There’s raw power in Chomko’s writing, but so much scrupulousness and craft that you feel safe when the time comes to weep.

A Thousand and One is rich and complex overall, the saga of someone battling to build a family and a stable home with no real experience of what that looks like.

The film gets progressively funnier and more delightful as it goes on; King layers plenty of good-natured comedy on top of each daring escape and chase scene, stretching probability and sometimes patience near the end, but each new hitch and escape feels like an act of invention.

That unnatural quality of drone footage, its ability to pull up off the ground and pivot as if you’re fiddling with Google Earth, is something Martel turns into an asset throughout the film,.

The Green Knight is about someone who keeps waiting for external forces to turn him into the gallant, heroic figure he believes he should be. But at the film’s heart is a lesson that’s as timeless as any legend — travel as far as you like, but you’ll never be able to leave yourself behind.

A first-rate zombie movie. The best tribute I can offer is that it makes you want to go out directly afterward and down some expensive single-malt scotch.

Jia’s recycling is not haphazard or mistaken. He’s an artist squeezing all the juice from his lemon: How many different ways can he show us that China’s development is leaving people behind? We also feel his confidence that Zhao, in every film, brings enough of herself to carry multiple characters. His reediting and reuse of her performances is a marvel.

Gregory and Demme have turned A Master Builder into (pardon my invoking the name of a Strindberg work) a dream play, and have made it once more madly, bitingly, chillingly alive.

Lincoln is too sharply focused to deserve the pejorative "biopic" label. It's splendid enough to make me wish Spielberg would make a "prequel" to this instead of another Indiana Jones picture.

Achingly funny movie...Guest has cultivated a stock company of players whose work together is so intuitively sharp that it seems to redefine the boundaries of acting.

At times, it feels as though it has emerged — dusty, tattered, and beautiful — from the storied earth of Italy itself.

The film is both humane and scathing. Which is why Haynes’s stylistic treatment of the subject, veering between noirish gusto and flights of snark, winds up being so touching.

Here is a place, then, where everyone does as they’re told, and beneath its placid surfaces, its lush setting and clean spaces, lies a deep moral decay. This is a common theme in science fiction, but on film it’s rarely been presented as entertainingly and thoughtfully as it is in Spiderhead.

These are the intriguing ideas at work in Secret Mall Apartment, but the film works as a movie thanks to the sly way it’s been put together.

Wes Anderson’s latest cinematic styling is The Grand Budapest Hotel, an exquisitely calibrated, deadpan-comic miniature that expands in the mind and becomes richer and more tragic.

July takes these weird, desperate characters and gives their lives a couple of cosmic twists that serve both to clarify her vision and to expand it. This might be her best film yet.

The Stranger, it turns out, is a story for our times, which makes this lovely new version doubly welcome.

To call Benediction a biopic would be giving biopics a bit too much credit. They don’t deserve Benediction.

Clocking in at 155 minutes, Who by Fire is not short. But it captures the imprecise language and ungainly rhythms of reality so well that you lose sense of time.

Three Thousand Years of Longing is indeed a cautionary tale, but it’s a complex, beautiful one, suggesting that love, longing, and loss are all parts of a vast, wondrous life.

Though mostly twaddle as history, Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite is wonderful, nasty fun, a period drama (wigs, breeches, beauty spots) that holds the screen with gnashing teeth and slashing nails.

Foxtrot feels unusually full for a film that seems to move in slow motion, in which the characters’ brains grind emptiness.

Tsunashima gives a deft performance in a role that starts out as caricature but becomes full-bodied. Collette commands the screen virtually the entire time.

Ralph Fiennes gives one of the year's subtlest, yet most exciting, screen performances.

Its real-world mysteries eventually become existential ones, but the film never stops sending chills up your spine.

Through her mesmerizing filmmaking, Kapadia creates a world that didn’t seem possible — which, of course, reinforces how imaginary this new place might prove to be. The film may end on notes of joy, but what lingers is more sadness.

Suzume may be a less effective romance than something like Your Name — it’s tough when half of your main pairing is a piece of furniture — but that’s because its real love story is with the stuff of everyday life, making it almost unbearably inviting and worth fighting for.

The beauty of DaCosta’s film is that these particular ideas are worked in subtly, even though The Bone Temple itself is not what one might call subtle. In fact, it’s downright looney tunes.

Slowly but surely, you settle into its gentle rhythms, and before you know it, it feels like an entire lifetime has passed by.

Among the most enraging (documentaries) I've ever seen, and while it's fine and heartfelt and I commend it to those of you with strong constitutions, it is the film that has finally broken me.

Rolling Thunder Revue is a brilliant rock doc because it doesn’t take itself too seriously and because it recognizes that rock and roll is a kingdom built on borrowed threads and fudged facts.

Polanski’s strongest and most personally felt movie.

The whole thing is irresistibly preposterous.

The unknowability of life is beautiful, but so too is our desire to know. To be human, La Grazia seems to say, is to fight and lose against uncertainty, and then to fight and lose some more.

Linklater must have recognized a kindred spirit when he read Belber's play. He's given us a reality-fantasy game, a psychodrama, a harangue, and a detective story all rolled into one.

