Richard Brody

Uncut Gems jitters and skitters and lurches and hurtles with Howard’s desperate energy. Sandler’s frantic and fidgety performance provides the movie with its emotional backbone, and he’s not alone.

An extraordinary new film, “The Fishing Place,” by the veteran American independent filmmaker Rob Tregenza, confronts the Nazi onslaught during the Second World War by means of a daring aesthetic and a refined narrative sensibility that are utterly distinctive—and with a bold twist that overtly wrenches the subject into the present tense.

Its mighty ambition and mighty power are suggested by its unusual length (it runs nearly four hours) and its distinctive, original style and tone. Yet it’s rooted in a familiar kind of story, a tale of the sort that lesser filmmakers could easily dramatize in familiar ways but which Hu expanded into a vision of life.

Badlands is [Malick's] Breathless.

Gavagai is an extraordinary and memorable film; its strong and clear emotional refinement arises from a rare force of imagination, a rare power of observation, a rare cinematic sense to fuse them, and a rare skill to realize them together.

Rough, tender, funny, and harshly searching.

Arnow’s poignant and original performance—refined in its awkwardness, exalted in its degradation, touched with grace in its rude self-presentation—is a double masterwork of acting and directing.

Peele’s perfectly tuned cast and deft camera work unleash his uproarious humor along with his political fury; with his first film, he’s already an American Buñuel

It is a fiercely composed, historically informed, and richly textured film, as insightful regarding the particularities of the protagonist as it is on the artistic life — and on the life of its times.

For all its intimacy, the drama has a vast scope, a fierce intensity, and an element of metaphysical whimsy (including one of the great recent dream sequences), which all come to life in the indelibly expressive spontaneity of Kim’s performance.

The American Sector is an exemplary work of cinema as political action, and proof (if any were needed) that the activist element of a film is inseparable from its well-conceived form.

There’s nothing derivative about Dash’s work; every image, every moment is a full creation.

All About Eve is one of the greatest movies about theatre—an idea that, in itself, opens an ironic abyss into which Mankiewicz spelunks with an impish, riotous aplomb.

Psycho, in its dark and sordid extravagance, remains utterly contemporary, in its subject as well as in its production.

There’s a way of looking at this movie, a colossal tale of the sociopathy of American history, that’s a matter of listening to what’s said and what isn’t. The movie raises the idea of silence to a nearly transcendent pitch of passion.

There’s neither pity nor sentimentality in Gomes’s populism; the highest strain of modern humanism faces up to the first person.

The plunging and roving camera provides visceral thrills; ecstatic special effects capture the sacred (the Crucifixion) and the profane (combat in the Great War); a metaphysical framing device (starring Lillian Gish) raises human conflict to universal import; and Griffith’s trademark closeups lend a quivering lip or a trembling hand the tragic grandeur of historical cataclysm.

Her rhapsodic tribute to the teeming artistic apprenticeship that Paris soon offered her isn’t solely a vision of beauty: she also observed, and unsparingly recalls, the political and social ugliness with which she was confronted during her time there.

With a blend of local lore and partisan fury, theatrical artifice and journalistic inquiry, Gomes single-handedly reinvents the political cinema.

Voyage of Time inhabits a rarefied plane of thought, detached from the practicalities of daily life, that leave it open to a facile and utterly unjustified dismissal, given the breathtaking intensity of its stylistic unity and the immediate, firsthand force of its philosophical reflections.

The film locates extraordinary political and cultural tributaries, marked by archival footage, that arise from the history of Dawson City and the gold rush.

It’s both the most romantic of Westerns and the greatest American political movie. But the movie is also romantic in another, intimate way—it’s a great love story and a painful triangle, involving the tenderfoot lawyer (James Stewart), his gunslinger friend (John Wayne), and the woman they both love (Vera Miles).

The film not only bears witness to the self-surpassing power of inspired collaboration but, as an art work, also exemplifies it. [Review of re-release]

Asteroid City demonstrates (for anyone who ever doubted it) that, far from being a mere stylist, Anderson is a far-seeing and deep-thinking political filmmaker.

It’s as daring and original a work of political cinema and personal conscience as the current cinema can offer.

The cultural richness of Birds of Passage is overwhelming, its sense of detail piercingly perceptive, and its sense of drama rigorously yet organically integrated with its documentary elements. Fusing the sociopolitical, the natural, and the mythopoetic realms, the movie offers a model to filmmakers anywhere regarding the dramatic power that inheres in the cultural specifics of any story.

Zlotowski crafts a distinctive style to distill and heighten the drama’s psychological complexities and societal analyses. No less than its young protagonists, the film dangerously brushes against the edge of modernity’s enticingly destructive glitz.

The film as it stands is a vision of a lost world of graces and traditions that are as alluring as they are confining, as beautiful as they are useless—as well as a portrait of the makers and the victims of modernity.

Bezinović presents the story of D’Annunzio’s autocratic rise, reign, and fall in a way that’s as unusual as it is revelatory.

Porumboiu cinematically constructs—both through the patient, subtly but decisively shaped interviews and the cannily gradual editing—a life story that engages, at crucial points of contact, with the political history of his times and that reflects aspirations and inspirations that are themselves of a historic power.

[Willis’s] heavy trudge on a game leg suggests weariness of historical dimensions; the harmonious mysteries of the urban landscape are themselves the essence of his art. A brilliant sequence of musicians at work gets away from familiar modes of filmed performance and into the depths of inner experience.

The movie’s writer and director, Kleber Mendonça Filho, crafts a tight story with startling freedom, leaping between characters in order to conjure their fateful interconnections, while giving them all, persecuted and persecutors alike, an identity and a voice. In the process, he brings history to life with bracing immediacy—a feat all the rarer for the audacious twists of cinematic form with which he renders the movie an act of archival reclamation.

It’s one of the rare movies that seems truly musical in its inspiration—and which, like much great music, envelops an astonishing complexity of invention and depth of insight in emblematically straightforward expressions.

