With ideological clashes that span countries, Among the Believers offers an intricate and frightening look into the microcosm of our current world’s biggest international issue.

Already a robust director, Laura Poitras has leveled up with a towering and devastating work of shocking intelligence and still greater emotional power... This is an overwhelming film.

Staggeringly beautiful and immensely true, the best animated film of 2016 — one of the year’s best films of any kind, really.

Bringing this 1,000-page novel to animated life in this way isn’t just an adaptation, it’s an illumination. It makes real the heightened reality that exists in your mind when reading a particularly captivating book.

The Troll Hunter offers high-caliber entertainment despite a low-budget production.

Compared to "The Act of Killing," Oppenheimer's technique with The Look of Silence is deceptively simple, but it applies a more traditional style of documentary storytelling to extraordinary goals.

Garrone’s film has a three-dimensional and devastatingly realized human soul at its core. The world could do with paying attention to Seydou’s story and the millions of other real ones like it.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You vibrates with a primordial love and respect for its heroine, one that self-evidently stems from Bronstein’s own experiences as a mother, but the film refuses to wink at its audience or often even the slightest hint of memeable solidarity.

The film is an exuberant, endearing triumph, setting a standard for wit and energy that defined Hepburn and Tracy’s partnership for a quarter of a century to come.

Alien on Stage captures lighting in a bottle. Like a real-life “Waiting for Guffman” with a fairytale ending, it’s one of the funniest documentaries in years.

Kapadia leaves it up to the audience to determine whether Winehouse's situation could truly have gone another way. Whether he has or hasn’t captured the true essence of the singer may require further debate, but what’s beyond question is that Amy is an extraordinary, powerful work.

The cumulative impact of The Arbor is one of claustrophobia; at times, the endlessly downbeat adventures of Dunbar and her offspring grow almost unbearably morose.

It’s simultaneously candid and also staged in a way that plays with form by straddling realism and fiction. Yet that doesn’t detract from the personal nature of the story Mullinkosson tells, and it doesn’t detract from the film’s political power either.

Pryor’s best film and his best performance and that’s not taking anything anyway from his co-stars Harvey Keitel and Yaphet Kotto.

The Tiniest Place calls to mind Patricio Guzmán's brilliant "Nostalgia for the Light," which focuses on the remnants of Chilean atrocities strewn about the Atacama Desert. Huezo, however, relies more on irony, juxtaposing the wartime setting with storybook images, acknowledging her distance from the events in question.

Jim Jarmusch’s breakthrough film Stranger Than Paradise — famously described by its director as a neo-realistic black comedy in the style of an imaginary Eastern European director obsessed with Ozu and The Honeymooners — captures something essential about the American character: the contradictory desire to be anonymous and to be identified, to blend into the crowd and yet still stand out.

S.S. Rajamouli’s RRR is a dazzling work of historical fiction — emphasis on the “fiction” — that makes the moving image feel intimate and enormous all at once.

Despite the formulaic setup, People, Places and Things benefits from first-rate writing and stellar performances.

In an overwhelmingly dense film that never feels as if it’s only ever doing one thing, Decker’s form never forces you to choose between the story and its very meta shadows.

It may have taken Hogg several decades to realize that her own box of darkness was actually a beautiful gift, but she unwraps it with the care and tenderness of someone who understands its true value.

Visually scrumptious and slickly told, Creative Control illustrates the power of groundbreaking technology while also indicting its extremes.

Rather than building towards the finality of a single climax, Leviathan injects several of them into the tapestry of its elegant design.

The magic of Uncle Boonmee is that it makes all viewers feel like the strange ones.

Not only is The Shape of Water one of del Toro’s most stunningly successful works, it’s also a powerful vision of a creative master feeling totally, joyously free.

Ornette isn't just a love letter to the liberty of jazz rhythms; it excels at expressing them.

One of the best films ever made about filmmaking, it’s simultaneously critical of its director’s self-importance and childishness and celebratory of the possibilities of the medium.

