Harrowing, unpredictable, painful, confrontational, this is a movie for grown-ups.

Long Day's Journey Into Night forces viewers to be simultaneously hyper-aware and un-self-conscious about the fact that they are watching a movie that, in several scenes, is presented in real time.

Art College 1994 is unassumingly sweet because it’s about young people and their eternal quest for freedom and self-expression, mostly inside their own navels.

It’s a gorgeous artifact and a cinematic experiment that works beautifully, one innovative frame at a time, centered on Ronan’s soaring and soul-restoring performance.

I was blown away by the film’s use of mostly archival news footage after its premiere at Sundance earlier this year. Upon a second watch I found it even more compelling the way Perkins, and editors Jinx Godfrey and Daniel Lapira, expertly deploy this footage to tell not a biography of ‘The People’s Princess,’ but rather of the way the media shaped the perception of her public life.

Under the Shadow, a Farsi-language debut feature written and directed by Babak Anvari, creates a world where reality itself is suspect. In a year filled with great first features, add Under the Shadow to the list.

Bolstered by expert empathy, understated direction, and evocative performances, Earth Mama highlights resilience while whispers of social misogynoir are incorporated without abandon and confronted head-on by the film’s women.

A searing drama about a European refugee crisis that resonates with similar crises in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and yes, America’s southwestern border, Agnieszka Holland’s “Green Border” strikes me as the best and most important film to be released in the U.S. so far this year.

Heal the Living is director Katell Quillévéré's third feature, and shows her humane vision of the interconnectedness of humans and the fragile miracle of life. The plot comes straight out of any hospital-based episodic, but it's Quillévéré's approach that is so unique, and ultimately, so powerful.

With its brutal violence, explicit sex, and up-close views of blood, sweat, urine, and semen, it is proudly an R-rated film, verging on NC-17—though the X-rating, which was discontinued by the MPAA almost 30 years ago, might feel more appropriate.

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.

This is John Patton Ford's directorial debut, and it is an extremely impressive piece of work.

This is a quiet classic. Every choice is just right.

The Tale of Silyan functions as a dialect between old-world wisdom and modern socioeconomic realities, between the natural realm and the worries of mankind; it’s both spiritual and humanist, about forgiveness and adaptability, and makes a case for holding on to what you’ve always known to fend off the illusion of progress.

A stunning, enrapturing film, a crowning work by one of the American cinema’s most essential artists.

I Am Another You is finally so absorbing because it plays like a lyrical road odyssey that’s also a detective story. The more Wang pursues her subject, the more depth and complexity she finds in it, and we share her sense of discovery.

In watching so many films in a given week, month, or year, it’s rare to find one that sustains its thrills throughout its runtime, matches its gorgeous imagery with a compelling story, and defies easy categorization. Mati Diop’s haunting narrative feature debut Atlantics is one such movie. It’s unlike few other movies you’ll see this year or possibly this decade.

It reminded me of being a child and seeing the original "The Exorcist" and feeling as if I was seeing a documentary record of evil, one that was itself cursed, and that I should not even be looking at, because by looking at it, I ran the risk of releasing that evil into the world.

This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection is a searing epitaph for Mary Twala, a veteran performer at the peak of her absorbing presence. And it is a radical international breakthrough for Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese, a filmmaker who uses potential philosophical expressions to ask tough questions about the ravaged history of Africa.

It's attentive to regret and failure in ways that American films tend to avoid for fear of bumming viewers out and making them warn other people not to watch the movie. And it seems to understand the way people mythologize others and themselves, and the reasons it happens.

This is an unrelentingly gripping and often disturbing film that dares to visualize (with taste and restraint) some of the vilest behavior the species is capable of, and take full measure of the psychic damage it inflicts on innocent victims.

By fashioning a kinetic work that pulls together references and sources from Black literature, music, politics, and meme culture, “BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions” stands as a seismic intellectual awakening.

Delusion feeds addiction, and addiction needs a constant supply of delusion. Uncut Gems shows this electrified-fence feedback loop like no other film in recent memory. It's excruciating and exhilarating.

