McQueen has made a textured, warm, breathtaking and heartbreaking portrait of Black experience, condensed economically into slightly over an hour of runtime. It’s exhilarating. It’s gorgeous. It’s moving. It’s also dangerous.

It speaks to Anderson’s skill as an architect of distended narratives that One Battle After Another’s parenting motif functions as a concrete pylon for action and political intrigue and rank human cruelty; it’s the beacon the film comes back to time and again.

Even more powerful than Sciamma’s portrayal of a feminine portrait of solidarity and desire is the statement that art is not exclusive to those who make it.

Radu Jude’s literalized mouthful Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World depicts, perhaps, the most accurate representation of the dystopia we live in, and the supposed impending dystopia that we’re in the process of arriving at.

In its gentle, modest way, Aftersun might well break your heart.

It takes everything Nolan does well and everything he doesn’t, everything he fights against and everything he embraces, everything great and terrible about him, and streamlines it, focuses it, until it’s pure Nolan, straight into your veins. It’s the most Christopher Nolan film imaginable. It also might just be his best one.

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

Scorsese’s gangster movies indulge the genre’s pleasures, of course, but in each of them—all seven of them—he’s looking for spirituality and for humanity. In The Irishman, he’s in self-reflection mode, glancing at his career-long search for God while pondering his own age.

Inside Out may be the best Pixar has released in a while, especially after a string of disappointing and underwhelming efforts, but what’s most cheering about the film—and most like Pixar’s celebrated classics—is that it’s so emotionally astute.

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

Though Chalamet and Hammer are up to the task of communicating a competition of desire with as few words as possible, they offer up a dare and a proposition that Guadagnino and his film never fully take on. Maybe they’re afraid of the consequences.

Good as Marriage Story’s pieces are, they’re too finely curated: Baumbach rarely lets the film be as messy as it needs to be, hemming himself in with the threads of his limited perspective.

With a gentle touch, Sciamma crafts a profound, easily digestible film that takes heavy themes and makes them bite-sized. She looks at the way we speak to one another, and to ourselves, at every age, and how these conversations are inevitably dulled in the schism between a child and their parent.

Lady Bird is nothing short of tremendous, a wise film about how two people deal with ambivalence.

All We Imagine as Light is both admirably restrained and deliberately poetic, painting its constrained women with nuance and empathy, before they light up a narrow path out of liminality.

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.

A marvel of so many confounding, disparate elements that somehow conspire to bring us from one side of the earth to the other. One would think the Safdies got lucky were we not wiser to their talent.

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

Field creates a creeping sense of cancellation from the inside, an indictment of the damned that won’t budge an inch (and not without some scorn for the whims of cancel culture baked in). For as tyrannical, ruthless and selfish as its subject can be, TÁR isn’t so shallow as to suggest simple solutions outside of the obvious.

While 3 Faces explores the social position of women in Iran through oft-whimsical encounters as Panahi drives across northwestern Iran with actress Behnaz Jafari (also playing herself), No Bears feels much more darkly prophetic, seemingly aware of the filmmaker’s encroaching imprisonment.

An understated masterpiece

Time melts beyond its tangible limits when watching Memoria, resulting in an audiovisual trance disorienting in its peculiar placidity.

The Florida Project is spattered with profound sadness, with moments of externalized, violent frustration at presumed helplessness, at practically being born into all this. To what degree you believe Baker to be condescending or patronizing or exploitive is up to you, but the film’s bursts of light, its idea of what caregiving looks like when caregiving is a privilege, is handled with sensitivity.

Two lives connecting across the wasteland of modernity can be among the rarest and richest parts of our days on this planet. When Tsai makes those connections, all too briefly, it’s indelibly moving.

Hittman’s work is remarkably precise. She does not focus on anything extraneous to the central drama of Autumn’s journey.

More hollow than hollowing, director Jonathan Glazer’s Edenic nightmare is better when taken metaphorically. There are no people to grasp onto here, only concepts.

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

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.

Though Drive My Car reaches a significantly less smoldering conclusion than Burning, it channels a similar feeling of catharsis. Though certain things are still left unsaid or incomplete, the tension they create—or shatter—conveys just as much as simple words or actions.

The story unravels at a steady clip, inviting more voices and frenetic emotions with every furtive location change, the possibility of righteous violence looking more likely and less inevitable at any given moment.

Saint Omer views Kabou’s crime and the story unfolding in its wake through the lenses of motherhood and daughterhood, arguing that neither can be disentwined from the other.

