Limbo is vital personal filmmaking from a world-class practitioner of the art.

Sciamma is weaving a spell here, so pure in its emotional resonance that it breaks your heart even as it heals wounds.

The movie would hit every bullseye it needed to even without her near-surgical deconstruction of the narcissistic monsters who scream “action” and “cut.” With Cruz’s take on artistic “genius,” however, this satire officially becomes a work of actual genius.

Maestro is every bit Felicia’s story as it is Bernstein’s, and all the better for it. Through her, we see how convivial, how magnetic, how cold he could be.

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.

Spike Lee is coming at you with his greatest and most galvanizing movie in years. BlacKkKlansman is right up there with "Do the Right Thing" and "Malcolm X" in the Spike’s Joint pantheon of game-changers.

Atlantics pulls you into an experience. The empathy machine runs at full speed here. Ada, c’est moi.

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

Under the astute direction of Danny DeVito, who does a sly turn as Oliver's attorney, this acid-dipped epic of revenge is killingly funny and dramatically daring.

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.

Watching Collective when it premiered on the fall festival circuit last year, it was easy to see that it should be considered a flat-out masterpiece regardless of timing. Yet to watch it, or rewatch it, now is to experience something even deeper. It’s a story of a nation’s inability to take care of its citizens that comes to us in the middle of a pandemic that’s crippling America’s economy and killing its citizens.

This stunning, slow-build thriller from South Korean director Lee Chang-dong sizzles with a cumulative power that will knock the wind out of you.

You should prepare to be wowed by Natalie Portman, who delivers a take-no-prisoners performance as Celeste, a swaggering rock diva who tends to burn down everything in her path, especially when she’s crossed.

There are surreal and absurdist touches throughout Nyoni’s second feature, and like the Zambian filmmaker’s awe-inspiring debut, I Am Not a Witch (2017), it proves she has a perfect sense of how to blend no-nonsense realism with its more magical counterpart.

Kapadia, as masterful a filmmaker as they come, is happy to let viewers wonder where these stories will intersect, and how they’ll collide into or off of each other.

Like Vardalos and Corbett, who play their roles with vibrant charm, the film, directed by Joel Zwick, is heartfelt and hilarious in ways you can't fake. It's a keeper.

Ferrara’s blend of toughness and lyricism turns this visionary crime film into something stylish, seductive and haunting.

As entertainment and provocation, Joker is simply stupendous.

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

Prey, director Dan Trachtenberg’s addition to the Predatorverse, isn’t just an intriguing expansion of the series or a cool intellectual-property detour; it’s something close to a B-movie masterpiece, a survivalist thriller-slash-proto-Western-slash-final-girl horror flick that, like both its iconic alien and its indigenous Ripley 2.0 heroine, is extremely good at what it sets out to do.

Only some bumpy, arid passages in the script keep The Others out of the master class occupied by the likes of "The Sixth Sense" and, my favorite, 1961's "The Innocents."

A kickass documentary.

Redford blows the dust off a 35-year-old scandal about rigged TV quiz shows and makes it snap with up-to-the-minute relevance.

A svelte jolt of everything that captures Prince at his most dazzling: the singing, the dancing, the multi-instrumental talent, the rapport with his band and those bolero-chic outfits.

Surprisingly timely and enduringly timeless.

McTeer and Brown make magic ina film that is wonderfully funny, touching and vital.

The burning intensity of MacKay’s face, reflecting the ferocity and futility of war, leaves an indelible mark. His fervor, coupled with the creative passion that Mendes infuses in every frame, makes 1917 impossible to shake.

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.