A lovely companion piece to the latest album from the legendary musician, a gorgeous, introspective journey into the very concept of the American conscience.

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.

The most fascinating thing about the film is how it leans into predictability rather than make a show of fighting it.

The latest example of what I call an emperor’s-new-clothes film is Neon Bull.

There are so many ways to go wrong with this story, which we are told was inspired by an unidentified real father and son. Writer/director Uberto Pasolini does not let that happen, relying on the most ordinary details to take on greater and greater weight.

Reckoning with the sacrifices that people make to survive in this country, and with the ugliness of what real love can sometimes resemble, [Liu] emerges with an achingly honest meditation on the loneliness of building a life for oneself.

An astonishing directorial debut.

These movies are not WHOdunits as much as WHYdunits, and it’s everything that’s under the murder and its resolution that makes this sermon so entertaining and so powerful.

The film is deeply sympathetic to the impossibly difficult choices these girls face and respectful of their efforts to do better for their babies than their parents did for them.

The Testament of Ann Lee is a large-scale production, mighty in detail, and Fastvold proves herself up to the challenge of her own aspirations, tackling the weighty biography with the same sort of labor-intensive dedication characteristic of its subject.

X is a clever formal experiment, but one that plays like a feature-length joke for horror fans and filmmakers rather than offering a distinct perspective. West conjures nasty fun with a genre enthusiast’s expertise and then doesn't offer much beyond that.

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.

Raoul Walsh’s essential 1939 gangster movie that turns Prohibition into a tragic nostalgia trip, is a terrifically entertaining film in its own right, rough and witty and fast on its feet in a way that only a ‘30’s Hollywood production could be. But it’s also a historically vital hinge movie of sorts, for its director, for its stars, and even for its genre, which was reaching maturity at the end of the decade that saw its central archetypes created.

Knock Down the House prevails with albeit straight-forward intentions: to amplify the women who are both mad as hell and doing something about it.

Dinner in America, written, directed, and edited by Adam Rehmeier, is a movie with anti-establishment anti-social quicksilver coursing through its veins, but at its heart it is a sweet love story, one of the sweetest in recent memory.

Coup 53 is worth seeing, but its general effect on this viewer was to seek out more books, rather than movies, on the subject. Which I suppose is something.

Although this is all presented by Diễm with no judgment, it’s hard to watch such young girls be so blithe about a tradition that robs them of their autonomy.

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On will make your spirit soar and remind you to enjoy those you love, inhale a bit of fresh air, and respect the earth every second as though it were your very first time.

Filmed in Central Appalachia—including the director's home state of West Virginia—King Coal moves beyond shallow impressions of the region with a real love for her neighbors and prodding questions about what it means to identify with an industry that has harmed and exploited generations of families.

It’s one of those rare movies that makes you feel edgy, conveying its protagonist’s dilemma in ways that prey on your nerves and emotions more than just relaying a night-from-hell anecdote.

Reichardt—who also edited the film and has said that she based the story on details from many real-life people and incidents, including the 1972 robbery of an art museum in Worcester, Massachusetts—builds the movie with her characteristic mix of dry humor, incisive psychological details, and elegant, minimalistic visuals.

Viewers are not privileged with a more thoughtful, specific view of the institutionalized problems that Sudanese natives face because Sauper's not interested in making that kind of film.

The result is a dark and stirring variation on the standard coming-of-age narrative that, much like its central characters, does not follow the path one might expect.

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.

As Olfa and the sisters give perspective on their shared trauma and heartbreak and discuss the underlying principles of it with each other and the actresses, what ensues is not simply the story of a family but a tour de force examination of women’s place in the world and the costs of how they choose to cope with it.

Ira Sachs is one of American cinema’s most reliable crafters of human-scaled cinematic dramas. That description doesn’t sound too terribly exciting, so I should assure you that Passages is some kind of time at the movies—a briskly-moving, turbulent, emphatically sexy, deliberately exasperating love triangle in crazy times.

Trophy strives to be kind and fair. But it is unmerciful in its exploration of the hunting business. Like a ruthless lawyer, it loves poking holes in arguments that appear rock-solid.

Incredibles 2 understands something that most family sequels, even the Pixar ones, fail to comprehend—we don’t just want to repeat something we loved before. We want to love it all over again. You will with Incredibles 2.

Totally Under Control will become a useful document for the study of this pandemic in its eventual aftermath. It’s a bit too surface-level to be completely satisfying, but it was enough to overwhelm and upset me so much that I had to turn it off several times to decompress.

This is a tearjerker of a film but also a joyous one.

Chasing Ghosts has a great idea in showcasing as much of Traylor’s work as possible, and next to the creations of other Black artists, but its talking head presentation is fairly didactic.

On both levels of the film, the archival and the textual, there’s much that’s fascinating and worthwhile. What’s regrettable is the refusal to contextualize and explore the ongoing ramifications of what we see and hear.

Cane River offers American indie cinema a hero worth remembering, and a romantic with a vision beyond his years.

