The Irishman is alive with Scorsese’s trademark style.

The nuance and specificity that makes the film so interesting is also why it requires a decent knowledge base to appreciate — this is about as far from an introduction to the Harlem Renaissance as you’ll find.

Fireflies is, at times, unbearably sad, a eulogy for a bleeding nation but also a hugely imaginative tale that reminds us of art’s power to lift us from the ramparts of our own devastation.

Pull back from the moment-to-moment thrill of Inside Out and it gets very deep: The scenario implicitly questions standard definitions of free will by suggesting that we're all slaves to ghosts in the machine.

While five-plus hours of mostly hanging out in strangers’ apartments might seem like an increasingly tedious invitation, Loktev ends up justifying the running time as her “undesirable friends” soon become ours as well. Smartly structured so that different “foreign agents” take centerstage from episode to episode, we’re forever kept on our toes (right through to a finale that hints at a part two, currently in the works).

While all of the people they meet are delightful characters who the film manages to milk for every ounce of their personality, Varda and JR inevitably emerge as the real stars here.

The absolute immediacy of Lee’s performance allows you to feel every frame of Past Lives on your skin, which is crucial to a film that conveys the brunt of its meaning through sense instead of story; a film that commands its placid rhythms and ethereal fussiness with a confidence that elevates Song’s “people don’t talk like that” dialogue into a decisive plus.

The final beats of Guadagnino’s adaptation galvanize two hours of simmering uncertainty into a gut-wrenchingly wistful portrait of two people trying to find themselves before it’s too late.

First Cousin Once Removed benefits from the clarity provided by Honig's published poetry, which surfaces in voiceover narration and words on the screen, rendering the undulations of his life in sweeping abstractions.

If you’ve ever imagined how you’d try comforting your younger self or your family about the uncertain future ahead of them, Blue Heron may be the most emotionally devastating film of the year — and also perhaps the most comforting.

The brilliance of the movie lies in how it starts from a familiar place, then sneaks into transcendence.

La La Land is magically in tune with its reference points even as falls a few notes short of their greatness.

The result is at once both the most ordinary and most enchanted thing that Sciamma has made so far, a wise and delicate wisp of a movie.

Lady Bird is both snarky and sincere — a touching, markedly feminine ode to growing up that never takes its familiarity for granted. Gerwig earns the ability to make this rite-of-passage saga her own.

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

American Utopia isn’t just a concert doc, but also a life-affirming, euphoria-producing, soul-energizing sing-along protest film that’s asking us to rise up against our own complacency.

A master of threading the needle between conflict and contrivance, Kore-eda manages to turn this drama inside out without every betraying its most resonant truth.

the film isn't always successful at justifying its heft, repeating the central father-daughter tension innumerable times before the pair finally start to make some progress. It's only thanks to the two actors' extraordinary authenticity that the film continues to work as long as it does.

Witnessing is the most effective defense people have against occupation, and the Israeli military, like all thieves, wilts in the face of being watched. The footage is out there, and it’s rarely been assembled into a more concise, powerful, and damning array than it is here. Now it only has to be seen.

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.

It’s among Altman’s greatest films because its grandest themes – the end of the Old West, the rise of modern civilization – come through in an intimate story, one that never reduces its characters to symbolic figures. Paired with Leonard Cohen’s mournful songs and Vilmos Zsigmond’s evocative, hazy cinematography, it’s the most emotional movie Altman ever made.

An ode to art for art's sake, Inside Llewyn Davis is the most innocent movie of the Coens' career, which in their case is a downright radical achievement.

It’s right there in the title: Claire Simon’s stunningly personal documentary “Our Body” might generally be about her own health journey, but it’s really fixated on the communal experience of occupying a female body. Our body.

The build-up to the film’s low-key, poetic resolution is made all the more moving by Shim’s intelligent performance, which is effectively informed by the actor’s positioning between two languages throughout, giving her a platform and reason to convey additional emotional nuances without dialogue — the performer, in a sense, also breaking free from “a cage of words” like her character.

TÁR is a provocation full of slow-motion suckerpunches and the driest of laughs (even its accented title is a knowingly pretentious in-joke) and yet Field seems as uninterested in trolling his liberal audience as he is in patronizing them.

Panahi is a director who has always mingled fact and fiction, and here the distinction is more addled than ever, so that by the time the final credits roll it’s not exactly clear what was staged and what was real.

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.

The overly earnest movie falls below the rich ambiguities that Keaton brings to the part, resulting in a measured drama so restrained it sometimes underserves the material. Where "Birdman" magnified Keaton's talent, Spotlight leans on it.