Fire of Love is one of a vanishingly rare breed of documentary that is determined to be "total cinema," not just capturing the facts of what happened to its subjects but creating an entire aesthetic—a vibe—around them.

The game of wits between Phil and everyone else is a chilling one to watch, and it’s exactly the kind of end-of-the-year movie to finish things with a bang.

This film, directed by Zhao Liang (acclaimed here for his 2009 “Petition”) is a kind of poetic documentary. It’s all images and sounds, no interviews, no talking heads.

This franchise has demonstrated an impressive ability to beat the odds and reinvent itself, over a span of time long enough for two generations to grow up in. It's a toy store of ideas, with new wonders in every aisle.

Apart from its numerous profound achievements, Neulinger’s picture is an extraordinary work of film analysis, inviting the viewer to study certain encounters frame-by-frame as a way of revealing their unspoken subtext.

Watching Coppola land on his head and then pick himself back up again and point himself at another brick wall is ultimately strangely inspiring.

"D-Man" is one of the most eloquent works of art to come out of the AIDS era, and it continues to be done by dance companies around the world. Can You Bring It shows the challenges inherent in this, but is also an essential reminder—to people who sorely need it—of just how bad it really was "back then"...

A diminutive and misleading title for such an affecting, often profound film.

This is a moving drama about people pushed together by fate who end up not merely helping each other survive but elevate through an increasingly harsh world.

For all its horror and sadness, this is one of the most hopeful films I’ve ever seen.

One of the best films I’ve seen about fine art. It casts an entrancing spell that allows the staggering depth of its subject’s work to consume us, while showing how her trailblazing vision left an unmistakable imprint in over a century of iconic art spanning various mediums, resounding through history like a drop of colored paint in a pitcher of water.

In every way, this quietly majestic film should be considered a triumph.

On paper, it sounds iffy; in execution, however, it’s absolutely glorious, a gleeful glide through adolescence that doesn’t gloss over pangs of grief or grimmer thoughts.

Robinson is matter-of-fact, thoughtful and enormously compelling in illustrating hidden chapters of our shared history.

From both a technical and political standpoint, The Stroll is a tremendous achievement.

Pixar might have uncovered the mysteries of our brains with “Inside Out.” But Aardman knows its way around our funny bones.

Co-directors Allison Berg and Frank Keraudren seem to be operating from a place of nonjudgmental curiosity, so pure and sustained that it becomes indistinguishable from love. They can't get enough of John Wojtowicz.

Gasoline Rainbow feels like a living, breathing, laughing organism. It’s not a caricature of Gen-Z nor a wishful document of what we may hope or theorize 2020s youth to be, and the Ross brothers’ largely hands-off technique allows this to thrive.

Roger Ebert famously described cinema as a machine that generates empathy. This movie is that machine: a relentless engine field by idealism and craft.

Patient and kindhearted, a painted storybook in motion, Sirocco and the Kingdom of the Winds is a lovely glimpse of what animation can be.

A country can be a home, and a home can be erased, and the aching, lovely Flee trafficks in the space between belonging and wandering.

What an affecting film this is. It respects its characters and doesn't use them for its own shabby purposes. How deeply we care about them.

It’s a film that somehow plays as both a child’s heroic journey and an old man’s wistful goodbye at the same time, a dream-like vision that reasserts Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli’s voice and international relevance. It’s gorgeous, ruminative, and mesmerizing, one of the best of 2023.

This is a film with a dread fascination. McKellen occupies it like a poisonous spider in its nest.

The movie is so much more nuanced and bold than the first wave of outrage charged. With Cuties, Doucouré announces herself as a director with a keen visual style who’s unafraid to explore these cultural and social tensions.

This is a work just as startling and potent as anything she has done to date — a powerful example of art being used to exorcise personal demons that is anchored by two stunning performances and some of the most gripping moments to be seen in any film so far this year.

