Feels feverishly dreamlike while keeping its subject firmly rooted in the present. If you desire a female empowering musical manifesto with both claws and kisses, here it is.

Hustlers is an absolute joy and one of the most refreshing movies you’ll see all year.

The Rider is a stunning piece of fiction played close to the bone.

Technically, what’s on display may not be the Oscar winner’s finest go at filmmaking, but never has his message seemed more urgent and unaffected.

Big Night is, in a word, delicious.

It's enough to make you weep.

Death and the Maiden is a streamlined razor-ride of a movie: taut, riveting, and a psychological horror show that will leave nail-marks in your palms for days afterwards.

This is Iranian cinema at its most accessible: a bit slow even in its 92 minutes, with more environment than story, but deeply immersive and thought-provoking, and quite often funny.

It's Cronenberg's film, but it's the actors who elevate Eastern Promises from mere thriller to some other, more disturbing plane.

To be crystal clear: Comedian and actress Gilda Radner was a genius. Her humor and her life were an impeccable combination of a love of life and precise comic timing. There are beings that light this planet, shining brightly. And Radner shined. It is impossible for me to think of a world without her, and Lisa Dapolito’s documentary goes above and beyond in marking this person’s life.

Cavite isn't a horror film, per se – its nightmarish sense of unreality is thoroughly grounded in the geopolitical here and now – but the emotions it conjures from the audience can be traced straight back to Shockers 101.

Rather than this being some random moral crusade, Flaherty’s understated anger is about how the very rehab process that helped him so much has been perverted into a system indistinguishable from how street dealers operate. It’s his furious curiosity that informs the film, and gives it such devastating insight.

It’s a slow burn of a film, one that creeps through the consciousness. But it is not without levity.

Julie’s restlessness is anchored by a self-confidence that Reinsve conveys guilelessly and brilliantly.

This criminal tale excited audiences and landed the kinetic Cagney on the movie map. Now a classic, this is the movie in which Cagney famously crams a grapefruit into Mae Clarke’s face.

Fueled by witty imagery, wonderful performances, and careful direction, Heavenly Creatures is a must-see for those who like their films a little on the adventurous side. And while many will feel that they are discovering the work of an intriguing new director, die-hard fans may fear that Jackson is “selling out” to a mainstream audience because the picture isn't loaded with severed limbs and spurting arteries -- but, rest assured, this is hardly the case: Heavenly Creatures is the director's most unconventional movie to date -- and is coupled with both a delicate maturity and confidence that makes his evolution as a filmmaker all the more thrilling to observe and lead one to wonder what this unpredictable talent will come up with next.

In its cinematic incarnation, Sex and the City has lost none of its bawdiness yet gained a more profound sense of soberness. Parker, especially, who in the last season of the show bordered on insufferable in her affected squeaks and shrieks, is allowed to go to very dark places – to be, in fact, quite unfabulous.

It is an exhilarating feat of control, and a scathing deconstruction of the sacrifices made in the name of art. You have to confront those threatening corners of the psyche. You have to embrace the black bear.

In the end this movie belongs to Del Toro. He imbues Jerry with such life, such ambiguity, such unsentimental complexity and depth that you can’t help but feel you’re watching the most intricately mapped depiction of addiction and strained humanity the film world has ever given us.

This film began the fine tradition of deviating from Ian Fleming's novels, which gave us the suave, sophisticated Bond over Fleming's monosyllabic misogynist.

The film is unapologetically sweet and hopeful, but it's said the heart's true home is the water, that its nature is to bob atop the cares of the world like a wooden cradle on the waves.

Julien Temple gave Shane MacGowan exactly the documentary he deserves – unruly and full of heart.

Wisely, a lot like the real event. No answers are given, barely any questions are asked, and the film unfolds at a leisurely, inexorable pace that stymies the traditional filmmaking tropes of tension and release.

The result is total immersion in the moment of the music, sure to send jazz fans over the moon.

Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour is bound to be a blast for anyone who has been moved by Swift’s songwriting or musicianship no matter the era. It’s an impressive, career-spanning feat from one of our most notable performers that’s worth seeing on the biggest screen you can.

The performances of all the central and secondary characters match the passionate intensity of the film's behind-the-scenes collaborators.

Jim Jarmusch applies his minimalist style to the margins of Memphis as seen through the experiences of three sets of foreigners. Great casting and occasional moments of grace.

Herzog outdoes himself with Rescue Dawn, making his most popularly accessible film yet and proving at the same time that he is among the most daring of all filmmakers and capable -- like his characters -- of almost anything.

Dreamlike, disjointed, and possessed of a stunningly complex sensual and narrative poetry that may confound audiences not familiar with Chinese director Wong's defining stylistic tropes, Ashes of Time Redux is, simply, one of the most gorgeous films ever made.

Second Skin might just be the most accurate and entertaining glimpse of the economy and psychology of technology since Tron.

Everyone has secrets, Hosoda posits, and the internet may play a role in our ability to process them, heal our wounds, and maybe find the person who can save us from ourselves. That he does that through a gorgeous SF-tinged version of a classic fairy tale is not simply a bonus (just those components would have made a memorable new version of Villeneuve's timeless story). It's a vital act of recontextualization, not ham-fisted revisionism.

