Rawly exposing the cruelty imposed upon predominantly Black children by the carceral state while also capturing the emotional whiplash of this fleeting encounter, Rae and Patton construct a visually stunning and narratively resonant portrait of love and longing.

Iranian master Asghar Farhadi’s A Hero spirals out a good deed to all its messy conclusions, providing fertile ground for the filmmaker’s command of aesthetic realism and closeknit interpersonal dynamics.

Sinners is a vampire story with something to say about America’s unresolved sins and reinforces that Coogler is one of his generation’s best filmmakers, mining something fresh from every genre he tackles.

The most tension-filled ransom exchange sequence ever filmed works perfectly as the midpoint break between the two halves, which eventually begin to converge as a potent study on the psychological effects of income inequality disguised as a straight genre piece.

A quintessential “last teen summer” story, the premise of Goodbye, Don Glees!, writer/director Atsuko Ishizuka’s first original feature, is a bit trite at first blush. But like the nectar of succulent flowers in full bloom, there is much to savor.

Think better of art’s power, Ree’s filmmaking tells us, but especially think better of each other, too.

Friendship feels custom calibrated to give Robinson the best possible debut as a cinematic leading man. It’s not just a vehicle for one comedian, though; it’s a timely commentary that, in its own way, slightly deflates the pop sociology notion of the male loneliness epidemic—an idea that basically excuses the anti-social behavior of men who won’t or can’t try to make friends with each other.

The Blind Man Who Did Not Want To See Titanic gives Poikolainen’s fiercely charismatic lead performance such a thrilling, empathetic home.

Rarely do anime franchises end on such a pitch perfect note, but Anno shows it is possible with Evangelion 3.0+1.0: Thrice Upon a Time. After decades of grappling with what this series means to him and using it as a mechanism to process his own emotional baggage, Anno has finally found closure within his broken world full of angst and hope.

When the film concludes, you may find yourself wanting to watch it again to fully absorb the journey Zvyagintsev took you on. And because Loveless is so accomplished, the repeat viewing promises to be deeply rewarding.

Soul stuffs its playful optimism into a simple message and delivers it with colorful, endearing beauty.

In her fourth collaboration with Reichardt, Williams is better than ever. Possibly overdone in beleaguered, regular-woman makeup this time around, Williams still best showcases just how lived-in of an actress she can be in Reichardt’s work.

If Election is a shot of tequila, The Holdovers is a slow succession of sips of bourbon that you don’t realize have affected your spatial awareness until you get out of your armchair.

The Coens have created a film that is wholly original and highly entertaining.

At the beginning of Apolonia, Apolonia, Glob proclaims her goal: To create an eternal portrait of her subject, one that evokes the paintings of kings. She accomplishes this feat, leaving a dazzling record of Sokol’s life that champions and carries on her legacy as an artist.

Twomey gives The Breadwinner ballast, binding it to the real-world history that serves as its basis, and elevates it to realms of imagination at the same time. It’s a collision of truth and fantasy.

Buck and the Preacher is a classic and iconic Western—brightly colored, beautifully assembled and channeling social issues through its plot rather than tacking them on in an obvious or distracting manner.

Wacky, smart, engaging and exciting, Get Duked! represents the next step in the Wright/Cornish school of 21st Century British comedy.

With Downhill Racer Michael Ritchie did for sports films what Two-Lane Blacktop did for road films. He created an existentialist sports film that is as tense as it is harrowing, and brought the genre into the realm of the bleak.

The approach and tone is decidedly non-maudlin, and determinedly hopeful despite capturing the staggering hardships Fox faces simply navigating an average day.

Though A Couple is [Wiseman's] first narrative feature in 20 years, the narrative structure documents history by fashioning Sophia’s diaries and letters as a performance.

It is a true artistic accomplishment that writer/director Mathieu Amalric was able to take Galea’s text, originally meant for the stage, and spin it into a vivid piece with such a uniquely lush cinematic language.

House suggests that the nitrous-oxide hyperdrive of Japanese pop culture—as vivid now as ever in entertainments like Takashi Miike’s Yatterman, for instance—is a brilliantly imagined, if not in fact transcendental brand of therapy.

A hushed, unassuming, intimate movie to remind audiences of the power of cinema by interrogating the definition of cinema itself.

She Dies Tomorrow is both the perfect film for this moment and also the worst viewing choice possible considering the circumstances.