Despite its occasional shortcomings, From Russia with Love is still a terrific Bond entry. There's true chemistry between Connery's 007 and Armendariz's Kerim Bey, and it is all the more remarkable when considering that the Mexican actor was in great pain and living his final days while the shooting took place. His character's eventual fate is among the few in the Bonds to have a real emotional impact.

While the issues it engages are timely and important, the film’s claim to fame really comes from its terrific accomplishments on every front, from writing and directing to acting and cinematography.

If you’re willing to bend with the story, The Secret Agent will take you places movies rarely go.

Beyond the Lights makes unapologetically damning statements about the music industry’s treatment of women, yet it never feels preachy. It strikes a risky, though successful balancing act between being immensely entertaining as a musical feature and making dramatic, important statements about depression, self-worth and female empowerment.

Anderson the illusion-maker is more than graceful, he's dazzling, and with this movie he's created an art-refuge that consoles and commiserates. It's an illusion, but it's not a lie.

This is a thoroughly stimulating movie.

A quiet, heartfelt, and beautifully nuanced drama that feels unique and universal, featuring what will surely go down as one of the best performances of 2023.

People have spoken about how understated and old-fashioned Brooklyn is, to the extent that it might come across as a pleasant innocuous entertainment. Don’t be fooled. Brooklyn is not toothless. But it is big-hearted, romantic and beautiful.

Bianca Stigter's documentary Three Minutes: A Lengthening is a great film about filmmaking and a quietly devastating memorial for lives long gone.

In "Here," what matters is not what is offered, but the act of offering itself.

Higuchi and Anno not only deliver the genre movie goods but also deftly preserve their title character’s sugary purity. Rather than gigantify what was always juvenile material, Shin Ultraman allows the iconic character to retain his original shape and proportions. You and your dad are gonna love the new Ultraman movie.

The film depicts a subtle, complicated, mostly internal process so thoughtfully — blending humility and go-for-broke nerve — that its flaws ultimately seemed minor to me.

Lee has crafted an exciting, violent film that can be enjoyed as strictly that, but what elevates it to greatness is what it says and what it shows about the perception of Blackness, whether in heroic situations or human ones.

If your moviegoing needs are driven less by a need to "feel good" afterwards and more by a desire to see something that will grab and touch you in ways that you will not be shaking anytime soon, this is the movie for you.

It weaves every detail — whether provided by an on-camera witness, a document, a drawing, a painting or a photograph — around that set of intertwined arguments, which are too complex to explain in this review, but come across powerfully by the time the credits roll.

With The Card Counter, Schrader has a sub-theme he can toss off like a light cloak, and when he does, the movie swerves into a semi-surreal realm not entirely like that of the climax of First Reformed. But then it swerves back into a variation on Bresson that constitutes one of the most brilliant shots of his career.

While Loznitsa’s films, particularly his documentaries, often have a terrifying epic sweep, “Two Prosecutors,” as its title implies, is an altogether more intimate undertaking. And no less terrifying for all that.

Writer-director Shuchi Talati’s feature debut, “Girls Will Be Girls,” is a profoundly moving document of generational girlhood.

As delightful as it is surprising. The surprises begin with the fact that the Iranian master’s last work is, of all things, essentially an animated film.

Watching Kristen Wiig's lived-in and alive performance as this blunt, practical, and yet totally innocent woman is to be in the presence of something very very special.

With Sachs’ painterly compositions and Whishaw’s deceptively effortless performance, “Peter Hujar’s Day” is a surprisingly beautiful and subtle tribute to the balancing act it takes to be a working artist.

For all its stunning exteriors, it's really concerned with emotional interiors, and it goes about exploring them with simplicity and directness.

In the end, Killers of the Flower Moon is like a puzzle—each creative piece does its part to form the complete picture.

I do know this for sure — I can’t wait to see this film again. It’s so layered and ambitious, the product of a confident filmmaker working with collaborators completely in tune with his vision. Every piece fits. Every choice is carefully considered.

Brian De Palma is one of the great seducers of the cinema, and he proves it with Passion, a spellbinding thriller.

