Peter Debruge

It’s the human side of the character that makes this McCarthy’s best performance to date, revealing haunting insights into friendship, loneliness, and creative insecurity.

In the decade since “Kells,” it’s not just the technological advances that make Moore’s latest so impressive, but the rapidly changing cultural conversations as well. He brings everything together by borrowing from timeless visual influences, leaving audiences with another stunning artwork for the ages.

Stands out in a field of generic, cookie-cutter dramas, not simply in terms of representation — though the female-made, indigenous-focused thriller offers a field day for intersectionality theorists — but also in the unconventional way the story unfolds.

A mature work of meticulously tuned meta-fiction.

Rosi has long been drawn to quiet lives, but has never been quite so successful in conveying the soulful qualities he sees in them to his audience — until now, using the oblique approach of Lampedusa’s residents to spotlight this growing international crisis, while using his young protagonist’s obliviousness to reflect and indict our own.

McQuarrie clearly believes in creating coherent set pieces: His combat scenes are tense, muscular, and clean, shot and edited in such a way that the spatial geography makes sense. He places audiences just over Cruise’s shoulder, or staring into the actor’s face as he grimaces with exertion.

Herzog himself is one of the great lunatic directors of our century, a mad genius who repeatedly attempts to challenge nature and the gods in his own films.

How fortunate that Boseman’s legacy should include this film, an homage to Black art that’s tough enough to confront the costs of making it.

The brilliance of this particular episode is how it allows us to see ourselves in Kingsley and to consider the many unseen forces at play in our own socialization. For Black audiences, it confirms many of those invisible barriers. For white ones, it may lead them to question whether the myth of their “success” owes in part to keeping others back.

For those on Zhao’s wavelength, the movie is a marvel of empathy and introspection.

The magic of the movies is never more evident than with stop-motion animation, and nobody does it better than Wallace and Gromit creator Nick Park.

The result looks as much like a Natural History Museum diorama as it sounds: a respectful but waxy re-creation that feels somehow awe-inspiring yet chillingly lifeless to behold, the great exception being Jones' alternately blistering and sage turn as Stevens.

In his first feature, director Joshua Marston passes no judgments. He doesn't condemn drugs. He merely depicts the system that has arisen to support this illicit trade.

In the end, while the movie’s wit is its most satisfying selling point, “Spider-Verse” proves too clever for its own good. But in this universe, where audiences are suffering from the very real phenomenon of superhero overload, ambition and originality are to be encouraged, especially it broadens the mythology to include women, people of color, and yes, even that hammiest of scene-stealers, Peter Porker.

The trouble with Flow is that it already looks dated — commendable to be sure, yet rudimentary at the same time. It’s as if Zilbalodis decided to dump an ocean’s worth of water in the Uncanny Valley. Still, animal-loving viewers will bond almost instantly with the cat and its motley companions.

Murderball asks you to put all your assumptions about quadriplegics aside and start over.

The helmer constructs scenes with a bustling documentary energy, studiously avoiding melodramic tropes, even when they might serve to make the narrative more engaging, less unwieldy or simply easier to digest overall.

Barrino’s soul-felt R&B sensibility lends itself to the role, and the patience it took to reach this point mirrors Celie’s long path to finding herself. Barrino may have embodied the character on Broadway 15 years earlier, but the moment is now right, and everyone else in the terrific ensemble seems to have fallen into place around that choice.

Director Heller does a better job of adapting Schreck’s play than the team behind Disney Plus’ recent “Hamilton” film, in part because the underlying production is so much simpler.

Visually stunning even in its most banal moments and emotionally perceptive almost to a fault.

From the opening scene, set in an unfinished chalet in the French Alps, it often feels as if the movie is eavesdropping on moments too intimate to be shared.

While some might find it triggering, “Josephine” dares to confront the life-shattering intersection of sex and violence in our culture, facing the toughest of “adult situations” with clear eyes.

Ira Sachs’ Little Men is a little movie brimming with little truths about modern life. It won’t change the world, but it does understand it

Michael Dudok de Wit’s hypnotizing, entirely dialogue-free The Red Turtle is a fable so simple, so pure, it feels as if it has existed for hundreds of years, like a brilliant shard of sea glass rendered smooth and elegant through generations of retelling.

It’s a thorough dive into the psychology of everyone involved, not least of all the woman who’d be drawn to play such a role.

Through it all, Gyllenhaal assumes an unfussy, practically invisible non-style that conveys the essential (like that missing doll, visible in the background of a key scene) while privileging the performances.

The Canadian helmer has created the cinematic equivalent of an M.C. Escher drawing, which bends and breaks and folds back on itself in impossible ways. Brain-shattering as it all is, we can hardly tear our eyes away.

While not as stylistically radical as Trier’s last film, “The Worst Person in the World,” this layered family-centric drama (which was also written by Eskil Vogt) shares its ability to find fresh angles on sentiments you’d think that cinema would have exhausted by now.