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.

It's magnificent and unique, an adrenaline shot of wonder and skill.

Fonda’s own interviews are candid and insightful. Her regrets about the way she allowed herself to be used by the North Vietnamese are sincere but practiced.

Newtown is being characterized as an apolitical documentary, just a portrait of Newtown before, during and after the shootings, but that's not entirely true.

Not much has changed for people of color, which probably wouldn’t surprise the author. And yet, he’d demand we not give up. This film powerfully conveys that message. The struggle is real, but so is the joy. We live, we laugh, we love and we die. But we are not gone. Our story continues, carried onward by our storytellers.

Birdman is a complete blast from start to finish.

Can You Ever Forgive Me? comes from a place of understanding and love that few other biopics truly dive into, and it makes this difficult character a joy to meet.

Textured in ways that family entertainment is rarely allowed to be and even more visually ambitious that the other Cartoon Saloon films, this is a special movie.

As an examination of memory and experience and how they shape us, The Missing Picture is meaningful beyond its specific subject matter.

Foumbi’s Our Father, The Devil manages to take overused themes like trauma and grief and imbue them with every facet of their respective meaning.

Not the type of Iraq soldier film one may expect. It does present intricate experiences of PTSD, but does so with distance.

It’s a deeply personal and very moving film, anchored by the best work of Antonio Banderas’ career.

Familiar Touch is a gorgeous drama with an open, aching heart.

Here was a film that took elements that one might have encountered in other movies in the past—black humor, gore, surrealism, erotic imagery, gorgeous black-and-white cinematography and oddball performances—and presented them in such a unique and deeply personal manner that the end result was something that literally looked, sounded and felt like nothing that had ever come before it.

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.

This is a dazzling film—not just one of Haynes' best, but possibly the one that his whole career, with all of its self-aware formal and historical experiments, has been building toward.

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.

Stanley Nelson’s documentary Attica is a harrowing, infuriating look at racism and the abuse of power by people who see others as inhuman.

"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"...

The movie has its own unique life force, and such confidence that if you're tuned into its wavelength, you'll forget to speculate on what will happen next.

As laudable as the movie is, it does not quite achieve greatness. That’s the fault of both its indirectness and its obviousness.

It’s got that finely-tuned, perfect blend of every technical element that it takes to make a great action film, all in service of a fantastic script and anchored by great action performances to not just work within the genre but to transcend it. This is one of the best movies of the year.

Boseman never gave less than one hundred percent to his often demanding roles. His work here as the trumpet player, Levee, is no exception. It’s no stretch to say his last performance may be his finest.

If you can hook into it, Level Five is not just witty, insinuating, and penetrating; it’s also unexpectedly moving and, as deliberately threadbare as it often looks, cinematically rich.

Pablo Berger’s “Robot Dreams” is a lovely fable about partnership and imagination, a movie that uses the form of animated cinema to tell a story in a way that couldn’t be possible in any other medium.

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.

En el Séptimo Dia makes its points powerfully, even more so since the set-up is so simple. Even better, its third act is as thrilling as anything in a traditional sports movie. McKay's control of tone and rhythm is in high gear, creating a work both thought-provoking and hugely entertaining.

One of the best documentaries of the year so far.

The film’s winsome, self-satisfied comedy will no doubt appeal more to viewers who prize juvenile hi-jinks over the cultural moment it depicts.

Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story is one of the most frustrating Martin Scorsese films as well as one of the most out-of-character.

This is heavy material, to be sure, but it’s not without dark humor.

The “endlessness” of the film encompasses a lot of absurdity and disappointment, but its notes of grace sound the loudest.

Vesuvius might erupt again. The angel of history keeps moving forward. Time destroys, preserves, and then returns (one hopes, at least). Rosi’s film is a meditative and moving document showing that process and possibility.

A movie that finds poetry in the story of a seemingly average woman. It is a gorgeous film that’s alternately dreamlike in the way it captures the beauty of this country and grounded in its story about the kind of person we don’t usually see in movies. I love everything about it.

To be sure, cancer may not sound like an inviting cinematic subject, especially to families and individuals who—like this writer—have been faced with its sometimes-overwhelming trials. Yet the effect of Hope is anything but depressing; it’s reassuring proof of art’s ability to comfort as it clarifies.

The movie, then, is not just a niche film but a film for a niche of a niche. Rather than being ideal for people who know a bit about French cinema and want to know more, it’s best suited to people who know a considerable amount about French cinema (and culture) of the early sound era and want to delve deeper.

