Its beauty lies in its empathy — something currently in short supply and therefore very welcome in the stories we consume.

Hypnotic and heartbreaking, Identifying Features is a feature debut to marvel at, but only once you’re able to shake off the bone-deep chills emanating from Mexican filmmaker Fernanda Valadez’s disorienting tale of a mother’s search for her missing son.

From the script and novel of Leonard Gardner, this insider's portrait of the real world of the ring is a great tragicomedy: The bitterly funny, pugnacious banter between young alcoholic Oma (Susan Tyrrell) and Tully provides the humor; the lives of the fighters, whose hopes reach only to the next day, are its tragedy. [01 Apr 1988, p.29]

The craft is gorgeous, but The Color Purple would be nothing without its star turns, and Bazawule’s cast takes your breath away.

Quo Vadis, Aida? re-creates history in the present tense, with a gut-clutching immediacy that Žbanić makes bearable through sheer formal restraint.

While there is barely a story to tie it all together, The Mirror finds connections in the longings of Alexei. He longs to understand his past, his land, his family, his inspirations and fears, and that’s what the movie is able to convey in its abstract but persuasive way.

Schoenbrun, a native speaker of the language of the internet, has uploaded into the cinematic landscape one of the most thoughtful depictions of self-discovery in the digital age. Through Casey’s plight of suburban isolation, the artist reaches out to us from a corner of the web’s endless abyss with an unmissable invitation, quite literally demonstrating the transcendental prowess of storytelling.

Hope isn’t about getting you to cry, even as some of its characters occasionally do, but rather giving you an invigorating, even uplifting sense of what hearts can do under duress; nothing is forcibly tragic here, just experienced fully and openly.

It is didactic without losing its sense of organicism; it is radical without losing its sense of humor; it is intentional in its visual and formal design without flattening itself to the status of aesthetic image emptied of its politics. It is, in all ways, a reminder that any radical future must trust in the transformative potential of the communion between past and present.

Petite Maman generates continual surprise and delight, paradoxically, by treating even the strangest circumstances with a wry matter-of-factness.

A poignant, sometimes piercing triptych of tales, each one predicated on chance encounters and romantic possibilities (the original Japanese title translates as “Coincidence and Imagination”), it finds Hamaguchi in playful, beguiling and quietly affecting form.

The most entrancingly feel-good movie of the year.

This ability to get inside hysteria and obsession, the skill to make us feel sensations as intensely as its protagonists, is what makes “Creatures” memorable.

Despite the presence of a college-aged siren that Allen’s married, fiftysomething character becomes intoxicated with, this assured, penetrating film is no sentimental homage to May-December infatuations. Rather, Husbands and Wives is a lacerating comedy about love turned sour, a painful, deeply pessimistic yet somehow funny look at how caring relationships wind up as destructive emotional dead-ends.

Monster is a terrific film: a strong, absorbing, beautifully performed and crafted social drama that, unfortunately, proves even timelier today than when it was shot in 2017.

Hawks' direction is his very best: crisp, humane and full of humor. [26 Jul 1998, p.4]

With Licorice Pizza [Anderson] has sifted through a haze of wildly embellished tales and half-forgotten memories — and pieced together something that feels more concrete, more achingly, tangibly real, than just about any American movie this year.

Like his memorable period freakouts “The Witch” and “The Lighthouse,” though on a vastly more ambitious scale, The Northman is both a dazzling display of film craft and a sly retooling of genre, a movie that delights in fulfilling certain conventions while turning others on their artfully severed heads.

Hadaway’s previous career as a sound editor is all over this piece, as is her personal experience as a collegiate rower. She has crafted this film as catharsis, and like her protagonist’s journey, it’s both harrowing and triumphant.

The spiritual truth of Haynes’ spellbinding The Velvet Underground is that ultimately it’s about the thing that can’t be described, that defies parsing when gifted outcasts make great art — it’s to be experienced.

Campion handles the story with puzzle-box precision, but the power of this movie goes beyond its clockwork plotting and startling, deeply satisfying denouement.

A love story by turns sprawling, despairing and invigorating.

Pribar’s humane and heartbreaking drama is beautifully photographed and performed; a loving, warm, and even sexy film about death and dying that is teeming with life.

Against the Current is a gem. It’s gorgeous in many ways.

Working with cinematographers Giorgos Arvanitis and Andreas Sinanos and composer Eleni Karaindrou, whose beautiful and stirring score greatly reinforces the film's impact, Angelopoulos has created another masterpiece, one that recalls such classics as Bergman's Wild Strawberries and Kurosawa's Ikiru (To Live). [28 May 1999, p.F6]

Nearly every scene of this richly novelistic movie — which won the festival’s screenplay prize — teems with ideas about grief and betrayal, the nature of acting, the possibility (and impossibility) of catharsis through art, and the simple bliss of watching lights and landscapes fly past your car window.

