There’s a deep sense of melancholy and finality that runs through The Last Detail even when it’s at its funniest, not just because of Meadows’ fate, but because of Buddusky and Mulhall’s collective guilt for being part of a system that would dole out such a punishment.

Equal parts journalistic investigation and family portrait, Ford’s delicate project transforms the source of his frustrations into an absorbing cinematic elegy.

Steve James's The Interrupters runs long, but earns its heft.

The movie never lacks for insights into the nature of the disconnect.

The movie’s conclusion pits religion against personal desire in remarkably visceral terms.

This light and thoughtful documentary road trip still manages to draw a comprehensive map of what the Cold War relic has come to represent — and what freedom means to the people of a nation that’s been defined by its pursuit.

The director’s most ambitious work to date is a wildly successful romantic heist comedy, propelled from scene to scene with a lively soundtrack that elevates its slick chase scenes into a realm of musicality that develops its own satisfying beat.

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.

If nothing else, this memorable effort eloquently displays Hushpuppy's fragile understanding of her world, where the only certainty is that nothing lasts forever. That makes "Beasts" into a gigantic triumph even when it falls apart.

A film that’s dark and delightful and ripe for rediscovery.

Crip Camp proves some success stories only grow more powerful with age, and their ability to inspire action is timeless.

Hansen-Løve has traced her own paternal grief into an illuminatingly honest sketch about how loss is necessary for rebirth, guilt inextricable from self-fulfillment, and the present worth savoring for its role in bringing the past and the future together — rather than as a buffer for keeping them apart.

There are any number of movies about people who try to reinvent themselves in the face of a crisis. There are many fewer movies about people who violently refuse to even consider that idea — people who would rather kill someone else than become someone else. Park Chan-wook’s bleak, brilliant, and mordantly hilarious “No Other Choice” is the exception that proves the rule.

Blue Film leaves you feeling a little bit ill, and very uneasy about how you’re supposed to feel. But when most films either wouldn’t dare go here at all, or would tell you how to feel about the material, that’s rare and welcome.

My Father’s Shadow resolves as a movie less about a father than it is about the absence of one — a vibrant, deeply felt love letter to Lagos, written in blood.

Make no mistake: Culkin is the movie’s heart and soul as the eccentric, unpredictable wanderer Benji, but “A Real Pain” is — at the risk of it being too early in the filmmaker’s career to coin this term — Eisenbergian through and through.

Diop’s first feature doesn’t always fit together from a narrative perspective, but it musters such an absorbing vision of an alienated seaside life that not everything needs to add up for the atmosphere to take hold.

Stoned out of its mind and shot with a genre-tweaking mastery that should make John Boorman proud, it’s also the rare movie that knows exactly what it is, which is an even rarer movie that’s perfectly comfortable not knowing exactly what it is.

It’s hard to predict what value this documentary will retain in the future (or if it will just disappear into the content void, where history streams a mile wild and a millimeter deep), but it’s safe to assume that it will never be more urgent than it is right now, in a country exhausted by its overlapping tragedies, when so many people of all stripes could use a shot in the arm to remember what’s at stake.

Through even-handed reporting and a series of emotional first-person accounts, Athlete A excavates one of modern sports’ most horrific abusers and systems. It doesn’t do that by being preachy or shrill, instead working from one key belief: It must have started somewhere. Hopefully, Athlete A can contribute to ending it for good.

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.

The film’s unflinchingly repetitive shape allows viewers to lose sight of their perspective at the same time as it invites them to draw their own conclusions, a vertigo which proves to be more involving than the didacticism that a traditional documentary might bring to the same topic.

For those who know little about the subject matter, Dahomey is a bold and memorable history lesson. But with Diop’s expressive talents as they are, it’s fair to hope that she returns to the world of fiction next time.

If Get Out isn’t half as scary as the ideas that inspired it, Jordan Peele’s directorial debut is almost certain to be the boldest — and most important — studio genre release of the year. What it lacks in fear, it nearly makes up for in fearlessness.

It’s a wonderful musical, and an unabashed Steven Spielberg movie. And the moments in which it most comfortably allows itself to be both of those things at once leave you convinced that some harmonies are worth waiting for, even if it seems like they’ve been always been around the corner and whistling down the river.

