Shimuzu sees darkened staircases and hears the rustle of dead autumn leaves and reacts as if from the devil’s own haiku. And his dread is catching.

A terrific piece of work.

While Non-Fiction can be quaint in its examination of art versus commerce, it is never boring.

As fluid and intellectually stimulating as the man himself, a tragic, heartfelt take on an event some 40 years old that feels as fresh as yesterday's Times.

It's really a character study of a working-class stiff, of the kind that Raymond Carver would enjoy, who would work in a factory that sounds like the score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, barely music but more rhythmical pops, fizzes, and growls.

It’s arguably Linklater’s best use of an ensemble – and that’s saying something. But great as each individual performance is, and broad as Linklater pulls his aspect ratio, Nouvelle Vague is really a close-up on Godard.

Based on a memoir by Annie Ernaux, Happening is remarkable for its first-person depiction of the panic and desperation of a young woman carrying an unwanted pregnancy. Moreover, the film is remarkable for its depiction of a determined and unflinching female protagonist who refuses to accept her predicament as her deserved fate.

Of course, everything leads to the massive final battle, the pay-off we've been promised, and Wingard delivers.

In her remarkable, warm, and sometimes delicately sad debut feature, writer/director Channing Godfrey Peoples sees both sides of this intergenerational struggle. What's truly special is that she avoids any histrionics. Ever since James Dean screamed "You're tearing me apart," filmmakers have craved that emotional explosion, but Peoples paints life in this Black working class Fort Worth neighborhood in softer tones.

Sunny, warm, and so full as to almost split its skin, that's Much Ado. The Bard himself said it, “Ripeness is all.” Here's a hey nonny nonny to that.

The Magnificent Ambersons retains a haunted, elegant feel that takes the viewer inside an era Hollywood has largely sidestepped.

Makino finds a way to uplift the young women she writes without any cloying girlboss idealism, and that level of nuance is what these Texan teens deserve.

It leaves a lot of room for interpretation – depending on how you come to it, you could read Dog and Robot’s relationship as platonic or romantic, straight or queer – but the takeaway is all tenderness.

Billy Wilder’s cynical edge is finely honed in this darkly amusing satire, which won three Academy Awards. It’s a film that is perennially ready for its close-up.

Basing the story on family history, Mendes’ terrifying view of war is poetic and tragic, dreamlike without the forced stoner surrealism that too often afflicts war dramas. It is instead impressionistic, most especially in its highly structured cinematography.

The script, and Theron, matter-of-factly illustrate the old adage about Ginger Rogers, that she did everything Astaire did, only backwards and in heels. That the film actually gives her credit for it? That’s the best kind of wish fulfillment fantasy.

In this sushi age of methamphetamine concert DVDs and dysfunction junction music tell-alls, Jonathan Demme dreams us back to the golden age of performance films.

Despite my lack of Austen education, I found the film to be thoroughly engaging and surprisingly touching, so I can only imagine how pleased a true Austen-ite may be with Emma.

By trying to be about so little, telling a simple fragile romantic story, Dogfight is about so much -- war and peace, love and romance, sex roles and cultural myths. What it understands is that to be really anti-war, rather than glitzy moralizing, a film should just be full of life, its characters so richly nuanced and detailed that they resonate with energy.

So full of good stuff that it's impossible not to fall in love with it.

Cox, who wrote and directed the film, creates a strange but hilarious view of our culture, a brilliant satire on modern society...deserves the same respect and attention given to "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" and "This Is Spinal Tap," two films that define the cult category.

The Holdovers is a warm blanket on a sad day – an unconventional Christmas movie that finds reasons to move forward even in the hardest of times. And while students of the dramedy may anticipate its every narrative turn, there’s something magical about a film that encourages empathy, especially when it asks much of us.

Ultimately, all involved are cast in the shadow of Dano’s wide-ranging performance, capturing Wilson at his most ecstatic and his most hopeless. Already a well-established talent with remarkable turns in "There Will Be Blood" and "Little Miss Sunshine," the young actor has never demonstrated such profound sensitivity as he does here. Some might even say he’s been touched by greatness, or at least does a damn good impression of it.

It's a jaw-droppingly good performance from this pint-sized, first-time actor.

A war movie with a conscience, an action movie with a funny bone, a caper movie with a shifting agenda.

The cast, a who's who of British stars, is terrific, filling the drama with urgency. But driving it is Richard, is McKellen's towering performance, which seems embodied in his face, the left half sloping down, like a cliff sliding into the sea or like it's being pulled slowly -- fatefully -- to hell.

Sauper's delicately horrific documentary is a short, sharp slap in the face of the developed world, and a long overdue one at that.

Greenaway and his picture-perfect cast weave so many interlacing threads into the story, and so many curious subtexts - stylistic and otherwise - that it sometimes leaves us scratching our heads in wonderment.

As we are informed in the film’s prologue, "Cats live in loneliness, then die like falling rain." Sh--, man, whatever. This is so stupid it’s positively genius.

With its complexity of viewpoints, Get on the Bus has to be seen as one of Spike Lee's most mature visions to date.