Far from taking the comfortable approach as yet another cautionary sci-fi tale of technology run amok, Her isn’t interested in holding a dystopic mirror up to society. Jonze instead posits a wonderfully original alternative to Skynet and the Matrix—in the future, the first self-aware A.I. won’t destroy the world, but it may just break your heart.

If you’re a living, breathing person with feelings and emotions, it is almost guaranteed to set your soul aglow.

Avilés is more concerned with the shape and sound of childhood, and across the 95 minutes (which covers one evening in the lives of this disjointed cast), she offers a nuanced take on the disparity and complication of being young in a world built to amplify grown-up problems.

Though Nickel Boys is at least in part about Black oppression and the suffering that comes along with it, Ross uses the movie’s point of view to avoid making a movie that turns that suffering into a marquee attraction or an endurance test.

The film is as complicated as the man it is about, and this is what makes The Boy and the Heron a masterwork.

Bloodshed is structured into two intersplicing sections charging forward at a rate of devastation your tear ducts absolutely cannot keep up with.

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

Yes, This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection is constitutionally sad. It’s also angry, restrained, abandoned, exuberant when cracks open between its downward facing emotions, and, above all else, impeccably constructed.

Baker obviously loves most of his characters, and while Anora doesn’t necessarily give off warmth, spending so much of time in the visceral chill of a Coney Island winter, it regards the entire situation with nonjudgmental good humor and a touch of melancholy.

Rather than being concerned with historical authenticity (Sandy Powell’s costumes are gorgeously anachronistic), Lanthimos gestures towards an emotional reality that posits the lover and the loved as soldiers, capable of being a casualty in what each party believes is a greater cause. What a blazing and burning feat of melodrama.

In Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros, Wiseman shows us how the sausage gets made in an unusually literal sense, along with a whole host of other culinary delights.

For every beat of affecting brutalism, there is an equally affecting beat of brutality.

The dreaminess, a clear evocation of Fellini, feels well-worn and contrived instead of exciting, coasting on aesthetics.

Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World is as indecisive as its endlessly curious heroine, but it is an invigorating, exceedingly kind portrait conveying that the journey is just as—if not more—crucial as the place we end up.

Licorice Pizza is more than just a movie. It’s a delectable, playful, sentimental reminder of what it means to be young, as well as an embodiment of what it feels like to grow up.

If the film wants to implore us to understand the essence of man, how its portrayal of burgeoning American capitalism and entrepreneurial spirit is undoubtedly, jarringly, at odds with the nature of mankind. At its core, humanity craves companionship, stability and understanding, while capitalism breeds selfishness, inequality and isolation.

A lot of movies attempt to replicate the experience of a dream; this one situates itself right on the edge, whether ecstatic or delirious or stricken, of waking up.

Procession feels like the surest execution of Greene’s voice.

A beautiful, wise, erotic, devastating love story, this tale of a young lesbian couple’s beginning, middle and possible end utilizes its running time to give us a full sense of two individuals growing together and apart over the course of years. It hurts like real life, yet leaves you enraptured by its power.

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.

Overall, however, the viewer gets an essential introduction to Wojnarowicz—enough to foster a desire to look more deeply into his own, numerous written accounts of his life, and to examine their own upholdings of moral decency in art, sex and access to an unencumbered life.

As a standalone film, The Souvenir provides Hogg with the means to articulate and meditate on her past, creating a work that is bleakly beautiful and enchanting all on its own.

The documentary gives faces, names and histories to those affected by the residential schools—and looks, bracingly, towards a future where healing is possible.

Look Back is a requiem for art lost to violence, to circumstance, to conformity. It is also an argument to create.

In a world marred by the tragedy of displacement—casualties of myriad geopolitical, colonial and economic interests—Green Border’s resonance speaks for itself.

It’s a fascinating spectacle in large part because Nolan isn’t especially Malickian at all (though at least that frame of reference might temporarily ease the overworked, underbaked Kubrick comparisons).

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.

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.

As sobering as the film gets, it remains, as a work of art and expression of Victor’s thoughtful voice, a real joy.

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

This beautiful, gripping, disturbing film deserves to be looked at with as much nuance as it offers. It’s not a damned hashtag-anything movie, it’s a potent and poetic autobiography that refuses polemic or politics. It manages to dive so deeply into the personal that it explodes into something universal.

In his 80th year, Martin Scorsese remains a master of craft and storytelling, and while Killers of the Flower Moon may not rise to the greatest levels of his near-peerless canon, it’s still a more than worthy addition to his filmography.

