Melissa Anderson

Charlie Is My Darling captures the quintet at their most impossibly vernal and beautiful.

When Guadagnino focuses solely on the primal, the effect is spellbinding. Only the words get in the way.

Delving into microeconomics and macroaggressions, Toni Erdmann, the dynamite, superbly acted third feature from writer-director Maren Ade, is social studies at its finest.

Unclassifiable, expansive, and breathtaking.

A perfectly paced and performed character study of a woman raising a child on her own who must contend with a heinous act of violence.

Extraordinary, groundbreaking documentary.

As personal as it is political, Olson's meditative project offers a profound lesson on intimacy and history — and the ways in which both are distorted and remade by memory.

A question is posed to the main character of Barry Jenkins's wondrous, superbly acted new film, Moonlight: "Who is you, man?" The beauty of Jenkins's second feature...radiates from the way that query is explored and answered: with specifics and expansiveness, not with foregone conclusions.

With 45 Years, [Haigh] has created not only a searching examination of a long-term marriage — and the myths that sustain it — but also a compassionate portrait of a woman reconciling herself with those false notions.

The playfulness of Rivette's sublime female-buddy picture, recalling the fun of "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," would inform Susan Seidelman's "Desperately Seeking Susan" 11 years later. But its greatest descendant is David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive," another film about two women erotically attached, a house with a secret, and transformation.

Referents and identities are always slightly unfixed in Neruda, a film that reaches dizzying, exhilarating velocity by flouting the conventions of its hidebound genre.

In his sympathetic and intelligent Dickinson biopic, A Quiet Passion, Terence Davies honors his subject by remaining true to this observation from the poet herself: "To live is so startling, it leaves but little room for other occupations."

Plunging viewers into the thick of chaos, Leviathan explodes the antiquated paradigm of the documentary or ethnographic film, whose mission has traditionally been to educate or elucidate, to create something that seizes us, never letting us forget just how disordered the world is. This may be the greatest lesson any nonfiction film can teach us.

Rohmer's 1986 masterpiece (being re-released with its original French title, which translates as "The Green Ray"), Le Rayon Vert centers on those themes, too, but delivers something much richer: an absorbing, empathic portrait of a complex woman caught between her own obstinacy and melancholy.

Stranger abounds with precision and detail, evinced not just in the spectacular visual composition but also in the observation of behavioral codes in carnally charged spaces.

Nothing tops ILYPM's Jim Carrey ... in the most gloriously raunchy, unrepentant moment in the an(n)als of Hollywood A-listers doing gay-for-pay.

Sweetgrass reminds us of the stupefying magnificence of its setting—beautiful for spacious skies and mountain majesties—while never letting us forget its formidable perils.

Funny (sometimes caustically so), rueful, and bracingly honest, Happy Hour is also a movie defined by an unshakeable belief that any encounter holds the promise of magic.

Despite the claustrophobic setting and Tsangari's observational style, Chevalier doesn't register as hermetic or coolly condescending; the film feels loose and agile even amid so much capricious rule-making.

Firmly rooted in everyday particulars — primarily the transactions (business, emotional, or otherwise) facilitated by the time- and space-obliterating devices to which we are constantly tethered — Ferran's movie dares to venture, for much of its second half, into fantasy.

A triumph of maximalist filmmaking. And you won't look at your watch once.

A riot of technical tricks, Daisies shifts between color, black-and-white, and tinted images and includes a scene in which the two Maries, wielding scissors, essentially turn themselves into paper dolls.

The King of Comedy, which Film Forum is presenting in a new 4K restoration for a week-long run, brilliantly keeps viewers unmoored, the result of its consistently off-kilter tone. Though filled with sight gags and corny jokes, the movie is also darkened by genuine menace.

Thoroughly researched and packed with phenomenal archival footage, it's a rousing tribute to a mesmerizing performer that forgoes blind hero worship.

Like her namesake, the filmmaker Lizzie Borden took an ax...to cinema conventions and tidy political resolutions in her 1983 landmark Born in Flames.

35 Shots is Denis's warmest, most radiant work, honoring a family of two's extreme closeness while suggesting its potential for suffocation.