Insightful, kind and exceptionally well-acted, Marte Um reminds its characters that they’ll find what they need if they just keep looking.

It is a deliciously amoral journey, the kind that has already secured Lanthimos ample praise over the course of his career. But this is perhaps the filmmaker’s most garish and confident endeavor, using Bella’s naive perspective to design a world so heightened that it exists somewhere between a nightmare and a dream.

Good Time features no shootouts or car chases—there isn’t a single explosion in the whole film. The Safdies and Pattinson don’t need any of that. Like Connie, they thrive on their wits and endless inventiveness—the thrill comes in marveling at how far it can take them.

So often the medium focuses on being flashy with quick cuts, long action sequences and epic characters who must save the world. But, not in On-Gaku: Our Sound. Here, Iwaisawa pushes the form in a new direction that ebbs and flows with the sound of music.

Pawlikowski leaves it to the viewer to determine for themselves the fate of his Cold War proxy parents, and to glean purpose from the film’s gaps in time, its reticence, and even its black-and-white palette. Married with the Academy ratio, the color scheme makes the film feel classic, but Pawlikowski’s desire to plumb his past makes it timeless.

Half musical and half drama, it finds balance in poetic stillness and exuberant motion.

More than anything, the script, by Prathi Srinivasan and Joshua Levy, is funny. And Plan B works due to Verma and Moroles’ authentic, lived-in performances. Their rapport is delightful. Their delivery spot-on.

As the argument expands, all of these men start to look less like icons and more like, well, men: Regular people with regular concerns and everyday flaws. They’re mortal and imperfect, and to witness their mortal imperfection is One Night in Miami’s greatest joy.

In many ways, Weapons is a topical ensemble drama; thrillingly, it has darker, more genre-driven ambitions beyond that. Cregger mixes all this despair, cynicism, and brutality into an impressively wicked and heady brew—and a ferociously entertaining horror movie, besides.

The Sparks Brothers is a thorough and charming assessment and appreciation of an idiosyncratic band, and the highest praise you could give it is that it shares a sensibility with its inimitable musicians.

Marvel’s rambunctious entry into the space opera genre—and the cornerstone of its “Cosmic Marvel” roster of characters and storylines—so perfectly embodies what the preceding months of hype and hope foretold that even its weak points (and it has its share) feel almost like unavoidable imperfections—broken eggs for a pretty satisfying omelet.

While never didactic or patronizing, the movie should expand the horizons of some viewers and be validating for others who may see themselves on screen. But to be successful, the movie also has to be entertaining. And Anything’s Possible is.

This is neither a pleasant movie nor a pleasing movie, but it is made with high aesthetic value to offset its unrelenting pitilessness: It’s fastidiously constructed, as one should expect from a director of Kent’s talent, and ferociously acted by her leading trio of Aisling Franciosi, Baykali Ganambarr and Sam Claflin.

The blend of artistry and genre is breezy and dense at the same time, a film worth enjoying for its surface charms and studied for its deeply personal reflections on intimacy. You may delight in its lively, buoyant filmmaking, but you’ll be awed by the breadth of its insight.

A joyous, resonant snapshot of growing into one’s own, and challenging even your own expectations of who you thought you could be.

Loach knows there are heavy restraints on art to affect meaningful change in the world. But he’s also aware of the kinship between art and activism: How art can educate people, and agitate them, and perhaps lead them to make more responsible choices in their personal lives.

Above all else, Birdman is tender, raucously funny and deeply tragic.

It’s a gorgeous, shattering film. It’s an unapologetically real film about a number of very real subjects, plot-agnostic but driven by character, consequence and compassion.

What makes How to Blow Up a Pipeline great, is that it so deftly wins us to its cause anyway. It’s absolutely electric filmmaking.

The road trip always has to end, but the excellent Hit the Road introduces an exciting filmmaker whose journey is just beginning.

For those with the patience, and for those who simply love the way a fascinatingly unique film can so fully convey and shape a point of view, Under the Skin will reward the time spent in the theater.

Excoriating and exhilarating in equal measure, it is the first truly great movie to deal explicitly with the unique madness and malice that the global pandemic revealed, a kind of touchstone for a time and place that with only a few years remove feels at once as fictional and otherworldly as a sci-fi novel, and at the same time the very real-world harbinger of the political shifts that proceeded.

It takes a deft hand and a rare talent to make tyranny and state sanctioned torture so funny.