Byington excels at turning the edict that time waits for no one into a sensory experience. No matter how sly it gets, Somebody Up There Likes Me still retains that fundamental truth.

Buzzard is among the first great American satires of the 21st century, its scathing indictment of capitalism delivered as a prolonged, disorienting punchline.

Carried by an appropriately low-key Adam Driver and Jarmusch's casual genius for capturing offhand remarks, Paterson is his most absorbing character study since "Broken Flowers" -- and far more grounded in real life. There's no context necessary to recognize it as his most personal work.

A harrowing piece of filmmaking, and a fitting, powerful remembrance of those who fought for their humanity.

He’s only Tom Cruise because nobody else is willing to be — or maybe he’s only Tom Cruise so that nobody else has to be. Either way, Fallout is the film he’s always promised us, and it was totally worth the wait.

By the end of I Am Not Your Negro, Baldwin’s words have transcended the boundaries of their era and become timeless, functioning as both a celebration of cultural survival and a warning that the battle for its survival won’t stop anytime soon.

The Academy of Muses draws viewers in and forces them to take sides along with Pinto’s skeptical apprentices. By its end, the movie has transcended the boundaries of the classroom to become an educational experience in more ways than one.

Ultimately The Only Living Pickpocket in New York shows us that old school and new school aren’t opposites. Like the city’s many seeming contradictions, they are meant to coexist.

The Power of the Dog sticks its teeth into you so fast and furtively that you may not feel the sting on your skin until after the credits roll, but the delayed bite of the film’s ending doesn’t stop it from leaving behind a well-earned scar.

The movie delivers a bewitching dissection of happiness and unhappiness in love. Digging for Fire is a promising peek into the future of Swanberg, and one that only signals more to come.

This is a quiet little masterpiece of images, each one rich with meaning, that collectively speak to a universal process.

As with "Shotgun Stories," Nichols assembles a tense portrait of blue-collar life, while deepening his thematic interests and working on a bigger scale. Burrowing into the subconscious of a damaged man, he delivers a modern American epic with extraordinary restraint.

Two-Lane Blacktop is primarily a mood piece, and Hellman wants the audience to be imbued with the uneasy feeling of living without any roots. It’s that feeling that’s elevates Two-Lane Blacktop far beyond genre trappings and into the heights of cinema.

Lane set out to make a documentary about the nature of taste, and she’s accomplished that with panache.

More than a powerful elegy, 12 Years a Slave is a mesmerizing triumph of art and polemics: McQueen turns a topic rendered distant by history into an experience that, short of living through the terrible era it depicts, makes you feel as if you've been there.

The beautiful desolation of Bombay Beach makes it difficult to describe as a documentary. Alma Har'el's directorial debut takes a nonfiction setting and displays its haunting qualities in poetic terms.

David Lean’s Brief Encounter captures love at its most ephemeral.

Before Midnight is the rare cinematic achievement that implicates alert viewers in its mission to understand the mysteries of intimate connections.

For all of its self-insistent detours and high-minded indulgences, I’m Thinking of Ending Things rarely feels like a concept in search of a movie. There’s a fullness and vitality to it that shines through even when the film is chasing its own tail, which is basically all it wants to do.

Shrouded in grief and chilly to the core, Andrew Dominik’s mournful documentary One More Time With Feeling is at once sobering in tone and intoxicating in style.

There are many times in Hogir Hirori’s Sabaya, an anxiety-filled potboiler of a documentary about the fight to rescue enslaved girls from ISIS, where one might wonder how they pulled it off. That feeling is quickly followed by relief that they did.

People change, some more than others, but 63 Up is so beautiful and bittersweet for how it finds them becoming who they are. Hopefully many of them live to enjoy it, and this series continues for a couple more decades to come.

At first galvanizing in its depiction of survival amid dire circumstances, "The Overnighters" transforms into a devastating portrait of communal unrest.

