Whiplash is cinematic adrenalin. In an era when so many films feel more refined by focus groups or marketing managers, it is a deeply personal and vibrantly alive drama.

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.

You may be left cold, feeling that you’ve seen a theoretical exercise whose purpose was never articulated. Or you may react as I did. I took pages of notes for this review, doing my best to describe the movie as a discrete work—an object to be contemplated. When the final credits rolled, I closed my notebook and wept.

The Plague isn’t a horror movie per se, but it moves with the mood and music of one.

The movie has its own unique life force, and such confidence that if you're tuned into its wavelength, you'll forget to speculate on what will happen next.

Nicole Riegel's debut feature Holler is a film to treasure—an intimate drama about family and work, steeped in details that can only have been captured by a storyteller who lived them.

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.

Tony Benna’s irreverent, frenetic bio-doc “André Is an Idiot” is unlike any cancer doc you’ve ever seen.

It's a simple thing but if it's not the first film to show World War I taking place under heavenly blue skies it certainly feels like it is. The odd clarity is a horrible but absolutely necessary gift from Jackson and Walsh to these men.

Good One is intriguing in its disinterest in explanations. The film's refusal to "satisfy" an audience with easy explanations or even cathartic moments pulls you into its atmosphere, dragging you into the weird dynamic which grows more claustrophobic by the moment.

This movie struck me as both Ceylan’s plainest, and perhaps his finest.

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.

Birdman is a complete blast from start to finish.

Oppenheimer rediscovers the power of huge closeups of people's faces as they grapple with who they are, and who other people have decided that they are, and what they've done to themselves and others.

The Shrouds, about a widower who deals with his grief by creating a new kind of cemetery where the living can observe the decay of their loved ones’ bodies, is a Cronenbergian body horror of integrity and force.

In addition to being a tender film about a man finding redemption in caring for a canine, Syeed’s pious film is refreshing, showing us a corner of America that we never see.

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.

Bursting with humanity, grounded in humility, and in love with the poetry of faces, Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets is a classic indie film that will irritate or mystify some viewers while inspiring evangelical fervor in others.

C’mon C’mon is the kind of movie that invites reflection. It’s not building towards a larger cinematic event or full of explosions. It’s a sincere drama about relationships, told from the perspectives of different members of one family.

By inviting viewers to share in the most private of transformative periods for his family, Max Lowe scaled the Mount Everest of the soul, creating a cinematic gift that cuts to the heart in ways few films ever do.

This is a dazzling film—not just one of Haynes' best, but possibly the one that his whole career, with all of its self-aware formal and historical experiments, has been building toward.

So many visions of the future seem distant, but “After Yang” hits home in how it centers connection and experience to which we can all relate. It’s a powerful, moving drama about what it means to be alive.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is an uncomfortable but entrancing watch, a tribute to shattering silence around family secrets and bucking tradition for the sake of empathy.

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.

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.

Suspiria truly is one of the absolute classics of the horror genre and anyone who considers themselves to be true students of the cinema owe it to themselves to experience it for themselves, especially if they get a chance to see it on the big screen where it belong.

An aching film on such exquisite pains of impossible love, Paweł Pawlikowski’s Cold War concurrently swells your heart and breaks it, just like the sore memory of a lover that drifted away from your life, or an intensely craved kiss that never was.

Brutal, sad, funny, and disarmingly sweet-natured, Riders of Justice is not so much a revenge movie as a movie about revenge.