Get ready to be knocked for a loop.

Once you’ve seen this deft blend of genres and tones, all of the inspired laughter and the lumping of throats, you see exactly how Hit the Road fits all of its elements together with remarkable seamlessness.

Technology has allowed Jackson to erase the barriers of time and speak to a new generation about what war does to youth. His humane and heartbreaking film is a profound achievement.

The writer-director gives these unsung, oft-judged heroes of labor empowerment via empathy and representation.

You know how some costume epics can be such a bloody bore? Not The Favourite. It’s a bawdy, brilliant triumph, directed by Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos with all the artistic reach and renegade deviltry he brought to Dogtooth (2009), The Lobster (2015) and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017).

Let the unsettling secrets of this outrageously funny and steadily engrossing meditation on the life of two high school misfits after graduation catch you by surprise. It's that good.

The Gatekeepers cuts deeper than any political thriller. It's a powerhouse.

It’s not just that they don’t make movies like this anymore — of course they don’t! — so much as no one bothers to tell these types of sprawling narratives with this level of storytelling, chops, nerve and verve.

There is something uniquely unforgettable in the way Linklater, Hawke and Delpy (equal collaborators on the script) find nuance, art and eroticism in words, spoken and unspoken. The actors shine.

Even while the director is displaying her knack for cine-magic tricks and formalist gestures, she’s also well aware that she blessed with someone at the center of this carousel who needs no illusionist’s help.

Anderson may be concocting his own personal flashback to a funkier age of innocence, but he lets these two make it their own double-act as well. Then he generously invites an audience in as well.

Only Yesterday comes from a quieter, less demonstrative place. As he did in his most recent and reportedly final film, "The Tale of the Princess Kaguya," Takahata has built Only Yesterday to go gently and to last. Mission accomplished.

The sounds are finite, yet the benefits of tuning in to the film’s wavelengths are endless. It’s the greatest documentary you’ve ever heard.

Seeds is, at the abundant heart of it all, a work of protest art and political activism through sheer poetry. Attention must be paid.

Rea and Davidson are incomparably good in an exceptional film that is by turns darkly funny and deeply affecting. Though Jordan's control sometimes falters, it's a small price to pay for his daring.

How it informs so much of what the movie is getting at is something you’ll find yourself mulling over for weeks after you’ve left the theater. The feeling that you’ve just witnessed a major work from a great American filmmaker, however, is instantaneous.

Mad Max: Fury Road kicked my ass hard. It'll kick yours. So get prepped for a new action classic. You won't know what hit you.

Winter's Bone is unforgettable. It means to shake you, and does.

One of the best and liveliest movies of the year - funny and touching in ways you can't predict.

There’s not a bad performance among the central quartet here (Mescal once again proves that he’s a character actor stuck with a matinee idol’s square-jawed mug), but Scott is the one subtly shouldering the storytelling.

It’s a harrowing documentary, to be sure, but also healing in a way that doesn’t go for easy emotional button-pushing, or play down the white-knuckle struggle they endure while processing all of it.

Blue Is the Warmest Color sweeps you up on waves of humor, heartbreak and ravishing romance.

Not your typical biopic. But it is one of the best times you'll have at the movies this year.

Taking full measure of Phantom Thread may require more than one viewing – a challenge any genuine movie lover will be eager to accept. Our advice for now: just sit back and behold.

Gosford Park abounds in scenes to savor. It's a feast, and one of Altman's best.

Leave it to a g-rated cartoon to give the live-action epics a lesson in action, fun and bracing originality.

The year's most beguilling and touching surprise. Bravo.

There’s something stealthy in its awareness, in the ways it accrues crumbs of insight and observation and dispenses them throughout the narrative without us even noticing. You emerge from the movie with an enriched, nearly felt sense of the Mangrove as a place, not just as a symbol.

The crazy-ass imagination at work in Being John Malkovich hits you like a blast of pure oxygen...this movie of constant astonishments will make you laugh hard and long.

Bird has crafted a film -- one of the year's best -- that doesn't ring cartoonish, it rings true.

All Holland asks here is that viewers contemplate this headline-generating tragedy happening “over there” from the point of view of those within it. After you’ve sat through this devastating film, it’s impossible not to.

A new crime classic.

If you haven't already sold your soul to rock & roll, Almost Famous should seal the deal.

Oppenheimer is one of those shoot-for-the-moon projects that feels thrilling and wonky, brilliant and overstuffed, too much and yet not enough. It’s also a movie that brings to mind the difficult era-spanning epics of yesteryear, from Reds to The Right Stuff, and is a movie made by adults for adults yet done with the sweep and majesty we now associate with movies made for kids and teens.

