This is a movie you feel deeply in the pit of your stomach. Sometimes, it literally hurts to watch it.

This movie is delightful – funny and dreamy and sometimes desperately sad.

Pixar's Finding Nemo may well have the best casting of any animated film of the past 30-odd years.

Somebody is nihilistic, misanthropic, and weirdly relaxing. I've never seen anything like it.

For his part, director Stephen Daldry synthesizes the predominant beats of his film work, which has vacillated between feel-good awards bait (Billy Elliot) and feel-bad awards bait (The Hours, The Reader). Feel-good/feel-bad is Together to a T. It feels wonderful.

Kempner's documentary is a streamlined, gorgeous piece of work, full of revelations of time, place, and person.

The Counterfeiters differs from most Holocaust movies in that the emphasis is on the personal moral choices that are made rather than the overall horror and despair.

Pure entertainment, and a true chop-socky classic.

Marks the end of an era of good -- even very good -- Disney animated features, and the start (one hopes) of a new period of great ones.

Yes, Black Panther is a moment. But in 20 years' time (or 100 more Marvel films), when this moment has passed, it will still be the kind of resonant, rip-roaring crowd-pleaser to which all smart action films should aspire.

This fresh adaptation shakes the dust off Jane Austen's early 19th-century novel of manners and gives it a good airing out. The result is a witty and lovesick skirmish of the sexes that exceeds all expectations.

This political satire that's as fresh and exhilarating as anything we've seen come out of Hollywood in quite some time.

1900 is a marvelous movie, Bertolucci is one of the best directors who has ever lived.

Moments of almost unbearable beauty.

The adaptation by Joel and Ethan Coen (both co-credited as writer and director) of McCarthy's as-if-written-for-the-screen No Country for Old Men becomes a marvelous meld of narrative faithfulness and pre-established sensibilities.

This pleasantly rambling absurdist father/daughter drama is also one of the most strikingly unusual films of the year, period.

It's all about the little things, and the way in which the little things can steal into your heart in big ways.

At its heart, Luff Linn is a very sweet love story between Colin and Lulu, punctuated by absurdity and a specific type of humor that (as I’ve referenced before) brings to the screen the spirit of the work of famed graphic novelist Daniel Clowes.

Like all del Toro films, this Pinocchio thrives on a storytelling imagination that thinks outside the box.

Co-fabulists Pablo Larraín and writer Steven Knight have made a film that marries the former’s elliptical, experimental style with the latter’s penchant for alternative histories stuffed with archetypes. But it is Stewart’s performance at the center of it all that is the most startling aspect of Spencer. She brings a theatricality in the way she moves and speaks that transcends impersonation yet falls thankfully shy of camp.

A glorious, action-and-pathos packed capstone to the rebooted Apes franchise.

It's almost dreamlike in its weird little tone, a Manischewitz hangover of a nightmare that's giddy enough to usher chuckles and is thoroughly unique.

While some filmmakers fade into obscurity during their time away from the screen, The Bikeriders is a welcome reminder that Nichols’ thoughtful explorations of economic tension and toxic masculinity are more relevant now than ever.

It's worth seeing the action scenes on the big screen, and to get in the mood for the World Cup opener later this month.

While Kandahar is undoubtedly spectacular war cinema, it's also a weighty meditation on the seeming impossibility for some of walking away from conflict.

It may feel somewhat slight when it’s all said and done, but Apollo is packed with Linklater’s unique voice and breezy attitude that makes you feel right at home.

Certainly one of the best drug movies ever made.... Great performances make this dispassionate study a memorable experience.

Despite its probe of deep moral questions, Woman at War (a multiple award winner on the festival circuit as well as having been Iceland’s entry for Oscar consideration last year) maintains a light feel and concludes with a sense of uplift as we watch human beings forge ahead despite the floodwaters rising around them.

Soup to nuts, The Menu is satisfying and rich, yet lean and cutting.

Its core, depressing, and unavoidable question is simple: How did one of the most advanced and wealthiest countries on the planet so completely fail in its response?

The pleasures are in watching Maxine navigate through the bloodshed to the denouement she deserves, and watching West cut into the seductive allure of cinema.

More emotionally complex than even I had thought possible, Chasing Amy is the sound of burgeoning genius on the fast track to maturity.

Revenge proved that Fargeat can combine astonishing, lurid, hyperpsychosexualized visuals with incisive social commentary. Yet there’s a vibrant audaciousness to The Substance that’s matched and complemented by her cool examination of the cost of youth and beauty. She can swing between cerebral drama and body horror, but this is definitely not a Cronenberg knockoff.

Overall, You Hurt My Feelings is a sweet, warm, and funny rumination on the delicate nature of our interpersonal relationships. It’s also full of great performances and asks questions other films couldn’t broach without getting too self-important.

Could easily have tipped over into melodrama, but Schnabel is too much an artist to let that happen; he realizes that in order to make his hero truly substantial, and not just sympathetic, he has to present him as an ordinary man making the best of extraordinarily lousy circumstances. By doing so he’s created a character we not only marvel at but identify with.