The great power of the movie, beyond the passionate specifics of its romantic dramas, is in the distillation of an enormous vision of historical unity.

A masterwork of montage, a breathlessly frenzied collage of disparate sources that conjure the unholy tempest of a great man and a great mind at full gallop.

With this intricate web of personal and family connections, and the brave maneuvering in the face of the overseers’ commands, Gerima is doing nothing less than reconstituting and affirming the full humanity of the enslaved.

Decker pushes the action to the breaking point of fury, which the cast—and especially Howard, in one of the most accomplished teen performances ever—embodies with a flaying and self-scourging vulnerability.

Richardson in particular vaults to the forefront of her generation’s actors with this performance, which virtually sings with emotional and intellectual acuity.... Few performances—and few films—glow as brightly with the gemlike fire of precocious genius.

Jenkins burrows deep into his characters’ pain-seared memories, creating ferociously restrained performances and confrontational yet tender images that seem wrenched from his very core.

Yogi unfolds the characters’ intimate stories and the region’s history in sharply textured details and rapturous images; he blends social practicalities and metaphysical mysteries with a serene, straightforward astonishment.

The movie dramatizes the constraints of the era, the imposition of a narrow and religion-based morality, the stern discipline that’s internalized as a result, the elision of women and their world from public life, and the firm expectations of family and society that Héloïse will endure in her unwanted marriage. Yet it does more than merely depict them—it embodies them, in the characters’ poised stillness, which makes the airy surroundings feel as rigid as stone.

The French Dispatch is perhaps Anderson’s best film to date. It is certainly his most accomplished. And, for all its whimsical humor, it is an action film, a great one, although Anderson’s way of displaying action is unlike that of any other filmmaker.

With its blend of terrifyingly intense family bonds and the howling furies of the world outside, this is a great American political film.

Happy Hour, a work of distinctly modern cinema, reaches deep into the classic traditions of melodrama—along with its coincidences and its violent contrasts—to revive a latent power for grand-scale observation through painfully close contact with the agonizing intimacies of contemporary life.

The late director Aleksei Guerman’s last film is a grandly arbitrary carnival of neo-medieval depravity. It’s also a mudpunk allegory of Russian barbarism and backwardness.

In Our Day is essentially a sort of wisdom cinema, a distillation of the emotional complexity, the aphoristic brilliance, and the severity toward oneself and toward others that marks the world of admired creators—and it’s a work of paradox.

It’s a quiet, candid, sharply conceived and imaginatively realized masterwork, her first film of such bold and decisive originality; it’s Reichardt’s first great movie.

The backbone of Collin’s film is the sole audio interview with Helen Morgan, made in 1996, shortly before her death. The story that she tells combines with the story that Collin builds around it to provide a revelatory and moving portrait of a great musician.

Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?...is an overwhelming experience. It fills the current American landscape with the hatred, oppression, and violence that also scars its history.

It’s more than the portrait of an artist (or even of two); it’s a revelation and exaltation of the artistic essence, of the very nature of an artist’s life as an unending act of creation in itself.

A comedy, and a scintillating, uproarious one, filled with fast and light touches of exquisite incongruity in scenes that have the expansiveness of relaxed precision, performed and timed with the spontaneous authority of jazz.

It’s not the whole story, of course; it’s resolutely on the side of decorum and falls far short of the inner and outer postwar apocalypses envisioned in film noir. But the intensity of its liberal romanticism is utterly gripping.

Hong’s deft artistry is an attempt to get past the habits of issue-oriented, advocacy-besotted political cinema to work out just what a political cinema would be. And his answer is: first of all, it’s cinema. In this regard, he connects with Mankiewicz, Resnais, and other great filmmakers for whom politics is an important, interwoven part of life—and of art.

Ingeniously, Coogler has transformed “Rocky”—the modern cinematic myth that, perhaps more than any other, endures as a modern capitalist Horatio Alger story of personal determination and sheer will—into a vision of community and opportunity, connections and social capital, family and money.

In fusing Cleo’s intricate consciousness with the teeming vitality of city life and the fine grain of daily activity, Varda displays her vast artistic inspiration and expands the power of the cinema itself.

The animation, by Craig Staggs, has a notable imaginative specificity, and the meticulously complex interweaving of styles turns the film into a horrifying true-crime thriller that’s enriched by a rare depth of inner experience.

Minding the Gap is a personal documentary of the highest sort, in which the film’s necessity to the filmmaker—and its obstacles, its resistances, its emotional and moral demands on him—are part of its very existence.

July’s aesthetic imagination is inseparable from her empathetic curiosity and emotional urgency; it tempers a howl of anguish at a world of pain into a kind of cinematic music that unfolds it in nuanced detail and extends a hand of consolation, even offers a note of hope.

Vertigo is one of the great movies about movies, and about Hitchcock’s own way with them.

The teeming profusion of events that Lee dramatizes is inseparable from the historiography that he foregrounds throughout. Both are brought to life with an intricately varied texture of dialogue and gesture, purpose and spirit—a crucial aspect of Lee’s career-long artistry that, here, reaches new heights, thanks to an extraordinary cast of actors who blend fervor and nuance, and whom Lee directs with manifest inspiration.

Boots Riley’s first feature is a scintillating comedic outburst of political imagination and visionary fury.

The canniness of Gray’s procedure is matched by the boldness, even the recklessness, of the extremes to which he pushes it—along with his characters, his story, his emotions, and his techniques. The result is to turn Ad Astra into an instant classic of intimate cinema—one that requires massive machinery and complex methods to create a cinematic simplicity that, for all the greatness of his earlier films, had eluded him until now.

The new movie by Robert Greene is a tour de force in the blending and bending of genres.

In its modest, forthright warmth, “Cane River” is a work of visionary artistry and progressive imagination.

For all the earnest diagnosis of race relations in a country that doesn’t recognize race, Zadi crafts an extraordinary comedic work of lilt and sparkle.