As vulnerable as its predecessor and textured with the same velvet sense of becoming, “Part II” adds new layers of depth and distance to the looking glass of Hogg’s self-reflection.

If Uncut Gems leaves people rattled, disoriented, grasping for clarity in the chaos of one man’s hectic routine, that all speaks to the sheer precision of a visionary achievement in full control.

The beats of All We Imagine as Light are calibrated with hypnotic grace creating a rhythm that induces pure pleasure.

Via his subject’s idiosyncracies – VanDyke is a habitual hand-washer and diagnosed OCD-ite – Curry starts to weave a subtle, but nonetheless eloquent critique not just of one man's compulsions, but a culture's.

“Panico” is part love letter, part monster movie, and a fascinating reflection on what it means to let our inner demons run wild in our art.

Trophy tells a story as captivating as its images are beautiful.

The Pearl Button is a vivid, essential portal to understanding not only the heritage of a nation, but also the art of nonfiction cinema.

While adhering to an internal logic that makes each punchline land with a satisfying burst of glee, the movie nevertheless stems from genuine fury aimed a broken world. It's the rare storytelling endeavor that manages to be laughably absurd and profoundly tragic at the same time.

Like a great poem, End of the Century gives voice to a seemingly indescribable feeling, one anyone who’s ever fallen in love will recognize from deep in their soul — as if bumping into an old friend you forgot how much you liked.

Gentle as the stream that flows through the Yi’s property, and yet powerful enough to reverberate for generations to come, Chung’s loving — and immensely lovable — immigrant drama interrogates the American Dream with the hard-edged hope of a family that needs to believe in something before they lose all faith in each other.

Bottoms is an ambitious sophomore feature from a director who is just getting started, one that can craft both a hilariously surreal teen sex comedy and marry it with one hell of an eye for action sequences.

Bigelow delivers an acute realization of the mission's execution that's eerily in sync with the way it played in the popular imagination. Visually, the events unfold as a mashup of shadowy movements with flashes of green night vision. It's simultaneously predictable and tense.

Arthur Freed and Comden & Greene’s timeless classic is the musical for people who don’t like musicals: so clever, so witty and so brilliantly executed that the usual objections to musical numbers “stopping the story” don’t apply.

There is nothing artificial here, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t mystery. It’s the mystery of people and their unusual behaviors and the way they can flit in and out of our lives and our consciousness.

Lyrically involving and deeply sensual, Neon Bull showcases a full-bodied artist in command of his form.

Lapid’s film is too fresh and intransigent to know how well it will age over time or hold up to repeat viewings, but on first blush it feels like a powerful howl that’s hard to hear clearly, and harder still to get out of your head.

Schoenbrun’s astonishing second feature manages to retain the seductive fear of their micro-budget debut and deepen its thrilling wounds of discovery even while examining them at a much larger scale.

Poignant without being melodramatic, overflowing with unforced charm, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl holds a unique appeal that's certain to last.

Poor Things is the best film of Lanthimos’ career and already feels like an instant classic, mordantly funny, whimsical and wacky, unprecious and unpretentious, filled with so much to adore that to try and parse it all here feels like a pitiful response to the film’s ambitions.

The endless chaos of nature embodies the abstract threat of imminent destruction; by imbuing these shots with a combination of mystical allure and darker possibilities, Diaz creates a haunting atmosphere that makes it possible to absorb the story even when it slows to a crawl.

From its opening moments to the devastating finale, Collective plays like a gripping real-time thriller, merging the reportorial intensity of “Spotlight” with the paranoid uncertainty of “The Manchurian Candidate” as it explores the national fallout of a tragedy that won’t let up.

These portraits don't have a hint of didacticism or preachiness, but "Ex Libris" achieves a certain emotional velocity all the same.

Fiennes wisely stays out of his way here. Zizek is the star, edited down to digestible elements, with archival footage used adroitly to drive his arguments home.

It’s a wild romp with all the campy noir you might expect in a film by the father of queercore.

[A] magnificent film.