In stripping genre ornamentation away to get to what brings people together in stark, lonely, and in this case, mighty cold circumstances, Finnish filmmaker Juho Kuosmanen (“The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki”) has achieved something genuinely unlikely, and quietly renewing about what a love story can be.

The genius of Parallel Mothers lies in the way it gathers up so many of its maker’s preoccupations — the heroic fortitude of women, the tragic absence of men — and rewires them in an unexpected and entirely necessary direction. It finds Almodóvar doing something new by doing what he has always done well: finding grace and beauty amid suffering, and keeping memory alive.

What transpires is an exquisitely controlled yet diverting blend of pre-mourning and in-the-moment pleasures, a tonal blend of miraculous balance for a first-time filmmaker, even one with Panahi’s one-of-a-kind training.

Sun-drenched Luzzu is an unaffected triumph with a simmering power, the type of deceivingly familiar film that helps us sail into a place and a lifestyle most of us ignore but that are made vividly compelling in the hand of a new storyteller with classically honed sensibilities.

Attica is a jarring, engrossing, and enraging reminder of how those in power will lie, humiliate, kill and cover up to retain it, and the documentary is one of the year’s best.

Benediction, Terence Davies’ achingly beautiful portrait of the English war poet and soldier Siegfried Sassoon, is a movie of acute sadness and intense pleasure. The pleasure and the sadness are inextricable, which seems fitting, given how closely aesthetic bliss and moral despair were entwined in Sassoon’s own art.

Observational documentaries are by nature intrusive, but Procession, miraculously, never feels that way — you sense humane engagement, not imposition.

A film that both treasures the life span of a lit match and respects the patience it takes to endure a prison term, “Great Freedom” makes an exquisite case for the impossibility of caging the heart, even when love itself is criminalized.

Sankofa unfolds as a kind of oratorio--the film’s music in itself is incredibly rich and intoxicating--in which people deal with terrible cruelty through ritual and incantations of the African gods. It is a celebration of the strength of black people, in drawing upon their spiritual roots, to defy their oppressors--past and present alike.

President is in-the-moment documentary storytelling of the highest order, and what it’s showing is what the threat to democracy everywhere looks like and will continue to look like.

It is startling, and sometimes disturbing, but hits a place that is intensely human — bittersweet and bloody and beautiful at once, and unlike anything you’ve ever seen.

The fire of Katia and Maurice Krafft’s obsession consumed them, in no small part, because it ultimately restored their kinship with humanity.

As deliberate as the image-making often is, it’s always to train us in looking as the brothers do, to consider the breadth of life and interconnectedness in our world: Wherever you are, All That Breathes is asking, can you see what’s there, what needs your attention?

Like “Stray Dog” and “Drunken Angel,” it illuminates a reeling society while telling a story of deep human emotion.

Movies about the people who grow our food, who struggle as honest land stewards in a time of heartless industry, are few and far between, making Alcarràs a rare gem. In its unforced, plaintive artistry, it nurtures to a palpable ripeness the beauty and burden in these all-too-hidden lives.

If Wells has assembled a note-perfect evocation of a highly specific chapter — the end of a millennium and possibly something else — it’s when she deliberately breaks with realism that this gently aching movie achieves an overwhelming emotional force.

Because each moment serves at least two purposes — "Tár" is both a superb character study and a highly persuasive piece of world building — you may well find yourself marveling at Field’s economy.

As splendid as John Wayne is in these films, the elegiac She Wore a Yellow Ribbon provides him with one of his finest roles. [19 May 1996, p.72]

Part Frederick Wiseman-esque medical study, part endoscopic-horror tour de force, it is a thing to be experienced, ideally in a theater — a movie theater, not an operating one, though the filmmakers have a particular genius for blurring the difference.

Despite studio indifference, this was perhaps the one time in his career Sam Peckinpah enjoyed an uncomplicated, nearly universal critical response: The movie was instantly hailed as a modern Western classic. [18 May 1997, p.81]

In EO, the camera doesn’t just follow the story or record the action. Its restless, exploratory movements express a kind of shared consciousness, a spirit of communion among different members of the animal world, whether they’re running together in a field or sharing the same tight enclosure. It’s the grace of this movie to extend that communion to the human beings who pass in front of the camera, and whose fates are tightly bound up with EO’s, whether they realize it or not.

