As entertained as the audience is throughout, you don’t leave the theatre undisturbed.

The real achievement of Roma is Cuarón’s bold conception of a memory movie, blending childlike detail and adult detachment, and the rich visual and aural design that make this one of the more sensually pleasurable films of the year.

Ultimately One Battle After Another is about a father and daughter, and I think about one of PTA’s big themes: Love. But that’s just me.

This isn’t a film that suddenly bursts out at you. Sciamma, like her characters, works by restraining everything. She doesn’t rush the story or focus on a building sense of hunger or passion. The title notwithstanding, the movie is a slow burn, not a fire.

Running a digressive two hours and 43 minutes, this idea-filled absurdist comedy, presented in the fragmented visual language of social media, ties together economic inequities of the European Union, political corruption and the exploitative labour practices of foreign film productions. Also, it’s seriously funny.

Without being explicit, and by leaving the details up to us to intuit, Wells has given us a film that has a tonal delicacy yet a deep emotional core. It’s a beautiful debut film.

Granted a rare degree of access to reporters, and later to the Minister of Health, Collective is a tribute to people who work together to uncover the truth, even if the immediate benefits are not obvious.

No doubt, it’s pretty great to watch and listen to Franklin, 29 at the time and at the height of her powers, demonstrating her mastery in the genre of music she grew up on.

This is some of De Niro’s most moving work in years. His performance full of anxious misfit energy, where his often-parodied grimaces, tics and haunted gaze feel entirely correct.

The film is immersive, in the sense of the frog in gradually heating water, where you reach boiling point before you realize it.

Though I am sure there will be many more family memory films, Blue Heron sets the bar at a new level.

What makes Marriage Story so profound and affecting is its tenderness. Although there are points where one character’s choices puts the other into serious difficulty, Baumbach doesn’t demonize Charlie or Nicole, and never ever asks us to judge either of them.

There is magic in French writer/director Céline Sciamma’s beautiful new film Petite Maman. Running just 72 minutes, this spare and gentle little film has an emotional core that feels true and authentic.

Uncut Gems is a heart-pounding sprint of a movie, a two-hour anxiety attack, anchored by a tour de force performance by Adam Sandler.

Brainy, talkative, full of ideas and questions about contemporary culture and human nature, writer-director Todd Field’s Tár is a character study of a talented, flawed character. It’s also a comment on cancel culture though it could be the other way around: a film about cancel culture wrapped around a complicated character.

The focus of [Germina's] story is rebellion and liberation and treating his story as a sombre fable of a soul’s journey through time, he turns the luridly familiar to something poetic and tragic.

With Sir David as our guide, it’s a theme well worth plunging into.

At times, No Bears can come across as frustratingly convoluted, but Panahi is an artful filmmaker, who surprises us by breaking the rhythms of the film with disruptions, confrontations, and plot twists.

Weeraskathul also explores how identities emerge, dissolve, and connect but he steps onto that shifting ground of memory and experience through a poetic, reverent portal.

By not hammering on a hot-button issue, by avoiding turning this into a lecture, she has given us a movie about how some things in life come down to choices that are so intimate and personal that sometimes words won’t help you understand.

The Zone of Interest is a careful movie, observant. It’s a movie that asks us to reckon with history, with human nature and, in today’s world with the drumbeat of fascism rising again. Call it a caution.

This is a filmmaker in full control of her craft. But as accomplished as The Souvenir is, the story it chooses to tell can leave audiences both mesmerized and alienated.

Mendonça, a former film critic, has crafted a film steeped in seventies’ cinematic references, especially Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, David Cronenberg’s body horrors, and the paranoid American political thrillers of the era, stuffed with affectionate care for depicting the fashion, cars, décor and music of the era.

Behind the shell game of motives between the three main characters, there are subtle perceptions about class, youth alienation, and disposable people in contemporary Korea.

Certainly, it’s a welcome call-back to grownup movies of 1960s and 70s, about adult intimacy and meaning-of-life concerns. Shot with crisp, unfussy clarity inside a car or in boardroom offices and the streets of the modern urban Japan, it’s a drama about the intricate ways love, performance, and work merge into each other.

It’s one of the year’s best. Built around a moral question, the film is complex, intelligent, and relatable.

It’s a stripped-down French legal drama, with a carefully controlled, expanding emotional impact, touching on matters of motherhood, gender, immigration and race.

