Mountains is a film smart enough to forgo simplistic melodrama or narrative neatness. It’s the kind that dares us to look back and consider what it means to create a home away from the shores where you were born, in a country hostile not just to your betterment but to your very survival.

Shaun the Sheep might look like an exciting, no-nonsense tale for little kids — and it totally is, on one level — but beneath its pitch-perfect simplicity lies great wisdom and beauty.

Every decade or so, Godard’s film is revered all over again for everything it got right about the future. But for all its influence, Alphaville still looks and feels like no other movie. More than a prophecy, it is poetry.

Universal Language is a magnificent film, one that feels warm and familiar even as we realize just how startlingly original it is.

The audacity and beauty of Asteroid City lie in the way it connects the mysteries of the human heart to the secrets of science and the universe.

It is one of the greatest films Spike Lee has ever made.

A spare, lovely work directed by the late musician’s son, Neo Sora, Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus is even more haunting on a big screen, where its shimmering black-and-white photography and elegant camera moves actually heighten the intimacy of the performance.

Linklater’s gentle touch is his secret weapon, and Hit Man might be a masterpiece.

The film is a masterpiece, so you should see it any way you can.

Suspiria is a gorgeous, hideous, uncompromising film, and while it seeks to do many things, settling our minds about the brutality of the past and human nature is not one of them.

Spielberg has taken us back to basics -- back to art, back to amazement at the film medium itself.

As he proves yet again in his thrillingly syncopated heist movie Baby Driver, the 43-year-old U.K.-born Edgar Wright is just about the perfect 21st-century genre director. He has a fanboy’s scintillating palette — flesh-eating zombies, righteous vigilante cops, stoic bank robbers in sunglasses — without a fanboy’s lack of peripheral vision.

Spielberg has been ridiculed for shooting his actors from below against impossibly Spielbergian skies and a denouement that lays the love on copiously. But there's nothing simpleminded about how he uses movie magic, as a spell to dispel nihilism, to save us from the worst of ourselves by summoning up the best.

There’s life boiling under the simple surfaces, which is both Kaurismäki’s aesthetic mantra and his great theme. At their best, these quiet, cool films tear you to pieces. Fallen Leaves already feels like one of his signature works.

Everything he did in live-action movies with rolling boulders and runaway convoys he does bigger and better - by a factor of ten - in every frame. At the end of two hours, my jaw ached from grinning.

One of the most realistic documentaries I've ever seen--and, dry as it is, one of the most devastating in its implications.

This is the kind of Western in which we know there will be blood but pray there won’t be, because the violence is bound to be gratuitous, absurd, with a needless finality. Hell or High Water is a rare humanist Western: Finality is the true villain.

By replicating the process of dehumanization, the film’s form forces us to confront our own inaction. Green Border is unforgettable, in all senses of the word.

Ultimately, the director leaves us with more questions than answers. Which is probably what art should always strive to do.

Under Coppola's direction it succeeds on a variety of levels; as sheer thriller, as psychological study, as social analysis, and as political comment. [08 Apr 1974, p.78]

It’s intensely disturbing and hilarious in equal measure, as if somebody decided to let David Lynch remake Contagion.

It’s an astonishing work, twining together the lives of four generations of families with an intricacy and intimacy that feels like an act of psychic transmission.

Loktev’s film is a stunningly stressful experience in what it’s like to actually decide when the desire to stay and fight should give way to the need to cut and run.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of No Other Land lies in the way it compresses time.

Brad Bird’s The Incredibles 2 is, much like its predecessor, delightful as an animated feature but really, really delightful as a superhero picture. It’s proof that someone (not anyone, mainly Bird) can make a Marvel-type movie that’s fleet and shapely, with action sequences rich in style rather than tumult.

A rare example of first-rate filmed opera.

It’s true that the number of whales in captivity isn’t huge. But they’ve now become the mightiest symbols of our cultural hubris — of our inability to manage creatures we have the power to capture and imprison. It’s a metaphor for the ages.

The Queen is the most reverent irreverent comedy imaginable. Or maybe it's the most irreverent reverent comedy. Either way, it's a small masterpiece.

Fun, touching, and expertly assembled.

The result was one of the most acclaimed albums of her career — and one of the most elusive film projects of all time, full of twists and turns that would have made Orson Welles order a stiff drink.

In Her, Jonze transforms his music-video aesthetic into something magically personal. The montages — silent, flickering inserts of Theodore and his ex-wife recollected in tranquility — are sublime.

In The Secret Agent, there’s no line between a refugee and being part of a resistance movement — there’s only the state and the people who’ve been designated its enemies.

In finding a new way to adapt Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Nickel Boys, director RaMell Ross changes the way we perceive the world itself.

This tight, relatively low-key, step-by-step procedural has a stronger impact than any horror movie.

