The humanity on screen might be messy, but the skill with which it’s portrayed never is.

Roma is both visually and emotionally arresting, grandiose and intensely intimate all at once.

A revelatory burst of Black history suffused with the joy and struggle that made it possible.

Ejiofor is truly incredible from start to finish. McQueen’s approach to Solomon’s struggle is seamless, eschewing onscreen titles or obvious discussions of lapsed time or virtually anything that could briefly detach a viewer from their immersion into Solomon’s real-life nightmare.

This is pitch-perfect filmmaking, the kind that turns a hungry visionary into a popular last name. Rest assured, it’s all earned. Manchester by the Sea is a hearty, rewarding drama audiences will remember for years.

McQueen’s focus is on the community, not the individual; his focus is on the party as a whole and the optimism and community it engenders. Films about the unabashed celebration of Black joy and success are few and far between, which makes Lovers Rock all the more remarkable.

There’s something relatively shocking about the way One Battle After Another comments on This Moment In Time; it almost seems like production on the movie wrapped yesterday, as opposed to mid-2024. Yet while its focus on issues of political power, immigration, and the rise of white supremacy are all too relevant, Anderson never loses sight of his characters, and the different ways in which they commit to taking action.

I Am Not Your Negro is the kind of documentary that could open ears, eyes, and hearts with its moving agony and historical empathy.

By minimalizing his loftier techniques and tendencies of the past with brusque pacing and grand photography, Nolan has assembled the leanest and most impassioned film of his career.

The execution of this story is almost uniformly perfect. Haigh’s script and direction are a clinic in careful and measured storytelling, favoring a delicate and devastating slow burn of a narrative over big dramatic moments and outbursts.

The Irishman is a remarkable achievement that proves the best may yet to come from one of the most essential American filmmakers to ever live.

Inside Out is a superlative work of inspired imagination, one that may very well stay in your mind for a very long time.

The best movies are little worlds that welcome you into the experiences of fascinating characters, giving you everything you need to understand their perspectives and actions. Past Lives does so in spades, painting on a small canvas, but with rich hues of emotion and meaning, knowing that a great story and a great life aren’t necessarily the same thing.

It’s a transcendent love story, and a work of overwhelming empathy.

Johansson and Driver both give strong performances, while the use of supporting characters for comedic levity is smartly executed. While the content of the film isn’t happy per se, audiences will find much to like.

The superficial thrills of the genre are all present and adoringly rendered, but the actual purpose of the whole exercise is much harder to discern.

Despite hitting so many classic coming-of-age hallmarks, Lady Bird never feels anything but fresh (and refreshing). This is, in part, due to the the film’s remarkably realistic performances.

It is as much a celebration of song and contemporary dance as it is a call to action about the need to embrace our humanity and connect with others. Quite simply: it’s a joy.

It’s moving stuff, even if Kore-eda threatens to dilute his themes by overindulging in them. Shoplifters overstays its welcome somewhat as the third act rolls on, with an epilogue that seems to exist only to absolve characters that don’t quite deserve it. The empathy is admirable, but one wishes for a touch more restraint, especially in the wake of such an emotionally devastating climax.

What makes Toni Erdmann, the finest comedy in recent memory, so wonderful and beguiling is the deep undercurrent of sadness that informs its eventual life lessons.

While Howard Ratner is undeniably Adam Sandler, one of the most famous actors in the world, you’ve definitely never seen him like this before. He’s working with non-actors, some of them literally off the street because this is a Safdies production, and there’s just a sense of authenticity and rawness that you don’t see in mainstream cinema.

The film exudes pure humanity in every frame, in all of its messiness and splendor and tragedy, and much of that raw emotion is owed to the performances.

The glory of Hittman’s film is in finding those moments of beauty among the brutal silences, and the magnetic grace that can be found in a person’s most difficult days.

Grounded and yet also experimental, cold at some points and intimate at others, The Zone of Interest is one of the year’s most deliberately challenging films, unafraid to explore one of humanity’s darkest moments from some unexpected angles.

The Souvenir‘s power is deceptive, in a way; it’s only at the film’s end, at the moment of its bracing final image, that its ideas and genre subversions come fully into focus.