It’s enough to know that Gerwig directs romance in a similar way that Tarantino directs violence. The romance—like Tarantino’s violence—comes in large sweeping gestures turning in on itself before pulling out again. It’s all so authentically cinematic that some of it seem surreal.

Throughout, Rasmussen never loses focus on the humanity. He’s telling the story, not of a refugee, but of a fellow human being whom he knows personally. The rapport between the two, the quiet honesty with which Amin speaks and the respectful and obviously deeply affectionate way in which Rasmussen tells the story, makes this film something special.

Anyone looking for an uplifting story in the mode of Spotlight or Erin Brockovich won’t find gratification in Ross’s sombre film. Nickel Boys, a film that impresses and occasionally perplexes, is not a story of delayed justice achieved, or the suffering of others appreciated from a safe historical distance.

The Boy and the Heron is a treat for the eyes, the ears and the mind. Or the soul, if you prefer.

Both complex and rawly immediate, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Laura Poitras’s film about the 69-year-old photographic artist and activist Nan Goldin, is a great documentary and maybe the most essential film of the year.

A road trip movie that refreshes and elevates the genre, Hit The Road follows a squabbling Iranian family on a life-changing journey. Though it would be a stretch to describe the film as the Iranian art cinema’s answer to Little Miss Sunshine, this deft hybrid of crowd-pleasing fun and poetic melancholy comes close.

No doubt, there's a certain theme-park appeal to this use of technology to reconstruct a facsimile of the past, but it's shockingly immediate, seeing those old monochrome images of anonymous men in mushroom-cap helmets turned into images of pink-cheeked youth staring back at us through the camera lens.

A poetic drama about the lives of three Maori girls from the 1950s to the 1980s, Cousins is a heart-breaker, tempered with hope.

Anora is frenetic and entertaining and sometimes very funny, but it will break your heart.

The movie bridges the traditional Restoration comedy to the political satires of Armando Iannnucci (Veep, The Death of Stalin). Comedy also entwines with tragedy here, and bold touches of absurdism and iconoclastic revisionism.

Helped along by a fantastic cast, the storytelling is so rich and vibrant and the characters so well drawn that the film never flags.

On the surface, it’s a simple enough premise: a young woman transitioning into adulthood, trying to find her place in the world. But in the hands of Norwegian director Joachim Trier, The Worst Person in the World is at one level a social satire about love, identity and relationships, and at the same time, a warm and deeply poignant look at the imperfect way life can creep up on us.

Madcap, complex, and already controversial — bursting with fabulous acting from two newcomers and some of the best cameos of the year — it’s a character study, a (sort of) coming-of-age story, a platonic rom-com, and a tribute to life in the suburban San Fernando Valley section of Los Angeles where Anderson grew up, among other things. In short, it’s one of the most exhilarating movies of the year.

Some movies deal with the settling of the American West as mythic. And then there are films like writer/director Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow, which strips it down to its basics for a more human scale and poetic vision of the Western era.

A major factor in making this work as well it does are the performances, which are pitch perfect.

In summoning the artist and his eighties’ art-scene milieu, the film also serves as memorial to the generation of creative voices silenced by the AIDS virus.

Watching The Souvenir: Part II is a wonderful tonic for those feelings of ciné cynicism, a reminder of film as a means of discovery.

A bravura example of an endangered species: the unapologetically enigmatic, visionary European art film.

One hopes Sugarcane will be shown in schools all over North America.

Shot in black and white, with scenes of razor-wire barriers and terrified families hiding in the forest, Green Border evokes images of the Second World War and the Holocaust, the subject of Holland’s films Europa Europa (1990) and In Darkness (2011).

Oppenheimer is three hours of testimony played out as drama. There are no action scenes as such, besides pyro played on the quantum and city-destroying level. It is the opposite of escapism, but it’s real history worth telling.

We can see Cold War as a look back on recent history, not through the lens of realism, but as a Hollywood fantasy, a kind of romantic protest against a political nightmare.

Sorry, Baby, the feature debut of American writer-director Eva Victor, who also stars, is a clear announcement of an original new talent able to create highly inventive visuals with a limited budget. It is also a terrific — and sad and funny and contemplative — testimony about how trauma profoundly stains people’s lives, with far-reaching and unpredictable outcomes.

