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.