Ulrich Mühe gives a marvelously self-contained performance. There isn't an ounce of fat on his body, or in his acting: He has pared himself down to a pair of eyes that prowl the faces of his character's countrymen for signs of arrogance--i.e., of independent thinking.

Doubt is still overpowering; it took me a while when it was over to stop shaking. It's the dramatist’s business to sow doubt, to set down points of view that can't be reconciled, and Shanley makes visceral the notion that one can be right but never absolutely right, that doubt might be our last, best hope.

In sum, Last Days is the best kind of documentary — it ties you up in knots.

Miroirs No. 3 has nothing on Phoenix, Petzold’s post–World War II masterpiece about a woman haunting her own life, but it is entrancing. The key to its unsettling pleasures is the way it acknowledges that what is happening is disturbing only if one of its characters says it is.

Mustang breathes new life into the old trope by reconnecting it with the elemental horror that drives it. These aren’t just body snatchers; they take your soul, too.

The heart of Leave No Trace is the rapport between the father and daughter, and McKenzie and Foster are keyed to each other’s movements, perhaps even each other’s thoughts.

Lake of Fire centers on abortion, but Kaye understands that while dead fetuses are the hook, the agenda covers the whole life cycle.

In its own discreet, modest way, Evil Does Not Exist leaves us with a haunting sense of personal and ecological apocalypse.

The movie is a political remake of "The Passion of the Christ," only more aestheticized: It's rigorous, evocative, and, in spite of its grisly imagery, elegant. It's a triumph--of masochistic literal-mindedness.

Villeneuve’s facility with this stuff doesn’t just come from his talent for spectacle, though there are set pieces in Dune: Part Two that aim to blow the top of your skull off.

Experimenter is busily, thrillingly reflective. Its artificiality makes it seem even more alive, more in the present tense.

The result is an admirably bumpy ride of a biopic, a rare one that leaves you feeling not safe but bracingly unsettled.

Splitsville is a comedy that’s grounded in its characters, but also has a downright old-fashioned devotion to the visual, to the ways in which the farcical sight of four guys crammed onto a sofa can be just as capable of generating laughs as a good line.

The marvel of Priscilla is in its dual awareness, how it’s able to immerse us in the bubble-bath-balmy perspective of a teenager experiencing an astonishing bout of wish fulfillment and, at the same time, always allow us to appreciate how disturbing what’s happening actually is.

The adaptation frames the relationship it depicts less as a romance than as the intersection of two individuals in their own moments of transition. It’s a much better movie for it, though I’d guess that one of the reasons it’s getting such a quiet release is that it’s not a desperate melodrama about people trying to save each other.

Is A Christmas Tale a masterpiece? Maybe. I have to play with it longer. It's certainly Desplechin's most accessible film, in part because its dysfunctional-family-holiday-reunion genre is so comfy and its palette so warm.

The performances could hardly be better — with the exception of O’Dowd, who’s good but maybe needed to find just one redeeming moment. (The writers could have helped.) As for Andie McDowell, I haven’t changed my thinking about her amateurish work in almost everything but "Sex, Lies, and Videotape," but I also see that with the right material her inward demeanor can be powerful.

Séraphine is one of the most evocative films about an artist I've ever seen--and in its treatment of madness one of the least condescending.

Indigènes is a stupendous work--and why that new title stinks to heaven.

Death is intercut with passion, as tragedy and glory tangle onscreen. It’s as if the dig itself radiates out a new understanding of existence, revealing both the broad arc of history and the curlicues of love, loyalty, and loss that abound within it.

We’ve never sat through anything with Cloverfield’s subjective sting. You’d have to be tougher than I was not to be blown sideways by it.

The scene that kicks off The Climb is by far the best thing in the entire movie, but don’t hold that against the picture — the rest of it is pretty great, too.

It's a Parisian romantic roundelay with sundry couples connecting and disconnecting, but it looks and sounds like no sex comedy ever made: It's transcendentally yummy.

Rush is a wonder. It takes bravery to convey closure, tunnel vision, total indifference to the camera that actors always know is there, however self-effacing they might want to be appear. Final Portrait is, like Rush’s performance, a miniature, but there’s a fullness to Tucci’s vision transcending every surface.

What elevates the film above trauma-porn gore and pushes it into transcendence, though, is how its philosophical script and unshakeable performances navigate the question of whether survival is a transgression against God.

I Saw the TV Glow manages to be enveloping without being inviting and to offer a sense of emotional intimacy without requiring that those emotions be comprehensible.

Don't dig too deep into The Other Side of the Wind: It's largely surface. But what a surface. And what a chest of toys for a man who never lost his childlike delight in playing with the medium.

In its own sly and subtly devastating way, The Zone of Interest pulls us into its circle of evil.

By cutting things up and showing us the perils of fractured perspectives, the director, one of cinema’s great humanists, demonstrates that compassion is more than just a natural state of being; it’s a process that requires constant expansion of one’s field of vision.