One of the year's best films, and one that transcends the superhero genre to emerge as an epic of operatic proportions. The numerous battle sequences that are staples of the genre are present, but they float on the surface of a deep ocean of character development and attention to details both grandiose and minute

As a team, Seligman and Sennott share a spot-on sense of comedic timing, knowing just when to throw in the next cutting remark, eye roll, or fake smile. They hit bullseye each and every time, all the way to the credits.

Sugarcane is soul-shaking. It’s profoundly evocative, with spoken memories and moments of inability to muster the words gut-punching with equal measure.

Angelina Jolie's First They Killed My Father is far and away her best work as a director: a rare film about a national tragedy told through the eyes and mind of a child, and as fine a war movie as has ever been made.

It is in every frame a beautiful and powerful film — a masterpiece.

Keegan's writing is spare and controlled: she gets a lot done in 116 pages, and Walsh's adaptation captures the suggested interiority of the story.

Working the grill, and not letting anyone else touch it, is musician and music lover, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson making his directorial debut. Not only does he give us a concert film, we get a history lesson, too.

Black Barbie: A Documentary is as elegant and enriching as the doll that inspired it.

When combined, the diametric halves form a charming diptych whose thematic and emotional profundity make for Miyake’s most accomplished work yet.

A fascinating and fastidiously complex study of one man’s moral choices at a crucial juncture in his life, Cristian Mungiu’s Graduation is a thoroughgoing masterpiece which offers proof that Romania’s cinematic upsurge remains the most vital and important national film movement of the current century.

This is the Amy Winehouse few of us ever got to witness, radiating cheeky self-confidence and finding joy in sharing her considerable gifts.

The film's writer-director, Tamara Jenkins is a brilliant chronicler of upper-middle class white people and their foibles, and her eye for detail is anthropologically exact, empathetic but never begging for sympathy.

Cuaron has made his most personal film to date, and the blend of the humane and the artistic within nearly every scene is breathtaking. It’s a masterful achievement in filmmaking as an empathy machine, a way for us to spend time in a place, in an era, and with characters we never would otherwise.

Among Diwan’s greatest feats with Happening is making a case not only for safe access to legal abortions, but also for true sexual freedom that dares to yearn for a world where slut-shaming is a thing of the past.

Imagine, if you will, a dystopian nightmare set in a post-industrialized world that’s forever teetering on its last legs, but never quite falls over. This description does not, admittedly, tell you much, but the movie’s less of a narrative-driven parable than a dazzling and corrosively cynical vision of a hyper-compartmentalized society that’s struggling to both die and reset.

This is a sexy, fun film filled with a lot of zingers, but it also feels a little less personal than many of Assayas’ movies, perhaps in part because it’s not stuffed to the gills with songs he loves.

All of it staged and shot with conscientiousness and ingenuity rarely seen in films from any country anymore. It is indeed a phantasmagoria, and perhaps an overload.

Jean Dujardin, who’s best known here for a still-controversial performance in Michel Hazanavicius’ “The Artist,” is utterly flawless as Picquart, maintaining proper military bearing even as he begins to seethe with indignation.

There are as many quietly effective moments as there are stand-up-and-cheer moments, and they’re all handled with skill and dexterity on both sides of the camera.

McQuarrie understands that these films are essentially tall tales with a sense of humor, skating on the edge of parody at all times while maintaining a poker face.

One of the best documentaries of the year so far.

You won’t see another music biopic quite like “Better Man,” regardless of your level of familiarity with its subject. There’s a surfeit of charm here that helps sell the nonsensical gimmick.

It’s disarming and lovely to see a spiritual growth parable rendered in Anderson’s jewel-box style. His delivery here is not willfully eccentric but gorgeously centered. Form underscores content in "Henry Sugar" in a most delightful way.

Far and away the best movie of the year.

In 499, a truly brilliant accomplishment of unconventional storytelling, form and theme coalesce to open a portal where textbook history becomes an active entity and clashes with the present for a forward-thinking exploration.

The scenarios of Hansen-Løve’s films can feel rarified and unique at first glance, yet they are painfully relatable on some level. They may be devoid of melodramatic showdowns, but there’s a quiet ferocity to them in the way they so deftly address our daily pain, insecurity, and loneliness, still resonating with us long after the movie’s over.