An intimate movie with a metaphysical grandeur, a detailed local inquiry that displays the crushing power of societal forces as well as the passion and vitality of those who endure.

By means of ferociously intimate images, tensely controlled performances, and a spare sense of drama, Ashley McKenzie’s first feature, about two young drug addicts in Nova Scotia, conjures a state of heightened consciousness.

My First Film, which looks back at a young filmmaker’s crises and conflicts, is both a masterwork of an artistic coming of age and a virtuosic reconception of the art of cinema itself.

Birbiglia films what he knows, offering ample and intricate scenes of improvisations performed onstage, along with an insider’s view of the industry.

Kolodny’s film is a touching, disquieting, relentlessly fascinating view of a troubled soul and of the world of trouble he belongs to.

Either hour alone would be a wry, incisive, quietly painful drama, set at the intersection of art and life, about foregrounded action and the weight of personal history. Together, the two parts make a radical fiction about the crucial role of imagination in lived experience. Hong’s narrative gamesmanship reveals agonized regret.

The directors, Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes, rely on some tricky devices to tell the story of this film shoot—but those tricks, far from undercutting the emotional drama, intensify it. The result is the most accomplished and absorbing film about time spent in lockdown that I’ve seen.

It’s a strikingly modern, complex, disturbing, and yet sad, touching, and romantic film.

The vision of such severe regimentation is shocking; Zin-mi’s tears of shame and her sharply limited range of knowledge and inhibited behavior embody an outrage.

Its blend of documentary and dramatic filmmaking, of first-person reflection and reenactment, sets a standard for cinematic inquiry into the political implications of personal experience.

With “Daughters,” Dash places Black Americans’ intimate dramas in a mighty historical arc with metaphysical dimensions; with his “Color Purple,” Bazawule acknowledges Dash’s work as a landmark in that history and a fundamental inspiration in his approach to historical drama.

The visual gags that Wilder deploys are as stingingly cynical as ever, but here they have a newfound way with time, which they inhabit with an exquisitely controlled leisure. It’s the first of Wilder’s later and greatest films.

The glaring absence of political chatter doesn’t mar Treitz’s achievement: he has made an instant-classic Western.

Psychologically resonant, visually transcendent film.

The blend of midlife crisis and existential terror is reminiscent of the films of Ingmar Bergman, but Tarkovsky makes it a world of his own.

In its depiction of Guruji’s mastery, The Disciple conjures the wonders and the mysteries of a life that is itself a work of art.

Pumping Iron is, of course, a documentary, but Schwarzenegger isn’t merely its subject—he’s its star, and his beaming, witty, charismatic presence in the film is among the most ingratiating performances of the time, one that’s resoundingly predictive of the acting career that he had long aspired to and that he would, of course, soon achieve.

The trio’s breezy erotic sophistication masks an urban populism that’s as artistically fertile as it is politically risky; their domestic disasters have the feel and tone of epic clashes.

With a limited, intimate focus, Little Girl becomes a grandly diagnostic analysis of French society, distilling the country’s fault lines into a few indelible images.

Emotions, identities, and even bodily functions are distorted by the mechanized uniformity, but Tati’s despair is modulated by a sense of wonder.

I saw Brooks’s Fever Pitch when it came out, and was instantly smitten...Fever Pitch still delivers the same terse, grim, and ironic power that it had when I first saw it.

Akerman’s chillingly sardonic feminist fable—which also bears the weight of unspoken wartime trauma—is built on a sublime paradox, the elusive identity of someone who, as the title suggests, is so easily identified.

What matters in Monster isn’t the gamesmanship built into its structure but the imaginative richness, the emotional immediacy, and the vital performances that are concentrated in its extended third section.

Hong renders these universal conflicts locally specific and intimately personal.

Simon films the lives of others with an empathetic passion that transforms observation into deep and resonant subjectivity.

Here, more than ever, Hong’s cinema is also revealed to be a philosophy—his method not a means but an end in itself, an embrace of the history of the art and a preservation of its future in the eternal present tense of creation.

Filming cityscapes and intimate gestures with avid attention, adorning the dialogue with deep confessions and witty asides, Piñeiro conjures a cogently realistic yet gloriously imaginative vision of youthful ardor in love and art alike.

With audacious leaps of time and intimate echoes spanning a quarter century of intertwined lives, the director Jia Zhangke endows this romantic melodrama with vast geopolitical import.

Only some on-the-nose symbols and facile political sentiments diminish her majestically playful, fiercely empathetic vision.

Rockwell’s vigorous detailing of personal life—with its evocation of inner lives—is at the heart of its political vision and of its dramatic strength.

Sturges seems to leap out from behind the screen to address the viewer directly. Few classic filmmakers with so much to say manage to find so many splendid words to say it in.

The specifics of The Other Side of Everything far overleap the facts of regional politics; the movie is, in effect, a film of political philosophy, not only in Srbijanka’s trenchant, stirring, and tragic observations, but in its ever-relevant observation of the endemic reactionary counterweight to political progress: populist ethnocentrism and nationalism.

Scorsese infuses this tale with the passionate energy of New York street life and wonder at the powerful workings of show business and studio craft. Yet his main subject is the ineffable factor of genius, which Jerry has, Rupert lacks, and no desire or effort can replace.

This arch, bold, and tender transposition of elements of the Nativity to the cramped secular life of a high-school student in current-day Paris is as much of an emotional wonder as a conceptual one.

Eastwood only gently tweaks the story’s conventional surfaces, yet he infuses it with a bundle of ideas and ideals that turn it both bitterly ironic and ferociously critical.

C’mon C’mon is a tender and turbulent melodrama that amplifies its power with a documentary current. The result is a film of an extraordinary amplitude; it’s both poised and frenetic, contemplative and active, heartily sentimental and astringently contentious, intensively intimate and expansively world-embracing, exactingly composed and wildly spontaneous.

