Michael Nordine

Credit to Cooper for delivering his best, most soulful performance while pulling double duty behind the camera, but it’s his co-star whose magnetism most draws you into their world — and keeps you there even when the film hits the occasional wrong note.

Brazil might not want you to know it, but Aquarius is something special.

A cutting, at times unwieldy exploration of trauma and forgiveness, the enigmatic drama goes places you almost certainly won’t expect — and, once there, makes you wonder how you ever thought it could have gone anywhere else.

Knowing something is up and knowing just what that is prove to be two very different things for both protagonist and viewer, however, and The Wicker Man is propelled by the thrill of not knowing.

Manages to be intimate and impersonal at the same time, a trait constantly reinforced by his portrayal of not only Ceausescu but the populace he led, represented, and controlled for nearly three decades.

Fire Walk with Me isn’t what many wanted it to be, it’s easy to accept the film for what it is: a bracing look at incest and rape.

First-time writer-director Bi Gan and cinematographer Wang Tianxing infuse the imagery with a feeling at once otherworldly and familiar — the kind of thing you can't put a name to but would swear you've already experienced.

First Man is an anti-thriller of rare intensity, with lived-in performances from Ryan Gosling and Claire Foy heightening the sky-high drama at every turn. It’s not a comprehensive look at the Apollo 11 mission, but revisits that famous story from a more intimate angle, even as it delivers a satisfying ride.

Custody begins with an air of documentary reality before evolving into a thriller so claustrophobic its climax fits inside the bathroom of a modest apartment.

Wry and self-aware but never finger-wagging, Office looks back on an economic precipice and finds more humor and spirit than any other depiction yet made about it.

Olli Mäki isn't a knockout, but it does go the distance.

Lanthimos's consistently hilarious, borderline anti-humor slowly gives way to a romantic streak of surprising warmth.

As a descent into the apparently high-stakes world of truffle-pig-poaching, Pig is unexpectedly touching; as a showcase for Cage’s brilliance, it’s a revelation.

Our glimpses of what's already occurred and what will soon come are vivid and impressionistic, prophetic warnings about which everyone seems powerless to do anything other than silently observe.

I Wish has a tough time balancing the heartfelt with the saccharine and too often feels slight.

While passive and/or helpless characters rarely make for the most engaging protagonists, the sensitivity with which this story is told coupled with Wright’s performance makes for an experience that’s never less than engaging.

That the film has so many partial reference points only makes the ultimate amalgamation stranger, as the chimeric whole can't be fully explained by its parts. The Wailing enters the world malformed and screaming, as powerless to stop itself as we are.

Clay Tweel’s Gleason documents the agony and the ecstasy of its subject’s life, and is similarly exceptional in its avoidance of the cliches so common among inspiring documentaries.

Writer-director JT Mollner flips the script on this tired genre, crafting the cleverest thriller of its kind in a while with a mighty assist from a pair of killer performances by co-leads Willa Fitzgerald and Kyle Gallner. Best experienced with as little foreknowledge as possible, Strange Darling demands a bit of patience, but it also rewards it.

Indivisible is above all else a mood piece humming with energy and marked by wondrous moments.

Trash talk among competitors and spectators alike is a constant background hum, the informal banter taking the place of traditional talking-head documentary interviews.

Lapid is so unconcerned with crafting a conventional crime drama that merely titling his film Policeman reads as a minor subversion, a way of defining the narrative in relation to a genre it hardly fits into.

Not since The Tree of Life has Christianity been explored onscreen in such serious, conflicted terms, but Scorsese has crafted a far less grandiose experience than Terrence Malick did five years ago. Silence is restrained, austere, even ascetic.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and Chained for Life will have you rubbing your eyes to make sense of what you’ve just seen.

The film deftly marries the essence of the music to a moving coming-of-age framework.

Angels Wear White brings into relief the bureaucratic corruption and class tension that inform the power dynamics of such situations.

While hardly the first or most accomplished film of its kind, Death Metal Angola's focus on the ability of abrasive music to act as a healing agent builds toward genuine moments of renewal and serenity.

Beach Rats has an experiential, almost docudrama aesthetic whose lived-in authenticity is in keeping with that of the film as a whole.

If one measure of a documentary’s quality is whether it inspires you to learn more about its subject after the credits roll, The League is an unqualified success.

And Then I Go isn’t elegiac or fatalistic, nor is it a dread-filled slog toward an inevitable conclusion.

Acclaimed filmmakers often face the challenge of big expectations on their second features, but Kent joins the ranks of sophomore filmmakers whose new movies expand on their debuts in startlingly ambitious ways.

Everything about La Flor — that financiers agreed to bankroll it, Llinás and his team were able to complete it, and festivals, distributors, and exhibitors are now screening it — is a marvel. Anyone with a disdain for the studio system’s endless parade of franchises (and with 14 hours) to spare would do well to give it their undivided attention.