To be honest, the cynic in me thought “Paper & Glue” was going to be a piece of fluff that would make me roll my eyes at the notion of this type of art having an effect on society at large. But the film turns out to be a lot sharper, more pointed, and more poignant than its subject matter may imply.

Strange and creepy and entertaining.

Drowning Dry holds you at arm’s length, but I found it more moving—and unsettling—because of that.

This is rare, nuanced storytelling, anchored by one of Brad Pitt’s career-best performances and remarkable technical elements on every level. It’s a special film.

A typical Hong character performs the same actions over and over again, with minor, but noticeably different results.

The result is a story that’s hair-raisingly watchable and frequently moving, regardless of what you believe you might already know of Wilson’s life.

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 question of how we see our history and who gets to decide is powerfully presented, with respect and insight, in the documentary “Natchez.”

This is an exhilarating debut that courses with an all-enveloping urgency and life, even if you may occasionally want to look away.

The film’s images entangle us with the characters, which makes its indeterminate ending a little more disappointing than it might have been. But this post-cataclysm habitat is worth paying a visit anyway.

Its beating heart is in a story of youth. Reckless, fearless, joyous, always-moving youth.

Holofcener finds both humor and wisdom within the complexity of her cringe comedy, providing rich fodder for conversations afterward. If anything, You Hurt My Feelings might be a little too short; it’s so well-paced and engrossing it just zips by.

If Black & Blues returns to the same melody a few too many times, it doesn't diminish the overall achievement, which feels free in a way that these sorts of films rarely do.

Wiseman himself is also the last person who’d call his films “objective,” because they’re not. It’s more that their point of view is multi-faceted, sophisticated, connoting a point of view that’s deeply felt but not on-the-nose obvious.

A very unusual and rare kind of movie: one that is good in spite of itself. Which isn’t to say that the movie’s director and co-producer Tony Stone doesn’t make some provocative, interesting choices.

It’s one of the year’s best and most distinctive movies, though sure to be divisive, even alienating for some viewers, in the manner of nearly all Malick’s films to one degree or another.

The Meyerowitz Stories shockingly belongs to Sandler, who is absolutely fantastic.

Arrebato invokes cinema as an otherworldly entity that possesses, just as addictive and destructive as mind-altering substances injected into the bloodstream.

Ian McKellen is stunningly good as the older painter, Julian Sklar, a 1960s Swingin’ London sensation who has aged into a decrepit caricature of himself.

Al Maysles, a great fixture in the New York film scene and an influence on several generations of documentary filmmakers, was a keen, understanding observer of human nature and behavior from the 1950s up until his death last month at age 88. Iris and another recently completed film, “In Transit,” will stand as testaments to his unique talents and contributions to the documentary form.

The film ultimately runs up against the limitations of its own nature.... But it’s still an exhilarating ride, filled with archetypal characters with plausible psychologies, melodramatic confrontations fueled by soaring emotions, and performances that can be described as good, period, rather than "good, for 'Star Wars.'"

It’s an unflinching depiction of life in a vulnerable city, a place where innocents are constantly under attack, and the few people doing their best to protect it.

Private Property is a terrific example of the spell that a confident film can weave by placing a handful of troubled characters in a confined location, and in the end it does feel like as much of a tragedy as a potboiler.

The film captures both the pain and the power of people at the base of a global infrastructure. By not departing from the frontlines of the fight against Amazon’s labor exploitation, Story and Maing bring the true face of their struggle into focus.

Gibney crams as much material as possible into a quick two hours (he really knows how to edit and pace a piece like this one as it feels much shorter) and yet, to be fair, there’s still an angle missing just by virtue of the fact that he couldn’t get anyone from the Church of Scientology today on camera.

A brutal but stirring fantasy.

Unfortunately, The Public Enemy isn't as tightly scripted a movie as some other Cagney gangster pictures. Even at 81 minutes, it meanders a bit, and one setpiece doesn't often seem to follow another, logically or psychologically.

A tight, restrained, worthwhile first feature from a cast and crew whose next jaunt into the woods will surely worth sharpening our teeth for.

Again and again, I marveled at the humanist depth of the world Haigh creates, one that can only be rendered by a truly great writer and director, working near the top of his game.

Claire's Camera is, like many of Hong's best comedies before it, amusing without necessarily being laugh-out-loud funny.

The finish line in Bergman Island is of the opaque kind. But anything else would have done Hansen-Løve’s wistful sleepwalk through memory, time and cinema injustice. Her film is less a direct, clear-cut homage to Bergman, and more a searching exploration of reality and art in the way they mirror, propel and feed on one another, washing ashore remembrances both dreamy and lifelike.

It’s a visual feast that succeeds as both a gleeful escape and a battle cry.

It works best when it's most impressionistic. Although the big events in life have the most impact (you wonder what on earth is going to happen to these three boys), it's the small things — the early morning light, the tall grass, the black flowing river, Ma's smudged mascara, Paps' dazzling grin — that we really remember.

The film’s message is quiet but clear: Darius McCollum is black and neurodivergent, and society treats him differently than it would if he were white and neurotypical. The justice system, in particular, seems designed to chew him up.