The brisk and lyrical action, filmed in chilly black-and-white tones, is adorned with eccentric, symbolic details; the petty stuff of daily life shudders with stifled conflict and looming calamity.

Rigid formality leaves much unsaid in Yasujiro Ozu’s 1949 film, but the director reveals the hidden depths of ordinary life with a quiet astonishment and observes his characters with an exacting subtlety of expression.

Southside with You, running a brisk hour and twenty minutes, is a fully realized, intricately imagined, warmhearted, sharp-witted, and perceptive drama, one that sticks close to its protagonists while resonating quietly but grandly with the sweep of a historical epic.

In a year of audaciously accomplished movies, “Nickel Boys” stands out as different in kind. Ross, who co-wrote the script with Joslyn Barnes, achieves an advance in narrative form, one that singularly befits the movie’s subject—not just dramatically but historically and morally, too.

Jia’s restrained yet fierce X-ray of the ills of modern China also evokes a calm, intimate compassion for its struggling survivors.

The Eternal Daughter is very much a two-hander for one actor, an astonishing tour de force for Swinton’s art and for Hogg’s writing and direction—all the more so inasmuch as it’s a sequel, the third in a series.

Cassavetes’s most cleverly constructed film is also a definitive lesson in the death-defying, all-consuming art of acting, proof of a madness beyond the Method.

Filming with long, ironically balanced takes, Porumboiu delivers an ingeniously intricate goofball comedy that evokes heroes of legend while bringing sociological abstractions to mucky life.

The directors, Kentucker Audley (who co-stars as a talk-show host) and Albert Birney, embrace both sides of Sylvio’s temperament, realizing his frenzied outbursts (including a vehicular-chase scene) as imaginatively and as delicately as his self-doubt.

Silver’s incisive direction blends patient discernment and expressive angularity; he develops his characters in deft and rapid strokes and builds tension with an almost imperceptible heightening of tone and darkening of mood.

Diop films the characters and the city with a tactile intimacy and a teeming energy that are heightened by the soundtrack’s polyphony of voices and music; she dramatizes the personal experience of public matters—religious tradition, women’s autonomy, migration, corruption—with documentary-based fervor, rhapsodic yearning, and bold affirmation.

Nope is one of the great movies about moviemaking, about the moral and spiritual implications of cinematic representation itself—especially the representation of people at the center of American society who are treated as its outsiders. It is an exploitation film—which is to say, a film about exploitation and the cinematic history of exploitation as the medium’s very essence.

[Anderson] makes a movie that’s both brilliant and hollow, an old-fashioned movie about the world of today (and maybe tomorrow), a vision of hopeful possibilities that remains unmoored from realities. Yet his film, even in its omissions, brims with strategic ingenuity and daring, cinematic and political—to fight other films’ empty fantasies with substantial ones, to battle other advocates’ pernicious myths with virtuous ones.

The stylistic thrills of “The Phoenician Scheme” are inseparable from its turbulent, violent physical action, and it is here that the film proves most surprising and most original: its linear narrative lays bare Anderson’s cinephile obsessions.

The film puts people and their surroundings, the moments of grand drama and the moments of contemplative solitude, in a state of spiritual equality.

Having already helped launch the genre, the director Howard Hawks here reinvents his comic voice, establishing archetypes of theme and performance that still hold sway.

Allen joins the Catskills tummler’s anything-for-a-laugh antics with a Eurocentric art-house self-awareness and a psychoanalytic obsession with baring his sexual desires and frustrations, romantic disasters, and neurotic inhibitions. It’s a mark of Allen’s artistic intuition and confessional probity that he lets Diane Keaton’s epoch-defining performance run away with the movie and allows her character to run away from him.

Manfred Kirchheimer’s 2006 documentary, only now being released, is an exemplary work of urban romanticism, intellectual history, and visual analysis.

The movie is simultaneously an apogee of the classic Western style, with its principled violence in defense of just law, and an eccentrically hyperbolic work of modernism, which yokes both bumptious erotic comedy and soul-searing rawness to the mission.

Coogler presents a provocatively Africanist view of Black American experience, and does so with exuberant inventiveness; the uncompromising political essence of his allegorical vision is expressed with aesthetic delight.

Even great and prolific directors have high points, and this film is one of Hong’s best; its form relies on disturbing ironies to approach one of the mightiest of subjects—the nature of happiness and, in particular, a happy marriage, from the perspective of a married woman.

The Braggs pull off the vertiginous intricacy of this narrative with playful cheer and breezy charm, which is carried along by the performances, and also by the heartiness of the story itself.

It’s among the great American films of the sixties—including Juleen Compton’s Stranded and Jim McBride’s David Holzman’s Diary—that display the global reach of that Paris-centered movement.

A Man of Integrity is both a work of political defiance and of artistic audacity. The movie’s extreme contrast between the bland surfaces of daily life and the maddening pressures of ambient power looming beneath them turns its starkly realistic images into calmly furious denunciations, journalistic revelations, and even wildly disorienting hallucinations.

The dramatic fusion of physical and administrative power captures nothing less than the bloody forging of modernity.

It wasn’t on my list of likely occurrences that a nostalgic and sentimental holiday movie would provide some of the year’s sharpest characterizations on film and also boast a strikingly original narrative form.

The film brings the past to life with a vividness and an immediacy that seem wrenched from Davies’s very soul.

The story...opens out into a dazzling multigenerational array of characters, as well as a panoply of trenchant themes.

[Hong's] tightrope-long takes of scenes filmed in settings ranging from the picturesque to the banal (restaurants and apartments, café terraces, Mediterranean beaches) have an intricate dramatic construction, replete with glittering asides and wondrous coincidences, to rival that of a Hollywood classic.

The greatness of Murnau’s work—maybe even the essence of beauty—is that it offers much to talk about, because it is neither emptily decorative nor devoid of ideas, but, rather, embodies ideas even as it surpasses them, and conveys, by the very fact of its being, emotions far beyond those arising from story, character, or situation.