Shot on delightfully grainy 16mm and featuring a cast of nonprofessional actors, the film is so alluringly disorienting that, by its end, some viewers will find themselves struggling to remember how this fever dream started.

Creepy is both a return home and a return to form.

Tickled inspires many laughs throughout but, true to its subject, more and more of them are born of discomfort as it goes on — part of you wants it all to stop even as you’re amused.

Everything about the film manages to be forward-thinking and old-school at the same time, giving the genre a bite in the neck it might not have wanted but certainly needed.

Schnabel fuses form and content in a way that’s rarely attempted and even more rarely achieved; in risking the same derision with which Van Gogh was sometimes met, he transcends the limitations of the conventional biopic and creates something that feels genuinely new.

It’s like we’re front-seat passengers, and though it induces much anxiety, “The Load” compels us to keep both eyes forward lest we miss whatever might happen next.

Schrader’s direction is unobtrusive but agile, as though she considers it her duty to provide a cinematic soapbox for Zweig and politely exit the spotlight.

That Battered Bastards is practically a hagiography doesn't negate the fact that it has more anti-establishment joie de vivre in any given scene than most talking-head docs about previously unheralded mensches contain in their entire run times.

It’s unlikely that any documentary could make us feel half as bad for the poachers as we do for their prey, which might not even be Kasbe’s aim. He succeeds in bringing shades of grey to a situation usually thought of in black-and-white terms — not enough to change many minds, perhaps, but at least enough to open some.

You wouldn't lose anything watching Fastball on ESPN rather than in the movie theater, but it does stand as further testament to baseball's status as our most chess-like sport, and one that, even when broken down to its tiniest component parts, never loses its magic.

You might not want to live here, but the imagery makes for a nice postcard.

[A] suitably workmanlike documentary.

Pop Aye never dips into cutesiness or sentimentality, even when you might find yourself wishing it would; it’s less a big-top circus and more a low-key character study.

These aesthetic flourishes are as necessary as they are nice to look at, and go a long way toward making the darker shades of Hounds of Love less of an endurance test.

Propulsive battle sequences in which sandstorms make the fog of war quite literal are the ostensible focus of American Sniper, but the real tension comes from our anticipation of how they'll affect the life this sharpshooter is reluctant to return to until he feels he's done everything he possibly can.

Louis Black explores the casual philosophizing of his subject's work in Dream Is Destiny, an admiring documentary that wisely lets Linklater do most of the talking in his plainspoken, unpretentious manner.

“In My Mother’s Skin” finds a rare sweet spot between story-book nightmare and historical allegory.

Steve Hoover's film (which was executive-produced by Terrence Malick) doesn't feel dishonest in its behind-the-scenes glimpse at its subject.

Sensuous and arresting, Alleluia constantly feels as though a séance or ritual murder is about to be performed; the actual deaths, when they arrive, turn out to be rather unceremonious affairs.

They're still thirteen-year-olds, which leads to Breaking a Monster's funniest moments.

Suffern strikes a respectful, not entirely hopeless tone throughout.

This is the kind of experience that might tell you more about yourself as both a viewer and a person than you’re comfortable knowing; it’s also the most alluringly strange movie of the year so far.

The animation itself is striking — an early sequence in which the sky is filled with dragons is an early sign of the visual treats to come — and ends up being the film’s highlight.

Don’t Breathe makes a striking first impression but overstays its welcome.

There’s a fine line between watching someone toil and feeling as though you’re toiling yourself, of course, and “Makala” doesn’t always land on the right side of it. It can be edifying at times to watch this, as the film is clearly a labor of love — even if the actual work depicted is not.

Keaton was an ahead-of-his-time innovator, and though Bogdanovich honors that legacy he doesn’t always live up to it: You’ll leave the film knowing more about its subject than you did when you walked in, but there’s little here that feels like it couldn’t be found in one of the many other accounts of Keaton’s life and work.

Hathaway makes Gloria feel familiar and unique all at once. The same can be said of Colossal itself, which lives up to its title without losing sight of small-scale human drama.

Sin Alas matches the half-awake feeling evoked by Luis's ruminations — on love, on Cuba's history, and on himself — well enough to feel authentic even when it meanders too far from what makes it most compelling.

Before, Now & Then moves with its own dreamy cadence, with narrative developments washing over the film like waves. Closing your eyes once it’s over, you might even experience the sensation of having been in the water all afternoon as those gentle waves lapped over you — and longing to return to them.

The director’s control over the material is such that, even when this all feels like a bit of a joke, it’s one you’re happy to be in on.

Kill Me Please is as much a teen movie as it is a horror movie, vacillating between the genres in such a way that you’re reminded from one scene to another how similar the two really are.