The movie is a volatile combination of ambitious mythmaking and nasty reality, and like most of Spike Lee’s work, it is also an inextricable combination of good and bad.

It’s the sly way that the film starts off lodged in one character’s perspective, and makes its way to the other’s, that enables its rollicking final act to work as well as it does. Sleep is a wild ride, but it refuses to lose sight of the emotional state of the people it puts onscreen, even as they fall apart.

Its most impressive trick is its underlying warmth, its understanding of the vulnerability and fallibility of its supposedly fearless artists and preening industry experts as well as of the downtrodden writer standing just on the outskirts, trying his best not to let anyone see how much discomfort he’s in.

Kim exalts nature--life’s passage--without stooping to sentimentality. He sees the tooth and claw, and he sees the transcendence. Whether this is a Buddhist attribute, I cannot say, but the impression this movie leaves is profound: Here is an artist who sees things whole.

Ultimately, this is a tale of a mother and daughter trapped in a cycle of yearning and despair. It’s a lovely, deeply affecting film.

At its best, the film compares favorably to its obvious antecedents, "Rififi" (which Melville once hoped to direct) and "The Asphalt Jungle."

You should — you must — see Last Men in Aleppo to witness an ongoing tragedy. But you should also see it to learn humility. We — meaning Americans — ain’t seen nothin’. Yet.

The movie doesn't quite jell, but you'll feel its sting for hours.

Bullet Train feels like someone crossbred Kill Bill with a Final Destination movie. And at times, David Leitch’s film is almost as glorious as that description makes it sound — elaborate and ridiculous but dedicated to making the elaborate and the ridiculous feel … well, not plausible, exactly, but certainly compelling and fun.

By all means, see Up in its 3-D incarnation: The cliff drops are vertiginous, and the scores of balloons--bunched into the shape of one giant balloon--are as pluckable as grapes.

It's a beautiful, reflective film even as it is also a brutal, visceral one.

The script, instead of being what we tolerate in order to savor the visuals, is a delight all by itself.

The Hurt Locker might be the first Iraq-set film to break through to a mass audience because it doesn't lead with the paralysis of the guilt-ridden Yank. The horror is there, but under the rush.

That Feuerzeig can navigate this hall of mirrors so cleanly and effectively is positively supernatural.

The result is the most exhilarating and wounding film M. Night Shyamalan has made in many, many years.

It feels odd to see a Western in 2020 that actually dares to be a Western, especially coming from a director who for so long specialized in urgent, high-tech, ripped-from-the-headlines thrillers. But maybe that’s not so odd a combination. News of the World has the trappings of an old-fashioned epic, but it also has a restless, modern soul.

The Other Side of Hope — which is tragic, funny, depressing, and inspiring — shows that a truly imaginative artist has resources unavailable to journalists and nonfiction filmmakers. In Kaurismaki’s work, it’s as if the masks of comedy and tragedy don’t — as usual — face away from each other, but stare each other in the face, as if they were saying, “You and me, we’re in this together.”

A brilliant study in the link between moral corruption and narcissism.

The movie, a near-masterpiece, is a monument to intoxication: of sexual conquest, of military conquest, and, most of all, of cinema.

Presence isn’t afraid to be narratively predictable, because it’s out there visually. It’s an art film that also works as a spellbinding horror film, and it might be the best thing Soderbergh has done in ages.

Belzberg doesn't intervene during the moments of violence, believing that the film can force social change only by showing the worst. If she is correct, then this film should move mountains.

The Savages is a delightful movie--the perfect companion piece (and antidote) to the year’s other superb convalescent-dementia picture, "Away From Her."

What makes it so good is that no one is bad. These humans, desperate to do right, are caught up in a perfect storm of inhumanity. The evil is in the ecosystem.

Spellbindingly original -- Like the wild orchid, Adaptation is a marvel of adaptation, entwined with its hothouse environment and yet stunningly unique.

Jarecki puts the veteran actor to brilliant use in the insanely gripping Arbitrage.

It’s a flittery movie, too, but with soul: Gerwig has a gift for skipping along the surface of her teenage alter ego’s life and then going deep — quickly, without fuss — before skipping forward again.

It feels like a great throwback thriller, one of those movies viewers will still be discovering years from now. Try to see it on a big screen while you can.

So there you have it. A Prayer Before Dawn: Fine entertainment. Fine teaching tool.

Effervescent and ridiculous and grounded in a pastel-shaded Toronto and the nearby throwback details of 2002, it has texture and specificity to spare, and the only person it cares to speak on behalf of is its 13-year-old heroine, Meilin Lee (Rosalie Chiang).

Viktor Kossakovsky’s mesmerizing documentary Gunda still serves as a bracing corrective to the way animals are usually portrayed on film. Its earthy radiance reminds us of what we’ve been missing in our need to see ourselves in these creatures, instead of seeing them as themselves.

It's a "road" story in the best disciplined sense. Quaid is nothing short of remarkable as the boy who blunders into relationships and finally comes to intimations of himself as individual and as person.

Up in the Air is poised to be a smash, and Clooney--slim, dark, perfectly tailored--glamorizes insincerity in a way that makes you want to go out and lie.