Farhadi’s orchestration of all these elements is complex and viscerally kinetic; few viewers will experience it without holding their breath at some point.

The result is a film that is funny and sad, scary and sweet, disturbing and revelatory.

Here is a formidable opus whose real spiritual relative is Tennyson's "Ulysses". Yes. All is Lost is that good.

With 2008’s “In Bruges,” and now “The Banshees of Inisherin,” the Irish actors, under the writing and directing aegis of frequently pleasantly perverse Martin McDonagh, display a chemistry and virtuosic interplay that recalls nothing so much as the maestros of the early 20th-century Comedy of Exasperation.

Stillman pushes the comedy right up to the edge of screwball.

Creepy beyond belief, Hereditary is one of those movies you shouldn't describe in detail, because if you do, it will not only ruin surprises but make the listener wonder if you saw the film or dreamed it.

The movie's major, perhaps only, fault is that its brilliant construction denies it the storytelling clarity and basic insights that conventional nonfiction films provide.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is an uncomfortable but entrancing watch, a tribute to shattering silence around family secrets and bucking tradition for the sake of empathy.

Easily among this year’s finest films and laced with an unapologetic social message, Happy As Lazzaro dares one to imagine a reality where each individual would task themselves to be as selfless and morally whole as its main protagonist. If only.

At heart, Caught By the Tides is an experimental romantic drama, though that makes it sound unapproachable and a little gimmicky. It’s neither, thankfully, and that’s largely thanks to Jia’s typical focus on the material signs of time’s relentless passage.

Written and directed by Jackson, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is a poetic memoir of Mack’s life. Memories will appear one after another from her youngest days to her gray-haired years, non-sequentially, creating a winding road that bobs and weaves through mundane and life-defining moments alike.

It would seem like an impossible feat, but somehow, directors Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman have breathed thrilling new life into the comic book movie. The way they play with tone, form and texture is constantly inventive and giddily alive.

Oakley’s care and McEwen’s intense performance make Blue Jean one of this year’s most impressive movies. It deals with so much heartbreak without as many words; its pain is communicated through its somberly beautiful palette and performances.

This “Macbeth” is as much about mood as it is about verse. The visuals acknowledge this, pulling us into the action as if we were seeing it on stage. But nowhere is the evocation of mood more prominent than in Kathryn Hunter’s revelatory performance as the Witches.

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

Life itself, that loaded two-word phrase, is what Roger really wrote about when he wrote about movies.

The Shape of Water doesn't cohere into the fairy tale promised by the dreamy opening. It makes its points with a jackhammer, wielding symbols in blaring neon.

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.

A digitally restored version arrives in spectacular fashion with its mixture of bold imagery and biting wit.

Bisbee '17 is also about the artifice of storytelling and the alchemy of acting, and that magic moment when we decide to forget that we're seeing performers pretending to be long-dead people.

Resurrection is ravishing in its command of shadow and light, but it studiously hollows out any sense of soul beneath the surface.

Strickland’s film is a daring, atmosphere-soaked piece of kink hypnotherapy that pays explicit homage to the films of Franco, down to the casting of former Franco regular, formidable femme Monica Swinn, in a sinister role.

My Golden Days exists simultaneously within and outside of its characters' headspace, a testament to Deplechin's powers of imaginative sensitivity.

To watch it is both painful and vital, like taking a great deep breath with a set of broken ribs. It will hurt. The pain is worth the reward.

The result is a striking look at the sacrifices and concessions people make in the fight for freedom and how propaganda can make it seem impossible to win.

Unlike American movies, where our identification with one character or another would likely be imposed from the outset, Force Majeure stands back from its couple, allowing us to inspect the characters from a discreet distance and draw our own conclusions.

Good One is intriguing in its disinterest in explanations. The film's refusal to "satisfy" an audience with easy explanations or even cathartic moments pulls you into its atmosphere, dragging you into the weird dynamic which grows more claustrophobic by the moment.

It is a great pleasure to see actors who know how to use every bit of their real, unfixed faces to show the subtlest details of thought and emotion.

Fashioned out of fresh faces unable to lie to the camera, “Playground” is a study in human behavior wrapped in equal parts fear and curiosity.

As written by Sean Baker and Chris Bergoch and directed by Baker, it's assured and immensely likable, and truly independent in story and style.