So yeah, Booksmart is a different kind of teen comedy – clever and buoyant, proudly feminist and wonderfully reassuring that, yeah, the kids are alright.

The film’s message, which it wields like a war chain, is a timeless one: Don’t be such a dick to people because they look different from you. We all live in Bomb City: One stray match and the whole thing will explode.

The way the individual stories are intercut builds connections between the seemingly discrete tales such that they begin to converge in ways that were not readily apparent. Repeated viewings, I'm sure, would enhance the connections, so smartly are they conceived.

A spare, discomfiting score and uniformly excellent performances, and you have a quiet little masterpiece of dark and chilling beauty.

The challenge for the audience is to simply keep up. Jallikattu is such sensory overload – containing so many crowded images and rhythmic cuts – that we almost need a little distance to fully appreciate what the filmmakers have pulled off.

Be forewarned: Folman closes his film with a grisly, real-death denouement that may give you some nightmares of your own. As well it should.

Langella is terrific in a small but critical role as CBS president William Paley, although the one essential problem with the film is that it never clearly delineates the jobs fulfilled by the cluster of other newsroom employees that are always huddled about.

This stirring historical re-creation depicts the experiences of America's first unit of black soldiers in the Civil War and the young Northerner who leads them.

Summer Hours is a lovely rumination on the meaning of things, but one that remains rooted in its human subjects rather than the inanimate objects that are more easily graspable.

Maybe the film is simply a fanciful manifestation of one person’s healing passage through a landscape of grief and trauma. But there is little doubt that The Boy and the Heron is one of the Japanese auteur’s most cinematic feature-length films – maybe the most cinematic — in his relatively limited oeuvre.

If left in less deft hands, the film could’ve teetered into a too-on-the-nose commentary on America’s current immigration debate. However, the lean screenplay and Paragas’ focused creative vision makes for a singular directorial feature debut that feels like nothing else happening in film right now.

Yet for all the bleakness, Better Man is one of the most visually inventive and uplifting films in recent years.

Poor Things is a revelation, a potent story about self-creation that’s worth seeking out, and that’s worth getting lost in.

There’s nothing in Fourteen that moviegoers have not seen before, but the empathetic performances by both Medel and Kuhling make this a journey worth taking.

Ema is a vibrantly loud movie, propelled by dance and lust, and a celebration of sexuality like no other film before it. It is a fountain of energy, both bewitching and terrifying all at once.

Who would have ever thought to pair up Stanley Kubrick and Stephen King? But weird as it sounds, this creepy thriller works.

Once Upon a Time is an elegiac mash note to Hollywood 1969, at times sublimely, almost surrealistically moving while simultaneously managing to be the director’s funniest and least violent film to date.

Light Sleeper represents Schrader at his best, giving us a character we've become familiar with over the years and Schrader's intimate mastery of our fascination with decadence, loss and redemption.

It's filled with marvelous performances, fabulous wit, and some dizzying images.

Like Water for Chocolate, a simmering cauldron of romance and revolution, passion and purity, mysticism and witticism, is a powerful and heady brew.

With surgical precision, Triet and co-writer Arthur Harari’s script exposes nearly every contemporary relationship schism you can imagine (or maybe would sooner forget).

Zombieland is dead set against being dead serious. Its tonal pallor has more in common with a foreshortened "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" than with "28 Days" or "Weeks Later," and then, again, there's that jaw-dropping cameo. It'll kill ya.

Dingy atmosphere and great performances make this a standout.

That energy placed into making the audience look and listen out to the edges of the film makes Beth's central placement even more vital and enthralling; and by moving to The Night House, Hall is finally given the space that every previous performance has shown she deserves.

Snowpiercer holds its own; it’s an unruly but rattling – and ravishing – work of art. On first watch, I wondered if there was anything to scratch beneath the surface – it seemed so straightforward, I worried there wasn’t enough there there – so I rewatched it almost right away and was surprised to find it still left me panting.

Just strap in, because A Simple Favor's plot isn't just twisty: It's so labyrinthine that you expect a minotaur to pop up.

The cast is great and the scene in which Carl Reiner and vaudeville vet Tessie O'Shea are lashed together is unforgettably funny.

Paranoid Park shows the Portland-based director to be working at the pinnacle of his art in every frame, in every composition. It's breathtaking, heartbreaking, tragic, gorgeous, and true all at the same time.

Harris' thought-provoking performance art/life isn't yet over, but by film's end he's become unplugged, both literally and metaphorically.

An order-of-magnitude leap forward in animated storytelling.

Although the stellar contributions to this supremely intelligent film are many, there's no mistake that the presence of director Redford dominates the film.

Anyone who can watch this film and deny that the Sex Pistols were one of the four or five most exciting and indelibly brilliant rock groups ever is pumping formaldehyde, not blood, through his veins.

Whether you view it as a trenchant treatise on the contemporary effects of Marxism, or just a wonderfully odd glimpse into a fading star of the fashion industry, Celebration is at turns beguiling, fascinating, and true, which is what one should want and need out of a documentary.

It's a masterful film, the kind you itch to see twice or more, as elliptical as a dream and as direct as the short sharp shock of lead kissing flesh.

