Rory O'Connor

It’s visually astonishing and often devastating, too. This might be the freshest film about young people in America since Larry Clark’s Kids.

McDonagh’s latest work is simply exceptional; a film so rich with narrative fluidity, profane laughs, standout performances and complex character studies that its tremendous emotional hits–often arriving when you least expect them–might just leave you agog.

The only thing that beats the lightning bolt of discovery is seeing a filmmaker build on it with each passing work, stretching out to explore the further reaches of their talents.

The great theme of Dickinson’s life, Davies argues, is finding solace — not in religion, but in art, and A Quiet Passion itself can boast such moments of quiet catharsis.

With The Mastermind, Reichardt has made a unique film, even amongst similarly cryptic genre exercises. . . I left the cinema gripped and unusually rattled.

The Untamed does that very rare thing in cinema in that it blends mystery, horror and pseudo-reality with a kind of dark subconscious arousal.

It feels a complete whole––a wry intertwining dialectic on modern desires––yet each scene is uniquely bracing: beautifully poised, exquisitely observed, and even erotically charged––rife with unabashed seduction, though always close enough to farce to keep things kösher and to keep you guessing (it’s telling that we barely glimpse a kiss).

You could argue that Lazzaro Felice owes a debt to Pasolini with its fascination for peasants, saints, and faces, or even Gabriel Garcia Marquez with its mix of rural life and magical realism, but that would be to discredit the shear vivacity and boldness of Rohrwacher’s directorial hand, not to mention her incredible warmth as a filmmaker.

The Brutalist is less-than-perfect (for all his charms, Guy Pearce is no Philip Seymour Hoffman or Daniel Day-Lewis) but it offers an all-too-rare reminder of how it feels when this artform is at its very best, and that has less to do with the scale of its ambitions than how effectively it combines movement, emotion, and sound.

With all its sex and brutality, and the allegations surrounding its megalomaniacal creator, Khrzhanovsky’s project might not be for this world. However, it remains that rare thing: an artwork with the capacity to tap into our fears and even our hatred; to live in the imagination and to astonish. A shock of the new.

It’s a shocking piece of audio-visual art that only further cements Glazer as one of the 21st century’s most original and influential filmmakers.

Ash is Purest White is a tremendous, funny, heartbreaking, sprawling vehicle for Zhao, and what a gift it is to see her exploring the furthest reaches of those talents.

In The Realm of Perfection is in essence about that most slippery of topics: the beauty of the game. Sport might tell the truth, but perhaps only cinema can capture it.

Pacifiction draws you in with its sense of mystery and surrealism and leaves you ultimately agog.

It’s difficult to think of another debut that combines such crowd-pleasing sensibilities, political resonance, and cinematic sweep.

This is Kore-eda at his very best, facing up to the hardest truths with honesty and a nervous laugh — uncomfortable, invigorating, and ultimately cleansing, like the cinema’s equivalent of a cold shower. And I mean that in the best way possible.

Ruben Östlund might like his fish in a barrel but he’s a ruthless shot.

Taormina achieves a singular tone.

Bestiari, Erbari, Lapidari offers an incredible study of our place on this planet, our fascination with it, and our duty to record and remember.

Best of all, Lojkine’s film comes with a refreshing generosity of spirit.

As effectively violent and entertaining as Birds may be, there is a real current of bitterness and tragedy running through it. That bitterness speaks not of the physical colonization we saw with the conquistadors and rubber barons of Serpent, but more of a sort of colonization of ideas.

This effort to show Lara’s struggle like a coming-of-age story is what sets Girl apart. Dhont fleshes out his story with little growing-up moments everyone can relate to.

Aftersun is a beautiful film, albeit one with too many endings, brimming with inner life and creativity, and worthy of comparison to Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher and other debuts of that ilk.

Devos’ films can feel overly studied, slick to the point of being contrived, yet with each passing work––each reduction to the most potent flavors––he edges closer to something truly great. Here is his finest yet, an almost-perfect little film.

It’s a graceful, aching film that sculpts and stretches Murakami’s story into an enchanting three-hour epic (my, do the minutes fly by) about trauma and mourning, shared solitude, and the possibility of moving on. The narrative also doubles as a lovely ode to the car itself, and the strange ways that people open up when cocooned inside them.

Jenkin’s script is peppered with comedy, occasionally of a more subtle variety than men dressed as penises—even if that drew the biggest laugh.

Much like The Witch, there is something quite mesmerizing about the meticulousness in the period detail here and how Eggers so seems to revel in it.

It’s a twinkling surface examination of how humans try to coordinate their dreams with their reality (a very Hollywood conundrum), but also a celebration of just how wonderful old filmmaking techniques and emotions look and feel on modern L.A. streets.