While Abrams peddled name recognition, Johnson understands that the classic characters have to reignite the torch before they can pass it on, and gives both Leia and Luke defining moments.

A dense, challenging piece, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is more associative than explicative.

Neil Diamond isn't the best actor, and the 1980 version of The Jazz Singer doesn't have the best script, but this movie (love on the) rocks nonetheless.

The more one knows about Holmes lore, the more the film's foreshadowings of future cases will be evident. Set in a boys boarding school, the film's imaginings about the life of the young detective are quite entertaining.

Anyone who wants to better understand the cultural conditions leading up to the civil rights movement would do well to check out The League. But for those baseball fans who are used to charting the history of America alongside iconic moments in sports history, this one is a real treat.

In many ways, A Field in England is a funhouse mirror of audience expectations and something of a filmic Rorschach test.

The great director's masterpiece of bad juju. [Director's Cut]

As anthropology, Out of the Blue is engrossing; as a social document, it is essential; but as undiluted raw power, it is absolute. No filter.

It's an out-of-this-world, real-life adventure for kids of all ages, budding Neil Armstrongs and Ray Bradburys alike.

While grown-ups are sure, at the very least, to respect Into the West's beauty and integrity, it may be a tougher sell amongst the very young where the Irish brogues and the lack of rugged Hollywood heroes and high-tech derring-do may prove impediments. But the aura of magic realism has never felt more tantalizing as it shimmers Into the West.

In the documentary profile It’s Only Life After All, Emily Saliers and Amy Ray of indie folk rockers Indigo Girls convey what they want the audience to experience from their music: self-esteem, a shared experience, and healing, likening it almost to a warm hug from a loved one. And that’s exactly what the film provides.

Kusama’s paint-splattered jeans, her continual need to create, and her singular vision are concepts that Lenz gets through with her very loving film.

It comes as little surprise that Errol Morris and Werner Herzog, both masters of sly documentaries in which the subjects nail themselves with their own words, are the executive producers of Oppenheimer’s film.

It's a veritable shoo-in for an Oscar nod this year, and one of the more disturbing films to come out of a major studio in ages.

Diehl’s performance is a model of restraint; he more often imparts information by a look, a glance, the slump of his shoulders, than he does with a spoken word.

Nothing short of horror-hound heaven.

This is far from the first movie about the perpetual struggle of relating to other people; it’s not even Mills’ first stab at it. But C’mon C’mon is so lovingly assembled and insightful in its thematic concerns that it feels like he could keep returning to that well and find something just as essential there every time.

I can't remember the last time I felt so seduced by a film.

What Safe does so brilliantly is to plunge us down this frightening rabbit hole with Carol.

Odom Jr. won the Tony for his performance here, a fact that’s been somewhat dwarfed over the years by Miranda’s tsunamic success, but the neat trick of this filmed version is to time-machine viewers back to an extraordinary moment in American cultural history – to put us, to borrow from Miranda, in the room where it happened. It feels like such a gift.

Austin mainstays the Zellner brothers have managed to make a Western genre film appropriate for the #MeToo era’s audience.

Honestly, this ultra-noir adaptation of Frank Miller's black-and-white cult comic series is a visual feast ripped straight from the original medium's blood-soaked pages.

Sellbinding, distressing, and possessed of a dark and terrible beauty.

The film is a startlingly original and haunting take on our ageless fear of otherness.

Even when it feels packaged like a holiday entertainment that aims to please, watching Dreamgirls is like being on cloud nine.

Hoffman and Bancroft are phenomenally cast in a script co-written by Buck Henry and Calder Willingham that is by turns sly, touching, and amazingly fresh 30 years later. [Review of re-release]

Cyberpunk meets renegade romance, à la Orwell.

Karam manages an incredible feat of genre-bending, as neither the comedy nor horror impairs the other. Each is built so naturally within the drama: The laughs are the result of simply having well-realized characters and the scares an existential manifestation of their contentions.

An action-packed and hilarious story of two sisters whose bond is tested, Polite Society is worth seeking out. Come for the action and loving send-up of martial arts films, and stay for the sisterly support that shines through.

Crowe has created a genuine love song for all those who've ever felt their lives to have been saved by rock & roll.

An immersion into the characters' world in toto, from the "Oh geezes" and the "Oh, yaahs" to the dark and flinty core beneath.

Pixar's animation is simply flawless; colorful, deeply realized, and ably conveying both the chaos of the kitchen, and the sensual allure of food well prepared.

While Pulse was a warning, Cloud seems more like a funeral bell, a despairing look at life on the online economic periphery.

Though casting this mediocre screen hunk as an uptight businessman's alter ego was a stroke of pop genius for director Frankenheimer, it was Hudson's idea to have two actors play the lead, and his surprisingly thoughtful performance galvanizes this harrowing, cerebral thriller (and suggest Hudson's talents were under-utilized).

This is an undeniable star-making performance for Madison, who finds the grace and charm and stupidity and selfishness and wild-eyed wonder of Mikey, a tough survivor who falls for the oldest fairy tale in the book.