Once again, Ozu's script, co-written with constant colleague Kogo Noda, is a marvel of organic detail and deceptive naturalism. Ozu's late style -- the serene, easy flow, the smooth succession of floor-level interior shots, the quietly restrained acting, the mastery of intimate psychology and the subtle portrayal of Japanese society in transition -- are all in place. [24 Mar 1989, p.23]

An exquisitely tender tribute to love in its purest expression, The Blue Caftan doesn’t romanticize the complications and conflicts facing its two soulmates, and precisely because of that it feels like an utterly honest tale of romance.

Part horror film, part coming-of-age tale, part romance, the adaptation of Camille DeAngelis’ young adult novel Bones and All is a small marvel, unsettling and heartbreaking in equal measure.

This slice of (Hollywood) life is among the director's greatest works -- and among the best incisive-yet-affectionate examinations of the movie industry's dark side. [18 Nov 1988, p.25]

If you’ve ever doubted how art, rage or action can make meaningful change, Goldin’s combination of all three fighting an opioid crisis that nearly killed her is exhilarating proof of the power of “screaming in the streets,” to borrow what the queer artist David Wojnarowicz — one of many close friends of Goldin’s whom the AIDS epidemic took — wryly described as a necessary ritual of the living in a time of too much death.

The Eternal Daughter is haunting, as all the best ghost stories are. The best love stories too.

The realities of the situation are grim enough that a lesser work might have paled into insignificance, but No Bears — the best and bravest new feature I saw last year, a work of extraordinary emotional power, conceptual ingenuity and critical force — somehow manages the opposite.

What Polley achieves here is an artful, incisive distillation of Toews’ arguments, effectively if somewhat visibly engineered for clarity and brevity.

Walk Up flows as absorbingly as a dream and is no less pleasurable to puzzle over afterward.

A staggering masterwork that reveals itself unhurriedly, one permutation at a time, Chou’s third feature is perhaps the only film this year in which every single scene and every line of dialogue within them feel absolutely indispensable. The richness in every detail, and their unexpected ramifications over time, make for a one-of-a-kind character study.

With remarkable stealth and concentration, Diop rewires the generic circuitry of the courtroom drama, avoiding its natural inclination toward sensationalism and grandstanding. She also preserves, through a seamless meld of fiction and nonfiction, the contours and complexities of a terrible true story.

If you’re willing to surf on the wonderfully weird and wild wavelength of Infinity Pool it is indeed a singular, and unforgettable, ride.

Sunrise reminds us that the silent film was reaching its artistic heights just as sound was arriving. [29 Apr 1985, p.2]

On the surface, a lace of flirtations, insinuations and rejections compose the basic plotting. But Renoir uses flashes of accelerating drama to amplify his bigger points.

Never was Tati's mastery of sound effects more inspired than in Playtime, a commercial disaster at the time of its release that nevertheless may be Tati's true masterpiece. [14 May 1998, p.F18]

What a wonder that the film adaptation of Judy Blume’s beloved 1970 young adult novel Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is as lovely, heartfelt and, indeed, deeply radical as the original text.

This is a movie that teaches you how to watch it.

If the filmmaking feels poetic and subdued, it’s the opposite of coy. Leaf is confident enough to let her images, as much as her written dialogue, do much of the narrative lifting.

This madcap mockumentary works beautifully because Gordon, Lieberman, Platt and Galvin take care to imbue this setting with a real sense of culture and place, populated with wonderfully eccentric characters.

Throughout this movie, an absorbing, barbed and frequently funny evisceration of artistic ego, Petzold practices a deft and disarming sleight of hand, using key details to keep the viewer off balance and deliver a stinging rebuke to Leon’s myopia.

It takes a confident storyteller to avoid the trap of overexplanation, to give us only a partial glimpse of her characters’ lives, and these narrative elisions have the effect of deepening rather than undercutting the story’s realism.

It seeks to demystify the bodies we see, normalize the act of seeking medical intervention and remind us of the great swath of humanity — of different ages, colors, genders, shapes and sizes — passing every day through this ward and others like it.

The effortlessly orchestrated dialogue scenes are riveting, but what’s remarkable is that, no matter how talkative Samet and his cohorts are, they often don’t say what they mean. The characters argue politics, worldviews or how to handle the disturbing accusations leveled against Samet and Kenan at school, but their rhetorical jousting masks unspoken resentments and disappointments.

This exquisitely rendered work from Kore-eda is a delicate web of compassion and embattlement: three separate views of one stretch of momentous time, spun and re-spun with care and craft.

The conclusion that Glazer arrives at, with a sudden formal rupture, is shattering in ways that defy easy description. More than any movie I’ve seen this year, or perhaps any year, The Zone of Interest leaves you pondering the magnitude of what the banality of evil has wrought — and the terrible, inconsolable void that it leaves behind.