Strange Darling, J.T. Mollner’s self-consciously edgy gotcha of a serial-killer thriller, is so high on its own cleverness that it never stops to think about what it’s actually saying.

Boy and the World is dazzlingly colorful and alive, often resembling a more elaborate version of the kind of childlike drawings you probably have stuck to your refrigerator door right now.

The Eternal Daughter feels like a first draft, or a sketch to be filled in later. This is perhaps reflected in onscreen Julie's struggles to even write an outline. Hogg's outlines, though, are more interesting than other people's finished products. There's always so much to think about.

The Settlers is not just an account of historical events, it's a national reckoning with a barbaric past. The fact that The Settlers is shot with such piercing beauty intensifies its message.

One Night Only becomes the story of a man surrounded by music his whole life who knew how to filter those influences through a distinct voice. The film sometimes runs too long, but its subject has earned that length. He sounds phenomenal, and he’s filled with, well, personality.

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.

As with Morgan Neville's documentary "Won't You Be My Neighbor?", the tears may flow freely due to nostalgia or from some subjects hitting too close to home, but A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood fits as a companion piece. Where the documentary offers a more complex view of the man in the red sweater and tennis shoes, Heller’s movie is more about the cultural impression Rogers left behind.

The Forty-Year-Old Version is brimming with sharp but often understated humor and a deep experience of making art.

An observation that when you’re running away, it doesn’t matter where you’re running to as much as it matters where you’re running from. “Compartment No. 6” has an always energetic sense of place even when it’s keeping to the confined space of its title room. Combined with the committed acting, it makes for a worthwhile journey.

It’s the humblest deep movie of recent years, a work in the same vein as American marginalia like “Stranger Than Paradise” and “Trees Lounge,” but with its own rhythm and color, its own emotional temperature, its own reasons for revealing and concealing things.

In his impressive debut feature, writer/director Jason Yu strikes a fine balance between character-driven and high-concept horror.

Survival is easier said that done, and 7 Prisoners is a fraught thriller that wonders at the fragility of the human soul.

If watching a low-key portrait of a person struggling through a personal crisis with a refreshing lack of cheap melodrama sounds intriguing, well, that's exactly what director Kazik Radwanski has delivered with undeniably compelling results.

Beyond the political implications, this is a terrifically dramatic and very emotional film; understandably, some of the interviewees struggle to maintain composure when recalling their past trials.

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.

It’s an all too familiar, almost clichéd tale you’ve heard and seen before, complete with a much-yearned freedom journey to nowhere. But Mozaffari gradually makes this particular doomed excursion her own with a distinct style, even though her plotting choices don’t approach a sense of high-stakes urgency.

While the documentary does conjure up the whole sex-drugs-rock ’n’ roll ethos of that fabled time with great flair and pungency, it also movingly probes the hazards and costs of the overindulgence and self-deceptions the era’s lures often entailed. In essence, it serves up the myth and a necessary corrective to it simultaneously.

This is a purely sensationalistic cinematic experience that paradoxically encourages reflection and contemplation.

For most of its 80-minute length, The Pearl Button meditates lyrically on water and its effects on humankind. Then it makes a sharp turn into evoking the horrors of the Pinochet regime, a transition that feels awkward and rather forced, diluting the film’s ultimate impact.

This is a strong film that tackles a charged subject in a fair and even-handed manner. The Force will give viewers of all social and political persuasions much to think about afterwards.

Zlotowski’s stylized depiction of Rachel’s life is overly fastidious. Many creative decisions, from the score to the camera blocking, took me out of the movie. Instead of a complex character processing involved, compound emotions, I saw a talented filmmaker lightly touch upon a range of emotions while also studiously avoiding dramatic clichés and stereotypes.

Co-writers Albrecht and Herrera clearly have a deep connection to its setting in the Dominican Republic, to the island’s past, present and its future. They also deeply feel the ever-present current of African culture that persists throughout the post-colonial diaspora. They see the beauty and the complexity of feeling as though you belong in two places, to two cultures equally and at the same time.

At the center of I Am Not A Witch is Maggie Mulubwa, who says very little yet manages to convey multitudes with her face and her eyes.

The film grants hope for the women of Iran through its thick-skinned subject, putting her resume and grit on display. But with sharper editing and a bit more eagerness for the personal, “Cutting Through Rocks” would supersede general hopefulness for a more intricate touch to the heart.

Clouds of Sils Maria is oodles more poetic and enigmatic than the term “backstage drama” generally encompasses.

Like his previous film, “Midnight Family,” Lorentzen is curious about what drives certain people to care more about others than themselves, making caregiving their line of career. His camera shows the intensity of the work behind roles most of society may take for granted.

The horrors of Demon are disturbing because you can see how ordinary they might seem to anyone who isn't paying enough attention.

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.

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

Harrill, who wrote and directed the film, isn’t as interested in the supernatural elements in the film as he is with the story’s few players. There’s a lot of room for emotions to breathe and wash over its characters, but never does it tip over into excess.

It’s impossible to watch Introducing, Selma Blair and not feel deeply moved.