Should you surrender yourself to the film’s beautiful cinematography and whispered musings, you’ll find a breathtakingly gorgeous movie about love, death and immigration.

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.

With its image folding onto itself like a wave in unstoppable motion, “The Human Surge 3” envelops the senses until the very end.

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

In part shocking and gentle while trekking between chaotic and serene extremes, Black Mother is a fresh piece of work in both how it progresses and how it's assembled like a scrapbook of remembrances.

Apatow also has a knack for spotting up-and-coming talent and using his considerable influence to help foster it on the biggest stage and under the brightest lights. He’s done this with Lena Dunham (“Girls”) and Amy Schumer (“Trainwreck”), and he’s done it again with Nanjiani.

A glowing self-portrait of their friendship, a call to activism, a summer bestie comedy full of devilish antics, and a frank immigrant story, this bold slice of life defies easy categorization.

Throughout its majestic 188-minute running time, there is a profound sum of self-negotiation in Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s The Wild Pear Tree; a slow-burning and unexpectedly humorous character study as reflective and impenetrable as anything in Ceylan’s filmography.

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.

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is a love letter to the art of spinning a good yarn, but it’s also a sharply observed paean to the lies and truths we tell ourselves so that we may function from day to day.

City of Ghosts doesn’t feel like it has the impact of Heineman’s previous film, the searing “Cartel Land,” but it is still a worthwhile examination of the importance of an institution currently under siege around the world: journalism.

It is that very lack of objectivity that makes Strong Island the experience that it is. It is a very tough film to shake.

Ernest and Celestine is the coziest movie you'll likely see all year. Every frame is suffused with a fireplace kind of warmth that, for me at least, cast an immediate spell that didn't let up.

Because it is the first film to be released by Higher Ground, the production company formed by Barack and Michelle Obama that signed a highly publicized deal with Netflix, American Factory will no doubt find an audience far larger than the typical documentary focusing on the contemporary labor movement.

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

Baby Driver feels both influenced by the modern era of self-aware, pop-culture filmmaking and charmingly old-fashioned at the same time, which is only one of its minor miracles. It’s as much fun as you’re going to have in a movie theater this year.

Writer-director Angus MacLachlan’s “A Little Prayer,” about a family in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, is like a beautiful hand-wrought sculpture that’s small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. Making it bigger would not have made it better. It’s perfect just as it is.

There is so much earth-shattering bravery on display in the miraculous Sabaya that you wonder how the Swedish-Kurdish director Hogir Hirori managed to pull off a documentary that avoids showy, predictable notes of brouhaha throughout.

Expertly editing together moving interviews with its subjects with archival material, Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution becomes a commentary on how to change the world. It’s not just common human decency that should lead to equality for disabled people, but the truth that empowerment for everyone is the only path to true progress for anyone.

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.

There’s something so rewarding about going to a movie and giving yourself over to a master like Park Chan-wook, someone whom you trust through all the twists and turns of a film as tonally complex as No Other Choice. It’s so easy to see all of the places where this unique gem could have gone wrong, and so satisfying to see it only make good choices from beginning to end.

Blue Film, through its many frank observations, stands as a vulnerable work about one’s past colliding with one’s present, in a bid to make peace with one’s true self.

This is an enchanting film. At every moment, one feels spellbound by its earnest aims and its heartwarming excursions.

It’s a powerful feeling to witness art that reminds us that all aspects of our existence are valuable, especially our pain.

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 is scary, sexy, and strange in ways that American films are rarely allowed to be, culminating in a sequence that cast the whole film in a new light for this viewer. We're all just sitting in that banquet hall, listening to the story requested by King Arthur, told by a master storyteller.

Michell’s film allows us the privilege to spend an unscripted hour or so with the four acting goddesses during their routine visit to Plowright’s home in the English countryside, and though our time with them is brief, the very thought of our world existing in their absence is almost unbearable.

One former gymnast says, "The line between tough coaching and abuse gets blurred." This may be what it takes to win gold at the Olympics, but is it worth the cost?

Some descriptions of The Salesman call it a thriller, suggesting a Hollywood-style suspense film. It’s not. It’s a psychological and moral drama.

Serra’s meticulous shooting and cutting relate to phenomenology; that is, it delivers an account of subjective experience. It implies that Rey’s “personality” is superfluous to his being.

Beautiful, melancholy and intellectually stimulating, “Dahomey” is a documentary that should be seen by all.

Get Out feels fresh and sharp in a way that studio horror movies almost never do. It is both unsettling and hysterical, often in the same moment, and it is totally unafraid to call people on their racist bullshit.

There’s so much beauty in this West Side Story. It merges things that have truly shaped pop culture from the graceful precision of Spielberg—who has always had a musical director’s eye in terms of how he choreographs his scenes—to the masterful songwriting of Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein to the brilliant writing of Tony Kushner to the immigrant experience in this country. It grabs you from the very beginning and takes you there. Somehow, someday, somewhere.

