Days becomes such a resonant addition to Tsai’s exhumed body of work because the filmmaker recognizes and embraces that uncharacteristically sentimental undertow; the last 30 minutes of this (relatively short) movie reward viewers who’ve spent the previous 90 minutes searching — reaching — for a souvenir they might be able to take away from it.

Computer Chess excels at conveying the frustrations of feeling trapped by forces beyond one's control, the complexities of humanity irresolvable by any neat code.

Dickinson's hauntingly naturalistic look at disgruntled young adults trapped in the country following an urban disaster plays like "Martha Marcy May Marlene" transported to a post-apocalyptic survival narrative -- with lots of yoga and sex.

Like its central character, Listen Up Philip exudes a kind of highbrow affectation that charms more than it alienates.

Paddington’s ability to positively impact people is so profound that it can’t help but stretch out towards the audience, too. We may know that being kind and polite doesn’t always set the world right, but damn if that little bear doesn’t make you want to try.

Some viewers may be frustrated by the opaque way all threads are resolved. To the end, Mysius retains the sense of her film being a glistening and mysterious object, you can watch but can’t touch. Yet this intact mystery flows from themes too vast to ever be rendered fully transparent: young girls are prescient and love is fate.

In each tense moment, Miss Bala has a lot to say in a few words.

By combining genuine human drama and an exploration of a mysterious sacred text with a ridiculously entertaining plot about a child-stealing demon, the film serves as a reminder of all the things that horror is uniquely equipped to accomplish.

Poitras, an expert filmmaker as keyed into pace and mood as the topic they support, delivers a mesmerizing look at both how Snowden managed to release his information as well as why it all matters.

Love Is Strange is a sophisticated take on contemporary urbanity infused with romantic ideals and the tragedy of their dissolution.

While not designed to entertain on the level of style and spectacle that one expects from a Bond film, this tense period drama from the director of "Man on Wire" presents a far more credible take on the daring exploits of British agents.

The lessons are of the usual sort — how to be true to yourself, how to honor your family and friends, the value of culture in all its forms, the need to find humor — but they are rendered fresh and new, with Turning Red turning in one of Pixar’s best films not just about the pain of life, but the very joy of it, too.

Anchored by a sensational Charlotte Rampling as its lead, the movie combines Haigh's perceptive style with shades of Mike Leigh's "Another Year" to create a quietly moving and deceptively tragic look at aging romance haunted by past mysteries.

Like "Afterschool," Durkin's first feature explores the dangerous extremes of youth vulnerability.

These girls can only see so much of themselves on their own, but Sound of Falling so vividly renders the blank space between them that it comes to feel like a lucid window into the stuff of our world that only the movies could ever hope to show us.

Aspects of the plot do feel predictable, there’s no getting around that. But “Solo” is too smart of a film to be held back by contrivance. With nods to “All About Eve” and classic Douglas Sirk-style melodrama, the gradual unraveling and backstage backstabbing paints a picture of how the damage queer trauma leaves behind can shape us differently from person to person.

McCarthy elevates the material at every opportunity, and whenever the camera lingers on her expressions, she’s a study in contradictions — tough and tender all at once, unsure which side of that spectrum to unleash.

The poetic rhythm with which Hartley brings three movies of events to an end is a tight, gripping expression of closure.

Playing make believe with murderers, Oppenheimer risks the possibility of empowering them. However, by humanizing psychopathic behavior, The Act of Killing is unparalleled in its unsettling perspective on the dementias associated with dictatorial extremes.

Swanberg once again shows a capacity for capturing small moments that exist outside the direction of the plot. At the same time, the effective fragments of "Drinking Buddies" take his oeuvre in a new direction by accumulating into a reworking big picture.

Maddie’s Secret renewed my hope that this corner of the industry can go to new places, outside of what is edgy or trendy. It is an extremely accomplished debut and one of the boldest American movies I have seen in years.

Beautifully written and performed (Patra Au Ga Man as Angie being the standout of an excellent ensemble), All Shall Be Well illustrates Yeung’s keen eye for the nuances of social dynamics, especially regarding matters of wealth and class that many may prefer to skirt around when it comes to family.