The writer-director based the couple on his own parents, who bear the same names as his characters. It’s not their story, he’s said — what he’s given us instead is a love story that’s as sexy as it is savage, as tough as it is tender. It’s a spellbinder with a fever that won’t quit.

It's a magical, beguiling wonder.

Sorry, Baby is a movie with a trauma at its center, but it’s not a trauma drama. It’s about living with such things and still going on with your life. And the manner in which Victor presents this narrative, with such verve and confidence and tenderness and pitch-black humor, defies easy description. It’s simply an amazing display of someone knowing how to get their voice and vision across.

Adam Driver gives one of the loveliest and least likely to be rewarded performances of the year in Paterson. Why least likely, you ask? Because Driver's indelibly moving portrayal is so lived-in and lyrical you hardly recognize it as acting.

The Fits is more than a transporting film experience. It's cinema poetry in motion.

A fiercely poetic study of violence. Stunningly shot in black-and-white. [14 Dec 1989, p.23]

Far from being exploitive, the effect is inspiring: This is the best of us.

It's a modern horror story that gets you where you live.

For some, the silver linings in Russell’s movies represent a failure to embrace darkness. I see them as a humanist’s act of resistance. That’s why American Hustle ranks with the year’s best movies. It gets under your skin.

The script, co-written by Antonioni and Peter Wollen, focuses on a TV journalist (a superb Jack Nicholson).

Day-Lewis is smashing as the man caught between his emotions and the social ethic. Not since Olivier in "Wuthering Heights" has an actor matched piercing intelligence with such imposing good looks and physical grace.

Chases so many ideas that it threatens to spin out of control. But with our multiplexes stuffed with toxic Hollywood formula, it's a gift to find a ballsy movie that thinks it can do anything, and damn near does.

The acting is electric. By the end of this haunting, hypnotic film, you feel you have watched lives being lived, not just imagined.

Beat the drums for a Simmons Oscar, and add a cymbal crash for Whiplash. It's electrifying.

Von Donnersmarck has crafted the best kind of movie: one you can't get out of your head.

Forget "Hero" -- that cult hit was just Zhang Yimou's warm-up for this martial-arts fireball that throws in a lyrical love story, head-spinning fights and dazzling surprises.

Liu creates an unforgettable film experience that will knock the wind out of you.

A riveting screen adventure.

From the theme of global downsizing, the filmmakers wring humor, heartbreak, suspense and stirring social drama. Cotillard, a consummate actress, fits like a natural into the workaday world of the Dardennes (Rosetta, The Son, The Kid With a Bike).

Above all, it’s a Martin Scorsese picture, brimming with reverence for a culture that survived a horrible trauma as it is filled with exhilarating flourishes, film history references, and explorations of the faultline between the sacred and profane. And yes: It’s a masterpiece.

Cuaron's hot-blooded, haunting and wildly erotic film revels in the pleasures of the flesh without losing touch with thought and feeling.

Huppert, an fearless actress (see The Piano Teacher), gives a performance that's a riveting mix of carnal and chilly – you can't take your eyes off her.

Begins like an episode of "I Love Lucy" and ends with the impact of "Easy Rider."

You won't know what outrageous fun is until you see Borat. High-five!

In The Farewell, Wang builds a funny, touching and vital film about what makes a family in any culture. It’s simply stunning.

It’s the sort of performance that feels like early Pacino or Dustin Hoffman, all twitches and vibrations and seeming like he’s in a constant state of motion even when standing still. And it fuses so well with what we, the viewer, think we know about Chalamet that it begins to blur the boundary in the best possible way.

Comedy and tragedy cohere in this extraordinary film of Alan Bennett's play.

The movie is a film-length argument against our usual, overly personified, cutesy depictions of animals. It is also, not incidentally, a plea to stop eating them.

Delicate business is being transacted in Columbus, a whisper-soft debut from Kogonada that nonetheless results in something unique and unforgettable. It's pure cinema.

The Artist encapsulates everything we go to movies for: action, laughs, tears and a chance to get lost in another world. It just might leave you speechless. How can Oscar resist?

Poetic is a word that gets thrown around willy-nilly, but it fits perfectly here. So does woozy. It feels less like a film than a high fever, burning slow but hot in order to incinerate a virus.

For all its playfulness, it’s the real, stinging, joyful, inconvenient reality of life that Dick Johnson Is Dead gives us. It’s a committed act of preservation: a looping, reeling, repeatable act of love.