An intensely felt cinematic experience.

Yet, love and beauty remain a constant source of minute, if not fleeting, pleasure. It is not a cure-all in the way it would be in a Disney princess fantasy, but it is enough to sustain existence in spite of its high risk and low reward ratio.

Its visual landscape is unlike any I’ve experienced, and though everything about it is aggressively repellant, it still managed to hold me in a constant state of gobsmacked awe.

Renaissance is both intimate and vast as it basks in Beyoncé’s impossible beauty but also turns the camera toward the audience to emphasize the powerful sense of community the Beyhive provides.

It’s a daring, long film that sometimes feels too chilly and self-indulgent, but it builds to a series of scenes that hit like a punch.

The key to this movie’s winning emotional delicacy is its formal sturdiness. Every shot has a specific job to do and does it well. The performances are measured and restrained.

Nebraska is full of complicated people marked by flaws and failures, mistakes and regrets; they can be selfish bastards, too. It often feels as though Payne is trying to strip away the cliché that the region is populated exclusively by hardworking, decent hearted types.

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."

Like its hero, Stand Clear of the Closing Doors goes with the flow and has a chaotic and thrilling time but doesn't know where to go or what to do with itself.

Despite the harrowing stories that fill the film from start to finish, Dreamcatcher is not hopeless.

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

Riveting, wrenching and extraordinarily important.

Watching Krisha is a revelation: there are expected "rules" for such material (a former addict returns home for a holiday), but then director/writer Trey Edward Shults breaks every rule, making those rules seem tired and arbitrary in the process, and he does so with bravura, confidence, flash.

Dawson City: Frozen Time is a rather clunky and uninspiring title for a film that’s both revelatory and deeply fascinating.

Asili experiments with cinematic form as he considers “inheritance” as legacy, heritage, and tradition, resulting in an engrossing, challenging film that allures and confronts you in equal measure.

The finest and most genuinely provocative horror movie to emerge in this still very-new century.

Little Men doesn't reach the humanist tragedy of "Love Is Strange," but that's an unfair comparison since very few films achieve what "Love Is Strange" does. Little Men is extremely powerful in its own right, with its devotion to its characters' differing perspectives so refreshing in an increasingly black-and-white world.

Welcome to Chechnya is both astonishingly groundbreaking in its use of technology, and difficult to watch.

One of those rare animated movies that transports you to a different setting without demanding that you focus on narrative or character development.

Like Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” and Louis Psihoyos’ “The Cove” in years past, the film makes a powerful case less through argument than by using cinema’s most basic tool: visual proof.

Many of the year’s best films feature female protagonists who are resolved to live on their own terms, and My Happy Family ranks right alongside them.

One thing that’s fascinating in the story’s second half is the amount of expertise and effort that’s expended on searching for Alyosha.

There's something a little too neat about the structure of Showing Up, and the pigeon wears its symbolism on its broken wings. But the piercing specificity of Reichardt's vision, and her insights into the dynamics of an art scene like the one in Portland, are spot on.

EPiC is so vivid it makes Elvis seem not like an entertainer from the past, but a figure who lives in the perpetual Right Now.

Even if you don’t want to discuss the proliferation of bullshit that can be at least partly attributed to people like Jones, the specifics of this case are horrifying and enraging. Most importantly, they’re brought to life in Dan Reed’s The Truth vs. Alex Jones in a way that’s sharply edited, sensitively constructed, and expertly crafted.

For me, One Cut of the Dead is good enough. It sometimes surprised me while I waited for a payoff that Ueda basically delivered, even if he and his collaborators never made me involuntarily leave my seat.

The new film combines the filmmaker’s distinctive stylistic verve and droll wit with the talents and charisma of Mexico’s leading international movie star, Gael Garcia Bernal.

Jane Schoenbrun’s second narrative feature is a gnawing search for belonging in the static spaces between analog pixels.

May December is one of Haynes' most unbalancing and provocative films.

The film's flintiness and initially subdued nastiness set it apart from most other action films about the thin line separating cops from crooks.

This 43-year-old filmmaker is a major talent. Though he may not be the second coming of Fellini, his films all have a funny, refreshingly complex perspective, and his latest work is a perfect example of why he is the next big Italian thing.

By putting the garrulous, sometimes cranky Hersh on film, “Cover-Up” reveals, in the behavioral sense, the obsessiveness that makes an investigative journalist.