This is Spinal Tap is hilarious to everyone who’s not a musician. Because for as ridiculous and perverse as Rob Reiner’s heavy metal mockumentary gets, the slim, 82-minute comedy gnaws at more truths than any other rock ‘n’ roll biopic ever put to celluloid.

This unique blend of docudrama, action movie, and cartoon immerses the viewer in a way that wouldn’t be possible in a more traditional film.

This is despairing filmmaking, but also the kind that arrests the eye from its first moments. Lee has made something rare here: a portrait of poverty that treats its subjects not as victims or as aggressors, but simply as pawns of a far grander social scheme than any of them can possibly comprehend.

At times, László Nemes’ film induces the sensation of drowning, slowly. Not the kind where you’re pulled under by the riptide, but the kind where you’ve been treading water for so long that the body starts to betray you in tiny increments, and any life preserver must be met with utter desperation.

Little Women is made with so much love and enthusiasm — both behind and in front of the camera — that even the deeply sad scenes still fill you with joy and longing. It’s an explosion of emotions, from loss to love to everything in between.

Eclectic and unconventional in its presentation, Soundtrack’s density can throw you for a loop, especially if you don’t know the first thing about the geopolitics of the time and place. But it proves a healthy primer on the skeptical eye we should take towards world powers, and how even the art that’s meant to free us can be used against us.

If this film is Miyazaki’s true bow, it’s a magnificent final flourish that folds together many of the thematic and aesthetic threads he’s explored through his career: man’s relationship to nature, the majesty of flight, the twin pulls of love and loss. It’s stunning and inscrutable and measures among the best of his works.

Like the women who populate its halls, it might be easy to see The Favourite as only one thing, to reduce it to one quality, but it contains multitudes. And like its three central characters, you underestimate it at your peril.

Carpenter is patient in pulling away our warm blankets by slowly easing into the horror, simply by allowing the horror to slowly stalk us.

It’s undoubtedly one of the best films of the year, and of Anderson’s career.

Not only has George Miller made an effective return to the wasteland of the Mad Max universe with Mad Max: Fury Road, he has surpassed most action films released … well … ever.

It’s at once subtle and outlandish, sensual and thoughtful, outrageously unconventional and yet one of its director’s most confidently assembled features.

Mangrove elevates the oft-creaky genre of the courtroom drama with striking, evocative compositions, stunning performances, and a real sense of place.

As a viewing experience, Oppenheimer is a whole lot of movie, a man's life given the epic treatment — because he did do truly epic things, things that elevate his life story beyond the limitations of genre. And thus, the film proves exceptional at drawing the audience into the experience, when it lets the power of its images do the talking. Its best moments stand out as some of the most original and exciting filmmaking of the year, highs that do a lot to counterbalance the sequences which dive back into bureaucracy and comparatively petty rivalries.

There’s not an ounce of wasted motion to be found throughout Cold War. Pawlikowski moves at a fleet pace, trusting in his audience to fill in the gaps that the film’s understated storytelling leaves along the way.

Restraint and simplicity are words that can be applied to every performance in The Tale, and nearly all of those performances are excellent.

One of the director’s finest to date, the film derives its unique power from the repetition of daily life, elevating the mundane to a kind of divinity.

It’s quiet and strange and simple. It’s also unforgettable, in ways that can be easily named and in others that can’t.

Even amid its flaws — Scorsese’s sprawling focus leaving some characters in the dust, most of them the very indigenous Americans this film purports to speak for — Killers of the Flower Moon remains a staggering work of cinema.

Lee Isaac Chung’s smooth ability to craft relatable drama makes him a director to pay attention to. It’s not just that Minari is captivating in the moment. Like the best films, it has images and scenes that will stay with you long after the film is over.

Wang, along with her stellar cast, manages to deftly weave droll, observational family comedy with deeply resonant examinations of the role of family and culture in our lives. It’s naturalistic without feeling downbeat, farcical without being goofy, and treats its cultural signposts with a sensitivity and honesty few filmmakers can achieve.

Phoenix is a death-defying melodrama of rare emotional obsession.

Campion’s take on the Western is an elegant, sometimes unnerving accomplishment.

Kogonada matches the inquisitive eye of his two leads, finding the splendor in the everyday, the unusual in the unlikeliest places, and the need for connection that runs beneath all things.