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.

Anchored by Natalie Portman’s achy-eyed performance, Jackie is, despite a few wrinkles at the end, about the best version of this story you can get.

Director Lenny Abrahamson seamlessly translates Donoghue's work into cinematic terms with his relentlessly compelling adaptation. However, the drama owes just as much to its two stars, Brie Larson and newcomer Jacob Tremblay, whose textured performances turn outrageous circumstances into a tense and surprisingly credible survival tale.

In Quo Vaids, Aida?, Žbanic lays bare the deeply human toll of violence and war.

Stillness dominates, from the first shots of cornfields at sunrise to the final one that finds Helmer lying among them. When "It's All So Quiet" comes full circle, the title is virtually an understatement.

A master chef preparing an entire feast inside a pressure cooker, Spielberg shoots The Post like every shot was delivered to the studio on a deadline, and the result is a film that combines the spartan clarity of hard journalism with the raw suspense of an Indiana Jones adventure.

In the struggle to tell a story, Panahi reveals the redemptive power of art. No longer issuing desperate pleas, he has turned to cinema for the sake of survival.

Landline is a textured, silly, sweet, and deeply felt comedy that traces the distance between the most satisfied parts of ourselves and the most desperate, between the people we are and the people we think we should be, and it finds that — for better or worse — we’re all stuck somewhere in between.

This is an idea familiar to anyone who has waded through Bigelow's universe of conspiratorial agendas in which no good deed goes unpunished, and might not be a good deed at all. Cartel Land plants that dilemma in our backyard, and ends with the tangible perception that it won't go away anytime soon.

It’s not like this movie is a punishing chore; it’s not like Eggers doesn’t want multiplex audiences to like it. And they will. Because this is the kind of filmmaking that rips you out of your body so hard that you’re liable to forget what year it is.

The Florida Project further cements Baker’s status as one of the most innovative American directors working today, but he’s also an essential advocate for the stories this country often doesn’t get to see.

Feeling as his films often do, both traditional and surprisingly ahead of its time, it’s one of the best films ever made on the subject of infidelity and marriage.

That the movie succeeds both as a high-stakes crime thriller as well as a far quieter and empathetic study of angry, solitary men proves that Cianfrance has a penchant for bold storytelling and an eye for performances to carry it through.

One of the greatest comedy sequels ever made.

[A] transfixing and troubling archival documentary.

This movie is not about suicide, which would mean it would be about death. Rather, it’s about life, life that is far more complex than the soundbite clips from the past can give.

Ultimately, Widows works as well as it does due to the way McQueen juggles substance with entertainment value to such eager subversive ends. The movie engages with topics as complex as sexism, police brutality, and interracial marriage, but it still delivers on the car chases and gunplay.

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.

Rather than smothering the material in bad vibes, the filmmaker uses them to gradually reveal a fascinating world in which anger and resentment becomes the only weapon any of these people know how to wield.

Though at times almost too peculiar for its own good, The Lobster brings Lanthimos' distinct blend of morbid, deadpan humor and surrealism to a broader canvas without compromising his ability to deliver another thematically rich provocation.

This movie unfolds like artwork etched into a cave wall and brought to restless life by an unclassifiable spell that only cinema can muster.

The violent beauty of this film, which rips your soul out of your chest so completely that its seismic grief almost feels like falling in love or becoming a parent, is that it’s as much about the experience of having a child as it is about the experience of losing one.

Exhibition infuses its cerebral exposition with a strong dose of humanity.

The Club is a bold and bracing allegory of a church tainted by scandals.

So exuberant and full of life that it would probably convince you the movies were back even if they hadn’t gone anywhere, In the Heights is the kind of electrifying theatrical experience that people have been waxing nostalgic about ever since the pandemic began — the kind that it almost seemed like we might never get to enjoy again.

The best comedy of its kind since "Superbad," Wilde’s slick, unpredictable romp can sometimes feel like several movies at once. This riotous, candy-colored celebration of sisterhood is so dense with anarchic developments it often threatens to collapse into itself, but avoids lingering on any gag long enough to let that happen.

