Peter Debruge

In what’s been an underwhelming year for big-studio animation, it’s the best of the bunch: sincere, likable, surprisingly funny, and overall true to its source material.

In the end, The Sea Beast is a movie about challenging conventional wisdom and figuring things out for yourself, and that’s a philosophy that worked on both sides of the camera.

A film that lays emotions on the line and then drives them home with music.

There’s room for infinite points of view behind the camera, as well as among those who do the watching. Offering the tools for unpacking potentially challenging movies, Cousins teaches people how to be better spectators — not by telling them the right way to watch, but by encouraging them to engage more deeply with what they see.

Animation proves the ideal medium for Miss Hokusai’s relatively tame story, allowing audiences to admire the family’s artwork within a world that they were partially responsible for creating.

The fact that they could all lay down their weapons and finish the deal heightens Wheatley’s generally irreverent approach, all of which serves to remind that guns don’t kill people; insecure, overcompensating idiots do.

A literal shock to the system, Civil War is designed to be divisive.

More inspired by than adapted from Juan Mayorga’s play “The Boy in the Last Row,” this low-key thriller feels like a return to form for Ozon, whose pictures lost their psychosexual edge after the helmer stopped collaborating with Emmanuele Bernheim (“Swimming Pool”).

The affectionate cine-memoir is rendered all the more effective on account of young discovery Jude Hill and its portrayal of a close-knit family (Ciarán Hinds and Judi Dench and stay-put grandparents) crowded under one roof.

Turns out, this movie isn’t so much about space as it is about time travel, or more specifically, taking Linklater and his followers back more than half a century.

Here we have seven escape routes, each one reconnecting us to a world inevitably transformed by the pandemic — a world where art lives on.

McDonagh’s characters are more complex than the initial caricatures make them out to be — perhaps, in the end, even pitiful — leaving audiences to decide how they feel about their ultimate fates.

The “Neon Bull” director has always had an incredible visual sense, though his plots tend to lack focus. Not this one.

This vividly realized and emotionally satisfying feature ought to make Shinkai a household name — certainly in Japan, and with any luck, in other countries as well.

Delivering a feverish, raw-nerve performance sure to go down as one of the year’s greats, Byrne has never had a role even remotely this intense to prepare us for the emotional acrobatics her writer-director has in store.

For years, “gay movies” were practically a genre unto themselves, neatly conforming to one of three categories: stories about coming out, stories about unrequited love, and stories about the impact of AIDS. “Sorry Angel” succeeds in ticking all three boxes without falling into any one.

C’mon C’mon proves plenty poignant, but it’s less entertaining than it might have been.

Subsequent docs will surely tell a different story, after survivors have risen up and confronted the individual they deem responsible — and Gibney et al. want this film to be instrumental in that solution.

The helmer shows exquisite control of the world he has created.

Of all living actresses, only Huppert could capture nuances that alternately elicit sympathy and fierce sexual attraction to a recent stroke victim.

It’s calculated and precise and meticulously constructed in a way that will be of considerable interest to audiences who appreciate stories that unsettle, and those who recognize the precision of Sisto’s approach.

In many respects, Polite Society comes across as a giant pastiche of Manzoor’s favorite movie references, with homage paid to films from all over the globe via individual shots and sound cues throughout. But there’s no denying her creativity or the defiantly original voice she brings to her characters.

Greenaway has wrought an outrageously unconventional and deliriously profane biopic that could take decades to be duly appreciated.

Good Boy reflects the powerful connection between people and their pets as few films have, ultimately devastating us with the devotion these soulmates are capable of showing.

Argentine powerhouse Pablo Trapero (“Carancho,” “White Elephant”) takes a case so upsetting many refused to believe it was possible and retells it in ghastly detail from the p.o.v. of the perpetrators in The Clan, a muscular, Hollywood-style account of the Puccio fiasco.

There’s at least one more key aspect of Little Woods that sets it apart: Whereas DaCosta’s dialogue strains to find poetry amid such scrappy conditions, she intuitively reveals a deeper dimension to both of her heroines by taking an extra beat at the beginning or end of scenes to observe their faces when no one else is watching.

This rich, beautifully rendered film boasts an arrestingly soulful performance from Marion Cotillard.

With its linear narrative and clear sense of a protagonist, Evolution is both more beautiful (thanks to gorgeous widescreen cinematography, including stunning underwater and nighttime footage, from “The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears” d.p. Manu Dacosse) and accessible than “Innocence,” though the two films clearly function best as the twisted diptych that they are.