How does a small tale of love found and lost emerge as a major triumph and one of the very best movies of the year? Marriage Story is more than just a career high for writer-director Noah Baumbach (The Meyerowitz Stories, The Squid and the Whale); it’s a peerless showcase for its stars, Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson, who turn this tale of a contentious divorce into a "Kramer vs. Kramer" for the 21st century.

Like the best filmmakers at Sundance 2001, Nolan leaps into the wild blue and dares us to leap with him. Go for it.

All of this is presented with Director Park’s usual eye for extraordinary compositions and the occasional baroque flourish — dig that shot from the bottom of a boilermaker, as it’s being consumed! — but rest assured his tongue is resting comfortably in his cheek.

Even with its simple set-up and at a scant 71 minutes, there’s an entire buffet for thought laid out here. Alexandrowicz may have given us the single best documentary of the year; he has undoubtedly given us one of the most vital.

A thunderous spectacle.

Inspired funny business that allows Martin to hilariously torpedo Hollywood's corrupt heart.

The Hidden World is the best Dragon yet — an animated action phenom with moonstruck passion in its heart and a spirit that soars.

Woods delivers one of his all-time great performances and Stone demonstrates the sheer ambition, both thematic and filmic, that would become a career theme.

It’s part tour diary, part trickster handbook and totally mesmerizing. Rockumentary-wise, you’ve never seen or heard anything like it.

Glorious, a colossus of rousing action and ferocious fun.

Wait till you get a load of this babe from hell in scenes that are sure to put the gorgeously lurid Romeo Is Bleeding on the Moral Majority’s shit list. The rest of us – those who believe it’s children and not adults who need protection from movie mayhem – will be too busy relishing the riveting fireworks display from Olin and Oldman in this scorcher of a thriller. Director Peter Medak (The Krays, The Ruling Class) keeps the action stylish, sexy and fiendishly funny. The film rarely makes a lick of sense, but it’s compulsively watchable.

The artful symmetry is an Almodovar hallmark, and his cinematic memento is filled with the intimate, indelible moments that made a life. You can feel his passion for cinema in every frame. Pain and Glory is not just his most personal film. It’s also one of his greatest.

Tyrel appears to be an ensemble project, but this is Jason Mitchell’s showcase.

Written and directed by the bracingly brilliant Joanna Hogg, this delicate, dazzling memoir traces her own origin story, and there is something superheroic about her struggle to look back without hitting the brick wall of formula and weepy nostalgia.

What makes David Crosby: Remember My Name one of the best rock documentaries of all time is the no-bull immediacy of the filmmaking.

If you're looking to have your nerves fried and your pulse pounded, this is your ticket to ride.

A savage comedy of sexual extremes; the barbed laughs draw blood.

Anderson offers no phony uplift for the Tenenbaums or for audiences. But he does know how to take a sad song and make it better. In these troubled times, that's a gift.

One of the best movies of the year--startling, innovative, hugely funny and powerfully, courageously moving.

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.

Sadly, Howard blands out in the final third, using old-age makeup and tear-jerking to turn a tough true story into something easily digestible. Until then, you'll be riveted.

Elegant, funny and unexpectedly touching, this whodunit about a murder aboard the yacht of William Randolph Hearst represents a bracing comeback for Peter Bogdanovich.

Gorgeous filmmaking that brims over with funhouse thrills and ravishing romance.

Fierce, funny and vividly moving.

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.

It’s a matter of opinion whether Thunder Road is one of the best films of 2018, a distinction best left for listmakers and marketers. (Cue “It, Me” copping to the former.) But I can say it’s one of my favorites, the sort of experience where you walk out of a theater 90 minutes later and feel like something inside you has shifted two klicks to the left.

One of Moore’s best and most incisively funny films — right up there with "Roger & Me" (1989), "Bowling for Columbine" (2002) and "Sicko" (2007) — his latest goes way past taking potshots at the Donald, though it does that with piercing intelligence and wounding wit.

Oscar voters pretend not to see that Sandler’s a clown who can, almost by an act of will, stand toe-to-toe with the best we’ve got.