Visually splendid, but generically flat-footed, Song of the Sea is an animated fantasy that comes close to greatness, but is rarely as clever as it is comforting.

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 screenwriters’ way of describing this world’s fall from grace due to the lures of money and luxury has the power and inevitability of classic tragedy. It could be Greek or Shakespearean, though it is palpably modern and Colombian.

Trying to explain how this movie works as well as it does, without using excessive jargon or some kind of audiovisual aide, is tricky since “To the Ends of the Earth” isn’t about anything less than its heroine’s uncertain relationship with her foreign environment, and what she chooses to communicate simply by being seen and heard. Which is often thrilling to behold, but not so much to explain.

Like his prior film, 2015’s “Mountains May Depart,” this new picture from master Jia Zhangke is a three-part drama spanning decades. To this critic Ash is Purest White is a much more successful attempt at depicting a changing China through the lives of not-quite-tragic characters and their sufferings.

The film’s final scene is both charming and hilarious and puts a delightful ribbon on top of what the film’s opening so sneakily established.

This is a film we’ve never seen before: Syeed explores the heart of a rarely visited landscape, and the souls of the resilient Kashmiri people. This is an amazing film.

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.

An account of rodeo riders on a South Dakota reservation, it is so fact-based that it almost qualifies as a documentary. Yet the film’s style, its sense of light and landscape and mood, simultaneously give it the mesmerizing force of the most confident cinematic poetry.

Once in a while you encounter a piece that seems like a premeditated farewell — a conscious summing-up of the life and work — whether or not it was intended that way. Varda by Agnès, a combination autobiography and career survey overseen by the filmmaker, is that kind of movie.

The film is a history lesson, a poetic cry for justice, a testament to the Lakota Nation’s resilience and acknowledgment of the community’s loss—an incalculable loss that can never be fixed with underwhelming financial reparations—from the U.S. government’s 150-year betrayal of their people.

With beautiful cinematography and quiet, contemplative performances, there’s no denying how captivating The Delinquents is at the outset. But as the film progresses, it seems to lose sight of itself. Even with a runtime that exceeds three hours, the ideas and characters explored in The Delinquents are incomplete.

The movie’s senses of cinema are never present for self-consciously clever, self-referential reasons. Rather, they’re deeply intertwined with considerations of age and mortality.

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.

The extraordinarily assured feature film debut by writer-director and standup comedian Bo Burnham, starts out with one of these videos and it is so touchingly real, so embarrassingly true to life, you might swear it was improvised, or found footage. But it's not. This is Elsie Fisher, a 13-year-old actress herself, amazingly in touch with what it's like to be in the stage of life she's actually in.

The feature filmmaking debut from writer/director/co-editor Lauren Hadaway is an intimate and powerful sensory experience all around, but it’s the sound editing—Hadaway’s first calling, having worked with the likes of Quentin Tarantino, Zack Snyder, and Damien Chazelle—that grabs you off the top and envelops you throughout.

A powerful and entertaining film about a gang of girls, and what friendship means, the protection it provides.

There's always something to ponder with this film, which gets stranger and more polarizing as it goes along.

If there are any heroic figures in this sad tale, it’s the women of Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murders, a grassroots activists organization that took notice of the killings back in the ‘80s and spent decades trying to bring official and media attention to them.

A Nice Indian Boy is nowhere near the flamboyance of DDLJ, but it brings that same sense of the joy, the anxiety, and yes, the bigness of love to a wonderfully warm-hearted romance.

Like most of the director’s work—including “Ahed’s Knee”—it has many expressionistic and dreamlike elements, and weaves a loose, fairly simple story around wild situations that are mainly about questioning Israel’s self-image, prodding it, sometimes tearing at it.

It feels somewhat clichéd to call an animated adventure film a “delight,” but it’s the best word for the latest from GKids, April and the Extraordinary World, a joyful, accomplished movie that echoes “The City of Lost Children,” “The Adventures of Tintin,” “Metropolis,” “Howl’s Moving Castle” and something unique into a, well, delightful piece of work.

One could watch The Wild Robot with the sound off entirely and still have a rewarding experience—turn it on and you have one of the best animated films of the decade.

It’s very easy to dismiss a film about a hapless loser. But it’s nearly as difficult to ignore a performance like the one Rios gives.

In Andrew Bujalski and Regina Hall’s extremely capable hands, empathy becomes as active and compelling as any car chase, sword fight, or knock-down, drag-out fight. A simple thing, yes, but one well worth a valiant battle.

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.

Amid tableaus of sundrenched landscapes, Simón’s instinct for eliciting naturalistic performances—displayed in her feature debut “Summer 1993"—marries a remarkably stealth narrative structure that lets us into the lives of these people, collectively and individually.

At times, Hale County This Morning, This Evening evokes the work of Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose films “Tropical Malady” and “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” tell the stories of people and places primarily through their visuals.

In "The Taste of Things," no distinction is made between cooking for someone and loving them. It's "all one."