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.

While it never reaches the psychedelic heights of Guerra’s previous effort and relies on a more conventional pattern of events, Birds of Passage delivers another fascinating tone poem about Colombia’s fractured identity.

It’s a movie that often feels like a mega-mix of Jia’s greatest hits, but one that rehashes them with precious little of the ineffable grace that make each of them so valuable on their own.

The Treasure may not be a major work from Porumboiu or his filmmaking tradition, but it proves that even cerebral formalism has its soft side.

Shot over the course of several years, the movie blends an intimate perspective with trenchant investigative chops, uncovering a transitory figure whose romantic ideals give way to a harsh reality check.

Utilizing a cast of non-actors — most of whom are tasked with playing versions of themselves, in a story pulled from their lives — Zhao’s film derives its power from the truth that both drives it and inspires it, and the final result is a wholly unique slice-of-life drama.

Watching the 90-year-old filmmaker pick through the scrapheap of her own memories and fashion the bits into a fresh perspective on the relationship between reality and representation, stillness and movement, life and art, it seems that Varda has become something of a gleaner, herself.

While The Delinquents was pointedly made to provoke active viewing and push back against the algorithmic storytelling that has choked the life out of modern cinema, its airiness and emergent sense of romance make it a delightful place to get lost for a while.

A furious yet resiliently hopeful documentary about white America’s long and ongoing history of colonizing the Očeti Šakówin (along with the rest of this land’s indigenous people), Jesse Short Bull and Laura Tomaselli’s vital Lakota Nation vs. United States doesn’t waste any of its 121 minutes, but it also boasts a number of moments that effectively squeeze the film’s entire perspective into a single unforgettable image.

In some respects, it feels like the most nakedly personal film the now 83-year-old has ever made. In others, it feels like the only film he’s ever made. Or maybe all of them.

The film’s honesty, whether loquacious or laconic, sears even more in the absence of a score. Its observational ethos is remarkable given that it is quasi-autobiographical.

At every turn, Fisher is honest and open, relatable to the point that you feel as if you’re actually watching her own life play out.

It’s Furhman, steadily building Alex from the inside out, even as she’s crumbling around her, that adds the most tension and intensity to the film, offering a fully realized performance in a story all about the pain of realizing how much further you have to go.

The tense, involving result confirms Sciamma's mastery over the coming-of-age drama, a genre too often reduced to its simplest ingredients.

Mind-blowing in the best possible way, The Ornithologist may not work for everyone, but those willing to embrace its puzzling ingredients will find a rewarding solution: further confirmation of a genuine film artist.

Much of Kiki’s charm comes from Miyazaki’s understated approach to the material. Instead of grabbing the viewer by the lapels and insisting everyone’s having a great time, Miyazaki leads the audience into the story with unobtrusive grace.

Tales from the Grim Sleeper concludes by offering up the haunting possibility that even if the killer has been caught, the systemic failures that let him get away with it for so long remain firmly in place.

A Nice Indian Boy is all about subverting stereotypes about Indian culture, both within and outside of the community.

Princess is an arresting and taxing film experience, and although Ezer’s execution and vision are clear-eyed and she’s portraying experiences that still (tragically) occur in the real world, it’s difficult to wonder what the film itself is hoping to accomplish.

As sincere in its satire as it is satirical in its sincerity, the deliriously provocative Yes is a veritable orgy of self-loathing surrender that reaffirms Lapid as the world’s most visceral director on a shot-by-shot basis.

I had to see the new version twice to realize that there's so much to appreciate about this multilayered production.

The result is all the good, big words we want to hear about cinema aimed at our youngest audience members: it’s heartening and true and a little sad and incredibly inspiring with a big, ol’ message about the power of community and coming together in the face of major adversity.

Few leave unscathed as the handheld camera whip-pans and fast-zooms between cringe-comedy and genuine pathos and back again — especially once the hapless prof paves his own road to hell with his good intentions.

Support the Girls is a humble, restrained movie, at times aimless as it moves along, but never devoid of keen observations.