If in previous films "Adaptation" and "Being John Malkovich" Jonze seemed a little squirmy about sex, his treatment here is fully adult and keenly sensitive to the complexities of sexual intimacy – how it relates to emotional intimacy, whether or not a flesh-and-blood body is required to achieve it.

Filmed in magnificent monochrome with the kind of richness that reminds you black and white are colors too, Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus will put you in a contemplative place.

The Diary of a Teenage Girl is the rare movie that presents the subject of the loss of virginity from the female perspective. Not only is the film unique in this regard, but also in its frankness, humor, and artistry.

Much of the fun of The Christophers – and it is very fun – is in anticipating the hitches, then startling when they snag left rather than right. The delight is in watching Coel and McKellen play off each other.

The stunning vitality and passion of this film arises not only from the high-voltage personalities involved (especially Ali and King) but from the way they galvanized political and ethnic pride among the people of the poor West African nation.

The way July is able to juggle both the slyly cruel circumstances and the genuinely heartfelt transformation makes this her best work yet: a fractured mirror fable broken into perfect pieces.

The on-target performances, along with the unceasing barrage of popular music and daring narrative gambles, combine to make Trainspotting one of the grand movie rushes of 1996.

One wishes for a chewier whodunit – there just aren't enough clues for the viewer to work with – and the reveal of the mole is perversely anticlimactic. But maybe that's just stickling. We always knew Smiley'd get his man.

Visually, Lumet's use of gritty black-and-white realism to locate the story is also powerful.

Clearly the single best, the single coolest (to borrow from Harry Knowles) animated film in a great while.

The resulting film is an exceptionally crafted drama, anchored by the brothers’ mastery of their skills and Cotillard’s breathtaking performance.

Dune: Part Two is both horrifying and romantic, presenting a far, far future that is recognizable because people never change. While the war may be portrayed as a jaw-dropping spectacle, the answers to all those political and moral questions may leave the audience deeply uncomfortable. Herbert would be proud.

Nobody’s a monster here, and that’s the subtle, aching rub of Little Men: Everyone is right in their claim, depending on the right angle, be it economic, sentimental, moral, or fraternal.

The characters in The Claim suffer under the weight of very big things -- betrayal, abandonment, disease, death -- but they do so quietly, stoically, until, by God, they just can't take it anymore.

A manic, lithesome thing, 2 Days in New York flexes between broad comedy and a beautifully observed portrait of family life – especially life after death.

When people think fondly of John Hughes, it's movies like Ferris Bueller that they're thinking of.

The film's story is both culturally specific and broadly universal and that duality is a large part of what makes Once Were Warriors work.

Much as he did with his 2016 feature debut (at the age of 23), the love-triangle drama As You Are, Joris-Peyrafitte tells this story with welcome subtlety and a keen attenuation to his actors.

With Roadrunner, Neville is able to give the icon a send-off that’s tear-inducing and loving, a gift to those who will always be inspired by him.

The Host is a freewheeling mix of high style and goofy, good-natured fear-mongering.

In her sophomore film, director Fastvold, assisted by painterly cinematographer André Chemetoff, has envisioned a softer version of the American frontier, still untamed but capable of hope. It’s a befitting vision of a world to come, one in which forbidden love will one day finally find its name.

If you’re yearning to take a sentimental journey, Brooklyn is the perfect destination.

Under the gentle hand of Griffiths, The Ballad of Wallis Island is both hilarious and delicate, never even making the buffoonish Charles simply a figure of mockery.

It’s an indie film about abortion that comes snuggled in the broad strokes of a quirky relationship comedy. A grump might wonder when indie films got so soft, but I’m more intrigued by the inverse: Why aren’t more studio films this clever and winning and conversant in the same language as their audience?

By the time the explosive finale arrives (with a wistful Ray Charles crooning over shots of cataclysmic destruction, no less), you'll be hard pressed to name a recent film with this much action, pathos, and smarts.

A romance of fantastique proportions, a cautionary tale that revels in throwing caution to the wind, and a de facto monster movie with loose but loving ties to director Jack Arnold’s classic "Creature From the Black Lagoon" and Cocteau’s "Beauty and the Beast," del Toro’s latest is a masterpiece of compassion and insight into the (in)human condition and the transformative power of love.

A brilliant, exhilarating piece of filmmaking. It may even be the best mainstream film of the year thus far.

Operatic, overblown, and yet still touching, Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time may be a mouthful, but it's also full of heart.

If nothing else, Pearl is a showcase of the powerhouse that is Goth. She deserves all the accolades and then some.

It is riveting and uncompromising cinema of the highest order.

Coyness aside, Borgman is a supremely controlled and darkly nuanced fable that veers away from your expectations every time you think you have it figured out.

Coherence presents a far-fetched premise at the outset, only to slyly smuggle in some remarkably relatable matters of the heart along the way.

Delicious.

Moll's film is a far cry from the elegiac poetry of, say, Night and Fog; it's a document more than an examination, and its power of record is inarguable and incorruptible. And then, at the end, somehow you find yourself with that least likely of expressions on your face, a smile, courtesy of Representative Lantos.