It’s a narratively simple film that has been interpreted differently by dozens of critics since its Cannes premiere last May, but it’s one that is impossible for this critic to shake, a reminder of what movies can do when they loosen the restraints of traditional narrative and remember that images are meant to evoke as much as they are to explain.

At every turn magnifying the dramatic power of this story is Newton, an actress of exceptional grit and grace who’s capable of communicating more emotion in a single, simmering look than many pages of dialogue could exposit.

A film this satisfying on every level — one that can be enjoyed purely for its narrative while also providing material for hours of discussion on its themes — is truly rare.

The vast majority of "Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros" finds Wiseman and his cinematographer James Bishop finding a good spot to observe two or three or many more people doing a thing and just leaving it there and watching what happens. Each of these moments is rich enough to feel like a short film unto itself: sometimes explanatory, other times subtly funny or empathetic.

Jimmie’s story is a slow ballad, a tragic ode, a dirty limerick, a wistful lament and a heartbreaking elegy. It’s a tribute to the notion of home that we all carry. This is one of the year’s best films.

Gerima’s Sankofa is an invocation not just to African ancestors, but also the present-day viewer. It calls to attention how history exists in the present, how the spirits of the long-gone can still affect today.

Pillion is a quietly devastating ode to the power of that self-discovery, a reminder that perhaps one of life’s greatest tragedies is that we can’t always remain in a relationship with the people we learn the most valuable lessons from.

Only 90 minutes long, the film feels intimate and yet at the same time vast. It has a relaxed pace, but an intensity of focus.

Once again, Edgar Wright has proven himself to be the master of whimsical filmmaking. Never I have seen a documentary as fun as Wright's The Sparks Brothers, which is thrilling from beginning to end.

The completeness and sureness of the movie’s aesthetic is a joy to behold, even when the images capture human beings doing savage things. You don’t really root for anyone in this film. They are criminals engaged in contests of will. But the film is not a value-neutral exercise. There is an undertone of lament to a lot of the violent action.

It’s a movie that sneaks up on you like great fiction, blending theme and character in a way that allows it to live in your mind after you see it, rolling around what it means to both the people in it and your own life.

A clear masterpiece held together by visual splendor and idiosyncratic performances.

This is a musical movie, not just because it features musical numbers. It weaves its spell not merely by what it does, but how it moves, and what it chooses to say or not say, and when it decides to proceed to the next scene.

In the end, all that can be relied upon are objects and gestures. The littlest things that tie us to each other. The film often slows to a standstill to show children playing, cars passing, people talking and streets emptied of traffic.

Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan spends his latest engrossingly verbose, three-hour opus, “About Dry Grasses,” warning us that every truth is partial as it’s tinged with the teller’s perspective.

Little Women solidifies Gerwig’s one-of-a-kind voice on the page and behind the camera, opening up the classic in a blissful and innovative screen adaptation that feels ageless and vastly of today.

Alexander Nanau's Collective has a propulsive energy, relentlessly building in urgency and outrage.

What’s most bewitching throughout “Scruggs” is its sense of detail. Its meshing of formal discipline and screwed-down content sometimes give it the sense of a work that has been carefully and elaborately embroidered rather than photographed.

Like its lead character, and the actor who plays him, Barry Levinson's The Survivor initially presents as familiar and comprehensible. The biographical drama then proceeds to surprise its audience, not with plot twists—we're told at the outset what the character's issues are, and have a pretty good idea of where the story is going to end up—but with how it keeps finding little ways to complicate and deepen every relationship and moment.

Sam Now is remarkable not only for its powerful subject matter and the restrained, intelligent way it examines its key players, but for how it simultaneously reaches the audience and everyone involved in the story.

Civil War is a furiously convincing and disturbing thing when you're watching it. It's a great movie that has its own life force. It's not like anything Garland has made. It's not like anything anyone has made, even though it contains echoes of dozens of other films (and novels) that appear to have fed the filmmaker's imagination.

Share is a relatively restrained work. Nothing is made explicit aside from the internal agony of its heroine, whose headspace we occupy so fully, we can’t help sharing in every tremulous emotion that ripples across her face.