This is the great American nightmare, in which neither families, friends, neighbors, nor lovers can save you, and no matter what you try and no matter where you go, it won’t stop until you do. There is nothing more terrifying than that.

Johnson, being a primary voice behind some of this century’s most important documentaries, is a particularly qualified candidate to chronicle life in this way, and her greatest feat, one I can’t imagine anyone else achieving, is her ability to tell the story of her life without ever once talking about herself.

Leave it to writer, director, and professional expectation-defier Charlie Kaufman to make existential angst so completely delightful.

It’s beyond playful. Wonderful and whimsical, for that matter. Fun to look at and completely immersive. It’s hilarious, heartfelt, and humane, as well. It’s even a tad sagely in its universally appealing lessons of manners, sympathy, and open-mindedness.

The script feels like a great writers-room comedy, where only the leanest and meanest bits stay, and the most startling and intriguing ideas persist. It functions comedically and historically — the jokes have something to say about power.

Three Billboards may be a film chiefly concerned with rage, and pain, but it’s also one of the best dark comedies of recent vintage, and one of the better dramas as well. While some of McDonagh’s narrative threads do time out in unexpected and even unresolved ways, the film’s highs are exemplary.

A Star is Born isn’t a new love story, or even an especially unique one. But it’s a traditional love story told supremely well, and sometimes that’s exactly what audiences go to the movies to see.

Historical weightiness aside, Hamilton is simply fun.

A rich, complex drama that’s as much about consequence and justification as it is destiny.

It’s about how reality invades our dreams, and how the people we trust teach us to be less trusting as we get older. Tan plays these themes out with a rare emotional honesty, never allowing the fact that it’s a deeply personal work to prevent her from indicting herself alongside any of the other key players involved.

The director of Dogtooth and The Lobster has been gradually making his way towards something this vivid and vibrant his whole career, inching toward his audience with one absurdist feature after another.

There’s talent in every corner of the film, and it elevates Black Panther beyond so many of its superhero contemporaries even as it exhibits some formulaic tendencies. It’s a sterling example of formula done exceedingly well, however, particularly in the ways it uses the familiarity of that formula to tell a new kind of story.

Director John Crowley has fashioned a film that feels like a natural evolution from the Victorian novel, one in which the circumstances are deceptively modern even if everything else feels somewhat old-fashioned.

Apollo 11 is a great documentary, and its greatness can largely be attributed to the stunning archival scenes compiled within it. It’s impossible for anybody who wasn’t there to truly understand what it felt like to see Apollo 11 complete its travels, but for at least 93 endlessly arresting minutes, Apollo 11 does its very best to put you right there.

Weaving together the past and the present, masterful interpretations of Baldwin’s incredible prose, gorgeous visuals, and a sweeping score, If Beale Street Could Talk draws audiences into its overwhelming mix of emotions all at once.

Its moments of creativity and daring, while effective and elevating, never even approach the audacity of the subject on which they center, and it’s easy to wish that Heller had pressed down a bit more firmly on the gas. But the overall effect is so simply pleasing, the performances so honest and engaging, and the story, frankly, so worthy of an earnest what the fuck? that it’s hard to work up the steam for any kind of complaint. It all works, and works well.

Todd Haynes obviously loves rock and roll, which makes it all the more impressive that he’s spent his career making movies about key figures in its history while avoiding the usual lionizing cliches.

Mission: Impossible knows exactly what it needs to be: a fun and chummy thrill ride that’s always self-aware. Fallout follows that agenda, while also revisiting its more severe roots. It’s a sequel in every sense of the word, reintroducing not only familiar faces, but styles, themes, and motifs of past films.

As the world continues to mourn the loss of Chadwick Boseman, his last performance will serve as a magnificent reminder of the actor’s talent, and an exclamation point on a life that inspired a generation.

On almost every level, in almost every way, Jane is an exemplary work of documentation, storytelling, and filmmaking.

Both Dylan and Scorsese cast a spell in Rolling Thunder Revue, one that Dylan fans will gratefully fall under.

Education is a tinier, more intimate button on McQueen’s set of stories, but it’s one of its most potent: the simple act of learning is powerful actualization, so proven in the white establishment’s efforts to make it so inaccessible to Black people.

Nomadland is a gorgeous, lyrical film featuring another standout lead performance by Frances McDormand. Chloé Zhao’s latest is a testament to the beauty of the American Midwest and the value of living an unorthodox life.

