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.