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.

The result is a quiet film that doesn’t push an agenda, doesn’t rush, doesn’t trade on sensationalized emotion, but leaves us space to engage with wonderful characters. There’s a feeling of intimacy and sense of connection, open-heartedness and good will that stays long after the movie ends.

Well shot, well acted and with locations that vary from brutalist factory sites to beautiful nearby forests, No Other Choice is both believable and absurd as it unfolds. But its social relevance remains spot-on.

Superficially, it plays like an indie buddy comedy. But this film walks lightly and comes at its subject matter so obliquely, that it never aims to overwhelm the viewer. It’s about a multitude of deep emotional things, including grief, intergenerational trauma, and the complexities of love.

A magic realist fantasy, a ghost story, a love story and political allegory, Atlantics packs a deceptive amount of complexity in a gauzy, slender film.

Are audiences, who are used to having their heroic stories delivered to them in fantastically exciting packages, ready for this reined-in version of the wounded hero? In spite of its flaws, Lowery’s The Green Knight makes a case for a different sort of hero whose time may have come.

It’s hard to imagine a lovelier fly-on-the-wall experience than Nothing Like A Dame – a documentary that basically intrudes on a regular, wickedly-funny get-together of four octogenarians who’ve been friends since they were barely more than precocious schoolgirls.

In a sense, Dahomey, which runs just over an hour, is also a ghost story as well as a creative conversation between the past and present.

This West Side Story retains its ‘50s feel, while polishing this venerable gem of a musical to a greater gleam.

Ash Is Purest White — constantly dislocating and unpredictable moment by moment — feels all of its 135-minute running time but long after, the individual sequences hang in the memory.

Charm, humanity and a passel of filmmaking insights are all here, rewarding both the dedicated fans and newcomers to Varda, who achieved a new level of public profile in her last decade.

It’s an oddly funny journey, punctuated by some deliciously inventive camerawork (including the longest dissolve I’ve ever seen), a jazz-inflected score, and a treasured piece of vinyl that will have you searching out ’70s Argentine rock/blues band Pappo’s Blues.

Burnham’s debut is a little gem that feels true and is surprisingly tender.

It's a very easy story to accept, but the ease of the storytelling allows the message to penetrate and gives rise to thoughtfulness about how we can be better to those around us. Quite simply, this film allows us to want to be better than who we are.

One of the pleasures of Support the Girls is that it explores the constant fender-benders of sex, race, class, and age without ever coming off as preachy or lecturing.

Hale County, in the best sense, is the kind of film that asks more questions than it provides answers for.

The Taste of Things is rare, with a depth and maturity we don’t often see on screens anymore. It charts the connection of two mature adults who are at peace with themselves and each other. There’s a calm restraint to their relationship, and that adds to the film’s sensuality.

While the characters and events are real, the artful design of this film and its allegorical resonances seem to put Honeyland in its own genre – that of a real-life fable.

There is not much more you can ask of a film than that it provides you with another perspective, a new angle to look at old problems. The Beasts does that.

What it took to put together one of the most highly acclaimed exhibits ever on the art world calendar is captured in Close to Vermeer, a documentary brimming with passion, intrigue, history and beauty from director Suzanne Raes.

Historical hindsight lets us predict where this kind of train ride inevitably ends.