This being a Lowery tale, the monolithic, the overwhelming, are only more powerful for being rendered in intimate, miniaturized terms. The creepiness creeps just that much more; fear is heightened; fantasies, mysteries tingle with a sense of the unpredictable.

A marvel of letting an antihero's restless wanderings dictate the terms of the story, Pieces doesn't explain its lead's ennui so much as honors it.

The movie is thunderously exciting, but what makes it resonate is the wrenching story we read on Damon's face. We've waited all summer for a wild ride to grab us with more than jolts. Now it's here. Hang on.

What an exhilarating gift to watch Harry and Company go out in a blaze of glory and amazing grace.

It’s delicious — sweet, tart, surprisingly moving and funny as hell.

Nichols throws curveballs, but his film is unique and unforgettable.

A dazzling, darkly funny, quietly devastating human drama from the Islamic Republic of Iran.

There may be bigger, costlier, weighter films this year. There's none lovelier.

Nothing can detract from the film as a portrait of hell so shattering it's impossible to shake.

Easily one of the best and most modestly brilliant piece of nonfiction filmmaking you’ll see this year.

A jolt-a-minute horroshow laced with racial tension and stinging satirical wit.

This West Side Story proves someone can still leave their mark on the legend without building it from the ground up. It’s a classic Spielberg joint, a classic hat-tip to Hollywood, and a classic, period.

What makes Asif Kapadia's documentary a devastating don’t-miss dazzler — like the lady herself — is the way he lays out her story without editorializing.

With the help of acting giants, Jenkins turns The Savages into a twisted, bittersweet pleasure.

Part anthropological study, part rise-and-fall epic and all-out mesmerizing, this regional spin on the “family business” saga makes you rethink the notions behind why we watch crime flicks past the vicarious thrills. It’s both foreign and familiar.

An Education is remarkable for the traps it doesn't fall into. Jenny, for all her naive impulses, isn't a victim.

Once The Rider hooks you – and believe me, it will – there's no way you will ever forget it.

Varda by Agnès goes out not with a bang but a graceful farewell, as the director sits on a beach, a sandstorm whipping around her as vows to “disappear in the blur” and slowly fades from the image.

You don’t have to know about Erice’s own backstory to appreciate this mournful, seeking work about life, art, loss, and the space where they all overlap.

Bo Burnham’s story about a 14-year-old misfit is one of the funniest, saddest and most heartfelt teen movies ever.

The line between making guerrilla art and selling out has never blurred more provocatively.

Rogen and Heigl step up to the plate with a tougher task from Coach Apatow: Nail every laugh and the emotions underlying them. No worries. They knock it out of the park.

A new American crime classic from the legendary Martin Scorsese, whose talent shines here on its highest beams.

Yes is easily the most controversial film to hit theaters this year so far. It’s also, for all of the intoxicating rush of Lapid’s excessive style and cup-spilleth-over storytelling, one of the more sobering and vital ones as well.

Oldman gives a performance that is flawless in every detail.

This is an actors’ film, one that proudly wears its women-run-the-world bona fides on its sleeve. They provide the sisterhood and the sense of boiling over. After a full-circle callback to its beginning, Support the Girls ends, pitch-perfectly, with a primal scream therapy session on the top of a strip-mall building, female voices being heard above highway noise.

Pfeiffer is a knockout; she’s the sexiest presence in movies today and an exceptional comic and dramatic actress, to boot.

With it's dynamite performances, strafing wit and dramatic provocation, The Insider offers Mann at his best -- blood up, unsanitized and unbowed.

It is also Nicholson at his bravest and riskiest. By banking his fires and staying alert to the smallest details, he delivers a monumental performance that blasts your expectations and batters your heart.

The film never musters the intimate feel the gifted director brought to such early films as "Raise the Red Dragon" and "Ju Dou." You cheer his accomplishment in Hero without ever feeling close to it.

Simón refuses to allow Alcarràs to settle for being just one thing; she drifts between her characters’ moods with rare realism.

As with other movies that capture the joys of cooking and the carnal thrill of eating, this French romantic drama is as much an ode to regional bonne bouches as it is an epic tale of two epicures.

This is more than a movie, it's a privilege.

The director and her cinematographer Rachel Morrison do wonders with the elements that batter the people of every race and social class in the Delta. But it's the storm raging inside these characters that rivets our attention and makes Mudbound a film that grabs you and won't let go.

What's lucky is that no matter what language it's in, My Life as Zucchini never sacrifices what’s true for what’s trite and easier to sell. This is animation as an art form, inspiring and indelible.

Poetic is a word that goes thrown around easily and abundantly, especially when it comes to documentaries that forego any sort of standard interview-clip-context-rinse-repeat format. But it’s hard to think of a better adjective to describe the early sequences of Honeyland.