The Quiet Girl is, quite simply, a genuine work of art by a genuinely empathetic artist, and one of the single most moving, heartfelt, and heartbreaking movies from any country in the last decade.

Eastwood's direction here is a thing of beauty, blending the ferocity of the classic films of Akira Kurosawa (Seven Samurai) with the delicacy and unblinking gaze of Yasujiro Ozu (Tokyo Story).

Filtered through Kaufman's searching mind and soulful brilliance, the result is a masterpiece.

The movie pulls you in through the sheer immersive force of its filmmaking. In Long Day’s Journey, the search is everything with meaning as elusive and haunting as a dream.

A hugely entertaining blend of music, fun and eye-popping thrills, though it doesn't lack for heart.

This seriously funny movie, artfully photographed by the great Roger Deakins, is spiritual in nature, barbed in tone, and, oh, yeah, it stings like hell.

Capote is a movie that doesn't pull its punches. It's a knockout.

Who'd have thought the demise of a kill-happy Russian dictator could leave you laughing helplessly? That's The Death of Stalin for you, a slapstick tragedy – and for the funniest, fiercest comedy of the year so far – from the fertile mind of Armando Iannucci, the British political satirist behind the HBO's Veep and the sensational, Strangelovian In the Loop (2009).

Leigh and all of his cast are so on-point here, so dedicated to breathing life into these everyday people, that every time he cuts away from Pansy and allows us unfettered glimpses into their lives outside her sphere of influence, you want to follow them into their own two-hour movies.

It's a renegade masterpiece that will get you good.

In the end, what Quest gives you is not just well-earned empathy but the pleasure of the Raineys' company, and that is what genuinely makes it worth seeking out and seeing ASAP.

Huppert's brilliance is indisputable, her performance alternately playful and deeply moving.

His (Anderson) abiding love for a vanished past, real and imagined, is at the core of The Grand Budapest Hotel. The thrill comes in watching as this rare talent gives his movie wings.

It’s a tribute to everyday people of another era that walks its own poetic path, content in the knowledge that one unremarkable person’s journey is remarkable enough to deserve such cinematic treatment.

You get pulled into a force field, thanks to Cooper’s behind-the-camera chops and Gaga’s sound and fury. By the time the end credits roll, you realize that, in fact, two stars have been born.

It's a wow of a thriller with a soul that isn't computer generated. Poitras may be guilty of taking Snowden at face value, but she succeeds brilliantly in evoking a shadow villain intent on world domination. Big Brother is back, baby, and he's gone digital.

Recoing gives a performance that won't soon be forgotten. Neither will Time Out. It's a great movie.

All the acting is first-rate -- Dukakis gives major dimensions to a supporting role. And Christie, a Sixties screen goddess in "Darling" and "Doctor Zhivago," shows that her spirit and grace are eternal. She's a beauty. So is the movie.

It’s an indisputable classic.

The ending, depending on you, may come off as either too neat or appropriately revelatory. But the film’s emotions have a stark, memorable sheen.

Foxtrot makes demands on audiences and then richly rewards them. It's a riveting, deeply resonant achievement.

Incisively witty, provocative and acted to perfection, this sublime entertainment is a career peak for producer Ismail Merchant, director James Ivory and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

You don't just watch it as much as you absorb it until the film's ebb and flow become a part of you.

It may sound silly, but Lord and Park conjure up a world of visual miracles.

Two men alone create an epic landscape of feeling in one of the very best movies of the year.

Chris Pine proves he can act. Ben Foster, well, he always could. And Jeff Bridges shows them both how it's done. Those are just three riveting reasons to pony up for Hell or High Water.

Up is a breathtaking ride into the realm of pure imagination.

What Tan has given us is an incredible, sui generis tribute to the international lingua franca of D.I.Y. cinempowerment. She’s also telling us the story of how one person stole a big part of her youth. This documentary is her stealing it back. Victory, finally, is hers.

Poor Things never gets dogmatically bogged down — it prefers a swifter, Swiftian attack on bygone mores regarding sex that still don’t feel bygone enough — but whether you dig the manner in which this pilgrim’s progress is presented may be a matter of taste.

Say this about Black Panther, which raises movie escapism very near the level of art: You've never seen anything like it in your life.

Even though it retains the basic theatrical conceit of a lone character having a one-sided conversation, it is pure cinema, because how could Almodóvar and Swinton do anything but turn this into pure cinema?

Brooklyn is easily the year's best and most beguiling love story. The surprise is that it also goes deeper, sadder and truer.