The movie gathers force as it proceeds and delivers one final shock toward the end. It’s not a twist, exactly, but rather a development that makes you reconsider what you’ve just seen — suggesting that those who sometimes seem to care the least about the world are, secretly, the ones most overwhelmed by it.

In his fourth movie, Allen comes into his own as a filmmaker, providing us with the comedy of the year.

Mungiu has a lot more on his mind than tepidly insisting both sides can be bad. For all the political pole reversal that happens in Fjord, the movie stealthily argues what’s really going on here is that old standards about assimilation and cultural uniformity have just been given a socially acceptable gloss.

Pawlikowski understands the mythic, destructive pull such narratives have on us — as audience members and those swept up ourselves.

It truly is a movie about politics, and it’s among the more mesmerizing ones you’ll see — even if you know very little about Zimbabwe itself.

It’s richer than anything onscreen right now. It’s worth the pain.

The film is a nearly unrelenting nightmare. Even interviews shot with the survivors after the fact have a current of dread.

Coppola both wrote and directed, and there’s a pleasing shapelessness to her scenes. She accomplishes the difficult feat of showing people being bored out of their skulls in such a way that we are never bored watching them.

There’s a resilient buoyancy running through The Personal History of David Copperfield that proves irresistibly moving by the end of its journey. Its protagonist weathers hardships and cruelties in addition to benefiting from acts of kindness, and yet he never loses his capacity to be fascinated by people, a quality that’s comforting without feeling cloying.

The way he films Kiefer, Wenders finds more drama in gestures such as these than he might in biographical detail. This is art that dares to live in the world, and Anselm is itself a wonderfully alive work.

Beyond the Lights is a deft, gorgeous movie. For all its honesty, it’s never slow, and for all its criticism of the music industry, it’s never finger-wagging.

For all its extravagant running time (three hours and 26 minutes!), its big-swing history lessons, and its tale of an Old West giving way to the regimentation of a modern police force, Killers of the Flower Moon turns out to be that simplest and slipperiest of things: the story of a marriage. And a twisted, tragic one at that.

There isn't a banal moment in Winslet's performance--not a gesture, not a word. Is Winslet now the best English-speaking film actress of her generation? I think so.

What it's really about is the euphoria that talent can bring to those who are possessed by it. That euphoria lights up the screen.

What makes Alex Garland’s Civil War so diabolically clever is the way that it both revels in and abhors our fascination with the idea of America as a battlefield.

That’s part of the beauty of this film: It games out very real, very human impulses to their surreal breaking points, only to uncover even greater truths.

Dedee is a great, entertaining caricature, an updated teen version of a forties-noir seductress and murderess -- Lana Turner without corsets... Ricci possesses a devastating way with a nasty line; she could curdle mother's milk from 30 paces.

Thrillingly confounding.

When I came back to the film months later, the intricacy of its emotional undercurrents bowled me over, as though I just needed to know what was coming to fully appreciate what Baker was up to.

The funniest and most emotionally charged erotic road movie since Bertrand Blier's "Going Places."

As it proceeds, it expands its vision and compassion, even as it de-escalates the tension. It’s not about the thing it’s about, except that it ultimately is totally about the thing it’s about.

Outrageously entertaining.

So Polley has gone meta — exuberantly, entertainingly, with all her heart.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is instead an incandescent work that examines Goldin’s personal life, her evolution as an artist, and her later turn toward harm-reduction advocacy, and understands them to be part of the same journey.

It’s the damnedest thing how the longueurs of Loving have such a cumulative power. I was still crying as the credits ended.

The picture thus combines the excitement of an old-school disaster spectacle with a fly-on-the-wall portrait of institutions struggling to function in the face of a calamity. The effect is singular: We enjoy the thrill ride immensely, but it’s the realism that sticks with us. Movies end, but the fires are here to stay.

This movie is utterly irresistible.

In most good rom-coms you fall in love with the characters; in The Half of It you fall in love with their sheer longing.

It's hard to know whether to marvel or weep when James Carville goes into his Bill Clinton–meets–Looney Tunes act in Rachel Boynton's knockout documentary Our Brand Is Crisis--the context is so morally topsy-turvy.

Fukunaga’s hurtling camera and taut cutting keep Beasts of No Nation only just this side of hallucinatory, and Elba is the kind of titanic actor to kick it to a near-mythic level.

It's an elliptical tragedy in which the fate of its characters takes on a larger significance while never losing its intimacy.

Perhaps most importantly, The Taste of Things offers a perfect match between Hung’s artistic impulses and his subject matter.

The movie is phenomenally gripping—although it does leave you queasy, uncertain what to take away on the subject of men, women, marriage, and the possibility of intimacy from the example of such prodigiously messed-up people.

In totalitarian societies, artists have found all sorts of ways - some brilliantly imaginative - to disguise their political protest, but Panahi has no subterfuges left. This Is Not a Film ends with a whimper that is a bang. He must be freed.

She Dies Tomorrow is one of the scariest movies I’ve seen in a long time.

The off-kilter, absurdist vibe of the picture is enchanting, but it’s rooted in deep horror: The whole movie is about the ways that cruelty and injustice become codified. Sometimes, the only way to preserve your sanity is to go a little insane yourself.