It's no wonder Imamura has now collected not one but two Palmes d'Ors; The Eel is a flash of quiet brilliance that resonates long after the images have faded from the screen.

It's not necessary to be a longtime fan of the Star Trek universe to appreciate the sheer emotional punch and swagger of this rough and randy Enterprise crew.

Dueñas and Lucas give knockout performances as two twisted souls seemingly locked in a match to the death to determine who is the madder one. I’ll call it a tie, and I’ll also say Alleluia is a grotesque masterpiece. L’amour fou, indeed.

Absolutely harrowing, shocking in its sudden revelatory immediacy, and very, very well done, Black Hawk Down is one of the best depictions of the outright lunacy inherent to battle I have ever seen.

Doesn’t provide any answers, and that’s both its strength and weakness.

Campion’s story of a tubercular poet and his lady love recasts the hackneyed old stanza in refreshing new verse.

Yet it's really Phoenix that binds the whole piece together. In him, Callahan is self-piteous and sardonic, wildly inappropriate and desperate to please.

Farhadi takes a seemingly simple idea and threads holes and complications into it, creating a pressure cooker of intensity based on a handful of white lies and distrust. It’s a tragedy of simple misunderstandings, and misgivings.

Picture scenes of excess followed by degradation, shame, teary promises of “never again,” resolve to start anew. Then the record skips and we’re right back to the beginning of the song, and it doesn’t sound any better on repeat listen. The Outrun hits similar beats, yet manages to do so in ways that feel novel at first, and ultimately transcendent.

Perhaps the best way to sum up Boy and the World is by saying it is what it is and what it is, is absolutely remarkable.

The Hanna-Barbera animation is better than the studio’s usual bare-bones mediocrity, and the voice cast is superb.

Peter Hujar’s Day is a monument to the thrillingly mundane minutiae of living. I found it almost indescribably moving.

Thanks largely to the raw bravery and intensity of the two leads' performances, Happy Together takes a quantum leap forward in terms of visceral power.

A spectacularly imaginative piece of Shakespearean cinema.

As good, old-fashioned dorkfests go, it doesn't get much better than the National Spelling Bee, with its arcane words, bespectacled competitors, and stinging little bell.

What Wright makes us understand is that it's never really been that hard to understand Sparks. Plus, "This Town Ain't Big Enough For The Both Of Us" is a stone-cold classic.

Possibly the best argument against couples therapy ever, Antichrist is a tour-de-force trip inside the mind of a dangerously depressed man. That man is Danish filmmaker von Trier, and he has gone on record as having conceived and executed Antichrist in the wake of a deep depression.

Jude and Cărbunariu have brought Mugur Călinescu back to life, and woven him into a complex tapestry that reveals a country’s history as a most fragile trompe l’oeil.

A remarkable movie: touching, honest, and unassuming, without a hint of irony or false motive.

A remarkable balance of sentimentality and harshness, darkness and light.

All Light, Everywhere’s roaming tangents always return to the heart (or the eye) of the matter, and that skill of orchestration is no mean feat.

Is there such a thing as too much pathos? Trick question, because there is not. So, should you find yourself a bit emotionally imbalanced these days, and the aggressively optimistic charms of Ted Lasso have proven to be a placebo, come see how the other half lives and seek out The Macaluso Sisters, a beautiful bummer that is the perfect elixir of Aristotelian purgation, and a restorative for your soul.

On Her Shoulders offers some limited insights into the politics of international refugees, but the film keeps its focus on a woman of humble origins who willingly takes on the pain of millions.

Everything about Gaia works in tandem to create a steadily escalating mood of Blastomycotic body-horror distress (including Pierre-Henri Wicomb’s anxiety-inducing score). Fans of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy and its Annihilation adaptation, and lovers of the defiantly feminine and vengeful natural world will find plenty to chew on in Gaia.

Vladimir Putin’s Russia – brutal, carnivorous, delusional, but monstrously well-evolved for crushing both spirits and lives large and small – is taken to task in this excoriating portrait of the state’s omnivorous hunger for control in a far-flung northern fishing community on the Barents Sea.

For my money the most gloriously, enchantingly trivial play in the Shakespearean canon, A Midsummer Night's Dream may also be the most screwup-proof of the bard's works.

Like Spencer Tracy, Gene Hackman, and others who have made acting on the big screen seem so easy while taking us on a journey that is far from simple, Clooney is the real thing.

The director is unflinching in his portrayal of the horrors that occurred, and nearly all the characters, from Voight's Wright to Rhames' Mann, are wonderfully nuanced, desperately believable creations.

Suspiria is not a movie that will gel with everyone. It will awaken the sickest, most twisted parts of your mind if you allow it.

The German film Victoria gives off a lustrous intensity. Filmed all in one take in pre-dawn Berlin, the film is a technical marvel inset with small jewels.

