Director Fernando Meirelles and screenwriter Jeffrey Caine put a human face on John le Carre's novel of sex, lies and dirty politics in modern Africa. Prepare for a thrilling ride.

Rehab movies nearly always make me cringe, as if the audience needs to take medicine, as if hope needs to be force fed. Short Term 12, an exceptional film in every way, breaks the mold.

Parenthood, heartfelt and howlingly comic, also comes spiced with risk and mischief. Just when you fear the movie might be swept away on a tidal wave of wholesomeness, a line, a scene or a performance poke through to restore messy, perverse reality.

Residue is the kind of movie to make you wonder what may have changed in D.C. during even the short span of its own making. Gentrification works quickly; it arrives buoyed by a whirlwind sense of the rug being swept from under residents’ feet. These are details Gerima builds into the movie based on his experience of leaving for just one year. Jay is returning after time in college. One can only imagine his shock.

Other films this year will have to sweat bullets to match the explosive power and subversive wit of David Cronenberg's A History of Violence. It slams you like a body punch and then starts messing with your head.

The result is raw and riveting.

A firecracker of a film exploring modern-day dating (and heartbreak) mores while providing witty commentary on the borderline-absurd ways in which millennials and zoomers have latched onto social media buzzword culture.

The Lobster, with a score that samples everyone from Beethoven to Nick Cave, comes at you with images that burn and laughs that stick in the throat. Take the challenge of this movie — it'll keep you up nights.

A movie heart-breaker of oddball wit and startling grace.

Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas restores originality and daring to the Halloween genre. This dazzling mix of fun and fright also explodes the notion that animation is kid stuff. The history-making stop-motion animation in this $20 million charmer transcends age. It's 74 minutes of timeless movie magic.

Paris Is Burning catches the sadly hollow spectacle with acuity, wit and intelligence.

"Waves" is a spellbinder.

Without jerking tears or reducing the acid content of his wit, Baumbach's humane movie gets under your skin.

The result is a movie miracle; it soars.

Even education can't kill the demon of fun in Black. Enroll in his class and you won't stop laughing.

A burst of pure filmmaking exhilaration that manages to pay homage to the classic 1960s TV series and still boldly go where no man, William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy included, has gone before.

The acting is flawless, with Simmonds and young Jupe making every minute count. Blunt (Krasinski's wife off screen) is in a class by herself, taking a near-silent role and building a tour de force of expressive emotion.

It’s a love letter — to New York, to the bohemians and musicians who still live there come hell or high water, to the art of crafting a damn fine customized Stratocaster, to taking pride in your work, to shooting the shit and most importantly, to finding a place for fellow freaks and misfits to call home.

This is a generational family saga everyone can relate to, and Nair gives it her special magic.

Baumbach, in his most compassionate film since The Squid and the Whale, catches Frances in the act of inventing herself. It's a glorious sight to see.

Deeply felt sincerity of the kind that Mills offers can be a tough pill. You kind of have to be in the mood. But this isn’t a film that works despite those excesses. Instead, it makes a case for them.

An artistic triumph.

There's a word for the kind of comic, dramatic, romantic, transporting visions Miyazaki achieves in Howl's: bliss.

Want to find the heart of rock & roll? You can hear it thundering in Anvil.

Not only is this dazzler by far the best and most thrilling of the three Harry Potter movies to date, it's a film that can stand on its own even if you never heard of author J.K. Rowling and her young wizard hero.

Deliberate, demanding and character-driven, Michael Clayton flies in the face of what sells at the multiplex. I couldn't have liked it more.

What a kick to watch whip-smart director Rian Johnson shake the cobwebs off the whodunit genre and make it snap to stylish, wickedly entertaining life for a new generation. That’s what happens in Knives Out, a mystery that takes the piss out of Agatha Christie clichés.

James Ponsoldt's funny and touching coming-of-age tale covers old ground with disarming freshness.

Exciting and then some, Face/Off blends the director's supercharged images of balletic brutality and spiritual catharsis with an off-the-wall humor that allows John Travolta and Nicolas Cage to really let it rip.

The greatest surfing picture of all time, this unassuming piece of counterculture anthropology is so likable that it had kids around the world buying boards and heading to the California coast in search of the perfect barrel.

Stick your neck out for this Swedish horror show. It's a winner, full of mirth and malice, plus a young romance you'll never see on the Disney Channel.

For a film so consumed with hitting something over a net, O’Connor’s work here is practically an ode to performing without the safety of one.

It’s a good-looking, well-acted movie with a solid kicker. As for the odyssey of emotional nuance that its style and portent seem to promise, it digs beneath the surface, but to a shallower depth than it seems to think.

To watch Sorry We Missed You is to realize that, despite its dedication to showing how people live and love and work (and work, and work, and work) in everyday Britain, this is a story that goes far beyond the United Kingdom.

While it is gratifying to hear each woman speak on her art in her own terms, the documentary’s most illuminating moments are those that demonstrate how each musician’s work has been received by others over the years.