With her swanlike neck and ever-flushing complexion, Felicity Jones has a perfect nineteenth-century look, but there’s something forward and modern about her physiognomy, her huge eyes and strong nose and overbite. As she gazes down in enforced modesty, you feel her soul about to burst. The performance is startlingly vivid.

What makes the film such a spare but searingly insightful treatment of the issues at the core of Me Too is the way it refuses to separate its unseen executive’s sexual predation from the larger structures that enable it.

Chalfant is one of those acclaimed theater actors who has never found the same showcase for her talents onscreen, and the delicacy of what she does in this role is astounding.

Andrew Davis, the director of "The Fugitive," one of the best thrillers of recent years, has added pace and heat and explicit sexuality to the material without whipping up phony excitement.

The film returns us to a childlike gaze, marveling at a world alive with possibility, where every sight lives on a continuum of meaning.

Satrapi’s parents ship her off to a French school in Vienna, but she’s rudderless, ungrounded. She’s drawn back to a devastated Tehran, where she can’t design a life, either. This great film, by Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, is that life, designed. It freed her mind; it frees ours.

Once Within a Time runs 52 minutes, and it’s so lovely, funny, and charming that it feels like 15. But when it’s over, you feel like you’ve seen the world.

A movie that really zips along; it offers some of the same pleasures as the silent slapstick comedies, particularly the Keaton films, with their sense of how sheer velocity carries its own wit.

Burton, bless him, constricts the space and concentrates the melodrama; he finds the perfect balance between the funereal and the ferocious. Above all, he treasures these ghouls: He digs both their bloodlust and their melancholy.

Chris & Don is the rarest of documentaries: a realistic portrait of the human spirit.

Whatever his foibles, An Honest Liar depicts a great American original — a man who has taught a generation of scientists, magicians, and even certain film critics that our senses must be trained to detect the smell of bullshit.

Anyone who loves live-wire acting will gasp in awe at Blanchett, more emotionally exposed than ever, and, most of all, at Dame Judi, who’s so electric she makes you quiver.

There’s an unflinching, near-clinical relentlessness to the picture, but therein lies its compassion and empathy.

In short, I'd be the happiest person in the world if Wong announced there was a four-hour cut of this film somewhere. For now, neither version is perfect, but they’re both so beautiful, so heartbreaking, that the question may be moot. Whatever its flaws, seeing The Grandmaster theatrically, in any version, should be a sacrament for any true film lover — a spiritual duty.

Bitches, it’s always a good month in America for an antigun movie. The newest, Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq, might be the best ever. It’s sexy, brash, and potent — a powerful weapon in its own right.

The uncommonly entertaining horror film, the third from the Cam and How to Blow Up a Pipeline team of Daniel Goldhaber and Isa Mazzei, is a clever, nastily contemporary riff on what the original represents — not just the blurring of what’s real and what’s not, but the urge to rubberneck at gore and treat the ability to be unshaken by it as a point of pride.

Before our eyes, Every Little Thing comes to embody the fragile yet uncontainable mystery of all life.

The mystery may be resolved, but the suspense and uncertainty remain. And so, Guiraudie ends his film on a cold, almost cruel note of existential solitude that just might, if you let it, break your heart.

It's a truly prodigious piece of work, resembling a career summation far more than a maiden voyage.

Ibelin is an overwhelming film, ugly tears all the way down. It starts off with the most unspeakable of tragedies and then, as it winds its way back through Mats’s life, becomes a bittersweet story of empowerment, acceptance, even joy.

It’s painful, paranoiac stuff, and your heart breaks for Tyler, who feels increasingly trapped among a crew of rowdy, drunk, irreverent white dudes, as these little injustices mount.

Alongside Gladstone’s expressive performance, Fancy Dance’s ability to choreograph that criticism gives the film a singular grace.

Jenkins and cinematographer James Laxton’s palette is rich and warm, its colors deepened by a score by Nicholas Britell that ranges from a distant, forlorn trumpet to a string quartet in which the players dig in as if they’re having their own dialogue between hope and despair. The close-ups are immense, the emotions archetypal.

At the age of 78, Andersson continues to make films that desire to capture no less than a grand sense of human existence — and that somehow achieve it. Here’s hoping this one isn’t his last.

Nope is a work of sly devastation from writer-director Jordan Peele.

BlacKkKlansman is a nuanced story of race in America, but Lee doesn’t take any chances with vagueness or ellipses, nor should he. As much as BlacKkKlansman plays with the mechanics of blaxploitation fantasy, it doesn’t leave one with any question about what’s real.

A film that transcends its obvious timeliness to say some elemental things about personal loyalty and institutional betrayal.

The resulting film is bizarre to the point of ­trippiness, yet it’s one of the most lucid portraits of evil I’ve ever seen.

20th Century Women is irreducible, too, although certain adjectives and adverbs do leap to mind: generous, reflective, absolutely delightful.

It recreates the sensation of drowning in your own hormone-churned emotions so vividly that the film would be difficult to watch if its very existence didn’t serve as a kind of pressure valve. And it provides reassurance that while things may get worse before they get better, this period of life does pass, and eventually you get enough distance to look back on it from the outside as well as from within.