If you can groove with Jarmusch's patient, philosophical indulgences and the wooden exteriors of his characters' lives, the movie rewards with a savvy emotional payoff about moving forward even when the motivation to do so has gone.

Such an internally combusting prequel might seem like a strange lead-in to a movie that spit fire in every direction, but don’t you worry: George Miller still has what it takes to make it epic.

Whishaw's sensitive performance gives Lilting its emotional intensity.

Despite the cerebral formalism that pushes it forward, Mond has made a genuine tearjerker.

A viscerally charged movie that foregrounds surface tensions and gripping performances, Ginger and Rosa is the filmmaker's most accessible and technically surefooted work to date.

I Wish embraces blissful ignorance, even celebrating its child characters' naivete.

For American audiences, each gag has added appeal because it contains an uneasy humor that's often explored but never fully exploited in these parts.

You couldn't ask for a more appropriate genre of music to carry a movie. As Didier explains the bluegrass appeal, "the banjo sort of snarls," bringing a primal form of energy that even he can't put into words. It's also the element that manages to rescue "Broken Circle" from the meandering nature of its structural looseness, which sometimes distracts from a thoroughly involving story.

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.

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

Unable to express the sorrow of Cory's passing or the larger sense of detachment from the world it represents, most of the people in Putty Hill try to remain disaffected. By pestering them with questions, Porterfield gets under their skin - and, in the process, ours as well.

Mr. Turner is a first-rate match of director and subject. Less an explication of the man's genius than an immersion into its essence.

Ricky emerges as a marvelously understated examination of one man’s struggle to achieve stability.

mother! begins as a slow-burn and builds towards a furious blaze. Awash in both religious and contemporary political imagery, Darren Aronofsky’s allusive film certainly opens itself to a number of allegorical readings, but it also works as a straight-ahead head rush.

The film ultimately becomes a haunting portrait of just how broken we all are — whether it’s the result of our parents’ shortcomings or Eve biting the apple is beside the point.

Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy? bears the stamp of Gondry quirk but allows it to feel a lot more intimate than anything he's done since "Eternal Sunshine."

Haynes’ tonal playfulness has sometimes been overshadowed by the unerring consistency of his emotional textures, but here, in the funniest and least “stylized” of his films, it’s easier than ever to appreciate his genius for using artifice as a vehicle for truth.

The Line is a must-see for a peek behind the coke-filled sheets of fraternities, well, everywhere.

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

Simmien both mocks and provokes the nature of our seemingly progressive times by illuminating misguided assumptions and fears embedded in forward-thinking discourse. But Simien's relentless screenplay is never too self-serious or didactic, instead pairing culturally-savvy brains with a goofy grin.

Oscillating from intimate father-daughter exchanges to surreal meta-fictional tangents, the movie lives within its riveting paradox, reflecting the queasy uncertainty surrounding its subject’s fate.

The subtly profound ways in which this movie distorts the recent past makes it one of the most radically entertaining things its iconoclastic scribe has ever written.

Gaspar Noé’s remarkable psychedelic ride is his most focused achievement, a concise package of sizzling dance sequences and jolting developments that play like a slick mashup of the “Step Up” franchise and “Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom,” not to mention the disorienting cinematic trickery of Noé’s own provocative credits.

The Damned Don’t Cry is excellent, asking tough questions about society and morality without easy answers or neat conclusions. Non-actors populate the cast, performing terrifically, in one of many nods to the neorealist tradition out of which Pasolini’s film emerged.

The Killing of Two Lovers moves at such an involving pace that it’s easy to get lost in the tension of the moment and forget we’ve seen countless iterations of this scenario before.

Haigh tells this potentially maudlin story with such a light touch that even its biggest reveals hit like a velvet hammer, and his screenplay so movingly echoes Adam’s yearning to be known — across time and space — that the film always feels rooted in his emotional present, even as it pings back and forth between dimensions.

Stainless where the original was musty, neutered where the original was soft-core (there isn’t a single gratuitous shower scene in this sequel, let alone three of them), and structured like an immaculate pop song where the original moved like freeform jazz, “Maverick” sounds like a major regression from an age where summer movies didn’t always play safe. But let’s not forget that Cruise is the only guy whose summer movies still vehemently refuse to do that.