Triet’s movie is a monument to the ambiguous and unknown, a labyrinth of half-glimpsed causes and vague, sinister effects.

From unsettled beginning to wondrously open-hearted finale, The Delinquents is wise enough not to offer clear or easy answers, beyond its certainty that getting lost is the only way to be found.

Using a style of elegant lyricism, which enshrines tiny moments into glisteningly miraculous turning points, Erice lets the exchanges between the people he’s conceived play out without the need to advance the plot.

The year’s most succinctly perfect film, Fallen Leaves aims to do for us what companionship does for its couple: make this treacherous life a bit more bearable.

Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell reminds us that confusion is often a necessary first step toward enlightenment, and that bafflement and beauty often go hand in hand. This is a lesson that Thiên must learn as well. The gift of this movie is that it invites us to learn it alongside him.

As with Rohrwacher’s previous movies, there is an exquisite blurring between the tangible and the ethereal, the urban and the pastoral, life and death, past and present — all of it overlapping with the same ease as the hues of a twilight sky.

This film beams and buzzes inside its closed loop with the hard-won wisdom of acceptance. And it does so while staying in awe of what can never be understood, only appreciated — and if we’re lucky, enjoyed.

[Anderson’s] movies have always proposed — sometimes ingeniously, sometimes exhaustingly, always sincerely — that we might benefit from looking at the world from a fresh vantage. And so it is with The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, in which a revolutionary new way of seeing holds the key to an altogether deeper transformation.

The film is at once of its time--simultaneously the fullest flowering of the French New Wave and the shattering of its male chauvinist tendencies--and utterly timeless in its perception of love, sex and human nature.

What rings truest and richest about The Eternal Memory, as exquisitely humane a film as you’re likely to see all year, is what abiding love and stewardship look like in the moment: to care so deeply for someone as to tend to their memories, and to be loved so deeply that it’s the last beautiful thought one may ever need.

As you leave The Boy and the Heron, you may feel strangely bereft, emptied out in a way that I suspect Miyazaki both intends and hopes to console us against.

Marty is a must-see picture. [11 Jan 1956, p.6]

A corrosive rage courses through this 163-minute odyssey that’s matched by a leavening absurdism, Jude aghast at the comical stupidity of our inauthentic, greed-driven world.

Boasting one of the most exciting all-star casts ever assembled, glittering with authentic glamour, this MGM hit is one of those happy instances when art and entertainment are one. [17 Jun 1991, p.F9]

More than any great movie I can remember, Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers captures the eerie, disorienting and utterly sacred experience of encountering a lost loved one in your dreams.

Janet Planet is a brilliant debut for Baker, who doesn’t so much translate her artistry to the screen as discover a whole new frontier for her singular sensibility.

You can get the facts about these migrants anywhere, but Garrone knows the tool of cinema is more effective. By presenting these adolescents in all their fragility and strength, he comes as close as is possible to getting us to feel how they felt. Io Capitano is as unflinching as it is robust with empathy.

There’s an acting master class to savor, as one might expect from a cast that includes Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen and Natasha Lyonne, each of them in career-best form.

A film like Sing Sing is a rare, precious achievement — a cinematic work of unique empathy and hand-turned humanity, hewed from the heart, with rigorous attention paid to the creative process.

Minute by minute, it’s a roving, inquisitive, elegantly expansive portrait of an establishment whose many constituent and tangential elements — farms and markets, kitchens and dining rooms, chefs and sous-chefs, servers and customers — function together in a kind of whirring, bustling day-to-day harmony.

Within "Housekeeping’s” restless, naturalistic aesthetic, Stolevski crafts complex and poignant images, contrasting the playacting the couple is forced to do with their searing gazes.

The term classic gets tossed around a lot, but few films ever actually fall within its definition. John Huston's 1956 production of Herman Melville's Moby Dick, coolly received by critics when it first came out, now falls within the parameters -- a model of its kind. [03 Sep 1993, p.F23]

Baker wrote the part for her, and Madison returned the favor with a star-making performance, leaning into Ani’s audacity while revealing the fragile façade, the vulnerabilities and self-deception lurking underneath.

This tale of parents and poultry more than earns the exclamation point in its title. It sweeps you into a whirlwind of ingenuity, bite after animated bite.

Crafted with care and a distinct point of view, Between the Temples is the kind of film that bears rewatching just because you want to spend more time with its idiosyncratic rhythm and energy. Singing in its own key, there might not be a more authentic and purely entertaining film this year.

In its lived-in quality and gathering churn, Good One is a dream of an indie, from the craft in every frame to the humor, epiphanies and mysteries that gird its portraiture.