Human beings can be really complicated. And thankfully, there are filmmakers around like Claire Denis who make films such as Both Sides of the Blade to remind us of that complexity. Films that seemingly help us in trying to understand each other, but really show us that we might never be able to.

I don't want to oversell the thing. It is, quite simply, something very special indeed.

Ju Dou is a juicy and stylish potboiler that keeps the pilots turned on full blast.

Adapted from the Leonard Gardner novel, Fat City is long on character and short on plot (at times nearly playing like a Cassavettes film), but it's a crawl through the mud that'll stay in your psyche for days.

Just plain unforgettable.

The Blue Room is mesmerizing, psychologically complex, and, at the very end, viscerally devastating. They don’t make them like this much anymore, but they should.

Sexy, sophisticated comedy that only occasionally falls short of its admirable ambition: that is, to be a fun, fizzy, razzle-dazzle thing. Straight to the moon, indeed.

There's no doubt that the slow disintegration of Allen and Farrow's relationship inspired this work, but that is where the comparisons end. This is not an instance in which art imitates life, as so many have claimed. Here, real life is the stuff of tabloids, while Husbands and Wives comes close to the exquisite stuff of art.

Loud, hilarious, and enormously entertaining, 24 Hour Party People makes you want to toss current FM radio out on its pre-fab, corporate-sponsored backside. And not a moment too soon.

The perfect antidote to the summer heat in Austin, more refreshing even than a dip in our chilly holy waters of Barton Springs.

Crowe has rarely been better, and the same goes for director Scott, who parallels and then dovetails Lucas and Roberts' stories with sublime, gritty precision, working up to a magnificent "Godfather III"-style crosscutting sequence that electrifies an already explosive tale.

For those who only recall Bana from his bland showing as Ang Lee's super-thyroidial meltdown monster, his performance here is a revelation.

While it’s perhaps not the best date film of the year, it is a grim and unmistakable masterpiece of bleak, black sorrow.

Only those who have been through this experience – who have cared for a loved one who has dementia – can speak to the accuracy of this approach. For the rest of us, The Father will serve as welcome humanization of those suffering from a most alien disease.

Wright takes the tools of a bloodless medium, the video game, and crafts an action-comedy with a true-blue beating heart.

A sweet-natured romantic fable, albeit one that packs in carnivorous cockroaches, rampaging brontosaurs, and the ever-Freudian Empire State Building among its requisite emotional baggage. And, too, it's a corker of an action/monster movie.

Rică, like Acasă, My Home itself, meditates on how we define a life worth choosing.

Oscar-winning special effects and animation sequences by Ward Kimball make this musical fantasy a perennial favorite.

The film is so velvety textured and dreamy, I would’ve stuck around for more. That is Cianfrance’s special talent.

Its audacity is entirely matched by its artistry.

At the center of it all stands Reeves, a convincing embodiment of both the calm before the storm and its subsequent capacity for ruin.

Grounded and sweet, delicately bawdy, and decidedly hilarious, CODA puts an effervescent and original spin on the coming-of-age comedy-drama.

The film's content is adult – and for the first time in Araki's career, so is the director.

If there's a depressing note to Piketty's circular view of history, it's his belief that egalitarianism often springs from catastrophic disaster ("everyone is equal in death" becomes a refrain), and that it's the slow grind of extreme wealth and extreme poverty that breeds those disasters.

There's a genuine sense of loss when dreams go unrealized, and in these moments Dig! transcends the typical "rock movie" format and aspires to something greater: an examination of why we create and what we receive from art.

It packs a hefty emotional wallop.

Factotum, for all its grim grind, is funny-serious, and smart-stupid. Just like you after four beers, and me after eight.

Yet in many ways Shoplifters is an unlikely yet organic extension of his last film, 2017's crime drama "The Third Murder." Less a whodunit than a whydidyoudoit, that legal procedural was really a subtle assault on Japan's judicial system, in which it's more important that a case makes sense than it reaches the truth. Shoplifters cuts close to the same marrow as "The Third Murder," but with how Japan views families as his subject.