Rafaela Sales Ross

It is a film that feels movingly personal while speaking to the ubiquitous tussle between duty and desire, and that does so through the gnarling of fresh and guts and bones to find what is buried deep within one’s being: a throbbing vein of wanting, undeniably alive, and that, once freed, will not stop until its thirst is quenched.

Romería is loyal to its sense of withholding almost until the very end. It is then, finally, that Simon reaches the grand apex of her journey of self-reflection, one that holds in the stunning clarity of carefully chosen words a moving encompassing of how one can only build a sturdy foundation for the future after lovingly repairing the unrectified cracks of the past.

It is an experience as moving as it is unnerving, and as the piercing screeching of iron rods announces the Rose of Nevada is to leave port once more, it is we the audience there to wave a pained goodbye, quietly stunned by the ethereal aura of Jenkin’s striking creation.

The Secret Agent is, of course, a film of its own, and feasibly Mendonça Filho’s most refined, outright-auteurist work yet. Moura anchors this tale of history as an afterlife with a terrific encapsulation of the kind of hopelessness that masks itself as resilience, his gaze infused with the aching longing of a future condemned to remain possibility.

Despite this welcome insight into the muddy rules of their relationship, the approach to Kerr’s addiction is the only time “The Smashing Machine” feels a tad slight, the filmmaker proving perhaps a bit too close to its subject to properly gnaw at the ugliness of chemical dependency and rehabilitation.

Although the narrative is faithful to the book, del Toro rewrites the dialogue almost completely, an exercise whose only chance of success relies on his ingrained understanding of Shelley’s writing and tonal cadence. The result is a stunning piece of text, acutely aware of the labyrinthine nature of our most primitive emotions, and zigzagging through musings on love and loss and want with the careful rhythms of a writer who gets that tackling the grandiose often merits delicacy.

It is Clooney, of course, that anchors and crowns this dramedy milimetrically envisioned to tug at the hearts of cinephiles (and, for the sake of addressing the elephant in the Netflix room, awards voters).

This is a film about anger, felt as deeply by the characters whose lives unspool in front of the camera as by the filmmaker who sits behind it. Such anger is a long river that bifurcates into two opposing forces: violence and empathy.

Lawrence is the undeniable propulsive force of “Die, My Love,” a performer whose rare ability to swing from the effortless charm of the classic movie star straight into the dark abyss that houses the odd and the grotesque lends itself perfectly to a role as tangled as Grace.

No one is more seen in The Chronology of Water than Poots, who allows herself to be consumed with the urgency and hunger of Lidia.

The director is an expert in this precise kind of world-building, one intricately related to yearning – for another, for belonging, for redemption.

It is a disorienting, all-consuming sensorial experience and made all the much better to those willing to surrender to its mysteries.

I’m Still Here triumphs in pairing Salles’s intrinsic understanding of the emotional potential of realism with two brilliant performers in Mello and Torres.

The horror comes from seeing seismic consequences closer to newspaper headlines than history books. Figureheads die, but words live on, with grifters always waiting in the wings, spouting the same hate.

Of all the things Phillips does better in Joker: Folie à Deux than he did in Joker, the best is by far his course correction in catering to radical misogynists. The director isn’t subtle in his nods to the controversy stirred by the original.

At a time when more and more filmmakers seem to be looking back at the basics of classic genres like cop procedurals, romantic comedies and crime thrillers, Watts brings to the table a tightly written and directed action comedy that is reminiscent of the era that crowned the genre without alienating itself from the time in which it was made.

It is hard to conceive of a director this young and early in his career to be able to deliver a film that comes out of the gates with the confidence and grandeur of a classic. And not a classic in the making, but one already made.

This back and forth between assuredness and doubt also makes “Babygirl” a refreshing look at BDSM and questions of consent and desire. Reijn is unafraid to have her characters play out all the wobbles that come with negotiating one another’s boundaries, reinforcing how pleasure comes from good communication. That the Dutch director manages to do so while crafting some of the hottest sex scenes in a major film in years and without dropping the ball in pacing this satire on the era of the politically correct feels almost impossible.

Abbasi manages to thread the lines between tabloid fodder and veiled endorsement with great skill.

Schrader’s gaze is patient — tired, almost. He frames Gere’s aged face in tight close-ups, and it is as if we are seeing him for the first time, wrinkled and ragged and oh so very beautiful.

There is so much beauty in Bird, both within the relationships unraveling onscreen and on the screen itself — bright reds and whites and blacks lusciously captured in the film, the edges of the image burnt and remade, almost like yet another bird, the phoenix.

I’m not yet convinced it works, but my goodness, am I thrilled it exists.

Briones and Mara are perfect dance partners in this waltz between reality and possibility, stark opposites and doomed lovers united by a hope they know to be foolish.

In this deliberately stunted teasing of information, Mielants builds a muted drama that cleverly harnesses horror tropes to paint a picture of what happens within the convent’s walls.

Society of the Snow humanizes the gruesome tale of a group of rugby players trapped in the Andes.

Love is put to the test in Greek director Christos Nikou’s Fingernails, a sleek sci-fi film about a near-future where couples can scientifically test their love by removing one of the titular body parts.

The thorny nuances of multiethnic relationships are deeply understood by Celine Song’s directorial debut, Past Lives.

Although it is true that The Beast would greatly benefit from a gentle trimming in its first hour, it is easy to forgive the indulgence when the result is such a remarkable commentary on the looming threats of artificial intelligence and the dangers of glorified emotional numbness.