I love when non-fiction filmmakers stretch the form and attempt, with as much honesty as they can muster, to put us in the middle of the events they describe. They give us stunning hybrids like "Waltz With Bashir," "Persepolis," and, now, Tower.

Might be the most provocative teen sex comedy ever made; it is certainly one of the most convulsively funny.

I've never seen a movie with this mixture of fullness and desolation. Rachel Getting Married is a masterpiece.

It’s a total knockout, both austere and dryly hilarious, and its quality is impossible to consider separately from its colossal lead performance.

Something sacred passes between Trintignant and Riva. The actress's eyes signal deep awareness as the sounds coming out of her mouth become animalistic.

The LEGO Movie is the kind of animated free-for-all that comes around very rarely, if ever: A kids’ movie that matches shameless fun with razor-sharp wit, that offers up a spectacle of pure, freewheeling joy even as it tackles the thorniest of issues.

Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville’s masterful Best of Enemies leaves you with an overwhelming sense of despair. It’s not just a great documentary, it’s a vital one.

The movie is an old-fashioned rouser with a lot of new-fashioned virtuosity.

While No Bears is profoundly powerful in its own right, the knowledge that its maker is incarcerated gives its explorations of exile, truth, and freedom a throat-catching urgency.

This is a near-perfect film, and a heightening in every way of everything that was great about Baker’s last movie.

There’s a vulnerability to being touched by something, to finding something sexy or scary, and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is filled with a wry but immense compassion for its heroine and her habit of holding up concepts to ward off her own reactions.

Anderson says that as a child she dreamed of making something that had never been made before, and, with the help of some gifted artists and editors and camera-people, she has done it again — with bells on. The only thing that would make it more pleasurable would be Anderson narrating it in person.

The accrual of human detail pays off masterfully when we get to the dance itself — especially when the girls see their fathers for the first time.

Hype would bruise Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight, which is so delicate in its touch that the usual superlatives sound unusually shrill. It’s the gentlest, most suggestive of great films.

The mechanics of Sciamma’s film are simple, but they’re realized so delicately, and with the help of such unaffected child performances, that they feel miraculous.

Ghostlight is one of the best movies of the year, and if that’s a meaningful enough statement for you, then feel free to stop reading now.

The actors carry the music in their gait, their gestures, the rhythms of their speech, so that their singing and dancing is a small but exquisite step up from the way that they normally talk and walk. To rhapsodize about La La Land is to complete the experience. You want to sing its praises, literally.

The most powerfully entrancing children's film in years. Of course, a true kid's classic is just as magical for adults.

The most deeply and mysteriously satisfying animated feature to come along in ages.

The tonal mismatch I feared could have turned one giant movie into a bit of a slog turns out to be among its greatest strengths. The reflective second half recontextualizes the first, and the progression of colorful action fantasia to quiet existential reckoning is overwhelming.

This is, no doubt about it, a tour de force, a work that fully lives up to its director's ambitions.

The visually stunning Sin City has grit to spare and a thrilling undercurrent of morality.

The movie is a slot machine that never stops spitting quarters.

After Yang has the structure of a subdued mystery, though at its core it has no answers to these, or any, questions. Instead, it provides a slowly dawning and utterly devastating understanding of the hidden richness of its title character’s existence.

The marvel of Tótem is that it feels so organic though it’s clearly the result of an enormous amount of preparation and precision, the camera winding its way through crowded spaces to catch the most delicate of interactions. It overflows with love and pain, sometimes both intertwined, and it’s openhearted about death existing alongside life in a way that feels rewardingly mature, even if its protagonist is a child.

It feels, exhilaratingly, like the throwing down of a gauntlet. Gerwig’s Little Women demands its viewers reconsider these familiar characters and what we’ve always assumed they stood for. It doesn’t just brim with life, it brims with ideas about happiness, economic realities, and what it means to push against or to hew to the expectations laid out for one’s gender.

Cyrano is a delicate dream of a movie, the kind of film that feels like you might have merely imagined it — light on the surface but long on subconscious impact.

Jackson has a genuine epic gift: Few filmmakers have ever given gross-outs such resplendence.

For all the personal hardship each of the main characters has encountered, they’ve also lived lives of unquestioned security, such that they’re able to pass through a country in an apparent state of emergency without believing such a thing would affect them. Sirāt brilliantly depicts that bubble breaking, its characters confronted with what it really means to be a citizen of the world, rather than gliding above it, with the music turned up loud enough to not have to listen.

The self-satire of The Kids Are All Right is so knowing, so rich, so hilarious, so damn healthy that it blows all thoughts of degeneracy out of your head.

Bird clearly knows the great silent clowns: The slapstick he devises is balletic.

Cold Water has the kind of emotional purity that puts it in a class by itself. Its blue fog envelops you.