What reveals Pontecorvo as an artist, and not simply a propagandist of genius, is the sorrow he tries to stifle but that comes flooding through anyway--the sense that ALL sides in this conflict have lost their souls, and that all men are carrion.

The movie is gorgeous, mesmerizing, poetic; the lyricism actually heightened by harsh jets of gore.

Unusually grounded for a Marvel superhero epic, and unusually gripping.

I was shocked to discover that I was actually … touched. Climax is a small miracle, and if this is Noé going soft (for him, of course), that might actually be a very good thing for the movies.

If Timbuktu has a “takeaway,” it’s a deeply humanist one and so, in this context, political: that there’s no such thing as a monolithic Muslim culture; that the threat is nowhere near as great to Westerners as to the people of Mali, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, etc.; that ideology is deaf and blind and anti-life; and that cinema (and all art) can blow it to what I’d once have called Timbuktu.

Sheridan’s actors work with their intellects fully engaged--and they engage us on levels we barely knew we had.

This so-called “children’s film” selects a variety of phobias and stitches them into a patchwork of shimmering terrorscapes and half-baked ideas about secret societies, the occult, and, of course, dirt-bike-racing in rural England. In other words, it’s perfect.

The how of Tillman, Mabry, and Wells’s telling distinguishes their story. The Hate U Give should be an epic, and it is: Yes, it’s a teen melodrama, but it’s also an elegantly constructed piece of world-building, a love story, a family history, a sociological spiderweb of cause and effect of the hate referenced in the Tupac-coined titled. If this is what the next wave of YA adaptation will feel like, we are in a good place.

It’s that rarest of psychological thrillers: one that actually lives up to the words “psychological thriller.”

Whenever it gets down to the business of making Tom Cruise run and jump and drive and fly in and out of things, Dead Reckoning manages to astonish.

Nichols has a genius for making landscapes and everyday objects resonate like crazy, for nailing the texture of dread.

Furiosa — somber, steady, and supremely twisted — is a reminder that none of this stuff is really supposed to be cool.

The literary world jabs are sharp and funny, but it’s the rueful family dynamics that make the film so rewarding, as well as the performances.

Antz, with its deadpan witticisms, its heart-stopping shifts of perspective, is completely entertaining, a kids' movie that will leave grown-ups quoting the best lines to one another.

The Northman doesn’t invite its viewers into its world, but instead dares them to try to catch up.

Park’s ability to manipulate his imagery is something else entirely. His dissolves and overlays and intercutting are formal and sensual expressions of his great subject: that all of us are trapped in the same socio-economic and psychological nightmare.

This isn’t his smoothest film, but it’s his fullest and most original. It’s also his most urgent, which is really saying something. It’s one of the most urgent films ever made.

In the best moments of Howl's Moving Castle and in his extraordinary body of work, Miyazaki teaches his viewers more valuable lessons.

The film manages to be both intelligent and visceral.

Moodysson captures exactly the preening narcissism and gumption of these frazzled would-be revolutionaries trying to wriggle out of their bourgeois straitjackets.

It’s absorbing, suspenseful, and deeply moving — a case study in how to make an effective psychological thriller.

The Banshees of Inisherin is like watching two cars slowly set out on a collision course ending in a crash that would be easily averted if one would just give way. But it’s also a caustic masterstroke of anti-romanticism, a counter to every starry-eyed screen portrait (often made by an American) of rural Ireland as a verdant sanctuary of close traditions, quirky characters, and a more authentic way of life.

It’s a lively, occasionally powerful history lesson, and an essential reclamation project.

The jamboree is beautifully shot and directed, by Chris Menges and David Leland respectively, and there is a haunting touch: the presence of George’s son, Dhani, on guitar, looking near-identical to his dad in his twenties.

What makes Booksmart land so delightfully is Wilde’s handle on exactly how seriously to take her neurotic heroines. ... Booksmart manages to be inclusive and progressive, without being precious about anything or sacrificing an ounce of humor. It feels at once like a huge moment for the teen movie genre, and also effortless, effortless enough to make one wonder what took so long.

No filmmaker I know has gotten as close to a professional athlete as James Toback gets to Mike Tyson in his new documentary.

It builds a deeply moving emotional journey out of the simplest, most mundane elements. By the end, almost nothing has happened, and yet you’re a wreck.

Hot-dog Hong Kong action stylist Johnnie To has never achieved the cult status of John Woo in this country, but his explosively entertaining — and startlingly splattery — Drug War should win him new fans.

One of the very best American independent films you’ll see this year, John Magary’s The Mend, takes what could have easily been a mundane tale of brotherly dysfunction and turns it into something abstract and electrifying.

A brilliant, disturbing, but unstable and half-crazy piece of work.

In The Flight of the Red Balloon, the great Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao Hsien uses Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 masterpiece "The Red Balloon" as a springboard for his own masterpiece--a distinctively modern and allusive one, yet so tender and plaintive that you understand what Hou is up to on a preconscious level.

The Kidman in Rabbit Hole is a revelation.