The Pigeon Tunnel, then, is a chance to see an expert raconteur, who seems to know every trick of the trade—answering a master documentarian’s questions when he wants, and deflecting with panache when he doesn’t, regaling you with such wonder that you can’t help but be enthralled.

Inshallah a Boy doesn’t give any clear answers. Instead, the film offers a look at the life of an ordinary woman in Jordan, going through an ordeal likely faced by many like her.

It’s a meditation on how objects carry history, how they reflect our decaying bones, and how they sometimes outlive us.

For all of its cosmic implications, the film remains steadfast in its human devotions.

Gorgeously realized and bolstered by amazing performances by Souleymane and Alio, Lingui, the Sacred Bonds is a prescient portrait of what tribulations afflict—or await—women who are barred from receiving comprehensive reproductive care.

Soderbergh has been an indie wunderkind, an anarchic prankster, a self-sabotaging bomb thrower, even a studio hack. Logan Lucky isn’t the best movie he’s ever made, but it’s pointing him a most fascinating new direction—the auteur as compulsive entertainer. He’s well on his way.

This movie is unbalanced and constantly fluctuating and as uneven as you’d expect from Spike Lee, but this time that works for the film rather than against. There’s a nationwide emergency, and Spike Lee, with BlacKkKlansman is screaming in your face for action at every turn.

The Piano Lesson is an adaptation, and a directorial debut that absolutely has me excited for what he attempts next.

A Ghost Story rewards viewers who are willing to engage with it, to accept its evolving premise and experience the expressionless specter’s afterlife as it reveals itself.

Guided by Fabietto, the movie takes its time. It watches. It breathes. It captures life with a clarity even Sorrentino’s best efforts haven’t quite—which makes it his best effort to date.

In amplifying the diverse voices of American children through the film’s radio vérité subplot, C’mon C’mon proves that kids have some pretty insightful advice to impart, if only we’d just listen.

Stuffed with bombastic bit parts from a roster of recent television’s greatest comedic talents and casually incisive dialogue that lays waste to media empires and preconceptions of women’s autonomy alike, the film is an unexpected, welcome antidote to emotional isolation and toxic masculinity that meanders in and out of life lessons at a pleasingly inefficient clip.

It’s a journey jammed with pleasures we can all appreciate, and canopied by questions we all ask.

The places and things Kogonada includes in his frame are important for drawing us into Columbus’s world, but it’s Richardson who gives that world its shape, supplying her director’s clean, static compositions, captured in long shots, with aching humanity molded by doubt and disappointment.

Son of the White Mare must be seen to be believed, but mostly it just needs to be seen.

With a heartbreaking lead performance from Jean-Baptiste at its center, Leigh has crafted one of the most sincere slice-of-life films to come out of British cinema in recent years.

Furiosa is a film well-planned and deeply dreamed.

Jeon truly shines. Her chameleon-like ability to turn from a concerned mom to a dangerous killer, without the viewer doubting either aspect of her persona, is riveting.

Touching upon (but never proselytizing about) matters of misogyny, religion, caste and gentrification, All We Imagine as Light exudes unwavering naturalism, undoubtedly influenced by the filmmaker’s documentary background.

It’s an endurance test where viewers pit their tolerance for naked displays of ugly masculinity against Bravo’s assured directorial chops. It’s also the best, or maybe most vital, presentation of whiteness in theaters in 2017, or for that matter the last half decade or so of pop culture.

Instead of acting as a short, satisfying jaunt through Almodóvar’s aesthetic, The Human Voice is an exercise in deconstructing the very tenets the filmmaker has propped himself on throughout the entirety of his career.

Thought the harmony between Lee’s film and Murakami’s text, even as different as they are, is something of a paradox—Lee makes notable changes to the protagonist; fleshes out Murakami’s story to create the film’s first two acts, adding a powerful third—Burning belies the notion that auteurs in different mediums can’t fully co-exist in the same work.

Shoplifters is held up by the strength of its ensemble and Kore-eda’s gifts as a storyteller, which gain with every movie he makes—even in the same year.

It’s all delightful to watch.

It’s chaos, but it’s controlled chaos (even if only just), and in the chaos there’s absolute joy.

The carnal Catholicism which permeates the film is at this point to be expected from the 83-year-old Dutch filmmaker—but equally so is the film’s ability to utilize eroticism as a vehicle to examine pain, paranoia and power.

