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.