This is melodrama of the highest order, which is a compliment, for melodrama is not a bad thing. It is part of some of the greatest works of art, and in the right hands, it can elicit an ennui-shattering response from the audience.

Hall, Grau, editor Sabine Hoffman, and composer Devonté Hynes do an excellent job of casting a hypnotic spell on the audience. This is a deliberately paced film with enveloping moods that feel like symphony movements.

The character work here is both intimate and nicely compressed. But the movie really gets to its most sublime heights visually.

With her harrowing film In the Same Breath, Wang has established herself as the preeminent documenter of the pain inflicted by oppressive regimes on their people.

It's fascinating that while the movie deals with exceptionally grim material, it never becomes too unbearable to watch.

Honeyland is both an immersive experience and an undeniably gorgeous reflection on our relationship to nature.

The Beasts may not be realistic, but it is genuinely eerie.

A tricky movie, but not in a way that’s dishonest. Its first feet are in the school of miserablist realism, and while director Lee never abandons his things-as-they-are approach, he tells a love story by letting magic in at unusual angles.

Close to Vermeer is a gentle, thoughtful documentary, populated by knowledgeable individuals like Vandivere, experts at the top of their fields who have maintained their passion and love for the subject.

When Linklater's style works (and it works in Everybody Wants Some!!), there is nobody quite like him.

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.

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.

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

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.

The result is absolutely delicious, a svelte piece of entertainment that feels like a vintage yarn yet very much represents our own current anxieties, questions of sustaining trust in relationships and high-stake careers.

Wang and Zhang's film ends with an explication of a new “two child” policy, a celebration of the one-child-policy’s overall success. The propaganda for his policy is as cheesy as that for the old one. A sense of dread as to how this policy will be enacted intermingles with a strange feeling that a true reckoning with the old way is still very far off.

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.

Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin, is one of the most deeply personal films of his long and brilliant career, I am not just indulging in a bit of critical hyperbole.

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.

To this viewer, it develops into a pretty nifty piece of genre work, a thriller that’s expertly made even if it doesn’t quite hum like the best Park films. The fact that a good, well-made thriller feels almost like a disappointment given this creator’s pedigree is just a testament to the work he’s produced before.

There are dozens of carefully observed and touching moments in “Daughters,” which won both the Documentary Audience Award and the Festival Favorite Award at Sundance.

You think [Spielberg's] giving you everything and that it's all right there on the surface, but the movie lingers in the mind, and the longer it stays there, and the more times you re-watch it, the more you realize it's giving you something different from, and better than, what you saw the first time.

It's one of those rare films where the title has real meaning, one that grows in power the moment the credits roll.

Directed by Madeleine Gavin, Beyond Utopia is a bracing and frequently jaw-dropping look at, first and foremost, the discontented people of North Korea who attempt defections doggedly. It’s a more difficult trip than you’d probably imagine.

Vermiglio, about the lives of villagers in the mid-century Italian Alps near the end of World War II, is the rare movie set in the past that seems attuned to the consciousness of the time it depicts.

I imagine even Billy Wilder would’ve gotten misty-eyed during the final, perfectly-pitched moments of this extraordinary film.

One of the many “stand up and cheer” moments in Morgan Neville’s enchanting documentary, at least for me, is when cellist Yo-Yo Ma describes his first meeting with the man who will forever be known as the proprietor of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.” “He scared the hell out of me,” says Ma.

In many ways, Fruitvale Station is as green and earnest as "Boyz N the Hood," a debut film made by another alumnus of Coogler's alma mater, USC: John Singleton. Yet its ambition is closer to that of the most important American indie film in at least a decade, Patrick Wang's "In the Family," a must-see that's now available on DVD.

It’s difficult to fully contextualize how incredible Torres is here; she matches the film’s silent grief by keenly deploying her character’s internal angst into her slender frame. Through her formidable presence, the deliberate “I’m Still Here,” a film that locates further meaning in the face of Brazil’s present Far-Right wave, remains in the heart long after the picture fades.

Watchers of the Sky, an intricate and immensely powerful documentary, directed by Edet Belzberg, is both the story of Raphael Lemkin as well as a harrowing examination of genocide, past, recent, and ongoing.

We’re left with the question of what a person can hang on to when everything about their identity and values leaves them.

It is voluptuously beautiful, frankly sexual, occasionally perverse and horrifically violent.

It's as much an anthropological pseudo-documentary as it is a drama, one that sometimes evokes the Terrence Malick philosophy of "The Thin Red Line," which began by insisting that humans are a part of nature and that when humans war with other humans, it is nature warring with itself.

If nothing else, Black Is King is a jaw-dropping visual achievement.

Against the Tide, a documentary directed by Sarvnik Kaur, depicts environmental disaster with an intimate lens.

The Work asserts that the collapse of emotional barriers feels like an exorcism, and that life’s true labor involves facing and contending with the blues inside us all. Prison blues doesn’t only belong to actual prisoners.