By taking a disturbing and sometimes conflicted look at the prejudices that led to the West Memphis Three's imprisonment, it asks murky questions about how people could get something so wrong for so long.

Gastón Solnicki's mapping out of his family's narrative from within never feels exploitative or self-absorbed.

Miguel Gomes combats austerity with expansiveness, leavened by doses of frivolity and scatology.

Wildlife is at once loquacious and laconic, a film in which simple words hold unspoken and unequivocal power, and the space between banal utterances become chasms.

Red Rooms interrogates how the only thing preventing someone from being sucked down a moral whirlpool is to catch sight of their own zombified reflection on their computer screen.

The film starkly reveals the toll propaganda takes on everyday individuals and communities.

Though set in Mexico and ripe with authentic details from daily life, Él is less a portrait of machismo gone awry than it is a brutal and absurd glimpse at one man’s runaway paranoia.

Asif Kapadia's documentary is ultimately less affecting and insightful on a universal thematic scale than on an individual, personal one.

The Lost Leonardo deals less with absolutes than fungible notions of perception and power.

Good as the cameos are, however, the lasting draw of the film is its exceptional aesthetic. Gilliam keeps his camera low in a child’s perspective, and wide-angle lenses only exacerbate the magnified sense of scale that everything has.

It's Cristian Mungiu's staging and compositional skill that lends the material its true sense of dawning dread.

Wife of a Spy could use a streak of live-wire, huckster crudeness, a bit of melodrama delivered in an unselfconscious manner.

Orlando, My Political Biography languishes in an undefinable interstitial space, floating between fiction and essay film.

Michal Aviad’s film forcefully brings home a reality that many of us have been aware of only intellectually.

It's the rare film to sell sex as something truly tender and life-affirming, and Helen Hunt, in particular, is lovely and poignant.

The film's most haunting sequences are self-contained arias in which characters grapple with their powerlessness.

This is activist filmmaking that manages to be both angry and elegiac in its recounting of the 2014 Ukrainian revolution.

Annihilation gets momentum from the deeper it pushes into the uncertainties of ecology and the self.

Mazursky finds the politics in the wrinkles of human behavior, rather than contriving behavior to suit his politics.

It's important to talk at length about Pariah's aesthetic because of how it distracts from the emotional truthfulness of the sometimes heartbreaking, by and large gorgeously performed story.

Ron "Stray Dog" Hall proves to be a welcome antidote to stereotypes about burly, bearded red-state RV dwellers.

An exposé of how the financial structures that make businesses possible in America seem to conspire against genuine good will and non-self-serving ambition.

Lee’s first film statement conveys the communal experience.

The film the tough true story has spawned is as formulaically cheery, didactically "uplifting," and fundamentally false as a Disney sports movie.

The film's constant cruelty is so inescapable that it starts to feel unfair not only to the protagonist, but to Iran itself.

It’s not a film about saying the right thing so much as it’s about people mutually arriving at the right place—no matter the untidiness involved in getting there.

There’s no denying El Cid‘s lucid grandeur as it reaches its famous climax, a simultaneously triumphant and tragic portrait of the warrior as corpse that, like the best of Mann’s work, never neglects the human toll of heroism.

The film might have benefited from taking a page out of Nam June Paik’s Zen for Film and slowed down its flow.

Ross McElwee is less anxious of death itself than of finally comprehending the vast faultiness of the life he's lived.

Balancing rough-edge verité with highly composed images and a meticulous structure, it doesn’t preclude itself from finding something like poetry in its subjects’ struggles.

The film’s rhythmic editing contextualizes Ferguson’s streets for their relevance to a black populace’s want for stability and peace.

Planet of the Apes became a blockbuster because it’s cannily crafted, in part, as a ripping adventure yarn, director Franklin Schaffner staging a long desert trek for survival by Taylor and his two surviving shipmates in the opening half-hour, a brilliant “hunt” sequence with gorillas pursuing the human brutes as targets and trophies (memorably enhanced by Jerry Goldsmith’s dissonant, percussive score), and a lengthy chase sequence where the escaped spaceman leaps and dodges past hairy denizens of church, museum, and marketplace.

Julia Solomonoff's film ripples with a palpable sense of the sheer distance between the down and out actor at its center and his goals.

There are hints that the film will scale itself to the broader historical context of this era, but the screenplay never elaborates on the ethnic strife the undergirds the Cambodian genocide.

It both feeds off of and perpetuates nostalgia for a time when the nation seemed more politically conscious and therefore more capable of creating lasting social change.

Though his film's feel is pure Iraq and Afghanistan, Fiennes doesn't push those parallels unduly, and his central performances prove clear, nuanced, and incisive.

