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?