Stories We Tell marks the finest of Polley's filmmaking skills by blending intimacy and intrigue to remarkable effect.

In Licorice Pizza, time isn’t something that keeps people apart — it’s the only thing that allows them to find each other in the first place. And this euphoric movie doesn’t waste a minute of it.

Oldroyd is clearly a master assembler of styles, but he never lets his vision outshine the wonderful central performances at the movie’s core.

With up-close footage of police beatings and hordes of angry protestors calling for the country's president to resign, Winter on Fire features the intensity of an action movie and the fury of a clear-eyed polemic.

In constructing its gripping overview, After Tiller maintains a generally straightforward roundup of talking heads, but its unassuming construction gradually generates an authoritative voice. Only once the arguments have been plainly established does the emotion truly take hold.

To write more about the pleasures and pains of Project Hail Mary would be (yes, over 1,300 words in) a disservice to what’s most entertaining and satisfying about the film: watching it unfold, enjoying the process, accepting the mission, asking the big questions. That’s about as much as you can ask from any blockbuster film these days.

The Descendants constantly hovers on the brink of a dark comedy. But it never takes the big plug. By treading carefully, Payne has created his warmest, most earnest work, if not his best.

Showcases Jones' ability to provide ample entertainment value with sharply drawn characters in a minimalist setting.

Red Rocket is so arresting because of how it keeps hope alive by rescuing devastation from the jaws of happiness.

From Romero’s original zombie series to the films it inspired, this type of horror succeeds when it laces its scares with biting social commentary, and “Cargo” utilizes this formula to great success.

We are afforded the intimate sight of a man who gave his life to music making a final offering.

Every Body” is a beautiful and cathartic celebration of intersexuality — and should be mandatory viewing for people of all genders.

Omar maintains an unsettling rhythm of suspense and sociopolitical critique throughout.

Alan Partridge stays true to this small, very specific world of regional British radio and this class of local celebrity while also injecting the high-level drama needed to carry such a story to a much larger audience. It’s this balance that should win the film over for Alan Partridge fans and the general movie-going public alike.

The least funny and most tender movie that Andersson has made since building his own studio with the profits he’d saved from decades of enormously successful commercial work, About Endlessness adopts the same qualities of life itself: it’s both short and infinite.

Like all of the best comfort food, Tampopo tastes familiar but not derivative, something more than the sum of its ingredients. If Tampopo resonates with you in ways you might not expect or be able to name, it’s because Itami also engenders the same respect for everything that goes into the making of a movie.

A singular, hypnotic, and formally unbound psychodrama that’s staged between a Lady Gaga-like diva (Anne Hathaway) and the only person who might be able to quiet her demons (Michaela Coel), this talky chamberpiece of a film is almost entirely confined to an unheated barn somewhere outside of London, and yet it grows to feel as vast as the synaptic gap that stretches between literalness and metaphor. A wound and its memory. A pop song and the person who wrote it.

As Burden, Garrett Hedlund astonishes in a nuanced portrait of a man resistant to change, until he finally comes to understand that hatred is literally killing him.

While blatantly topical, this is not a political film of the moment, but rather a calculated meditation on self-defined purpose in the midst of societal confusion.

Using a remarkable personal lens, the film examines the reverberations of propaganda on broken families across multiple generations. The cumulative effect creates the sense that its destructive effects continue to be felt well beyond China’s borders.

Although Madsen's survey of warning strategies has an aimless structure prone to repetition, he creates an effective mood that transcends his time-travel gimmick and eventually becomes topical.

This searing brand of humor has never felt more essential. Blending activism with entertainment, Baron Cohen’s best movie to date gives us new reasons to be afraid of the world, but also permission to laugh at it.

Detailed and deliberate, assertive but rarely obvious, Diallo’s Master is a towering, inventive shot in the arm for Black horror.

It's an unflinching update to media scholar Neil Postman's prophetic claim about the deadly impact of television on cultural identity: Smartphones in hand, we face the danger of filming ourselves to death.