Here the fellows seem to be getting along reasonably well. And director Maben’s frequent close-up views of guitarist David Gilmour’s cosmic-blues fretwork will make axe wonks happy, especially given the dimensions of the screen.

Riveting, original and breathtakingly accomplished on every level, Ida would be a masterpiece in any era, in any country.

Here is a film dedicated to recognizing our most common obstacles, its quiet storytelling largely accompanied by those feelings at the bottom of anyone’s gut: guilt, shame, defeat. Menashe is a gorgeous ode to everyone's inner screw-up.

Even with all the sexual trauma, The Chronology of Water manages the impossible, making a lot of the sex Lidia has as an adult look not just fun and playful, but mind-blowing and revelatory. Reclaiming your sexuality after having it stolen from you as a child is a huge, huge deal.

While writer/director Lulu Wang’s film is obviously personal and culturally specific, it achieves a universality and a resonance through its vivid depiction of a family in the midst of crisis.

Parasite is unquestionably one of the best films of the year. Just trust me on this one.

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.

Waves is unexpectedly ambitious and confident, the work of a filmmaker in complete control of his talents and using them to challenge himself. This is a deeper and more profound film than your average character drama, a masterpiece that’s hard to walk away from without checking your own grievances and grief. The ripple effect continues.

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.

No Other Land is a portrait of relentless cruelty, but it is also a portrait of the resilience of this besieged community.

The movie reminded me of what Peter Bogdanovich said of Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”: that it "is not a young man’s movie; it has the wisdom and poetic perceptions of an artist knowingly nearing the end of his life and career." The wisdom and poetry here are just as real and just as thoroughly felt.

Best debut feature I’ve seen in the last year, best Mexican film in recent memory, and best (black and white) cinematography since Pawel Pawlikowski’s equally stunning but very different “Ida.”

As gripping as the movie is as a legal thriller, it's even more notable as a portrait of a community.

Police Story is one of the great 1980s action films. It’s also one of the most 1980s action films.

Played by Matthias Schoenaerts, Vincent is a tormented and inarticulate man, and the riveting center of Alice Winocour's sexy, relentless thriller Disorder.

Whatever your feelings about Tarantino and his work, this is a tremendous visceral experience, with radiant colors, slate-somber black-and-white, and geysers of crimson blood. To quote the end of another Tarantino film, it just might be his masterpiece.

Easily the most astonishing and important movie to emerge from France in quite some time. While its style deserves to be called stunningly original and rapturously beautiful, the film is boldest in its artistic and philosophical implications, which pointedly go against many dominant trends of the last half-century.

An intelligently staged and executed creepfest that takes one of the most universally compelling of notions — the unbreakable bond that exists between a mother and her children — and approaches it in such a formally and narratively bleak manner that it makes the works of fellow countryman Michael Haneke seeming almost benign by comparison.

Bonello’s not here to tell us that the only thing to fear is fear itself. He’s here to tell us to be afraid—be very afraid. What he delivers is not just a densely packed art movie but the most potent horror picture of the decade so far.

My First Film is very emotional, but it’s also filled with ideas about cinema, being a woman, and creating art. Anger is willing to acknowledge her flaws and shortsightedness, and brave enough to recognize it is our flaws that make us artists, not our perfection.

Though Donald Trump is never mentioned by name in all 140 minutes of Ai Weiwei’s new documentary, Human Flow, the picture is, quite simply, the most monumental cinematic middle finger aimed at his scandal-laden administration to date.

Emotions never before experienced come surging to the surface. How Martinessi pulls this off — in what is his first feature — is nothing less than extraordinary.

It's a film filled with humor, charm, excitement and so many memorable images that many viewers will find themselves struggling to keep from blinking so as not to miss any of the eye-popping delights crammed into each overstuffed frame.

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.

The film explores the tender feelings of relationships at various stages, from budding playground crushes to adulthood’s alleged certainty. It’s the kind of nuanced movie that allows for self-reflection as well as entertainment, following two characters who illustrate how relationships—both fully realized and not—influence our lives.

The makers of Evolution may dazzle viewers with an intoxicating visual style, but they never lose sight of Nicolas' humanity. Do not miss this film.

A brave, revelatory, and beautifully realized film, it is easily one of the year’s best and most important documentaries.