It’s easy to find yourself so wrapped up in the austere unease of Campion’s first feature in over a decade that one might fully overlook the obviousness laden in Peter’s opening words, and uncertainty as to the film’s overt approach to its subject material is recurrent.

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 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.

Bewitching and masterfully rendered, Zama is an elegant, ravishing, often delightfully strange achievement.

Paddington 2 reminds us how difficult it can be to pull off a sweetly tempered, gently moving children’s movie by doing exactly that, and doing it so well.

Wiseman’s top-down approach to looking at government is both effective at sketching out the priorities of those in charge as well as demonstrating what they’re actually able to execute.

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

Veteran Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan returns to Anatolia, a place he previously explored in his Palme d’Or winner Winter Sleep, in About Dry Grasses. Although Winter Sleep is both more explicitly interested in exploring class dynamics in rural Turkey and more literary than About Dry Grasses (Winter Sleep is an Anton Chekhov adaptation), these two stories could be taking place side by side.

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.

This is a film that’s proudly impertinent but also deeply morally serious. And even if Three Billboards doesn’t always hold together, that’s appropriate for its anxious characters who are, themselves, a little unsteady.

It deserves a big screen if possible, though; Bentley and Kwedar have made an enveloping movie, one that might more closely echo its obvious influences from the comfort of home. This is a movie that belongs out in the beautiful, terrible world.

For every nice small observation and delicately detailed bit of emotional truth, A Star Is Born is, in a larger sense, trapped by its own construction. Yes, it can be quite moving—but it’s moving precisely how you might imagine it would be.

Similar to how the characters are there to serve Anthony, Colman, Gatiss, Sewell and Poots are there to serve Hopkins. The stage belongs to him. What he does with it is something special, an unmissable performance from an actor with a filmography loaded with them.

With its unflinching and painstaking execution of such grim subject matter, Foxtrot is certainly not an easy watch, but an ultimately rewarding one.

What Leave No Trace portrays so beautifully, with so much unspoken grace, is that divide between living and surviving to live. One can find all of that dissonance in Foster’s fathomless eyes.

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.

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.

Filho is self-reflective, not self-obsessed, and his clear-eyed stance is crucial to the anti-vanity he brings to his examination of his childhood home and youthful obsession.

Black Panther might be the first MCU film that could claim to most clearly be an expression of a particular director’s voice.

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.

The heartbreaking bravery of Barry Jenkins’ third brilliant film is that he rests upon a clean, aching ambiguity: Such hope is both enough, and will never be enough, because nearly 50 years later nothing has changed.

It’s sobering enough to witness a dedicated artist facing the possibility of losing his/her ability to create. And yet, Restless Creature is anything but relentlessly downbeat, primarily because Whelan refuses to be cowed by the pressure.

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

In exposing the horrifying reality of giving birth while Black—and providing tangible alternatives for increasingly dangerous hospital births—Aftershock might very well save lives. Most importantly, the film immortalizes two mothers whose deaths never should have occurred, giving space for the innumerable victims of this crisis to similarly take action and memorialize those they’ve lost to senseless medical racism.

Every detail here, every flourish, has a purpose, whether splashes of red on flower petals, soft edges around dusk-lit trees, or three-panel split screen sequences that read like the pages of illuminated manuscripts brought to life.

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.

Though I missed the larger context of Freddie’s life, Return to Seoul’s commitment to staying in the moment creates an engrossing cinematic experience, an inextricable character portrait both intimate and fathomless.

The Velvet Underground will leave one less acquainted with the band with an incomplete picture in mind, but it’s unfair to say that the film is only for true enthusiasts. Instead, Haynes is interested in capturing a mood: A feeling of creative interconnectedness, of change, innovation and of a revolving door of people and art that will never again be replicated.

The documentary uses the brothers and their relationship with the carrion birds as metaphors for the state of the environmental and political climate of India’s capital, forming a subtle subtext to the main account.

A few key performances and a filmmaker with a clear vision unite for a film that truly feels fantastical, like someone somehow snuck a camera as they were falling into a holy reverie.

McQuarrie’s sense of building a scene on the barest of elements, communicating the most empirical of information, is so breathlessly impeccable, the plot barely seems to matter aside from creating easily understood stakes and giving Ethan Hunt a reason to keep, in the parlance of the film, figuring it out.

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.

Without the looming pressures of rent, work-from-home set-ups and casual business meetings, Hong suggests that we might just finally be free.

At nearly two-and-a-half hours, Rolling Thunder Revue is overlong but also overpowering, inconclusive yet undeniably stirring. It left me exhausted, but I kinda want to see it again.

It’s a slow-burn stunner.