Though the end of the film seems rushed—its seventy-nine minutes could have gone on for hours—it is nonetheless a cause for rejoicing.

The films range widely in form—documentary, fiction, hybrid, and unclassifiable—as well as in tone, subject, style, and, for that matter, in originality and inspiration. Even the most ordinary of them is worth seeing, and the best of them, brevity notwithstanding, are among the most powerful films of the year.

With a wide range of incisive, sardonic, hyperbolic humor and drama, Lee sketches the circular connections between racist images, racist policies, and the lack of leadership to resist them.

It’s a film that’s energized throughout by a sense of artistic freedom and uninhibited creative passion greater than what Gerwig has brought to even her previous projects made outside the ostensible constraints of studio filmmaking.

The movie exemplifies the power of the cinema—even the popular and commercial and invigoratingly swingy cinema—to reflect the inner life through imaginative methods that, at the same time, reveal the fractures and complexities of public life with probing and passionate insight.

Haim brings a constant and instant focus even to riskily inchoate emotions, and Hoffman lends his driven energumen a lambent glow of innocence. Both inhabit the screen with a sympathetic responsiveness and a rare immediacy. Their incarnation of the ardors and audacities of youth is among the marvels of recent movies, and with them Anderson rediscovers something greater than his own youth—the youth of the cinema itself.

A work of practical realism that stands as a manifesto for the imaginative power of observation and for the political power of the imagination.

The movie, at its most vigorous and most menacing, is also illuminated with mystery and wonder.

The diverging paths and seething conflicts of two lifelong friends, now young Brooklyn professionals, are explored deeply and poignantly in this deceptively calm melodrama, written and directed by Dan Sallitt.

The movie’s visual prose, aided by simple but fanciful camera work, has an original, giddy spin; Bryant and Molzan’s smooth and floaty direction sublimates the rocky landscape into something disturbingly ethereal.

Even before the thieves cross the building’s threshold, “The Mastermind” emerges as an instant heist classic. Reichardt’s granular view of the plot, clearly bound for disaster, is both terribly sad and absurdly funny.

With “It’s Not Me,” Carax confronts the aberration of celebrity (even art-house celebrity) by means of a cinematic self-creation that’s both a matter of sincere reticence and an audaciously assertive work of art.

DuVernay embraces Wilkerson’s work wholeheartedly and rises to the artistic challenge with one of the most unusual and ingenious of recent screenplays.

The intensity and the lyrical fervor of Kasi Lemmons’s direction lend this historical drama, about Harriet Tubman’s escape from slavery and her work with the Underground Railroad, the exalted energy of secular scripture.

In disclosing the secret of engineering, Mann also offers a passionate and personal word on the secret of the cinema itself.

Above all, Till is a work of mighty cinematic portraiture, with a range of closeups of Mamie that infuse the film with an overwhelming combination of subjective depth and an outward sense of purpose.

American history bursts forth in the present tense in Robinson Devor’s probingly associative documentary.

The film’s styles, tones, and moods are as distinctive as its approach to jazz.

The movie’s rage is righteous, its symbols profound. It is hard to imagine a fiction film that could rise to the severe aesthetic demands of its enormous subjects, but “Yes” is the rare film that challenges the cinema at large to try.

He stages the clashes of idiosyncratic characters that give the enterprise its life while observing the infinitesimal details of which that life is made—how to make new friends, how to hook up cable TV—as well as the ethereally intimate connections that result.

Pennebaker films Stritch’s first rendition, among the most celebrated outtakes in history, with a rapt devotion that’s as revealing of the limits of recording as it is of the thrills of live performance—and of the camera’s mediating creative power.

In Kiarostami’s furiously clear view, religious dogma suppresses the eye’s observations through the dictate of the word; his calmly unwavering images, with their wry humor and generous sympathy, have the force of a steadfast resistance.

Scarface is by far the most visually inventive and tonally anarchic movie that Hawks made. Among other things, it’s a tribute to the freedom that independent producers afforded directors then—and still do today.

With bold and canny camera work that yields an uproarious parody of Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal,” White dynamites the formalist restraint of art films and the bonds of narrative logic to unleash the primal ecstasy of the cinema.

The range of tones and moods, like the range of situations, characters, and actors, is so wide, so recklessly self-contradicting, that it turns a tautly crafted local story into a comprehensive vision.

Its boldly distinctive method is inseparable from its emotional vitality, and its audacious sense of form is as immediate and personal as the story it tells. It’s a memory-film that captures inner life with physical style: patience, speed, precision, and breathtaking leaps.

There’s palpable joy in the sheer ingenuity of the movie’s conception and in the realization of it. Panahi goes at his subjects with an irrepressible cinematic verve that extends from the story and the dialogue to the performances and the very presences of the actors.

Keene films the supernatural tale of timeless rusticity with fanatical attention to the barren and craggy seaside setting; her stunningly spare yet phantasmagorical images fuse the forces of nature with the spirit of mystery. Björk brings an otherworldly calm to her visionary role, and occasionally sings.

With microcosms of microcosms and reflections of reflections, Greene offers a passionately ambitious, patiently empathetic mapping of modern times.

Maysles endearingly reveals Apfel’s blend of blind passion and keen practicality, her unflagging enthusiasm for transmitting her knowledge to young people, and her synoptic view of fashion as living history.

Avowals of literary ambitions and familial devotion, stories of death and faith, and a bold dramatic structure—based on flashbacks and leaps forward in time—set the vagaries of work and love on the firm footing of destiny.

Within the vigorous entertainment of Straight Outta Compton is a sharp-minded realism about the machines within the machines, the amplifiers of money and media that, behind the scenes and offscreen, play crucial roles in the flow of power.

Lynch’s powerful depiction of Merrick (played by John Hurt) moves a viewer from revulsion and fear to empathy and tenderness.

The filmmakers’ probing analysis reveals the basic principles of freedom and dignity within the political essence of labor issues.