If you're going to interpret on film the searching mind of an indisputable genius, it helps not to make too many dumbass moves. On that basis, score a triumph for Steve Jobs, written, directed and acted to perfection, and so fresh and startling in conception and execution that it leaves you awed.

It becomes more of an actor’s showcase, in other words, which has always been one of Payne’s strengths — he’s an old-school director of performers, with a penchant for conjuring memories of several old schools in particular.

Sound of Metal understands the importance of immersing you in this brave new noiseless world and giving you a compelling Virgil to guide you through it, but its real strength may simply be its powers of observation.

Powered by Simon's brilliance, Under African Skies is a cultural lightning bolt that soars on its music and an unshakable belief in the transcendence of art.

This is a lobbed grenade. But it’s also personal filmmaking at its prodding, profound best. This is a Spike Lee joint and a Spike Lee history lesson. Prepare to be schooled.

No true movie junkie is going to want to miss Side by Side.

Funny, poignant, personal and a rage-filled valentine to a metropolis that’s seen its fair share of gentrification.

Bouchareb's film helped shame the French government into raising pensions for more than 80,000 of these veterans. Here's that rare movie that really did change things. I'll be damned.

As for the animation, it's spectacular in every sense of the word and lifted by a superb Alexandre Desplat score, featuring taiko drums, that marks a new career peak for the Oscar-winning composer of "The Shape of Water."

Kelly Reichardt makes films that unfold at the speed of life, not Hollywood. She's a poet of the space between words, and the hypnotic and haunting Certain Women presents the writer-director at her artfully attentive best.

It’s the kind of alchemy achieved when an artist has his or her vision brought to a larger audience by someone who understands exactly what they’re doing. It’s a testament to the power of the material and the determination of its interpreters to not dilute it one ounce.

Drugstore Cowboy improves. Not much, but in provocative ways.

Love Is Strange is, above all, a triumph for Lithgow and Molina, two consummate actors who bring decades of experience to artful performances that are as emotionally expressive in silence as they are in words. Acting doesn’t get better than this. Want to know what love is? Watch Lithgow and Molina and learn.

Linklater is a sly and formidable talent, bringing an anthropologist's eye to this spectacularly funny celebration of the rites of stupidity. His shitfaced "American Graffiti" is the ultimate party movie -- loud, crude, socially irresponsible and totally irresistible.

It might have all been another Hollywood-formula flick with American might taking on the alien other. But Greengrass gives Phillips and Muse the time, aboard a covered lifeboat, to discover shared beliefs and fears.

A horror movie that hides its monsters in plain sight, Soft & Quiet is meant to disquiet you from the very beginning, forcing you to ride shotgun with these “jus’ folks” who mix matchmaking suggestions for single members with toxic comments about immigrants and minorities.

The movie sometimes feels a little caught up in its own virtuosity. But the actors, Covino and Marvin — a sentient grenade and spineless but loving worm, respectively — keep it lively and make it meaningful. If the movie succeeds in surpassing the exercise it easily could have been, it’s because of them.

When it comes to rousing action, whip-smart laughs and moral uplift that doesn't pump sunshine up your ass, Three Kings rules.

It’s an oft-stunning visual feast and an entertaining peek into Eggers’ instincts as a choreographer not only of historical detail but of bloody action. It is also an instructive example of how the most visionary intentions can’t always enliven an otherwise rote story.

Like his characters, Guiraudie is walking a tightrope, finding the point where sex and death exude a similar allure. You won't be able to look away.

A kickass documentary.

In Spanish, "sicario" means "hitman." In film terms, Sicario is sensational, the most gripping and tension-packed spin through America's covert War on Drugs since Steven Soderbergh's Traffic 15 years ago.

There are some breathtakingly gorgeous images the movie throws at you — the townsfolk silently waving white handkerchiefs during a funeral — among the few giddily grotesque visuals that you can’t shake. (Pedro Sotero’s cinematography is as stunning as a painting and as psychotropic as the drugs the villagers take before the finale.)

Green has created a work of startling originality that will haunt you for a good, long time.

An ugly masterpiece.

Just watch the magnificent Manville, in a raw and riveting award-class performance that exposes a grieving heart under siege. Her last scene is quietly devastating. So is this intimate miracle of a movie.

For Blade Runner junkies like myself, who've mainlined five different versions of Ridley Scott's now iconic sci-fi film noir – from the release print to the Director's Cut and the Final Cut (the last two minus that voiceover Scott and Ford hated) – every minute of this mesmerizing mindbender is a visual feast to gorge on.

Part of the miracle of Robert Altman's triumphantly fierce, funny, moving and innovative Short Cuts is that you can't get this movie out of your head. You keep playing it back to savor its formula-smashing audacity, its peerless performances and its cleareyed view of blasted lives.

I've seen A Mighty Wind only twice so far. Maybe it is less fresh than "Guffman," more strained than "Best in Show." Who cares? It's still a gift from comedy heaven.

13th, available in theaters and on Netflix, is one for the cinema time capsule, a record of shame so powerful that it just might change things. Godspeed.

The acting by Esposito and Jackson is exceptional, but it is on the remarkable face of Nelson that Yakin shows what gets lost when a child beats criminals at their own game.

