One of the most unique and honest musicals of the 20th Century.

The director’s most outwardly accessible movie in ages, Phantom Thread is at once an evocative period drama and a magical fable about lonely, solipsistic people finding solace in their mutual sense of alienation.

That it manages to end a note that’s both deeply sad and sardonic only further makes its case as one of the finest forgotten films of its time, and one of the best, period.

A wholly original and thoroughly surprising fusion of sensory overload and liberal philosophy bound to confuse and provoke in equal measures.

Heinzerling's beautifully shot, painfully intimate look at the aging couple's struggle to survive amid personal and financial strain is both heartbreaking and intricately profound. This is a story about creative desire so strong it hurts.

It's a frantic microcosm of life itself.

The result is a roman candle of a movie that feels like it was shot out of a cannon, despite being burdened with the gravity of an implausible dream; a totemic Jewish-American odyssey about where such dreams come from, where they might lead to, and where they’re liable to come apart at the seams along the way.

Radwanski’s Toronto-set story isn’t quite a linear, didactic affair drama either, but rather, uses its characters as points of rumination on the present, and its fragile nature, embodied by two people with a complicated past and, most likely, no real future.

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.

Splenetically hilarious for more than two hours before reality catches up with it in the film’s unforgettable final scene, “Anora” has next to nothing to do with romance, and almost everything to do with the kind of working-class heartache that a modern Hollywood studio would never even try to get right.

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.