The structure dispels the idea that there is a “right way” to navigate the Kafkaesque complexities of an oppressive regime, as is made plain by the ultimate fate of Hind and the two ambulance first responders, Youssef Zeino and Ahmed Madhoun.

A fantastical examination of man’s inhumanity to man, and as replete as it is with persistent visceral disgust, it also pulses with intelligence, a mordant compassion, and yes, incredible wit.

Polsky is so honest he has to add a question mark to the film’s declarative title. This slight detachment, this hesitation to believe without question, makes Polsky the best of guides.

Based on Jonathan Ames' novella of the same name, the film is rooted so firmly in Joe's point of view he sometimes is absent from the screen entirely. We're inside his head.

Dragon Inn is a romantic action film, but it still feels modern thanks to Hu's strict focus on action. I don't just mean the film's relentless series of fight scenes. Hu's film is all about movement.

On the whole, what Baker has created here is nothing short of pure movie magic— his smartly interwoven urban machinations make you giggle and inexplicably tear up on repeat (sometimes within the same sequence), while somehow keeping you acutely aware of the sorrow that is bound to rise to the surface.

More than anything, “How to Have Sex” is masterful in showcasing the drive and apprehension of sexual coming of age.

Its narrative clarity makes its fable seem timeless, while innovating and expanding the visual immersion of its medium.

The New Rijksmuseum is a four hour procession of minute details, an exhaustive catalogue of art world diplomacy and process, but what sticks is the way Hoigendijk weaves all the strands together, crosscutting here, overlapping there.

It is equal parts Buster Keaton-Jackie Chan slapstick extravaganza, WWE-styled spectacle, and "geek trick."

First Cow, adapted by Reichardt with frequent collaborator Jonathan Raymond from the latter’s novel "The Half Life," is many things. A simultaneously gentle and unsparing dissection of the formative flaws of capitalism, and thus of the “American dream”; a frontier story which captures the harsh realities and simple pleasures of a life built painstakingly from rock, wood, and soil; a heist movie; an argument for the power of baked goods.

When Melanie falls under the spell of a silver-haired pedophile as tall and trim as a Marine (Joseph Lorenz), the film gets set on its rocky path to a conclusion that fulfills the film's title and rounds out the "Paradise" series quite beautifully — if you're not afraid to look.

I’ve been trying to think when there was a historical drama I found as electrifying as Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour. It may have been Steven Spielberg’s “Munich,” which topped my 10-best list a dozen years ago.

The movie is potent with rage from end-to-end.

There are few gentler films you’ll find this year than Rohan Kanawade’s “Cactus Pears.” A touching queer romance whose subtle rhythms pull us into its tender embrace.

You have to be prepared to see a film like this, or able to relax and allow it to unfold. It doesn't come, as most films do, with built-in instructions about how to view it. One scene follows another with no apparent pattern, reflecting how the lives of its family combine endless routine with the interruptions of random events.

The most satisfyingly diabolical cinematic structure that the Coens have ever contrived, and that's just one reason that I suspect it may be their best movie yet.

One of the more unique, evocative and deeply felt coming-of-age films to come along in quite some time.

Chou’s Return to Seoul is an uneasy exploration of the concept of home and the heartache of losing it, following an imperfect heroine on her emotional journey to find a home in herself.

Writer/director Rian Johnson’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi is a sprawling, incident- and character-packed extravaganza that picks up at the end of “Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens” and guides the series into unfamiliar territory. It’s everything a fan could want from a “Star Wars” film and then some.

All That Breathes blends a verité-style character study with gorgeous nature cinematography while never losing the film’s overall commentary on how man interacts with nature—or merely chooses to destroy it through inaction.

Descendant is worth seeing no matter who you are. For viewers like me, however, it engenders the reality that, no matter how hard anyone tries to whitewash history, our stories will forever continue to be told in full, by us and for us.

This is not so much a film you watch as one you wake up from, shivering.