The project is a unique social experiment which we can all participate in, in a way, dipping back in time to connect with old acquaintances and, inevitably, measuring our own ups and downs in the interval.

While this is an autobiographical story about a young aspiring filmmaker and his skateboarding crew, it also speaks volumes about contemporary rust-belt USA, masculinity and abuse, weaving its themes and characters around scenes of the boys sailing through the near-empty streets.

Scorsese is a master at his peak who has made deliberate choices about the story he wants to tell, and the way he wants to tell it, and he makes all of it count.

Sosa, who shared cinematography duties with two other women, Judy Phu and Monica Wise, depicts a world of humble beauty, of sunrises and dogs and chickens and weed-strewn lots. With a measured pacing (the film was edited by co-writer Isidore Bethel), she has created a film that is more like an elegy than a simple chronicle of events.

Chung’s well-crafted film is amply aided by a uniformly superb, note-perfect cast, who bring colour, nuance and heart to the film.

The Farewell isn’t tour de force filmmaking. It doesn’t have to be. In telling her own story, or something close to it, Wang has managed to stand far enough back to see the crazy wonderful way in which a family dynamic — full of strange and wonderful ideas about how to live life uplifts us — and has delivered a gentle little gem.

By turns exhilarating and exhausting, Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme is a whirlwind race of a movie anchored by another brilliant all-in performance by Timothée Chalamet.

Even those resistant to Gunda’s vegetarian message would be hard-pressed to describe these creatures cavalierly having witnessed these exquisitely framed, highly meditative moments. We see life within these beings, and we witness their undeniable will to live. And it’s beautiful. Gunda is truly one of a kind.

With The Power of the Dog, Campion has crafted a contemporary Western masterpiece that turns on the same pacing and style of 50-year-old films. She takes her time, letting the story, based on the 1967 novel by Thomas Savage, reveal itself in languid style.

It feels unbalanced, a collection of often-compelling sequences stitched together in a way that is unpersuasive or sometimes simply puzzling.

Hard Truths is a film centered on a difficult, damaged human being. Watching the movie is not unlike the experience of being in the company of just such a person — uncomfortable, sobering, deeply moving.

Ultimately, Train Dreams is a unique concoction, and a journey worth taking for its own keening moments of grief and simple wisps of joy.

Bradley Cooper makes an impressive directing debut with A Star Is Born, turning one of Hollywood’s most remade movies into something fresh and soulful, even though it’s hampered by some of the story’s clichés.

The success of Miranda’s musical story is not just the strength of its lead, but the strength of the supporting characters.

The Father is a compelling, illusionary story about aging's disorienting symptoms. It is a masterpiece of structure, narrative, editing, and performance.

On the surface, Parallel Mothers is an engaging melodrama centred around a fabulous performance by Penélope Cruz. But, as is typical of Pedro Almodóvar’s movies, this easygoing, entertaining film is deeply layered, dealing with issues of personal morality and family ties, mixed with a reminder of Spain’s dark and not-so-distant fascist past.

Poor Things is like nothing else you’ve seen this year: A darkly comic satire set in a dazzlingly designed steampunk world. It plays like it’s for fun, but is built around a deep philosophical core, that is ultimately about living authentically.

Apollo 11 is ultimately the finest look back to the anniversary of this historic event you’ll see this year.

McCarthy’s talent is towering and yet so few roles (excluding SNL appearances which feature dozens) really leverage her versatility. Can You Ever Forgive Me? gives platform to it all — funny but nihilistic, bleak, sardonic, knowing — with McCarthy disappearing and something else rising in her place.

The film is gentle, subtle, patient and wholly authentic. What makes it essential is not only in its ability to create a drama that’s real, harrowing, haunting, and hopeful but in its ability to keep playing in our heart long after it’s over.

In evocative and understatedly emotional scenes, carried out with a mature grace by Banderas, we come to a connection of how we get where we are, and what holds us back from what we dream of becoming.

Led by a stunning performance by first-time actor Park Ji-Min and based on a real-life adoptee’s reunion with her biological parents, Return to Seoul is a slow boil, a subtle powerhouse of a movie.

It may not be quite as thrilling as Edgar Wright’s brilliant The Sparks Brothers, which had the benefit of two still-living, sharp-as-tacks protagonists to interview, but it’s a must-see for fans and a highly interesting two hours for music junkies.