An airy, low-key drama that doesn’t suffer for its lack of narrative tension, The Passengers of the Night further proves the old adage about the journey mattering more the destination.

Though full of anger and grief, the film is more than just a screed. Greengrass’ docu-real aesthetic doesn’t allow for grandiosity even when he gives in to more heavy-handed impulses. He’s on a soapbox at times, but his message is worth hearing.

Few movies swap genres halfway through, and even fewer do so successfully. “Bloody Oranges” does both.

As ever with Aardman, the cleverest moments are also the most fleeting.

Little of what happens will come as a surprise, but Corbet's narrative restraint coupled with his formal daring makes for a gripping experience. It's a slow burn, but the fuse attached had me holding my breath.

A film about the vital importance of speaking truth to power needn’t be so concerned with dressing up its own frightful truths, but Nobody Speak still compels as an opening statement on journalism’s dubious future.

[Michelle Monaghan's] at her best as Army medic/staff sergeant Maggie Swann in writer-director Claudia Myers's Fort Bliss.

There’s nothing particularly new or inspired about Zippel’s decision to simply train a camera on Friedkin and let him riff, but the man is such a captivating speaker that it ultimately doesn’t matter much.

Fear Street Part 3: 1666 isn’t just the best of the Netflix horror trilogy; it also recasts the prior two entries, “1994” and “1978,” in a more favorable light by deepening the mythology and underscoring just how crucial it is to watch all three chapters consecutively.

Vox Lux is a powerful, haunting film in part because Portman is a powerful, haunting presence — you can’t turn away from her, even if you occasionally want to.

The strange, ever-changing result is, at times, as original as loose remakes come, with Bidegain using his hallowed source material as a springboard for something rare: a "writer's movie" that loses nothing in the jump from script to screen.

Both Aria and the film as a whole are very much in their own head, which is a nice place to visit but probably not the healthiest environment to grow up in.

A docudrama that in its early scenes feels like a documentary — the co-directors have a nonfiction background, and the actors are actual carnival performers — the film plays out like a small-scale fairy tale.

Even the best records start skipping after a while, and once The Sound of Silence gives in to the demands of conventional narrative it begins feeling less fresh and new than it did when it was simply introducing us to Peter and his work.

Gilady never treats her heroine as a prop in someone else's redemption arc, and Rosenblatt's performance will have you looking for her work in other films.

This is an inside joke of a film, but it’s also one that wants you to be in on it.

There’s sadness and beauty in every frame.

It's like an odd storybook you'd find in the attic and have trouble putting down — the more quixotic Lian's journey becomes, the more you want her to see it through to the bitter end.

[Cox and Hirsch] add depth and dimension to the mystery they’re trying to unravel, even and especially as they unwittingly become part of it.

You’ve seen many movies like this before, which isn’t to say it doesn’t have its charms.

Xenia has a winning streak of oddness.

There's something to be said about a two-and-a-half-hour war epic that manages to make each of its countless decapitation scenes feel earned, even called for, in the moment.

The film mounts a competent offense as it shows how the Israeli squad overcame superior foes on the court and prejudice off of it.

“Christmas” is a cut above the usual holiday dross.

Denis Villeneuve's shared dream of a film takes the simple premise of a man glimpsing his doppelganger while watching a movie and mines every bit of tension and oddity from it — there's hardly a scene that doesn't exude menace.

Somewhere in Queens is a low-stakes slice of life for much of its runtime, with most of the actual conflict stemming from a questionable decision Leo makes to ensure his son’s success. That doesn’t necessarily make it feel slight, however, as the film is such an affectionate love letter to the Italian American families who populate the eponymous borough that you don’t mind simply sharing the dinner table with them.

Set at a prestigious drama school and frequently engrossing, the film unfolds like an experimental acting workshop that occasionally falters when the plot intrudes on the performances.

There are no jump-scares in this sensuous thriller, and the lack of anything corporeal on which to focus our unease only makes Butter on the Latch more darkly exhilarating.

Dragged Across Concrete may be a hard movie to love, but it’s a much harder one not to respect and even admire.

Fightville's most worthwhile material tends to lie in the space between what its subjects say and what we know to be true.

Focusing on the moment-to-moment thrills proves more satisfying than wondering what actually sparked this intrigue.

Without coming across as a soapbox for narcs or unserious stoners, Rolling Papers gives a clearheaded account of things as they stand and where they might be headed.

Skyler Davenport’s lead turn in director Randall Okita’s no-nonsense thriller (which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival last summer) will be worth remembering well after the January doldrums have passed.

This is a fun world to explore, but we’ve just barely scratched the surface by the time we’ve left it.

A Hologram for the King succeeds at putting us in Alan’s meandering headspace, but that doesn’t mean you’ll find his journey as meaningful as he does.