The collage film Cameraperson is one of the most original, challenging, sometimes infuriating documentaries of recent times.

Consciousness operates on multiple tracks and Aftersun understands this. The multi-level awareness is not in the dialogue, but it's there in the film's gentle rhythms, the editorial choices, the patience and sensitivity of Wells' approach.

I love how Boyhood admits that, in certain ways, growing up stinks. Every character has a least one moment in which they have to heed the advice of Corinthians and put away childish things. None of them like it.

Another brilliantly mounted drama concerning fracturing families, hidden motives and the difficulties of attaining stability in a rapidly changing world.

To enjoy Days, you have commit to its earthy dream logic. It is an extraordinary movie; it is not an easy sit.

A terrifically juicy, apocalyptic cinematic sacrament that dances around a fruitless relationship in dizzying circles. We are not stuffed inside a cavernous house of horrors this time around. But be prepared to feel equally suffocated by a ravenous family (albeit, a chosen, cultish kind) all the same.

The writer-director’s sharp script examines the many ways that the pain of grief can manifest, physically, mentally, and emotionally, and how it can fracture relationships if you let it. But his film is not all dark. It’s edited with a delightful humor, often landing a laugh with a quick cut or sly pan.

Tōtem is an all-encompassing tale of anticipatory grief. It’s a gentle caress of a film, the type that touches you with pitiful care, leaving you with a consequence of comfort and sadness, but also the knowledge of being seen.

For all five hours, Loktev’s camera is positioned close to her subjects, much like a friend in the same room, lending the project an intimacy and empathy that it would have otherwise lacked. And the length allows us to really get to know these people, feeling their frustration and their tension. It becomes our own. We don’t just see it. We feel it in our bones.

Compensation, director Zeinabu irene Davis’ masterpiece, is a film guided by the desire to represent facets of Black life and history left relatively unexplored.

Safdie’s daring choices merge with the best performance of Timothee Chalamet’s career for a story of a man who thinks he’s the best in the world at something, and that thinking is as important as actually being it.

I am a cat owner, I admit, but even I was surprised at the power of Kedi. Where did all that emotion come from? It's because what Torun really captures in her unexpectedly powerful film is kindness in its purest form.

Moss continues to deliver what we crave from woman characters: the kind of messy yet sturdy intricacy many of today’s thinly conceived you-go-girl female superheroes continue to lack.

It is a smart, thrilling piece of work that reminded me of other great part twos like “The Dark Knight” and “The Empire Strikes Back."

Identifying Features has a subtle frantic quality, a kind of restraint in bearing witness to the unspeakable horrors facing countless others who must stay silent.

The movie is angry and horrified and mournful but also warm, sensual, life affirming, and so blisteringly funny that critics and political commentators are sure to blast it as distasteful.

This masterpiece about propaganda, cinema and vanity as instruments of power and terror ends on an excruciatingly sustained, righteous money shot: a monster who could have been a good man suffocates on the truth.

Memoria is a sensory experience, but it takes a performer like Swinton to amplify Joe’s technique.

The Tale of Princess Kaguya is both very simple and head-spinningly confounding, a thing of endless visual beauty that seems to partake in a kind of pictorial minimalism but finds staggering possibilities for beautiful variation within its ineluctable modality. It’s a true work of art.

Pervert Park is eye-opening about the lives of convicted sex offenders, as inspired by a degree of empathy we need not be afraid of.

The wonder of Rashomon is that while the shadowplay of truth and memory is going on, we are absorbed by what we trust is an unfolding story.

James White is a masterful examination of how our behavior and the excuses we make about our lives fall away under certain, life-changing conditions.

Iranian filmmaker Sepideh Farsi’s “Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk” is not simply a documentary, but a poignant individual’s record. It is a reminder that every number we see on the news is a complex web of individuality. It’s historical sonder on screen.

The movie proceeds on two levels, as a crime thriller and as a character study, and it's this dual nature that makes it an entertainment at the same time it works as a message picture.