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.

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.

Moonlight is a film that is both lyrical and deeply grounded in its character work, a balancing act that’s breathtaking to behold. It is one of those rare pieces of filmmaking that stays completely focused on its characters while also feeling like it’s dealing with universal themes about identity, sexuality, family, and, most of all, masculinity.

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.

A quiet and understated film, which lingers lovingly on its subject. We see Dr. King’s famous sermons at the pulpit, and also see him sitting quietly with family and friends.

Jasmila Zbanic’s Quo Vadis, Aida? is a razor-sharp incrimination of failed foreign policies from around the world embedded in a deeply humanist and moving character study of the kind of person that these policies leave behind.

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

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.

It was about the act of seeing, being seen, preparing to see, processing what had been seen, and finally seeing it. It made explicit and poetic the astonishing gift the cinema made possible, of arranging what we see, ordering it, imposing a rhythm and language on it, and transcending it.

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.

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.

A somber, meditative, almost poetic film that delivers the horrors of bondage stripped down and head-on.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

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

The viewer is not only a fly on the wall at this party, they are also on the dance floor being carried along as the music moves them.

It’s also, crucially, a deeply humanist movie. Anderson cares about these characters deeply. Bob’s frustration becomes our own, as does his concern for Willa. So many “films of our moment” have felt angry or cynical, but Anderson’s movie transcends that by being human and even offering optimism. It’s not one loss after another. It’s one battle. Keep fighting.

It’s a delicate drama that flourishes through the liberating power of art, where a hopeful yet consuming love affair sparks between two young women amid patriarchal customs, and stays concealed in their hearts both because of and in spite of it.

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.

Baldwin's voice as a writer comes through powerfully anyway. It was wise to have Jackson read Baldwin's words plainly in his own voice, rather than attempt an impersonation.

Where Jude’s previous feature, “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn,” could be didactic at times, “Do Not Expect…” slips its knife between the audience’s ribs with such skill that the severity of the injury isn’t obvious at first.

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.

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

Carol is often about its surfaces, their beauty contrasting with the scary duality of people, relationships. The surfaces in Carol are so seductive that one understands the ache to belong in that world.

Before Midnight is moving because it acknowledges that even love stories that began as beautifully as Jesse and Celine's must still endure the wear and tear of real life.

This film is a powerful love letter to the Black Church, offering a soul-shaking introduction for the unfamiliar and a grandmotherly yank of the arm for those who know—it drags you from the theater straight into the pews.

This is a movie of vision and integrity made on an epic scale, a series of propositions dramatized with machinery, bodies, seawater and fire. It deserves to be seen and argued about. They don't make them like this anymore. Never did, really.

If you prefer acting prowess over “Star Wars,” you won’t do better at year’s end than observing Rampling (she of the withering stare) and Courtenay (he of the soulful gaze), two stalwarts of that wonderful wave of British talent that hit our shores in the ‘60s, as they perform a finely calibrated pas de deux.

Pham Thien An’s contemplative drama “Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell” blurs the line between surrealism and realism, faith and loss in a subdued search for purpose in the wake of a tragedy.

Filmmaker Mike Leigh's biography of the landscape painter J.M.W. Turner is what critics call "austere" — which means it's slow and grim and deliberately hard to love — yet it's fascinating, and the performances and photography are outstanding.

Alternately sad, violent, and dryly funny.

The best parts of it feel truly new, even as they channel previous animated classics (including the works of Hayao Miyazaki) and explore situations and feelings that everyone has experienced to some degree.

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.

Even measured against the Iranian and international cinematic treasures of the ‘70s, Aslani’s vision is still breathtakingly distinctive, an incisively devastating social critique embedded in a complex tale of intrigue, greed, oppression, and murder. The film is also, and perhaps most strikingly, a stylistic tour de force.

Agnes Varda is almost 90 years old and she is still making fantastic films. Searching, compassionate, provocative, funny, sad ones. This is one of them. You should see it, and then go dancing in the streets.

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.

Far and away the best movie of the year.

This devastating drama is an act of remembrance for its filmmaker, who has been open about how much of this story is her own. It’s also a reminder of the power of filmmaking to turn the deeply personal into relatable art, and an announcement of a major talent, one who has made the best film of the year to date.

With remarkable grace and compassion for his characters, Baumbach portrays divorce as a great equalizer, turning us into versions of ourselves we didn’t expect to become.

Gosling and Stone get these characters, finding grace in their movement but emotional depth in their arcs; Stone has never been better.

What’s most refreshing about Petite Maman is that it doesn’t play coy with its magic, nor does it separate it from the sadder, darker reality that surrounds it.

It is also one of the better solo directing debuts by an actor in recent memory. Hardly a false step is taken by Greta Gerwig in her semi-autobiographical script that centers on Lady Bird’s final year at her rather progressive Catholic high school.

The darkness of "All We Imagine as Light" isn't darkness at all. The darkness is filled with light.

David Byrne’s American Utopia is a joyous expression of art, empathy, and compassion.

For the bulk of Shoplifters, Kore-eda works in a beautiful register that feels both detailed and genuine at the same time. We get to know these characters so deeply, watching them all at their jobs.

The women are all compelling though never too-polished storytellers. Whether they succumb to the horror of what they're describing and start to cry or remain stoic throughout becomes part of the experience of hearing the tale.