Hauntingly beautiful film.

Family dynamics are just one tentpole in Jefferson's construction of a movie that deals with authenticity in direct opposition to the easy and frivolous.

Everything here from costuming and production design to the note-perfect score from Edward Shearmur works in tandem to create not so much a film as a singular and joyous tribute to a vanished age when wonder only cost a nickel and played three time daily at the Bijou.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood brings that essential essence of Fred Rogers to life. That sense of wonder, of kindness, and most importantly of letting kids – and adults – know that it's OK to have been hurt. Heller and Hanks remember that Rogers was not about being perfect, or pretending that bad things don't happen. It's about liking people just the way they are.

It's the truth, unshackled and captured against all odds, and it's one of the most powerful documentary films I have ever seen, period.

The sexual chemistry between Hepburn and Grant, when set against Charade's tumultuous backdrop of shifting identities, makes this movie an enduring favorite.

While the underdog element of this tale is emotionally gratifying, it’s the humanity on unadorned display here that will move you beyond words.

In an age of doggedly unambitious comedy, one marvels at the finesse these first-time screenwriters and director Feig bring to marrying raunch, romantic comedy, and the tested but ever-true bond between women.

As he proves again, few directors have Jarecki's skill for pulling a massive stack of disparate themes – race, celebrity, power, wealth, drug addiction, poverty, militarism – into one coherent narrative.

McKay makes moral outrage wickedly entertaining.

Yes, it's a coming-out film, but it breaks that mold by being thoroughly unpredictable. It's a coming-of-age film, too, and by virtue of of telling the story of a young, black lesbian, Pariah also ventures into novel territory for a motion picture.

Watching and listening to these two is a charming experience; their conversation has the ring of veracity, and rarely does the viewer's interest stray.

For all the fierceness of the elements, co-directors Anna Rose Holmer and Saela Davis, who previously collaborated on the well-regarded 2015 indie film The Fits, are in no rush here.

The most original comedy from either side of the pond in years.

Shot in winter grays with no warming ambers and the whiff of tuberculosis hanging around all the players, Inside Llewyn Davis is a chilly thing – a nominal comedy in brisk shivers.

Director Porter has done an excellent job assembling archival footage and interviews to tell Lewis’ story; she has the markings of a great storyteller.

One of the most original movies of the year.

The kind of movie that gets under your skin and takes root.

Disturbing, harrowing, visceral, and even sporadically humorous, Kids is one of those rare films that begs the description “a must-see.” For once, it's the truth.

Director Ceyda Torun was born in Istanbul and lived there as a young girl, leaving the city with her family at age 11 to live in Jordan and later New York City, but it’s abundantly clear her heart has never left her birthplace. Kedi is a valentine to her childhood home.

Scripted by Samy Burch, based on a story by Burch and Alex Mechanik, and citing head-spinning references from Ingmar Bergman’s Persona to Mike Nichols’ The Graduate to Hard Copy, May December moves a little like a dream, disorienting as the shimmering heat captured by cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt.

The Marvel films have been accused of being repetitive in their structure; Infinity War bursts any conventions wide apart. This is a vast, truly epic endeavor, one that both brings the current MCU to a near-climax (wait for the so-far-untitled follow-up, due May 2019, for the ultimate resolution), and sets the future in motion.

The film opens with a camera slowly swirling around a skull. Red droplets splash on the cranium. In Michael Nyman’s score, a brass section booms rhythmically like blood in your ears. The effect is brooding and provocative. It’s pure drama. It’s perfectly Alexander McQueen.

So often in these big multi-villain events, the hero gets swallowed up, but here he defines the film. If this really is Holland’s last outing, then he leaves having kept true to the spirit of his Spidey.

I don’t say this lightly, but I think jackass forever is exactly what we need right now.

Manages the most delicate of hat tricks: It gives definition to uncertainty.

Snatch is nothing if not watchable: It has the insane, popcorn rhythms of a Road Runner cartoon, and for that reason alone it's a minor masterpiece.

Apart from a handful of tracking shots, the film is a series of middle-distance static shots, giving us the same detachment the Höss household possesses living next to a concentration camp. But The Zone of Interest’s coup de grâce is never showing any activity within Auschwitz itself, allowing only the sounds of the camp to be a constant, nerve-racking presence.

You can take Yourself and Yours at face value, and watch it like Min-jung is a pathological liar, or you can watch it trusting her every time she claims she’s not Min-jung, and see it as a metaphor for how men see women. That there are numerous ways to view her and the story makes it one of Hong’s most powerful and engrossing films.

As Dawn, Matarazzo isn't afraid to evoke the horrors of puberty with a straightforward charmlessness: She's gawky, unhappy, and confused, while her tingling of sexual desire downright gives you the shivers.

Park is one sick puppy, and I mean that in the very best sense of the phrase.

The film is a magnificent document of secular humanism.

These are just boys, and it is all pretend, but Boys State, like the event itself, delivers some legitimate life lessons.