The Iron Claw is as exuberant as it is mournful, and the high spirits of performance and achievement are inseparable from the price that they exact.

It’s a revealing view of an industry of enormous personalities—and the indulgences that feed them.

Under the guise of a conventional bio-pic, with all of the dilution and sweetening that the commercial format entails, Fogel offers a wide-ranging and deep-rooted critique of American officialdom, of the political underpinnings of American society.

A crucial episode of the nineteen-sixties, centered on both the space race and the civil-rights struggle, comes to light in this energetic and impassioned drama.

With this film, Wenders crystallized his style of existential sentimentality. His cool eye for urbanism and design blends a love of kitsch with a hatred for commercialism, historicism with a fear of history’s ghosts.

The exemplary figure of Ropert’s film is Solange’s retreat into a sharply expressive silence, captured in poised and precisely composed images, that resounds as clearly as a cry of agony.

In Rewind & Play, Gomis does more than reveal the discussion that didn’t see the light of day in 1970; he reveals the cinematic methods by which the fabricated and tailored view of Monk’s life and work were crafted.

The movie offers, amid its hectic and rowdy melodrama, a constant and underlying vision of the crucial power of government to serve the public good—and the ease with which that power can, almost invisibly, be shifted to the unfair advantage of the rich and the connected.

Running gags about oddball twists in the restaurant business serve little purpose but don’t detract from the movie’s essential quasi-documentary power.

Dumont turns the tale into a dialectical spectacle: he stages military musters like Busby Berkeley productions, seethes at the torturers’ rationalizations, delights in hearing his actors declaim the scholars’ sophistries, and thrills in the pugnacious simplicity of Joan’s defiant responses, which reduce her captors’ pride to ridicule.

This drama, by the director Jessie Maple, from 1981—one of the first features directed by a black American female filmmaker—is a blunt cinematic instrument of immense power.

For his first thriller set in America, from 1942, Alfred Hitchcock runs loopily through a gamut of genres, filming in a range of settings, from California to New York, to depict a country that lives in the image of its movies. His set pieces take on the blue-collar drama, the Western, the high-society mystery, the urban police story, and the circus melodrama, while capturing the paranoia of a country newly at war.

In The Green Knight, Lowery revises a legend, in style and in substance, in order to evoke a way of telling different stories, and of telling stories differently. He takes the risk of perpetuating a deluded gospel of evil, or of seeming to do so, in a daring effort to dramatize a world in desperate need of artistic redemption.

Seimetz films this coldly ghoulish and derisive fable with quiet intensity and rage at the way of the world.

Carla, in “Between the Temples,” is given a terse but powerful backstory, and Kane conveys the character’s historically infused idealism, fierce purpose, and caustic humor with tremulous vulnerability and life-rich lucidity. She and Schwartzman expand Silver’s intimate cinematic universe beyond its frames and map it onto the world at large.

Filmed in 1969 but unreleased until 1989, Michael Roemer’s dyspeptic comedy, about a small-time gangster newly freed from prison, bares unhealed and unspoken wounds of New York Jewish life.

Seeing, in Simon’s documentary, the directing candidates forced to analyze a scene, submit a dossier, step on a set and direct a dictated scene, is like watching the training of hired hands rather than original artists—people better suited to writing grant applications than scripts, better suited to following orders than creating new worlds, to playing the urbane part of a director in meetings and interviews than actually being one.

Tashlin transforms the mystery into a giddy parody of Alfred Hitchcock’s films: borrowing his highly inflected, riotously inventive visual styles, Tashlin creates a sort of live-action cartoon, with distorting angles yielding disorienting juxtapositions, whether from the explosive results of a dish of kidneys flambé or during balletic capers at a bowling alley.

The silences that overwhelm the movie’s confrontational rages and the suppression of backstory details, underplaying motives and emphasizing action, thrust “Fire” out of the realm of psychological drama and into shocking emotional immediacy.

With an unfailing eye for place, décor, costume, and gesture, the director glides his camera through tangles of memories to evoke joys and horrors with a similar sense of wonder.

Though “Marty Supreme” is based (albeit loosely) on the true story of someone else’s life, it’s Safdie’s most personal film to date. It’s one of the very few movies that dramatize—hyperbolically, comedically, even mockingly, yet optimistically—the boldness unto folly of a young fanatic turning ambition into reality.

It’s a movie that, in adapting a novel by Ferrante, indicates the grievous lack in the current cinema of dramas that do what is done all the time in literary fiction: consider women’s lives in intimate detail and in the light of wide-ranging, deep-rooted experience.

Spectacular images, ideas, emotions, and performances are embedded in the lugubrious pace and tone of Pedro Costa’s modernist fusion of classic melodrama and documentary.

Nouvelle Vague isn’t a portrait of Godard by Linklater but a feature-length thank-you note, from Richard to Jean-Luc, for freeing him to make films his own way.

Blue Moon revels in a fine mind and a great soul, and Hawke’s embodiment of both is exalted and startling.

Almodóvar pursues the politics of memory with uninhibited vigor, with a relentlessly physical immediacy that endows his tale of startling coincidences with the power of documentary.

Hadi tells an engaging story, brings complex and surprising characters to life, lends a locale an aesthetic iconography, and renders personal identity inextricable from the forces of history that shaped or deformed it.

Long before the plot is resolved, Joji offers a sardonic vision of patriarchal tyranny and the pathologies it spawns—and the obvious artifice of the ending declares, with bitter irony, that there’s no end in sight.

This boldly confrontational and journalistically probing documentary, by the director Nanfu Wang, goes beyond the slogan of China’s longtime “one-child policy” to reveal the system of violence, corruption, propaganda, and silence on which it depended.

In The Barefoot Contessa, [Mankiewicz] shows the sordidness of the money-driven, ego-fuelled, ruthless machinations that are both central to the business of Hollywood and constantly threaten to derail it.

