A movie brimming with sentiment but not sentimentality, this is one of the most moving animated films in recent memory, and, beyond that, groundbreaking too.

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.

A wrenching self-portrait of inherited abuse that joins “The Tale” and “Leaving Neverland” on a growing list of essential and unfathomably brave films about the internalization of sexual trauma. What “Rewind” sometimes lacks in elegance, it makes up for in immediacy.

The result is a singularly American riff on “The Act of Killing,” a fascinating and dream-like mosaic that’s less driven by residual anger than by cockeyed concern, less interested in exhuming the past than in revealing its value to the present.

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.

Director Bennett Miller has produced a warm and generally agreeable character study about the pratfalls of athletic institutions and the willingness to think outside the box.

Is this impressive, boundary-pushing, experimental cinema or an endurance test with no internal logic where the chief pleasure is leaving the theater afterwards? Could it be both?

Strickland generates a discomfiting quality that keeps the mystery of his world in play. Above all else, he taps into the intangible elements of sexual attraction by bathing them in ambiguities.

Wang leaves audiences with the sense that, for good or for ill, the individuality of humans will never be fully stamped out. The same variance that makes it difficult to herd people into ideological molds ensures that, when things go wrong, someone will always be ready to speak up.

Modest and casual until the exact moment when the film’s master plan suddenly clicks into place like the hammer of a gun transforming a neutral tool into a deadly weapon, “Good One” is the kind of movie that tightens its complete lack of tension into a knot in the pit of your stomach.

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.

Mixing the hooks of Antonioni’s Blow-Up (murder mystery caught via photograph) and Coppola’s The Conversation (murder plot uncovered via sound recording), De Palma made his best film about the power and the limits of film and voyeurism, as well as his most emotionally devastating work.

It’s a pinhole portrait of life on Earth; a non-judgmental story about trying to reconcile meaning with meaningless before the well runs dry and it rains again.

While Wandel does well to leave some things to the imagination, like what happens beyond the schoolyard, she not-so-subtly nails the point home in the end, showing how all it takes is one person to stop bullying at its source. Still, her film is an arresting, eye-opening look at how violence begins at an early age, and how we can learn to be bystanders, or have the strength to speak out.

Baker once again manages to match underrepresented faces in American cinema with material that lets their personalities shine.

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.

[A] magnificent film.

Hard to sit through and impossible to forget, this torpid four-hour anti-drama is suffused with the sort of hopelessness that cinema only sees every once in a long while .

This is powerful and uniquely disquieting cinema that should reward the curiosity of those brave enough to seek it out, but you can only stare into a bottomless abyss for so long before you lose the will to keep looking.

The movie — and maybe Beyoncé’s life — is a constant negotiation between giving viewers that perfect show they crave and these moments of spontaneity. “Renaissance” as a whole sometimes struggles to find that balance, as it moves through all of its different and equally intriguing ideas. But maybe that’s the point.

As it calls the institution of marriage to the stand, Triet’s piercing film holds the ambient tensions and illogical loose ends of domestic life against the harsh and rational light of a legal system that searches for order in chaos.

An 81-minute film that’s as crisp and bittersweet as a late autumn breeze, Kaurismäki’s latest might amount to little more than a bauble in the end, but it offers a stirring reminder — both with its story, and through the experience of watching it — that life can only be so bleak so long as you can still go to the movies and escape it for a little while.

It's a sad, thoughtful depiction of midwestern eccentrics regretting the past and growing bored of the present, ideas that Payne regards with gentle humor and pathos but also something of a shrug.

No matter how much Mascaro reaches into the future, Divine Love retains an immediacy steeped in questions about the nature of faith, physical attraction, and the factors that can transform the personal into the political.

And if all of this sounds like a tremendous amount to pack into a single film, there’s the rub. In a somewhat disappointing twist, “Across the Spider-Verse” isn’t really a single film, it’s instead one-half of a planned two-film sequel.

Krisha snaps into focus whenever Shults' camera remains trained on his extraordinary lead, whose fierce commitment easily recalls a similar portrait of middle-aged alcoholism in "A Woman Under the Influence" — and, at under 90 minutes, matches its intensity in half the time.

As an act of preservation, Frozen Time is a marvel, a miracle, a complete good. As an act of storytelling, it’s still a bit too cold for the nitrate to catch fire.

De Araújo’s masterful ability to interrogate tension on every level keeps the film clipping along, each turn both a surprise and an inevitability.