Tomris Laffly

Jubilant, unapologetically massive, and bursting with a cozy, melancholic sense of communal belonging, In The Heights is the biggest-screen-you-can-find Hollywood event that we the movie lovers have been craving since the early days of the pandemic, when the health crisis cut off one of our most cherished public lifelines.

A stunning documentary of bone-deep moral resonance and cinematic mastery that deserves to be experienced on the big screen.

Easily among this year’s finest films and laced with an unapologetic social message, Happy As Lazzaro dares one to imagine a reality where each individual would task themselves to be as selfless and morally whole as its main protagonist. If only.

The understated film builds into a gut punch that’s more painful than anything in the superficial, recent Roger Ailes exposé "Bombshell."

For every laugh the family lets out, for each merry chance encounter they experience—like an oddly hysterical one with a Lance Armstrong-loving cyclist—there are tears shed in secret, cagey deals made in the shadows and the impending separation they inch closer to with every passing moment.

A sweet, deeply personal portrayal of female adolescence that's more attuned to the bonds between best girlfriends than casual flings with boys, writer-director Greta Gerwig’s beautiful Lady Bird flutters with the attractively loose rhythms of youth.

Ramsay lets her film, and her characters, exhale just a little. But there is a lot of earned wisdom and lived-in pain in that exhale, and in the entirety of Ramsay’s masterwork.

A devastating scrapbook and a confessional journal of sorts. It’s also a personal cinematic endeavor as opposed to a historical crash course in the vein of “Cries From Syria,” another superb documentary on the subject, but one with different ambitions.

What’s perhaps most miraculous about this tight and taut film is Domont’s unforgiving economy.

This is an astonishing filmmaking debut from Burnham, a renowned comedian as well as a musician—you might secretly wonder how a young male not only captured the point of view of an eighth-grade girl so exactly, but also expressed it with such emotional precision. Whatever the secret formula to his experiential accuracy and unexpectedly inventive directorial eye is, the outcome is a deeply serious coming-of-age film that is only light and charming on the surface.

An aching film on such exquisite pains of impossible love, Paweł Pawlikowski’s Cold War concurrently swells your heart and breaks it, just like the sore memory of a lover that drifted away from your life, or an intensely craved kiss that never was.

It’s a delicate drama that flourishes through the liberating power of art, where a hopeful yet consuming love affair sparks between two young women amid patriarchal customs, and stays concealed in their hearts both because of and in spite of it.

The most groundbreaking thing that Hyde and Brand pull off with “Leo Grande” isn’t merely an honest depiction of female sexuality — although that alone would have been enough to make their film a triumph. Rather, the duo goes further and observes an aging woman while she studiously unlearns her long-held beliefs and constraints.

On the whole, what Baker has created here is nothing short of pure movie magic— his smartly interwoven urban machinations make you giggle and inexplicably tear up on repeat (sometimes within the same sequence), while somehow keeping you acutely aware of the sorrow that is bound to rise to the surface.

A gradually swelling, deeply intellectual, and unexpectedly fun political thriller, Berger’s twisty film takes the audience behind the notoriously secretive closed doors of the Catholic Church for one of its most private processes: the election of a new pontiff.

A terrifically juicy, apocalyptic cinematic sacrament that dances around a fruitless relationship in dizzying circles. We are not stuffed inside a cavernous house of horrors this time around. But be prepared to feel equally suffocated by a ravenous family (albeit, a chosen, cultish kind) all the same.

Moss continues to deliver what we crave from woman characters: the kind of messy yet sturdy intricacy many of today’s thinly conceived you-go-girl female superheroes continue to lack.

It’s a gorgeous artifact and a cinematic experiment that works beautifully, one innovative frame at a time, centered on Ronan’s soaring and soul-restoring performance.

Among Diwan’s greatest feats with Happening is making a case not only for safe access to legal abortions, but also for true sexual freedom that dares to yearn for a world where slut-shaming is a thing of the past.

Little Women solidifies Gerwig’s one-of-a-kind voice on the page and behind the camera, opening up the classic in a blissful and innovative screen adaptation that feels ageless and vastly of today.

In a lot of ways, All Of Us Strangers is a poignant, deeply melancholic exercise on the attempt to bridge the past with the present, a cosmic inquiry into resolving all that was unsaid through second chances that never were.

Babylon mostly operates in a structure of set pieces, thoroughly earning its not-a-minute-too-long runtime—a whopping 189 minutes—and it’s packed to the gills with stunning craftsmanship.

A giant leap even for the youngest-ever Best Director victor, Damien Chazelle’s technically astonishing First Man is a poetic non-blockbuster of claustrophobic intimacy.

Lush melodramas are a dying breed, especially masterful ones like Karim Aïnouz’s Invisible Life that wear Douglas Sirkian genre conventions on their sleeve proudly and abundantly.

Writer-director Martin McDonagh’s soulful masterpiece offers a a windswept elegy on a camaraderie that has reached its inexplicable expiration, as well as melancholic rumination on mortality.

Sylvie’s Love feels downright rebellious, daring to exist with its unapologetic old-fashioned quality at a time when many maddeningly seem to dismiss honest-to-god romances and proud women’s pictures as slight and outdated.

As the jets cut through the atmosphere and brush their target soils in close-shave movements—all coherently edited by Eddie Hamilton—the sensation they generate feels miraculous and worthy of the biggest screen one can possibly find. Equally worthy of that big screen is the emotional strokes of “Maverick” that pack an unexpected punch. Sure, you might be prepared for a second sky-dance with “Maverick,” but perhaps not one that might require a tissue or two in its final stretch.

A richly textured masterpiece, Roma is cinema at its purest and most human.