De Sica, working with a host of screenwriters, builds a teeming story—involving broken friendships, families, institutions, dreams, and lives—in which elements of observation and research are concentrated into intensely emotional moments that heighten the film’s moral and mnemonic power.

Nyoni’s frank, confrontational style is both derisive and empathetic; she extracts powerful symbolic images from the oppressive environment.

Between its melancholy view of disconnection and incomprehension, it offers a hint of ironic optimism about what a family’s future depends on—namely, its past.

Director Howard Hawks makes a familiar plot resound strangely with new sexual overtones.

A fascinating, inspiring view of a filmmaker whose methods are as boldly original as his movie.

Schatzberg doesn’t romanticize addicts’ troubles; with a tender but unsparing eye, he spins visual variations on shambling degradation and transient relief.

Sirk unleashed a melodramatic torrent of rage at the corrupt core of American life—the unholy trinity of racism, commercialism, and puritanism.

The overarching and underlying question that the film poses is nothing less than: What is art? And, for that matter, is the conventional definition of good art too narrow to account for the merits of such works as these?

The filmmakers, despite their rueful gaze, inspire empathy for all parties to this miserable commerce.

Along with its trenchant, revelatory depictions and discussion of police work and related political ills, A Cop Movie pulls these hidden vectors of image-making, opinion-shaping power to the fore.

Gordon’s performance conveys something else that’s all too rare in movies of musicians—namely, joy. It’s a serene and lofty joy, with an element of wry detachment and even self-deprecation built in, but it’s vitally present nonetheless.

The spoken narrative, with its spare, literary diction and vigorous precision, seems to add details and even scenes to the image-scape. The copious observations and reflections that the speaker relates expand the movie—a mere seventy-one minutes long—into a work of novelistic amplitude.

[Leaf] reinvigorates one of the basic elements of movies, the closeup, and restores its centrality as the beating heart of the cinema.

From the start, Just Another Girl on the I.R.T., an independent film made on a very low budget (reportedly a hundred and thirty thousand dollars), is a polyphonic work of multiple voices and consciousnesses.

In Bogdanovich’s analytical twist on the genre, even joyous liberation leaves a huge mess.

The hard-won consolations of seasonal sentiment emerge in the searching performances as well as in the impressionistic handheld images.

The Novelist’s Film is straightforwardly chronological and naturalistic, but that makes it no less intricate or sophisticated a reflection on the nature of movies, both intellectual and practical.

With a teeming cast of vibrantly unglamorous Chicago characters who hold Eddie in a tight social web, Swanberg—aided greatly by Johnson’s vigorous performance—makes the gambler’s panic-stricken silence all the more agonizing, balancing the warm veneer of intimate normalcy with the inner chill of secrets and lies.

In presenting the game, Lund develops a passionately analytical aesthetic of baseball that offers a corrective to the way it’s usually depicted. His documentary-based method, in rejecting the patterned routines of television coverage, intensifies the drama of the sport itself.

The many characters’ distinct perspectives on the action are multiplied by chilling views from surveillance cameras, prompting deceptive displays—including romantic ones—in which tipped-off targets fool those who are watching.

Buzzes with the long-term historical power of the occasion, and notes the divisions that the organizers struggled to overcome.

May’s judgment on manhood is harsh: it entails renunciation, submission, humiliation, and the willingness to betray and to break the relationships forged in the heat of male bonding. Or, to be a man, one must stop being one of the guys.

For all its political determination, RRR is also a musical, and an electrifying one.

One of the few great films based on a great book; its acerbic humor matches the tale’s stifled horror of stifling morals.

Hitchcock’s ultimate point evokes cosmic terror: innocence is merely a trick of paperwork, whereas guilt is the human condition.

[Losier] revels in Cassandro’s offstage charisma and in his acrobatic artistry while also revealing the authentic violence of the sport’s blatant artifice.

The movie’s movingly confessional, even penitent look at private and public abuses of power is a glance askance at Hollywood mythologies, too.

Dumont doesn’t stint on the Lucas-like dialectics, and he works wonders with wryly blunt yet nonetheless spectacular effects-driven action scenes. But, most exquisitely, he delights in visions of earthly, natural majesty.

Italy’s crises of employment and housing are the subjects of its sentimental story, which is also a wildly imaginative tale brought to life with astonishing special effects and slapstick stunts.

When the Dostoyevskian drama kicks in, Allen’s venomous speculations take over, and bring to the fore a tangle of ghostly conundrums and ferocious ironies, as if the director, nearing eighty, already had one foot in the next world and were looking back at this one with derision and rue.

The film puts his work convincingly and revealingly into the context of his turbulent life and the passionate politics of the times. Above all, however, the movie puts on display Winogrand’s singular way of working—and proves that, as with many of the artistic luminaries of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, his process is as original a creation as his art, and is inseparable from it.

Lupino’s flinty performance and Bennett’s haunted one infuse the movie’s pugnacity and violence with tender vulnerability, and Walsh, a cinematic poet of brassy urbanity, stokes the story’s volatile elements—artistic passions, high-society temptations, streetwise bravery, postwar trauma, family loyalty, and the secrets and lies that pass for romance—to a crescendo of abraded grandeur.

Like Shoah, Procession does more than bear witness to atrocities; it uses the artistic power of the cinema to inscribe them in history.

The principal story that The Automat tells is that of a commercial vision meshing with an aesthetic one, the transformation of cheap dining into a sort of theatrical experience, complete with a stage setting of authentic craft and luxury, in which the banal purchase of food becomes a tour de force of industrial ingenuity.

Whether pushing the camera close to the performers or zooming in from afar to survey them intimately, Simon captures the lavish life of theatrical imagination that inspires them and makes gender itself seem like an urgent performance.

Cassavetes captures the gambler’s fatalistic joy in playing out a tragedy of his own making to the bitter end, and, revelling in the romantic solitude of the hunter and the hunted, presents a gun battle as a metal-and-concrete ballet.

