Sean Penn is so frighteningly good in this movie that he outdoes even the best of his earlier work.

The new Star Wars, Episode VIII: The Last Jedi is shockingly good.

The end of The Cove is as rousing as anything from Hollywood. Manipulative? Sure--but isn't that fitting? Capitalism has driven an entire village to massacre dolphins and keep its work hidden.

That's a knock on ­Bujalski -- that his characters exist in a vacuum, with few references to popular culture or politics or much of anything, really. Of course, one artist's vacuum is another's poetic distillation, and there's something about Mutual Appreciation (which is shot in an unassuming black and white) that spoke more directly to my inner slacker than any film since, well, "Funny Ha Ha."

This amazing, maddening film presents a series of extended, mostly static, terrifying tableaux of despair, poverty, and decay.

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

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

Has a mixture of bloodletting and exultation that would make Sam Peckinpah sit up in his grave and howl with pleasure.

Maryam Touzani’s film is as precise and vivid as its titular garment.

His Three Daughters is a movie about waiting, and it’s a movie that often feels like it’s waiting — for death, for reconciliation, for a confrontation, for something, anything.

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

The Forbidden Room is often maddening, occasionally beautiful, and ultimately unforgettable.

Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk is a film born of helplessness, about helplessness, and it embodies helplessness through its very form.

It’s easy to predict what will happen narratively in Between the Temples, but it’s not nearly as easy to predict what these characters will actually do, what they’ll say and how they’ll act.

It’s romantic, tragic, and inexorably strange.

Endlessly enchanting.

The first half is handsome but coy, the second is messier but stronger and fiercer too.

It all adds up to a searing portrait of social misery.

As a film, it’s warm and beautiful without being sentimental about the temporary intimacy that alcohol can provide, creating bonds that can dissolve in the daylightlike haze but are no less legitimate in the moment for it.

It’s whimsical and bold and also easier to admire in the abstract than to get deeply emotionally invested in, though it features a late-breaking burst of beauty that will soften the hardest of hearts.

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

Rarely has there been so obscenely precise a depiction of ravaged innocence. This young girl has nothing to live for--and an entire life ahead of her in which to live it.

It’s a fascinating meeting of three minds, and perspectives. Chief among them is Salgado himself.

Sing Sing may be an awkward chimera of a film, combining vibrant source material with synthetic attempts to serve as a star vehicle, but its insistence on the healing capacity of art is enough to soften the hardest of hearts.

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).

Bahrani’s concentration is close to supernatural as he tracks the young, prepubescent Ale (Alejandro Polanco) from job to soul-numbing job, some legal, some extralegal, to the point where you’re forced to suspend altogether your moral judgments and watch with a mixture of pain and awe.

A comedy in the best sense--it draws its life from the pitch-perfect authenticity of its characters.

Whenever the film focuses on Gary, it’s O’Connell’s show. And the actor’s ability to quietly express a whole range of emotions with his body language and his eyes, is staggering — especially since, for much of the film, he’s limping and covered in blood.