It portrays the struggle from the inside, from about as far from the filter of mainstream media as one can get, capturing tense shootouts and the extremes of revolutionary spirit in unnerving detail.

It’s a buzzing and vibrant ensemble drama whose unruly cast pulls our focus in a dozen different directions at once, but also one that always returns our attention to the earth shifting under their feet, and in turn to the question of who they will become once they’re forced away from it.

Homebound is a resounding triumph.

You can hardly see the scaffold of a documentary film at all. In fact, “Simple” unfolds more like a riveting neorealist drama, with no trace of the woman and her crew behind the camera, no talking heads, no filmmakerly intervention of any kind

Tran Anh Hung’s core skill is that of a top saucier, he knows how to add a glut of ingredients and reduce them to a rich flavor that moves the palate in ways that defy what seems like a simple dish.

Emotionally honest and algebraically stylish, Maio Mackay is a filmmaker the entire industry should watch in the coming years. But her latest purple-hued feature demands the attention of hot, tattoo-having, “Buffy”-loving, “Charmed”-binging, queer horror fans right now.

While Mudbound is rooted in a precise historical moment, it’s also a sobering commentary on timeless struggles.

Hall made many good choices for her debut — her entire crafts department turned in rich period production elements — but the casting of her leads might be the best of the bunch.

A testament to the power of community to heal the deepest wounds, My Life As A Zucchini takes on heavy subject matter with a light hand, and comes up with a delightful tale that is equal parts wrenching and uplifting.

Wang’s absorbing first-person account of the coronavirus outbreak initially seems like it’s treading familiar ground, tracking the outbreak of the virus in Wuhan and government propaganda efforts to pretend it’s under control. With time, however, Wang turns the tables on her Western audience, illustrating how those same lies emanated from American airwaves months later.

Atlantis is a political howl from the soul about a decaying Europe. But its cold, violent exterior turns out to be a bleak disguise for what is an unexpectedly sweet love story at its molten core.

This bitter and beautiful Sundance-winning doc focuses on a single beekeeper as though our collective future hinges on her hives.

There's no doubting that Holy Motors is an ungodly mess of images and moments, some more alluring than others, but it sure leaves a mark.

There will be many people who see themselves in the furtive glances and mud-covered kisses from which God’s Own Country weaves its harsh but hopeful narrative, and they will do so while witnessing a finely crafted piece of cinema.

Endlessly charming and sneakily wise, Everybody Wants Some!! epitomizes Linklater's unique ability to magnify human behavior with levity.

Ultimately, Two Prosecutors is like a perfect 50-50 cocktail of dread and dialogue, the vodka being whichever you’d choose, making the inevitable feel capable of deferment, before it strikes more devastatingly than you’d even think.

Farhadi's new movie confirms his unique ability to explore how constant chatter and anguished outbursts obscure the capacity for honest communication.

It also never hurts to be anchored by two actors who are totally game and committed to that vision, and willing to go there, chains, gags, assless chaps and all.

If Black Bag denies us the kind of duplicitous confrontations that other versions of this story might take pains to savor, Soderbergh’s aversion to giving audiences what they want — and the severe angularity that he tends to offer us now instead — is almost as rewarding here as it was utterly indefensible in “Magic Mike’s Last Dance.”

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.

Menuez and Rendón share a terrific chemistry as long-holding-on friends questioning whether they should stay friends at all, and if they should, then why? Comedies like Summer Solstice rarely ask that question with such candor and insight, and with a trans lead actor and character the movie lets simply be themselves despite living in a world rigged against them.

Harris refuses easy answers, and announces herself as a singular cinematic force in the hell her story brings just the same.

While the trauma of a missing child makes for the film’s heart, its spine is something much more difficult to effectively put on film: the horrible waiting, the in-between times, the stretched moments when no news — good or bad — is available.

While The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar may be, in some respects, the most literal Dahl adaptation you could possibly imagine, the true author of this project is never in doubt.

More meditation than movie, Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life is bound to mystify, awe and exasperate in equal measures.

Park’s funny, playful, and increasingly poignant crime thriller is less interested in what Hae-joon (Park Hae-il) knows about his suspect than in how he feels about her

An enormously moving documentary made all the more effective by co-directors Angela Patton and Natalie Rae’s steadfast refusal to settle for easy sentiment in the face of difficult outcomes, Daughters has as much ugly-cry potential as any film in recent memory.