[Maren Ade] fully embraces the inherent awkwardness of a testy emotional bond and tackles it to the ground, all the while mining it for heartfelt humor without the all-too-common safety net of predictability found in big-budget Hollywood fare.

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

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.

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.

Simon has an exceptional eye for the small details that illuminate the quiet but devastating, literal life and death moments.

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

In the end, "TÁR" is not a diatribe or parable, but an interrogation, one that seeks to draw the viewers in, and compel them to consider their own place in the question.

The travesties of justice on display throughout “President” become so repetitive and inevitable that it renders one exhausted, grateful if only that the killing of democracy has been so clearly and meticulously documented.

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.

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.

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.

No Bears is a picture that’s in keeping with his recent work—circumstances deemed that it just had to be—but one that breaks away from it in ways that yield a work of, yes, astonishment.

A great newspaper movie of the old-school model, calling up not only obvious comparisons with "All the President's Men" and "Zodiac," two movies with similar devotion to the sometimes crushingly boring gumshoe part of reportage, but also Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell shouting into adjacent phones in "His Girl Friday."

Nothing can give shape or closure to Cave—and that's OK. Watching him continue his ongoing search for existential answers is comfort enough.

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

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

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.

As magnificent as the movie looks, sounds, and feels, this cut expands upon and unpeels the movie’s weaknesses both as story and meditation on Vietnam.

It’s that honesty that makes The Florida Project so powerful. This is a remarkable film, one of the best of the year.

A thoroughly remarkable and disquieting film from Mali’s Abderrahamane Sissako, Timbuktu is also a work of almost breathtaking visual beauty, but it manages to ravish the heart while dazzling the eye simultaneously, neither at the expense of the other. It’s a work of art that seems realized in an entirely organic way.

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

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.

These caretakers are all too human. The movie somehow turns that into a reason to admire them all the more.

With stunning performances from two completely genuine young leads, this is a movie people will talk about all year.

It’s a disturbing work, guided by a discomforting sense of immaculateness that chills the viewer. It is the sanitation the film performs, which speaks to the now, in a way few Holocaust films have done before.

Ultimately Leviathan may divide viewers between those who find its possible meanings too numerous and inchoate and others who welcome the challenges of helping create its meaning.

For me, The Souvenir is perhaps the most empathetic movie to capture that kind of bad romance, the way it seeps into every aspect of your life, the way it changes your behavior, how you hold onto the memories of good times when things get rough and how after it ends, you're a changed person.

One of the most influential science fiction films that most people haven't seen, Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 Alphaville is a combination film noir, social satire and riff on tough-guy movies, set in a world of nearly nonstop night.

Post-Holocaust discourse frequently used the phrase “Never Again” as a slogan, specifically referring to persecution of the Jews but also denoting a prohibition against barbarism; the events under consideration in these films are dispiriting reminders that human progress in this area has been meager at best.

Tower is explanatory journalism and history, but also personally expressive, and the two impulses never cancel each other out.

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

It's a great film, engrossing, suspenseful, and strange.

A thoughtful and tearful ride in which the destination is a spiritual confrontation with oneself, Drive My Car devastates and comforts through its vehicular poetry of the sorrow from which we run, the collisions that awaken us, and the healing gained from every bump in the road.

Through cinematographer Amin Jafari’s sense of environment, the script’s agile tonal changes, and the attentive cast, we are enthralled from minute one until the end of an intense thriller that operates quietly but with no less punch.

Looking at the picture’s mostly sun-drenched and drolly cheerful surface layer, one marvels at Rohmer’s unerring sense of what drama kings and queens young people can be.

Alice Diop understands how silence, when allowed to exist, vibrates with echoes, and it is these echoes that are trying to speak to us. They have a lot to say. "Saint Omer" shows us how to listen.

With these scenes highlighting growth and resilience, Time refuses to be some kind of tragedy porn. Sibil and her brood demand justice, not pity. Her strength carries the film and elevates her sons toward success.

The most surprising and challenging thing about Part Two is how it takes one of the central ideas from Part One—art's ability help us understand and express ourselves in everyday life—and externalizes it, so that creativity that might otherwise have been confined to the stages of the arts centers erupts into the world outside.

The word that occurs to me in describing Kubrick's approach to Johnny and the film, is "control." That may suggest the link between this first mature feature and Kubrick's later films, so varied and brilliant.

This is a terrific document and a testament.

Röhrig has the tricky task of carrying this story on his shoulders—and us along with him—without the benefit of being able to emote or even say much. It’s a physical performance as much as it is a quietly emotional one; he has to establish who this man is mainly through his gestures, demeanor and energy.

Her remains one of the most engaging and genuinely provocative movies you're likely to see this year, and definitely a challenging but not inapt date movie.

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.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat succeeds as an intense piece of reclamation and rejuvenation, giving breath to Lumumba’s spirit by sporting the same kind of defiance the political leader espoused.

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.

The film’s boundless enthusiasm for the idea of the library wins the day.

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.

A powerful and thoughtful film, it is also not what it at first seems, which is part of the point Polley appears to be interested in making. Can the truth ever actually be known about anything?

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

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.

A Bread Factory is an idealistic statement about the importance of art in everyday life. It's about how a scene from a play or a line from a poem can cast a new light on your problems or dreams, maybe put a whole new frame around your life, your community, and the culture and nation that helped shape you.

Panahi’s latest act of defiance is entirely commendable on a number of levels, but I regret to say that from my own perspective, Taxi is the weakest of the films he’s made since he was enjoined from making them.

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