Everyone who has been in a long-term relationship has gone through that moment when they wonder where they end and their partner begins. Adult connection horror Together takes that inner fear and makes it physical.

A handsomely constructed and executed movie, the kind of effort that deserves appreciation, on its own terms, for what it both dares and accomplishes.

Even as Aatami survives completely ridiculous and clearly life-ending assaults, the magic of bloody-mindedness keeps the action … if not plausible, then never less than hilarious and gruesome.

Remarkably fresh and exciting.

Pattinson is fully committed to the performance – performances – and his impact subtly evolves from giggling to genuinely moving. That same evolution applies to the whole of Bong’s film, which dances so close to the edge of grand folly, the effect is exhilarating.

Terribly Happy isn't, but it is wonderfully unhinged, and a painstakingly constructed meditation on a place where good and evil meet, mate, and make sour times sublime and, dare I say it, beautiful.

All the film’s accoutrements are note-perfect from the costuming to the music, performances, and set design. Messy family life and moral ideals perfuse the film’s landscape but the film shows how these things can become the foundational elements of an individual’s life.

Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth is an outstanding gem of form and content, and I take solace that future generations of English students now have a new text to learn from.

By film’s end, my cheeks were wet with feeling so many feelings for these young people just getting going. I am in awe of their boldness.

Keeping with the spirit of its lead characters, Oscar and Lucinda is a movie best met with a gambler's faith: You may not be certain what it means in the end, but its magnificent payoff is nevertheless a sure thing.

We witness no darker horrors than the roar of a car wash, yet Haneke's static, panoptic camerawork – shot alarmingly close or disquietingly afar – conveys considerable menace.

Director Alfonso Cuaron, in his first American movie, has fashioned a world so real and so engaging that you can feel it and smell it and taste it as surely as if you were there.

Alternating between color footage and the genius interplay of startlingly lovely sequences of Stanton singing and playing harmonica in granular black-and-white, Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction perfectly captures the essence of the man.

The Inheritance is a metrical, stunning piece of cinema. There’s so much to unpack within its layers, and its vision and dissection of what Blackness means for Julian and his community is absorbing, perceptive, and stirring. Asili is truly a talent worth keeping an eye on.

McCarthy’s film is rich in tone and subtlety, but has precious little dialogue. It feels less like a modern motion picture than some odd poem long lost and then discovered in another age, a timeless, ageless gem of hard-resined emotions melting into real life.

So it comes as no small shock that The House With a Clock in Its Walls may very well be one of the best spooky movies to ever operate under a PG rating. The man known for taking things too far also appears to know exactly where to stop.

Which ultimately is what Applause is really about: applying the greasepaint of the daily mundane over the scar tissue of a damaged life, striving for a reality outside of a bottle (and off the stage) while still maintaining some semblance of what made this particular lion roar in the first place.

A film that wants you to get happy.

McKim’s documentary is as jangly and urgent as its subject and his art, and it packs a melancholy wallop, using the artist’s own running commentary via cassette tape (there were two hundred hours of it) and layering it over snatches of Wojnarowicz’s Super 8 films, countless photographs, and recollections from those who were both there at the start of Wojnarowicz’s career and at the end of his life.

This is Pixar's finest and most emotionally powerful film yet, and it draws on a wealth of cinematic resources that run the gamut from Chaplin's best to Buster Keaton, Jacques Tati, and even Martin and Lewis.

Ryan O’Neal has never been better cast than as the shallow and opportunistic hero of Thackeray’s early 19th-century novel.

A wholly original creation, crossed with shadows and light and the everyday madness of Savannah and its remarkable citizens.

Shot on location in Northeastern Massachusetts, chilliness hangs in the air of every frame, but Sorry, Baby – a uniquely special thing – is suffused with warmth.

Lodge Kerrigan is one of the great, though largely unheralded, filmmakers of our time, and with Keane, his third feature, he finally shows himself to be in full command of his uncompromising talent.

Honest and unflinching, Daughter From Danang isn't always pleasant to watch, but it is powerful and memorable.

Never devolves into the type of “man's man” adventure story that has become so fashionable again over the last couple of years, but instead trusts the power of its unembellished images and words to tell its tale.

The humanistic approach makes Eastwood's movie a war story for the ages.

Frankenweenie is that rare film that's both kid- and adult-friendly.

The Kids are All Right, a grin-cracking great portrait of a modern American family in minor and then major crises.

With American independent film teeming with so many shaky-cam snarksters, what an electric riposte to the status quo is Nichols, whose films are classically constructed and deadly serious. In his short but potent career, he’s mastered a wide-vistaed eye for the epic and the elemental.

An anime version of "Mr. Mom" this is not. Director Hosoda’s clear-eyed story allows for comic moments of fatherly ineptitude but focuses just as often on the marital and familial stress this sudden role reversal causes.

A third-act revelation will knock viewers silly and cause them to reevaluate everything that’s come before, but even without that jaw-dropping information, Moss’ film is a righteous piece of empathetic, of-the-moment documentary filmmaking.