[Silver's] densely textured images have many planes of action, which he parses with pans and zooms, revealing the volatile bonds of a group on the verge of combustion as well as the howling horrors of unremitting solitude.

Russell does more than fill the film with its high-wattage parade of stars, who energize the proceedings from beginning to end. He creates vivid and forceful characters—slightly heightened caricatures whose unnaturally emphatic presences befit the air of serendipity that gives history the oddball heroes it needs, and that gives them the happy ending they deserve.

The abruptness, the willfulness, the ferocity of Passages reflect, more than any other film by an American director that I’ve seen in a while, the influence of Pialat.

The documentary puts personalities to ideas; it teems with notable characters, spanning a range from righteous to indifferent to ignoble, who excel at speaking their minds and expressing their emotions when a camera is pointed at them.

For all its loose ends and unanswered practicalities, its wild urgency is thrilling. It defies the expectations fostered by Lee’s prior films; it steps back even as it moves inward. It is, in the modern-classic sense, a late film.

An exemplary work of cinematic modernism, a reflexive film that turns its genesis into its subject and its moral essence.

The director Todd Haynes’s artistry is hardly detectable in this environmental thriller, yet the film, based on a true story, nonetheless offers a stirring and infuriating story of brazen corporate indifference to employees, neighbors, and the world at large—and the obstacles faced by those who challenge it.

The film’s view of a mind thrown back on itself, and the profound vulnerability, mental derangement, and physical degradation that result, is, true to form, a political horror.

Two classic themes, the eternal triangle and a provincial’s big-city struggles, get distinctive twists in Philippe Garrel’s brisk yet pain-filled new drama of youth’s illusions.

Apollo 10 1/2 unites the inner and outer life in a form of cultural autobiography, and it does so with a unique sense of cinematic style and form.

Soderbergh’s premise is no mere gimmick. Working with a script by David Koepp, he infuses his dramatic mechanism with substantial themes.

Breillat directs her cast with precise clarity, and her exacting staging produces both intensely evocative moments and a rare, quietly terrifying pugnacity that permeates the drama.

The movie is a virtual documentary of city sights and moods, and also a bitter exposé of a country without a social safety net.

Malik Vitthal’s first feature gives rich dramatic life to a piercingly analytical view of the American way of incarceration.

Passing is a drama of vision and of inner vision, of appearances and images and self-images, and Hall’s spare and reserved cinematic style serves to emphasize the inward aspect of the action, its crises of consciousness.

With its intellectual earnestness, first-person grandiosity, and aesthetic extravagance, the film is more floridly and brazenly youthful than anything else Coppola has made.

Sembène looks ruefully yet tenderly at the ruses and wiles of the poor, whose desperate struggles—with the authorities and with one another—distract them from political revolt.

[Chahine]'s richly textured, good-humored, visually forceful storytelling portrays the surging, ribald vitality of Egyptian society that squirms beneath the unjust authority of dictators and dogmatists.

Sembène depicts a corrupt system that replaced white dictators and profiteers with black ones; the symbolic ending, a glimmer of revolutionary hope, is as gratifying as it is implausible.

The intricate story moves through New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Mexico, and picturesque points in between, but Tourneur cooks up shot-by-shot surprises that outdo those of the screenplay.

Borden’s exhilarating, freely assembled story stages news reports, documentary sequences, and surveillance footage alongside tough action scenes and musical numbers; her violent vision is ideologically complex and chilling.

Bergman blends a theatrical subjectivity—scenes of the inner life that defy physical reality and depend on special effects, whether in the film lab or on set—with a tactile visual intimacy, with his characters, the objects close at hand, and the superb coastal landscape.

Dumont films Joan’s spiritual conflicts and confrontations with playful exuberance but avoids frivolity; the ardent actors infuse Joan’s spirit of revolt with the eternal passions of youth.

Every step depends on stifled emotions and closely guarded secrets, resulting in a buildup of operatic passion that endows everyday gestures and inflections with grandeur and nobility.

The movie is constructed entirely of a remarkable array of archival footage, including Beckermann’s recordings, that spotlights unresolved national traumas and unabated anti-Semitism.

Mazursky applies a light and graceful touch to matters of intimate agony.

With eerie point-of-view shots, Buñuel gets inside the mind of a madman whose sadism is inseparable from his high social position; his commanding manner mirrors the folly and the cruelty of society at large.

Despite its heroic energy and impulsive youth, it’s a bleak philosophical work of its time, a bitterly terrifying vision of no exit.

With its tangled shadows, fun-house mirrors, wrenching angles, and glaring lights, the wide-screen black-and-white photography evokes the psychological distortions of reckless and rootless outsiders, the disproportion of their seedy circumstances to their doomed heroism.

In DaCosta’s hands, Ibsen’s emotionally extreme but tonally restrained play becomes a spectacular, flamboyant melodrama, with physical action as intense as the characters’ inner worlds.

Siegel’s terse, seething, and stylish direction glows with the blank radiance of sheet metal in sunlight; the movie’s bright primary colors and glossy luxuries are imbued with menace, and its luminous delights convey a terrifyingly cold world view.

Gerima films Jay’s intimate confrontations with an impressionistic flair that focusses attention on characters’ listening, thinking, and remembering; flashbacks and dream sequences infuse Jay’s tightening conflicts with the pressure of history—both social and intimate.

Ozu’s despairing view of postwar Japan looks as harshly at blind modernization as it does at decadent tradition.

Despite the merely functional reticence of Glowicki’s direction, along with the narrow scope of the drama, Tito is an instant classic of acting.

Doucouré pays keen attention to Amy’s quest for a self-made identity—and to a sexualized, commercialized mainstream culture that deludes children, especially those raised in cultural isolation. The film’s ultimate subject is the ghetto itself; a remarkable symbolic ending redefines French identity.

Through Glassman’s diligent and empathetic investigations, it becomes a film of documents, in which the aura of the letters—the worlds that they contain in their text and evoke in their sheer physical presence—generates overwhelming emotional power.