Mitchell gives this post-punk, neo-glam rock extravaganza everything in his loaded arsenal of talents. He gets the sound right, the look right, the fun right and - this is crucial - the pain right.

Holy Motors, fueled by pure feeling, is a dream of a movie you want to get lost in. It's a thing of beauty.

Unforgiven is the most provocative western of Eastwood's career, and with Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman and Richard Harris along for the ride, it's also the most potently acted.

No fair giving away the mysteries of The Dark Knight. It's enough to marvel at the way Nolan -- a world-class filmmaker, be it "Memento," "Insomnia" or "The Prestige" -- brings pop escapism whisper-close to enduring art.

It'll slap on a smile on your face that won't quit.

Bejo (The Artist) digs deep into the secrets and lies that have afflicted all her relationships, in a wonderfully affecting film that haunts you long after it ends.

Anyone who’s ever wondered what a rom-com collab between Nora Ephron and Tom of Finland might look like now has a definitive answer to that question.

It’s a great espionage thriller, and an even better scenes-from-a-marriage drama. Ian Fleming would love this. So would Ingmar Bergman.

What eventually emerges is a peerless portrait of collective trauma — a devastating look at how this law not only sociologically gutted a country but made everyone complicit in the crime.

Like the music, the film is outspoken, roaringly funny, defiantly sexual and relentlessly in your face. I couldn't have liked it more.

You can barely call it a movie. You can, however, recognize it as one of Wes Anderson‘s best attempts at transforming both his and his literary idol’s idiosyncrasies into something like art — and the most satisfying posthumous double act in ages.

Nothing in Joe Wright's screen version of Ian McEwan's dense, internalized 2001 novel of secrets and lies should really work, but damn near everything does. It's some kind of miracle. Written, directed and acted to perfection, Atonement sweeps you up on waves of humor, heartbreak and ravishing romance.

Like its predecessors (Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line and The New World), Tree delivers truths that don't go down easy. No one with a genuine interest in the potential of film would think of missing it.

We expect cinematic fireworks with a stylist like [Park]. It’s his sense of restraint and his substance, however, that makes what could have just been a clever check-out-these-moves exercise feel like a genuinely emotional showstopper.

Rather than telling you how young women are affected by this, Patton and Rae show you. And to watch one of the interviewees go for being a joyous, giddy, chatty child to being a slightly older, more distant and jaded tween is heartbreaking.

If the movie does adhere to his signature beats, and feature so many recognizable Spielbergisms, occasionally to its detriment, it’s still one of the most impressive, enlightening, vital things he’s ever done.

Is it that scary? Yes. Will it reduce you to quivering jelly? Oh, my, yes! Does it bust the bonds of the Godzilla formula to fuse fright with feeling? Better believe it, dudes.

The filmmakers offer no commentary. We watch. And what we see is explosive, deeply moving and impossible to shake.

It’s a demonstration of directorial chops that somehow never devolves into a look-mamushka-no-hands display, and a textbook example of how to use handheld camerawork (courtesy of cinematographer Kseniya Sereda) and splashes of red, green, and goldenrod effectively without being garish or grandiloquent.

In these troubled times, it's a good feeling to see a funny, touching and vital doc that is both timely and timeless.

As for Lee, he clearly relates to this material and the questions of political, musical and family identity he himself raised in films as diverse as "Malcolm X," "Mo' Better Blues" and "Crooklyn."

Reichardt has crafted a haunted dream of a movie to get lost in.

Fruitvale Station is a gut punch of a movie. By standing in solidarity with Oscar, it becomes an unstoppable cinematic force.

What’s remarkable is how [Torres] never overplays anything, or goes for easy histrionics and rending of garments even when the movie itself becomes heavy-handed in the back half.

The acting is of the highest caliber. Winger, magnificent and too long between films, is a volcano of repressed anger.

Panahi creates a raw, riveting film.

Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO, a winding misadventure about a sweet-tempered donkey, inarguably qualifies as an animal’s-eye view of all that’s warm and cruel, comical and arbitrary about human nature.

Brimming with humor and heartbreak, Slumdog Millionaire meets at the border of art and commerce and lets one flow into the other as if that were the natural order of things.

Dark secrets are unlocked, words draw more blood than punches, and Desplechin turns one family into a universe that resembles life as a startling work of art.

The film's sound design, sampling Beethoven and Nino Rota, among others, links up with visual miracles performed by Rain Kathy Li and Wong Kar-Wai's noted cinematographer, Christopher Doyle (In the Mood for Love), to take us inside Alex's head. The result, a defiant slap at slick Hollywood formula, is mesmerizing.

Want to know what the “right stuff” really is? Take a look.

