Like the remarkable films Eastern European countries turned out regularly during the Soviet era, it marries a character-driven story with social concerns, in this case a deft parable about the kind of corrupt privileged society nominally egalitarian Socialism created.

As warm as it is smart — and it is very smart — Lady Bird marks actor/screenwriter Greta Gerwig's superb debut as a solo director and yet another astonishing performance by star Saoirse Ronan.

Vaughn’s performance is riveting in its containment, and he honors his character’s ethos by making sure that every word, glance, gesture and silence counts.

Frederick Wiseman's Ex Libris: The New York Public Library is more than a magisterial mash note to that distinguished establishment, it’s a heartening examination of the vastness of human knowledge and the multiple ways we the people endeavor to access it.

An extraordinary vérité portrait of Manila’s Fabella Hospital.

Custody can be difficult, even wrenching to watch, but it always plays fair with the audience, and the experience, worth every minute expended, is impossible to forget.

An intricate, dazzling cinematic dance, Foxtrot goes both deeper in and further out than standard-issue cinema. It's profound and moving and wild and crazy at the same time, simultaneously telling a specific story and offering an emotional snapshot of a country whose very soul seems to be at risk.

Give yourself some time to adjust and Martel's style, at once immersive and disorienting, starts to feel like a corrective, a clearer way of seeing and hearing. The physical world here is not some abstract commodity; it is fiercely, palpably present, and utterly indifferent to the whims of men arrogant enough to think they can tame it into submission.

It’s a masterful effort.

What was impressive 22 years ago seems even more so now; what was problematic seems less important. Changes in us as an audience, changes in filmmaking fashions, changes in the times we live in, they've all combined in making this "Apocalypse" feel more impressive, more of a revelation than it did before.

Terence Davies' mesmerizing memory film, Distant Voices, Still Lives, becomes its own kind of poetry: taut, referential, inward, brilliant. Although it is set among the unremarkable flats of Liverpool, the place is stamped by Davies' profoundly original vision and sounds; its framing is painterly and deliberate. And just as you think you have its moves all doped out, a scene of such shocking beauty flashes before you that it takes your breath away.

The pleasures of this story are the pleasures of watching people think, quickly but methodically, through a situation. To the very end, where a different picture might have devolved into a routine bloodbath, the movie clings to its intelligence like a protective amulet; it keeps the viewer in a state of heightened alertness throughout.

Writer-director Steven Zaillian proves as much of a prodigy as his chess-playing subject, turning out a film that is a beautifully calibrated model of honestly sentimental filmmaking, made with delicacy, restraint and unmistakable emotional power. The feelings it goes for are almost never the easy or obvious ones, and the levers it presses are all the more effective because of that.

Minding the Gap is an essay that never feels like an essay, an intelligent and compassionate grappling with some of the most painful issues presently haunting the body politic: toxic masculinity and domestic violence, economic depression and a deep, existential despair. But Liu doesn’t contrive a simplistic thesis on Middle American misery to suit himself and his friends.

Most of all you remember Colman, in a performance that achieves its power, in no small part, by utterly destroying our understanding of what power looks like. She beams and scowls, brays and bleeds, shatters and disintegrates. She rules.

In cutting against the aesthetic grain, Jenkins gently and wisely corrects our vision. The passionate glow of this filmmaker’s embrace belongs, quite rightly, to his characters. He is generous enough to also extend that embrace to us.

Fiercely involving in a way we're not used to, made with sensitivity and honesty by director/co-writer Debra Granik, it tells its emotional story of a father and daughter living dangerously off the grid in a way that is unnerving and uncompromising yet completely satisfying.

Though it takes the risk of appearing too quiet too long, Roma and its melding of the personal with a glimpse of a society veering toward collapse is incontestably persuasive, a film whose like we are not likely to see again.

As if to prove that the unlikeliest material can make for the best films, The Madness of King George, directed by Nicholas Hytner from Alan Bennett's prize-winning play, has taken this footnote to history and transformed it into one of the triumphs of the year--potent, engrossing and even thrilling to experience.

The sensationally gifted writer-director Ari Aster may tip his hat to the horror canon (“Rosemary’s Baby,” “The Shining”), but he has no interest in making a coy, winking exercise in horror pastiche. With breathtaking deliberation and quiet, unshowy mastery, he spins a devastating portrait of an American family in sudden, inexplicable decline.

Fisher neither wilts under the camera’s scrutiny nor succumbs to the temptation to stare it down. She gives precise form and delicate feeling to emotions and experiences that, despite the specificity of the circumstances, most everyone will recognize.

Astonishingly, instead of business as usual, The Irishman is a revelation, as intoxicating a film as the year has seen, allowing Scorsese to use his expected mastery of all elements of filmmaking to ends we did not see coming.

A knotty detective yarn, a funny valentine to Singapore and one of the year’s most ardent expressions of movie love, it tells a story of cinematic theft, and in the process, becomes an entrancing feat of cinematic reclamation.

I daresay most spectators will also find the pull of this film irresistible. The — hardest — problem faced by its adapters must have been one of intangibles — how to make an essentially ballet-opera form believable as realistic cinema — and they have all but licked it. West Side Story never quite shakes off an aura of pretentiousness but its portentousness is stronger and that is all to the good.

The story, like "Frankenstein" and "Dracula," has taken on the significance of a modern folk tale, layered with obvious moralizing and as familiar as personal history.

It's simply the best, funniest Grand Guignol horror picture to come along in ages.

Though this film is simple to summarize, to understand and experience the powerful emotional charge King in the Wilderness conveys, it simply must be seen.

David Lynch's superb and subtly ironic 1980 film reveals the shining humanity in a horribly disfigured--and horribly mistreated--young man who actually lived in England in the late 19th Century and was rescued by an enlightened Victorian physician.