The skateboarding and camaraderie are contrapuntal notes, liberating flurries of motion in a powerful saga of kids who were — and in some cases still are — miserably stuck in place.

What makes Ahed’s Knee so powerful is the way the movie detonates before our eyes.

Union is a rare thing — a documentary that is undeniably political in its focus while being artful and observational in its approach.

Lonergan is the master of taking a scene that starts off as something familiar, then sending it spinning off in another direction, and then pulling back at just the right moment, as the viewer’s imagination hurtles ahead to fill in the gaps.

Anderson’s fearless, bighearted filmmaking is an antidote to the toxic cloud of Manifest Destiny. He has made a mad American classic.

Cuarón never seeks a tidy resolution for their loving, lopsided, complicated relationship. But it’s one of the reasons why Roma leaves such a deep and lasting impression.

Like so much of Reichardt’s output, The Mastermind feels modest when you’re watching it and downright brilliant once it’s had some time to settle in your mind.

At times the movie’s small canvas feels momentous. They’ve found the inner tensions in people’s presentations of themselves in a way that’s positively Wallace-like.

Mudbound could have easily turned out as a kind of dusty, respectable period drama that looks important while advancing nothing, but it exceeds expectations with every new layer.

Above all is Langella, achingly vulnerable under layers of flesh. In one scene, alone, he eats peanut butter intensely, thoughtfully, and nothing he could do as Hamlet would seem deeper or more poetic.

Jenkins’ writing underlines the fundamental instability at the heart of all our lives, while proposing that most universal of remedies: empathy, love.

The Boy and the Heron is irresistible in its dream logic, straddling the adorable (white blob creatures called Warawara that inflate like balloons) and the dark (parakeet soldiers that are on the search for fresh meat). But what makes it most compelling are the ways in which the real and the magical are equal presences.

The sci-fi chamber drama Marjorie Prime is exquisite — beautiful, intense, shivering with empathy.

There is something exquisitely grown-up about Both Sides of the Blade, which works its way up into a series of excruciating fights between Jean and Sara in which they talk and talk and wound one another terribly while failing to ever say what they really mean.

The little dramas and themes that emerge during the reunion of the film’s far-flung brood become, like a family, more than the sum of its individual parts, and an incredibly satisfying meal of a film.

The vision is as hateful as it is hate-filled, but the fusion of form and content is so perfect that it borders on the sublime.

For all the horror, it's the drive toward life, not the decay, that lingers in the mind. As a modern heroine, Ree Dolly has no peer, and Winter's Bone is the year's most stirring film.

One of the greatest documentaries I’ve ever seen.

We’re watching a mundane spectacle of a mundane spectacle — a man in a room relating the mostly forgettable events of the previous day — but somehow, we’re also witnessing the arc of time within this quiet hour. So, no, the film is maybe not a doodle. There’s too much craft, too much care here for that. But it is a masterpiece.

So intimate and sensual and funny and psychologically self-revealing that it makes most of what passes for sex in the movies look like cheap hysterics.

Get Out is a ludicrous paranoid fantasy, but that doesn’t mean it’s not alive in the unconscious. Having it out there in so delightful a form helps us laugh at it together — and maybe later, when we’ve thought it over, shudder.

What a cast Pride has — some of the best famous actors in Britain and lesser-known younger ones that will (soon) take their place in the firmament.

At her best — which is more often than you can imagine — Hogg convinces you that incoherence is the only honest way to tell a story with any emotional complexity. She spoils you for the overshapers, the spoon-feeders.

Marcel the Shell With Shoes On is the most unassuming and delicate of movies, but don’t be shocked if it leaves you in ruins.

With this documentary, Morgan Neville has made a movie about Orson Welles that would have transfixed the great master himself.

Sophisticated and nuanced, and every character is bursting with emotional contradictions.

This supernatural comedy isn't just Allen's best film in more than a decade; it's the only one that manages to rise above its tidy parable structure and be easy, graceful, and glancingly funny, as if buoyed by its befuddled hero's enchantment.

I’m not crying “masterpiece” here. Locke is too contained, too well-carpentered, too self-consciously “classical.” But tours don’t come much more forceful. Once you’ve taken this 90-odd-minute drive with Tom Hardy, you’ll never forget his face.

Meehl, in her directing debut, is attuned to the rhythms of Buck, who's attuned to the horses.

My Life As a Zucchini is a deft work of empathy, and unlike a few of its fellow animation Oscar contenders, it works on a more intimate scale, without a big message or master thesis to carry it to its conclusion.

Akl and Clara Roqet’s script provides depth to these characters and immerses us in each of their perspectives and relationships — which shift along lines of blood and love.

Like his protagonist, Bahrani never gives up on William; his camera never stops probing. He loves West's face, and he honors its mystery.