I’d say this playful yet nakedly personal coming-of-auteur epic was trying to split the difference between memoir and crowdpleaser, but it seems even more determined to reconcile the two: What else would Steven Spielberg’s ultimate divorce movie be about if not the hope for some kind of reconciliation?

Despite an occasional tendency to speed through its most compelling passages and flatten their mottled texture under the weight of Simon Russell’s emotionally instructive score, “One in a Million” is still a raw and absorbing epic about “what comes after” — one that naturally unfolds with all the joy, anguish, and unresolvable inner conflict of life itself.

A rich, rewarding documentary that digs deep into major questions without being afraid of the answers.

The film never fully commits to being a pure North Korean escape documentary, and its weakest moments come when it tries to be a general interest film about North Korea that happens to feature escape footage.

Life may have been very beautiful in this mountain town but even during its most tumultuous years, spending time within it isn’t exactly fascinating.

Beanpole is slow to thaw, and its emotional impact is dulled by a structure that delays the story’s full power until the final moments, but there’s a resonant beauty to how these women seize control over their themselves.

In Won’t You Be My Neighbor, the touching and insightful survey of Rogers’ decades-spanning career from Oscar-winning director Morgan Neville (“Twenty Feet From Stardom”), the filmmaker highlights Rogers’ capacity to explore complex themes through the lens of a kid’s program that took a dead-serious approach to his young viewers’ needs.

Reichardt crafts a highly textured narrative that both invokes the mythology of the American frontier and cleverly transcends it.

Fruitvale is largely sustained by Jordan's career-making performance and the way Coogler uses it to analyze his subject...It's a fascinating investigation into the contrast between media perception and intimate truths.

The idea of them getting justice never feels on the table, but the film instead is a path out of the madness of a system where to simply have what happened to their father admitted would fill some of the void he has left behind.

Boonbunchachoke has made a darkly hilarious film that deserves to be remembered for much more than its shock value.

No matter its overarching ridiculousness, The Handmaiden remains a hugely enjoyable dose of grotesque escapism from a master of the form.

Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time brings the long-delayed, highly anticipated tetralogy to a close with a bold, messy, uplifting, audacious, and emotional film that expands, complements, and comments upon what came before, while giving fans a fitting close not only to the movie series, but the entirety of “Evangelion.”

In Bresson’s version, it’s the humans around the donkey who are the true center of the story. Not so in EO. This is Donkeyvision, and we’re better off for it.

Overflowing with stunning visuals, Black Is King blends imagery from the Pan-African movement, African art and Western portraiture of African bodies, as well as Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s shared vision of Black excellence within Western culture.

Kaur creates a vital portrait of the intersection between the spiritual and industrial in the world’s most religious nation, grounded in the poignant interpersonal drama between friends, families and communities. In moving fashion, she captures how the effects of climate change ripple far beyond the shore, into the homes of those who depend on the sea not for their living, but for their cultural identities.

An emotionally riveting documentary that may very well be the most powerful group therapy ever caught on camera.

Shaggy and slapped together as it may be, “76 Days” is an urgent act of witnessing for a world that only tends to see itself clearly in hindsight; the film’s value to future generations is self-evident, but it has just as much to show us in the here and now about the history we’re making alone and together.

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret isn’t just the best Blume adaptation currently available, it’s also an instant classic of the coming-of-age genre, a warm, witty, incredibly inspiring film that is already one of the year’s best.

Dweck and Kershaw don’t build a narrative so much as an accumulation of encounters that often lead to the visually immersive thrill of watching a culinary ecosystem come to life.

Mostly, though, it’s Kaluuya and Stanfield — two actors who seem destined to be hailed for career-best turns with every subsequent project — who make Judas and the Black Messiah such an incendiary watch.

Tarantino’s desire to salute the creative thrill of storytelling is an inviting, welcome presence in American cinema, and his ninth feature suggests he really ought to work more often. But all the vivid callbacks to antiquated TV westerns and the forgotten characters in their orbit fall short of coalescing into much more than that.