movie that made me so acutely uncomfortable or watched an actor’s face that, like Dunst’s, expressed a nation’s soul-sickness so vividly that it felt like an X-ray.

For his latest knockout, The Secret Agent, the Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho embraces a freewheeling sensibility, and finds laughter amid the terror.

The importance of seeing, seeing the world deeply, is at the heart of this quietly devastating, humanistic work from the South Korean filmmaker Lee Chang-dong.

Together with his extraordinary performers, Mr. Chéreau breathes life into characters who long ago set a course for death.

The miracle of the movie is that, like Toni, it transcends blunt, reductive categorization partly because it’s free of political sloganeering, finger wagging and force-fed lessons. Any uplift that you may feel won’t come from having your ideas affirmed, but from something ineluctable – call it art.

Like “The Shining” and its maze within a maze, Mr. Ascher’s movie is something of a labyrinth. Puzzling your way through its compilation of vaguely lucid and crackpot ideas is pleasurable though, for avid movie lovers, it may also feel like a warning.

The genius of 12 Years a Slave is its insistence on banal evil, and on terror, that seeped into souls, bound bodies and reaped an enduring, terrible price.

Children of Men may be something of a bummer, but it’s the kind of glorious bummer that lifts you to the rafters, transporting you with the greatness of its filmmaking.

Throughout, Diwan’s gaze remains clear, direct, fearless. She shows you a part of life that the movies rarely do. By which I mean: She shows you a woman who desires, desires to learn, have sex, bear children on her terms, be sovereign — a woman who, in choosing to live her life, risks becoming a criminal and dares to be free.

Hamaguchi’s touch — delicate, precise, restrained, gentle — overwhelms in increments. His reserve is essential to his visual and narrative approach but also feels like a worldview.

With Where the Wild Things Are Jonze has made a work of art that stands up to its source and, in some instances, surpasses it.

Pitched artfully between the celebratory and the elegiac, it is an inarguably serious documentary with light, surrealistic flourishes that, at times, veer into exuberant goofiness.

Again and again, Haroun shows you Amina and Maria alone and together, at times exchanging hugs or tenderly bowing their heads toward each other. Every so often, you see each running along a street alone, her clothes fluttering and body straining with effort. He shows feet and braids, a flash of a bared leg, the teasing glimpse of a belly. He shows you women in motion and in revolt, fleeing and escaping and at times running sly, joyous circles around the men in their lives.

[Allen's] most sustained, satisfying and resonant film since “Match Point.”

Bong keeps things zipping along, and with such nimbleness that the movie’s heavier ideas never weigh it down. He jabs rather than pounds as he takes on targets — authoritarianism, comic-book heroics, the vanity of power — while playfully mixing moods and acting styles.

Duchess of Langeais seems to me a nearly impeccable work of art -- beautiful, true, profound.

The director Sebastian Meise, who wrote the script with Thomas Reider, tells this story with open feeling and steady, emphatic calm.

Dunkirk is a tour de force of cinematic craft and technique, but one that is unambiguously in the service of a sober, sincere, profoundly moral story that closes the distance between yesterday’s fights and today’s.

The audacity of The Missing Picture — a brilliant documentary about a child who held on to life in Cambodia’s killing fields — is equaled only by its soulfulness.