Adams, her face a reflection of conflicting emotions, is simply stellar in an Oscar-buzzed performance of amazing grit and grace. Without her, Arrival might be too cerebral to warm up to. With her, the film gets inside your head and emerges as something intimate and epic, a linguistics odyssey through space and time. It's the stuff that dreams are made of.

There's a special kick that comes in finding a new star. So step up, Ellen Page, and take your bows.

One of the best movies of the year and by far the most entertaining.

This is a tale that’s carefully crafted as much as told, with hints hiding in plain sight and surreal touches that add more to the vibe than the momentum. But you never feel like you’re in the hands of someone who doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing.

It’s comically postmodern to the point of feeling almost retro, which also describes Everything Everywhere’s sense of action, its enriched sense of comedy colliding violence, practical materials (like fanny packs) taking their ranks amid the physically superhuman feats of choreography — a mix many of us rightly associate with Jackie Chan.

Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams give two of the most explosive and emotionally naked performances you will see anywhere. Just know you're in for a workout.

Crowe -- fierce, funny and every inch the hero -- gives a blazing star performance.

It’s a testament to Yamazaki’s work as both director and screenwriter that Minus One feels like a wartime character drama first, kaiju film second.

Top Five is Rock's best movie by a mile. It's authentically hilarious.

Coco brims over with visual pleasures, comic energy and emotional wallop.

Bridge of Spies may be a snooze to the ADD crowd allergic to historical drama, but it's dished out by experts.

Freeman's nuanced acting is a marvel.

The movie is a world-class winner.

The three actors could not be better. Huge feelings are packed into this small, fragile movie. It's something special.

The hypnotic and haunting Foxcatcher can prove its worth as one of the year's very best films. Steve Carell, Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo give the performances of their lives.

McGregor goes bone-deep in a performance of shining subtlety. And a never-better Plummer is simply stupendous, refusing any call to sentiment as he shows us Hal's resonant lunge at life. Mills works the same way. Beginners is one from the bruised heart.

Wim Wenders’ heartbreaking, profoundly American masterpiece...The climactic scene – set in a peep-show booth – features a stunning autographical monologue that’s one of the most mesmerizing pieces of screen acting ever filmed.

Bright Star is the New Zealand writer-director's raw, sensual attempt to render Keats as experienced by a young girl who couldn't understand the genius of his verse.

The choices that King and Hoover make relative to the public pressures they applied to one another only serve, in Pollard’s recounting of this bitter history, to twine these men together ever so tightly. This is all part of what gives Pollard’s film its deafening urgency, its tingling aura of imminent danger.

Powered by a transfixing Portman, Larrain's film – one of the year's best – is appropriately hard to pin down and impossible to forget.

If "Get Out" reminds folks that you can smuggle intelligent social commentary and timely conversation-starters in to theaters via explosive genre packages, then Ducournau's feature debut doubles down on the notion. In terms of the female-body politic, it's an art-horror dirty bomb.

Test Pattern, for its emphatically binary sense of the world as summed up in the differences between these two people, for its literal examinations of blackness and whiteness, and gender, and everything else, somehow avoids falling into the trap of painting the world in black and white. It is a film that — more than presenting the mess of the life — dives in headlong, wisely, cuttingly, and to devastating effect.

Inherent Vice is packed with shitfaced hilarity, soulful reveries, stylistic ingenuity and smashing performances that keep playing back in your head. It may not demand repeat viewings, but it sure as hell rewards them. It's the work of a major talent.

It's a compelling, twist-filled tale, one told with a highly developed sense of empathy, a few aesthetic missteps (perhaps it's time to issue a permanent moratorium on montages set to "Walkin' on Sunshine"? Actually, scratch the perhaps there) and a knack for turning the triplets' experience into something bigger than just stranger-than-fiction tabloid fodder.

It helps that American Fiction has, at its center, someone who gives Monk a keen intelligence, a razor-sharp wit, and a spiky exterior, as well as showing you the perpetually scratched romantic beneath the battle-tested cynic.

While you're remembering new high-impact names, add Arnold. In only her second film, after 2006's "Red Road," she keeps the screen filled to bursting with the beauty and raw terror of life.

No grabs you hard, no mercy, and keeps you riveted.

Such wild zigzags in tone — between bumbling physical comedy and lightly stinging satirical observation, between heartbreaking vulnerability and bursts of gleefully vicious, slickly choreographed violence — ought not to work at all. And yet they do, thanks to Jensen’s calm, slightly wry command of the story, and a cast that have all understood the assignment, even when their respective assignments are all quite different.

Best Worst Thing brims over with moments of humor and heartbreak that reflect the feeling of knowing "we're what's new." This movie is more than good, pal. It's indispensable.

For all of its curated channeling of past midnight-movie programming, In Fabric doesn’t feel like it’s cut from the same cloth as anything else. It’s a singular trip into a singularly warped mind.

It's a blast.

Wake up, people. Tarantino lives to cross the line. Is Django Unchained too much? Damn straight. It wouldn't be Tarantino otherwise.