In the hands of director Kelly Fremon Craig (The Edge of Seventeen), Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret isn’t just about adolescence — it’s about the state of womanhood in general, with all of the accompanying sacrifices and vexations and humiliations that come with it.

Cuarón has a gift only the greatest filmmakers share: He makes you believe.

Judas and the Black Messiah can’t do everything. What it accomplishes is nevertheless quite something. It is a bittersweet compliment to what’s here that we end the film wishing it’d done even more.

Allen has never crafted anything as fiercely funny as this comedy of coming apart; it’s a groundbreaking film, full of sublime performances alert to the violence done in the name of love.

All the actors, in roles large and small, bring their A games to the film. Two hours and 40 minutes can feel long for some. I wouldn’t change a frame.

The top-tier cast, including Tilda Swinton as a character called Social Services, may be star overload, but each actor performs small miracles.

A landmark musical tribute.

If Sinners is messy, it’s sometimes pretty glorious, too. Coogler is swinging wide and far beyond the boundaries of franchise fare.

What the film does so movingly as a portrait is show the isolation that comes with creative success.

Savanah Leaf’s slice-of-life movie is full of these revelatory moments — sometimes lyrical, sometimes gritty, often swirling the two together — and the former Olympian-turned-filmmaker‘s feature debut pitches itself somewhere between the detail accumulation of cinéma vérité and the feeling you’ve stepped into someone’s dream.

Booksmart changes the game and opens the genre up to greater possibilities. Directed by the actor Olivia Wilde in a smashing feature debut, this femcentric spin on Freaks and Geeks is high on girl power.

Here’s McQueen working in one of his most exciting modes as a director: cool anger. In contrast to the passionate political thrust of of Mangrove and the heated groove of Lovers Rock, Red, White, and Blue is wrought of images that feel clinical and removed — until you mash them together into a movie. That’s when the hellmouth cracks open, and all the seeming poise at the movie’s surface is revealed for the disguise that it is. The studied symmetries, the visual confrontations marked along racial lines, all of it is expressive, and much of it works.

The acting is top-notch, and LaPaglia, who makes the cop's torment palpable, gives the performance of his career.

Sweeney has finally got her serious-actor moment and delivered.

At the end, with Sean's condition scarily deteriorating, the raw and riveting BPM musters the emotional power to floor you.

Hits hardest when it bypasses sentiment to ponder the inextricable mix of love and pain that comes with the ties that bind.

Sirāt...is not for everyone. But it is the sort of overwhelming cinematic experience and undeniable work of sound and vision that could be life-changing for those ready to receive it.

A triumph of acting, writing and directing that defies glib description...the kind of artful defiance that Hollywood is usually too timid to deliver: a jolting comedy that makes you laugh till it hurts.

Fierce, funny and finally devastating, Tanovic's superb film offers a timely look at the roots of civil war and acts of terrorism on both sides that can be exploited by political and media hypocrites alike.

For a series that began nearly 25 years ago, this classic in the making couldn’t go out on a more fitting note of tender, tear-drenched resolution.

How sexism, toxic masculinity, complicity, and not-so-borderline criminal behavior is baked into the music business gets pecked at but never fully unpacked.

This haunting film never pushes itself on you. It trusts you to suss out the horror that lies beneath the veneer of innocence. You'll be knocked for a loop.

An aspirational immigrant story that hits most every mark of the genre, but flows and overlaps and grows dense in unexpected ways.

The doc is a capsule history lesson on an eons-old natural phenomenon. But it’s also the greatest lava-fueled love story ever told, and the fact that those two elements remain as inseparable as the spouses at the center of it all is a testament to how sublime this stranger-than-fiction masterpiece really is.

Savor their technique and the sizzling performances of Frances McDormand as an adulterous wife, Dan Hedaya as her vengeful husband and M. Emmet Walsh as a private detective from hell.

Hamnet has managed to make the lines “goodnight, sweet prince” somehow sting more than ever, but it leaves you in a state of emotional bliss.

A crafty calling card brimming with beauty and terror. Eggers pulls us into the supernatural with subtle cunning and meticulous attention to detail.

Lacing tremendously exciting action with touching gravity, Looper hits you like a shot in the heart.

Graduation, isn't quite on the landmark level of his searing 2007 abortion drama "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," but this gripping film still sizzles with Mungiu's social-realist concern for people who believe they can't raise their position based on merit alone. In that sense, the filmmaker is working on a universal level.

What makes it one of the best (and most unclassifiable) movies of the year is the hypnotic way it keeps re-inventing itself from scene to scene.

Joaquin Phoenix is simply stupendous in You Were Never Really Here. His performance is damn near flammable — dangerous if you get too close.