Given all the on-screen risk-taking, Mission: Impossible - Fallout plays it pretty safe. What you get is essentially an action movies greatest hits package.

Viola Davis is an actor apparently incapable of a false note. She’s a force of nature, playing a force of nature. She is perfection. And even though Ma is the center of the story, Boseman’s Levee goes through the most changes through the film, and covers the most emotional territory. It is a masterful and powerful performance - a beautiful take on a difficult and tragic character.

It’s a wistful, beautiful, and tender movie that works across generations, yet another feat accomplished. It's not just clever storytelling, dammit! There’s heart and magic at work here.

Nomadland is a beautiful and affecting film: a small scale, spare movie with a deep well of compassion at its center.

The Irish have struggled to find peace on a road historically paved with war. The little village in The Banshees of Inisherin seems a microcosm of the complexity of maintaining that peace, even among ostensible friends.

With its elliptical, patched-together structure and multi-year duration, Caught By the Tides can be a challenging film to follow but, by the end, it achieves something both original and rewarding.

[A] crazily imaginative, hilarious and frenetic animated feature that’s practically a palate-cleanser for comic book earnestness.

It is slap-in-the-face powerful, taking place 35 years ago (I always wonder in period pieces where the characters are today; Jean would be in her mid-60s) but full of the kind of educational turmoil and “woke” fears that stoke today’s Western culture wars. The more things change...

Led by performances by Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand, the production makes this story of treachery, murder and the psychological cost of crossing moral boundaries feel both era specific, and frighteningly modern.

This is an artistic film best enjoyed in a theatre on a big screen, when the different shades of darkness juxtaposing against the shifting colours take you on a magical ride.

Good One, a lesson in minimalist storytelling from first-time feature writer-director India Donaldson, is a movie that sneaks up on you.

In a less careful movie, with a less relatable performance, this kind of narrative clumsiness would be ruinous. Here, it’s more like a permissible flaw in someone you care for too much to give up on.

As an intelligent, adult examination of a marriage gone sour, wrapped up in the trappings of a legal thriller, Anatomy of a Fall is original and engaging, though perhaps not so profound an investigation into truth as some of its advocates have claimed.

Kaurismäki does not shrink from present-day buzz-kills like updates on Russia’s attacks against Ukraine, or the afflictions of poverty on Helsinki’s working class. But here again, is the contrast; even amid conflict, things charming and funny can occur.

You don’t need to be a comic book nerd to enjoy the film though. It stands on its own merits well enough. But, go see it with one anyway. Watching them enjoy the film is almost as fun.

Showing Up is a movie that whispers, and yet when it ended, I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to Lizzy or to the other characters in her world, to the sunny leafy streets of Portland, to the free spirit vibe of the art school, to the relationships I just started to get to know. I wanted to see more. I still want to.

EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert doesn’t ask you to worship Elvis so much as to remember what it felt like when the man took control of a room and decided—joyfully, deliberately—to make it move with him.

I Saw the TV Glow demands the audience's attention. I can’t say that, even with all synapses firing, I was able to catch every (maybe none) of the nuances Schoenbrun was tossing out. But it’s at times like that when I find it best to relax and experience the film rather than struggle to make sense of it.

May December is a movie about moral gray zones, a look at contemporary culture through the unique Todd Haynes lens. What’s involved are great writing and great performances.

Watching each new documentary by Poitras (The Oath, Citizenfour All the Beauty and the Bloodshed), is to lock into a mental track, with a balance of structure and pace, coherence and surprise, intellectual and emotional engagement.

This is a heavy-duty topic but rather than lecture or make an angry or ideological film, Diwan works here with restrained and even slightly distant tone, focusing on the character of Anne and her determination to control her own life.

With brilliant work by Colman, The Lost Daughter is a haunting work about choices, motherhood, and memory.

At three hours without much obvious plot, the movie is, no doubt, a bit of a butt-number, though there’s enough wry humour, visual delight, and psychological insight here to more than reward an open-minded viewer.

Sentimental Value, one of the year’s best films, is an absorbing, beautifully drawn family drama that walks lightly, but goes deep.

It's always presumptuous to refer to a slice of history as "little known" simply because you didn't know about it, but it's probably safe to say that Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution — a rousing look at disability rights — will tell a new story to a lot of people.