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.