As an allegory to civil war, it’s well-worked and deeply thoughtful. But overall, the film leaves a slightly bitter taste, and — perhaps purposely — lacks some of the final third conviction that McDonagh has achieved so often in his stage and film work.

Love & Friendship is easily the funniest movie Whit Stillman has ever made. His bristling screenplay — which shows shades of Noël Coward and Evelyn Waugh — has so many impeccable one-liners that it would take three or four viewings to catch them all.

Hereditary‘s horror functions on multiple levels. What we see is undoubtedly terrifying, but it’s how we see it that truly distinguishes the film.

There’s a breathless sense of discovery and play that makes the film seem new, even as it’s tap-dancing through the imprints of so many sci-fi stories throughout the years. Simply put, superhero movies don’t often carry this sense of possibility anymore.

Coen’s version of Macbeth is a canny, fascinating hybrid of a theatrical sensibility and a cinematic translation, shot in ghostly monochrome.

Filmed in aquatic hues and bathed in nostalgic mid-century style, The Shape of Water is both a love story and a love letter to monster movies, musicals, and classic cinema. Del Toro’s affection for the genres – and for the magic of film in general – is clear in so many charming and not-so-charming touches.

There’s a lot of depth to Rushmore, but lingering in those depths for too long does a disservice to how consistently funny it also is.

Arnaud Desplechin delivers a thrilling reminiscence that romanticizes and believes in youth’s ungraceful but intense splendors.

Donaldson has a tremendous command of pace and silence, laying the desperation of middle age (and how it looks to those whose lives are still ahead of them) bare with little more than a gesture or a closeup. It’s a killer debut for both her and Collias, and it will be exciting to see what both can do with the momentum a picture like this can provide.

Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé is a true odyssey, a maximalist explosion of sparkles and beats and visuals and insight.

There are choices here that prove reminiscent of the iconic Looney Tunes cartoon “Duck Amuck” — if “Duck Amuck” was over two hours long, and Chuck Jones had chugged four dozen Four Lokos while directing it.

Krisha, directed by first-timer Trey Edward Shults, is a masterful opera of discomfort and hurt feelings.

Little Men is a summer breeze, with rich melodrama and an easygoing mood, built up around two great kids and their troubled families that says more than any after-school special. It’s an episode of actual experience, presented in lovingly natural, minimalist strokes.

It’s a harrowing moral fable, a political fable, and above all, a deft lament.

The real horrors presented by the film are all internal, about what can happen to a person if they repress too much of themselves over time. There are ghosts, but they’re the ghosts of potential happiness and fulfillment. And those ghosts haunt us like none other.

It’s a master class in discomfort.

It’s a perfect marriage of direction, performances, and writing, the kind of comedy that people eagerly wait for. Its solutions aren’t easy, and its paths unusual, but it’s a love story that completely earns its emotional peaks, and the kind of comedy that makes you wish every single one of them were this great.

City of Ghosts is far less about the region’s troubled history than about the now, the daily abuses that continue to grow in severity as politics are talked elsewhere.

Hawke is too committed for Toller’s humanity to not shine through. It’s a layered, transformative performance, his gritting, introverted Toller bearing no traces of the rambling, loose-limbed Hawke of Richard Linklater’s canon.

No Hollywood suit and no diehard fan could have had the foresight to picture something like this, namely because nobody but Wright had any idea what this was supposed to be. This is something that’s been brewing inside his head for over two decades, and that unquestionable dedication, confidence, and passion fuels each and every scene of Baby Driver.

There ends up being something really profound about the way A Real Pain lets the undercurrent of history serve as contrast to the deeply felt emotions of its core character story.

David Lowery deconstructs the hero's journey with this sumptuous dark fantasy.

Given that The Salesman strives to be far more than a revenge thriller, Emad’s story isn’t enough to make it an unqualified triumph, but it’s still a genuinely good film, and worth watching.

Peele is a talented director of action as well as horror, and Get Out is always far from boring even in its more familiar scenes.

The Rider is nothing short of a masterpiece, an elegant work of cinematic poetry that elevates the everyday struggles of real people to the level of high art.

Having empathy for your characters often means giving them opportunities for growth, and Burnham thankfully never loses sight of the belief that things truly can get better if you want them to.