An exceptional puberty comedy by way of Sanrio-branded Kafka, Turning Red’s truthful transformations are strikingly charming, surprisingly complex and satisfyingly heartfelt. And yes, so cute you might scream until you’re red in the face.

A Different Man is a major work—even as it shapeshifts from Cronenberg to Kaurismäki, developing into new territory at every turn, Schimberg never loses sight of his central questions: What makes us who we are? What does it mean to be a good person in this weird but beautiful world, surrounded by other people?

If anything, The Janes is a call to find and form networks in one’s own community. It’s a reminder, as the inevitability of another abortion ban inches closer and closer every day, there will always be people who disregard what is lawful in favor of what is right—and documentary can be a tool in teaching what, who and how to effectively parse and evade that lawful, undeniably wrong side of history.

Besides announcing Song as a brilliant observer of dialogue, interaction, and tone, Past Lives is a strikingly romantic movie about what composes our lives.

Forged in flame and fury, Robert Eggers’ The Northman is an exquisite tale of violent vengeance that takes no prisoners.

The power of writer-director Andrew Haigh’s sublime drama is that it can support myriad interpretations while remaining teasingly mysterious—like its main character, it’s always just a bit out of reach, constantly enticing us to look closer.

The Old Man and the Gun is a jaunty joyride, a valedictory for a beloved American icon and a giddy true story. But Lowery ties it all together at the end: It’s a story about how the years go by, and who we are. It’s a story about all of us.

City of Joy is a piercing little film, by turns appalling and uplifting, that manages to go straight to the heart of a complex issue and contend with it eloquently, bravely, and concisely.

Particularly paired with Cruz’s knockout performance of a woman whose life endures the legacy left by the trauma of her family’s unresolved past, Parallel Mothers is a deeply political example of what is lost when we have forgotten—and what is achieved when we fight to remember.

Gyllenhaal’s extraordinary direction, paired with exceptional performances from The Lost Daughter’s lead actresses, culminate in a perfect storm that yields an astute portrait of the painful expectations of womanhood.

Rita Baghdadi’s new documentary Sirens is a smartly crafted, hugely entertaining look at the band as it goes through growing pains, fights for bookings, and navigates inter-band dyke drama against the backdrop of a city under constant threat of attack.

Experiencing Branagh come full circle with Belfast is like getting an invitation to observe an artist come to terms with his roots. There’s the expected nostalgia, but also the graceful observation of the wisdom and clarity acquired with the power of hindsight.

By way of candid humor, a magnetic performance from Rex and Baker’s careful attention for authenticity, Red Rocket is a sympathetic profile of a porn star past his prime.

Judas and the Black Messiah’s greatest success is not that it somehow humanizes the Black Panthers, but portrays the Black Panther movement as self-evidently legitimate.

It’s a slow-burn stunner.

The documentary’s so simple it feels profound without ever really trying.

This is a film that wants to make you feel as confused and terrified as the characters you’re watching. In this, it is unquestionably successful.

Phantom Thread gets under your skin. On the surface, it is proper and refined and exquisite. But underneath, messy, angry real life keeps bubbling up, fervent and eager to escape. At last, it bursts through the seams. It always does.

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is more than Boseman’s performance, sure, with Davis and Domingo going on some delicious tears of their own and Wilson’s words continuing to sear and soar in equal measure. But Boseman’s ownership of the film, an Oscar-worthy snapshot of potential and desire, gives an otherwise lovely and broad tragedy something specific to sing about.

It helps that this quiet film is stocked with actors who can carry the weight of their long silences, as well as a stellar supporting cast.

Ridley Scott directing a grand, riveting medieval epic that doubles as an analysis of gender dynamics might be unexpected, but The Last Duel manages to effortlessly combine Scott’s action sensibilities with an empathetic thread between the past and present.

It is a film attuned to decline, not just to the pain it can cause, but to how it refracts memory, presence, and touch. Above all else, it’s a film acutely aware of memory’s place in a person’s sense of identity, how it can unfairly slip through hands desperate to hold on.

A multimedia extravaganza of frozen idiocy, Hundreds of Beavers is a slapstick tour de force—and its roster of ridiculous mascot-suited wildlife is only the tip of the iceberg.

Ghostlight is a comedy in a loose sense, a tragedy in another, and a redemption song in yet one more. More succinctly, it’s a Thompson film, meaning it gently, tenderly unpacks and embodies every single feeling its characters might have about their situation at hand.