The movie is, of course, beautifully made. Anderson’s visual style is remarkable. Shooting the picture himself, reportedly, with the collaboration of lighting cameraman Michael Bauman, he frames in a Kubrick-inflected style but cuts with a Hitchcock-influenced one.

The Souvenir Part II is more, though, than Julie's progression towards a completed film. It could be called, with apologies to James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman.

Sound of Falling operates like a ghost story, complete with a haunted house, but the ghosts aren’t supernatural. The ghost is history.

Sugarcane is soul-shaking. It’s profoundly evocative, with spoken memories and moments of inability to muster the words gut-punching with equal measure.

Mangrove becomes a full-on courtroom drama. The standard, expected beats and tropes are hit, but what happens within those elements makes the film so powerful and so rewarding. The lead actors also step up their game here, with each getting juicy dramatic moments that linger long after the credits roll.

The Swerve is the opposite of comforting.

A searing drama about a European refugee crisis that resonates with similar crises in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and yes, America’s southwestern border, Agnieszka Holland’s “Green Border” strikes me as the best and most important film to be released in the U.S. so far this year.

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.

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.

Victor’s offbeat film may not resonate with everyone, but their approach to this story and its heavy topic is impressive. It feels refreshing to see characters discuss this taboo topic without making it the defining focus of their lives.

It's those bigger questions about our nature and our capacity to think beyond self interest that will stick with you.

The film is one long interrogation, not only from Jennifer the character's standpoint, but from a directorial standpoint.

The movie’s protagonist, played with spectacular attention to detail and what feels like a genuine sense of affinity by Adam Driver, is named Paterson.

An effective and creepy-surreal film.

David O. Russell out-Scorseses Martin Scorsese with American Hustle, a '70s crime romp that's ridiculously entertaining in all the best ways.

While the themes here are, of course, redolent of neorealism, the filmmakers don’t make ostentatious nods to cinema past. Their voice is their own; the camera is mobile when it needs to be, but stands still much of the time, letting the excellent cast build their characters as the events of the film test their endurance.

While The Overnighters has the feel of an epic, given what an expansive slice of America’s current economic experience it ponders, it’s also a very intimate one.

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.

I didn't come out of this one feeling depressed or even particularly sad, more reflective. The sheer breadth and depth of this series creates its own sort of poetry, one that's strangely indistinguishable from journalism.

Its easygoing intimacy is what puts it over the top.

Cotillard can be an exquisitely subtle actress, with expressive eyes and a face that are made for quiet suffering. Even when Two Days, One Night drags a bit, Cotillard’s performance remains compelling.

In the end, Killers of the Flower Moon is like a puzzle—each creative piece does its part to form the complete picture.

Like the Maysles brothers, like Shirley Clarke, like D.A. Pennebaker at his heights, Wiseman has created a body of work that proves him a great filmmaker, period. His latest picture, National Gallery, is a typically lucid, graceful and unobtrusively multi-tiered work.

A devastating scrapbook and a confessional journal of sorts. It’s also a personal cinematic endeavor as opposed to a historical crash course in the vein of “Cries From Syria,” another superb documentary on the subject, but one with different ambitions.

That the movie presents Cody as so iredeemably destructive, yet somehow makes you feel for him anyway, is the kind of storytelling magic that’s hard to explain or quantify. Thanks to the writing, the filmmaking, and especially Cagney's performance, you end up caring for this horrendous man, or at least understanding his pain and the demons that drive him.

Elle is a high-wire act without a net.

It’s impossible not to appreciate the deep understanding of human behavior, as well as the way that ordinary objects and situations acquire symbolic meaning when we think about them in relation to the characters. This is a lovely, unique film.

While writer/director Lulu Wang’s film is obviously personal and culturally specific, it achieves a universality and a resonance through its vivid depiction of a family in the midst of crisis.