While Jones (as is his right as an artist) seems determined to recast D-Man as an amorphous meditation on grief in many forms, the specificity of the piece is undeniable — and what makes it so enduring. D-Man speaks for itself, and it’s poetry in motion.

Hard as it might be to imagine, Women Talking is an upbeat and propulsive film cut with a sharp wit and a ready sense of humor, even if its characters are often laughing as hard as they wish they could cry.

Writer/director Jarmusch has called “Father Mother Sister Brother,” which he wrote in three weeks, an “anti-action film,” but if you’re looking closely enough or tuned in to its hangout-movie sensibility, it has more action than most bona fide action movies, even when much of the action here is offscreen, under-the-surface, unsaid.

While Entertainment lacks the focused critique of "The Comedy," it nevertheless offers a fascinating look at the tension between personal aspirations and the harsh realities holding them back.

Rest assured: Johnson isn’t reinventing the mystery movie with “Glass Onion,” but he is having a hell of a time lightly deconstructing it and reorienting it to suit his whipsmart script and central super detective.

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.

The Cat Returns is an excellent companion to Spirited Away, as they are both Alice-in-Wonderland-like excursions into bizarre worlds with their own rules and logic. Both have female leads who, unlike dear Alice, experience definite arcs of character and capability. The Cat Returns is a lighter film overall, delivering belly laughs.

The movie provokes the wonder and terror of what it means to live in a world where every resolution brings new questions, and the prospects that a happy ending might carry the greatest risk of all.

The Black Phone is a succinct and stressful terror blanketed with themes of friendship, family, and inventive portrayals of resiliency.

It’s “Veep” in the Soviet Union, a welcome expansion of Iannucci’s canvas that keeps his savage comedy intact.

The small miracle of director Andrea Arnold’s experiential documentary is that it enacts its simple premise in straightforward terms, but assembles them into a profound big picture.

Duplass' feisty energy is matched by DeWitt's constant smarminess, while Blunt's shy, fragile behavior balances off the forceful personalities surrounding her.

Despite Cukor’s rocky start with the couple, Hepburn and Tracy are in top form in Cukor’s sophomore collaboration, the 1949 courtroom comedy Adam’s Rib.

Campbell’s staggering performance becomes the film’s center of gravity, her captivating sense of chaos and complexity giving the audience emotional motion sickness as her moods shift between extremes.

Once again, Reichardt has crafted a wondrous little story about two friends roaming the natural splendors of the Pacific Northwest, searching for their place in the world. The appeal of this hypnotic, unpredictable movie comes from how they find that place through mutual failure, and the nature of that outcome in the context of an early, untamed America has rich implications that gradually seep into the frame.

Princess Cyd is a triumphant little film — little in the detailed moments it creates, not the content of its character. Anchored by complicated, smart, funny women, Princess Cyd is a rare delight of a film and a model for others to follow.

With the shift from conventional rock doc into something more sophisticated, As the Palaces Burn remains enthralling all the way through.

By refracting Brian De Palma’s self-reflexiveness and the Coen brothers’ mordant fatalism through the prism of his most personal obsessions, Schimberg creates a house of mirrors so brilliant and complex that it becomes impossible to match any of his characters to their own reflections, and absolutely useless to reduce the movie around them to the stuff of moral instruction.

The movie is a giddy joy, hilariously gross, and earnestly heartfelt, with the kind of icky-gooey attention to detail that makes Selick’s movies such a visceral experience.

This film is about the contagious power of storytelling — which includes lying and self-deception — and what a potentially lethal device it can be in the wrong or even right hands.

It doesn’t get much better than a rude maître d’ denied room on a life-saving elevator. And yet, even falling from the top of the Skyview, Bloodlines will have you laughing about that piano all the way down.

As Levine unravels clever jabs and jibes at current culture — few recent features have so smartly picked apart both feminism and caveman culture with such insight and humor — tenuous bonds break down.

If Spider-Man: No Way Home is the poison, this is its antidote.