Weerasethakul casts spells, and this is a particularly auditory one, the weaving of a liminal soundspace.

Does Close-Up reveal the truth? I’d prefer to say it reveals the beauty of distortion.

Shockingly modern in sensibility, construction, and execution, Brief Encounter is very different from what one thinks of as a David Lean movie, whose historical epics have come to define posh, mid-century, cinematic excellence.

The incessant, rhythmic swishing of the chain gang’s scythes burrows into your brain – and then adds Newman’s supernova performance. It’s a gulag melodrama, if such a thing is possible.

Part historical document, part character portrait and part art project, The Act of Killing ultimately registers as something altogether more powerful: an exorcism.

At first glance it’s as if the masterful Romanian abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days had been remade as a piece of scruffy American neorealism. But then comes The Scene.

Ultimately, The Zone of Interest demonstrates what it means to have moral vision, to choose to see—or, in this case, hear.

Watching The Souvenir is like watching a friend drown, and being unable to help.

The movie’s morality lies in its form.

Moura captivates as the quietly seething central figure, while Filho’s use of saturated colors and lively diegetic music make The Secret Agent a sumptuously unsettling experience.

There is a soft sadness that permeates the film and steadily spreads, until it gradually devours each of the main characters. It may devour you.

As Yusuke Kafuku, the theater director, Hidetoshi Nishijima delivers a master class in withholding, while still giving the audience everything we need. He’s both stoic and seething.

Despite the casual quality of its title, It Was Just an Accident—the latest film from dissident Iranian director Jafar Panahi—carries serious moral weight.

Far from a courtroom procedural, however, Saint Omer expands beyond those wood-paneled walls to consider how culture, colonialism, biology, and race determine what women experience—and how society views them because of those determinations.

Time puts a face—and a family—to the systemic injustice within the American prison system, asking why it took an extraordinary woman’s extraordinary efforts to reclaim basic human rights.

If anything identifies The Killing as a Kubrick picture, it is the movie’s overall sense of fatalism – even as we watch how carefully things are planned, there is a sense of impending doom.

If Swing Time isn’t the pinnacle film in the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers partnership, it surely has their pinnacle production number: Never Gonna Dance, with music by Jerome Kern and lyrics by Dorothy Fields.

If the moral horror of the Holocaust is at once crystal clear and unfathomable, then Son of Saul exists in that tension, employing the art of cinema to create a singular act of remembrance.

Ably mixing past and present sensibilities is no easy feat, but every person in Gerwig’s ensemble cast manages it.

Gently yet urgently, Flee gives intimate attention to one refugee’s story, while reminding us that Amin also stands in for millions upon millions of others across the globe who are subject to dehumanization as they simply seek a safer life.

There is nothing like nostalgia here, but in the quiet consideration of how these days actually passed—what was dear about them, what was dangerous, and what has been irrevocably lost since then—A Brighter Summer Day gives early teen life, in all its complexity, a burnished reverence.

Nickel Boys overflows with formal ingenuity and daring.

It’s nearly an apotheosis, in that the movie synthesizes his greatest achievements into a stirring, standalone work of art.

Already, the younger Panahi has a firm command of the (largely) fixed camera; an eye for incorporating dramatic landscapes into the mise en scene (the family’s goodbye, a long shot against drifting clouds, is a heartbreaking stunner); a penchant for stylistic flourishes (including a magical flight into the stars); and an affinity for performance.

Mosese’s camera is dispassionate, but deeply attentive.

Anora is a tale of two shots: its first and its last.

As for the actors, Weisz gets to showcase her skill for subterfuge, while Stone reveals new levels of manipulation and deceit. But it’s the lesser-known Colman, as Queen Anne, who ultimately wrests control of the film.

You know those countless slasher flicks in which a psychotic maniac slices his way through horny teenagers, only to be thwarted by the virginal heroine in the end? Halloween is the fountainhead. Despite countless imitators, however, few have been able to match the level of craft and psychological depth on display here. Halloween is a landmark, and a legitimately enduring classic.