The film meticulously yet concisely probes how, why, and when our understanding of the greenhouse effect went from a scientific certainty to it being up for debate.

The poetic pretenses are compounded by a sledgehammer insistence on elusive and irreducible moments as inherently beautiful.

For Patricio Guzmán, to gaze at the Cordillera is to comprehend the range of history and the possibility of its distortion.

Rather than a simplistic, straightforward parable of greed, Bad Education depicts its true events with a surprising amount of depth and ambiguity.

Hondo is a mash of the usual tropes, a whirlwind of Native American war paint, cavalry stripes, a sawdust-saloon poker game, a few fistfights, plenty of gunfire, and every moral equation coming to a satisfactory balance by the time the credits roll.

J.C. Chandor's fondness for situational irony is empowered by the spartan efficiency of his method, and that of most of his performers.

The film builds on a docudrama realism while also reaching toward the mythological.

In the film, Manaus is a place of irreconcilable tension between the lush natural world and the cold, metallic world of industrial modernity.

There's a comic streak to the film that suggests David Fincher may understand the material as trash, but it's the kind of affectation that only reinforces, rather than dulls, its insults.

Though relentlessly and admirably logical, the movie constantly glosses over the buried human element.

It's the first segment that feels the most fleshed out, for how well it presents characters with actual lives as compared to the thinly veiled talking points of the film's second half.

The title of Susan Froemke's documentary is both an expression of aspiration and a statement of achievement.

Good Luck's political implications—most prominently that the almighty dollar is humanity's enduring slave master—are expertly woven into the hallucinatory aural-visual fabric of the film.

Small, Slow But Steady is one of the first great pandemic movies because it reflects the lessons about mutual support and communal perseverance that we should be taking from very familiar pandemic struggles.

Peter Strickland’s playful mockery of performance art and excessively serious-minded “collectives” feels both insular and, at times, a shade too flavorless.

Israel's fractured psyche is plumbed via narrative splintering in Policeman, Nadav Lapid's compelling drama about his homeland's burgeoning social unrest.

Like the movie itself, every character is a beautiful swirl of contradictions.

With Ahed’s Knee, Nadav Lapid plays a game with alter egos that’s at once canny and frustrating.

Herzog’s idiosyncratic horror classic remains a vital conversation between two distinct generations of brilliant German filmmakers.

Loving finds little grooves of humanity to explore in its characters, and in its milieu, in between expected plot beats.

The film brims with hilarious dialogue, lightly satirical observations of a culture that treats art as a commodity, and satisfying payoffs to a number of story elements planted early on.

Martin Scorsese crafts a versatile, multifaceted work that encourages serious reflection and contemplation.

Rainer Sarnet is as invested in telling a convoluted story that feels rooted in millennia-old folklore as he is in unabashedly experimenting with form and style for the sake of visual pleasure alone.

It compellingly captures a family wrestling mightily with the riddles and contradictions of a culture that promotes achievement at all costs with little thought as to what that actually means.

A buoyant tribute, even if the pedigree of the project implies something more paradigm-shifting.

A story of a poet, Hotel by the River comes to resemble a poetry collection itself, abounding in emotional currents and grace notes that are bracingly allowed to hang, free of reductive explication.

That the democratization of the internet has opened a doorway for fascist ideologies to openly quash democratic ones is an irony that isn’t lost on the film.

The film's approach to exploring the Sonoran Desert and topic of immigration often veers toward the avant-garde.

The film is marked by wild flashes of invention, all born of painstaking craft and devotion.

Denis Villeneuve’s film, like its predecessor, offers an object lesson in the visual splendor made possible by meticulously storyboarded minimalist maximalism.

A lot of critics will talk about how the movie is a stripped-down, "pure" genre piece, and there's a lot of truth to that. What may not get as much press is the way stripped-down-ness is an affectation, and always has been.

Throughout, Lynne Sachs undercuts the image of the past as simpler or more stable than the present.

From its engagement with genre tropes (particularly film noir), to its tangibly grimy urban backdrops, to its archetypal hero/villain dramatic dichotomy, there’s no mistaking the film’s American influence.

This is a fanboy movie, one more engaged with the excitement of possibility than that of reality, and whatever the noxious connotations of that form of film appreciation, this particular project does a pretty fantastic job of stirring up enthusiasm.

Cary Joji Fukunaga’s artistry registers less as psychological imprint than as a measure of his professional bona fides.

Apollo 10½ ultimately suggests that memory distorts and amplifies just as much as it preserves.

Though Kingsley’s saturnine poise is much more interesting in roles which call for varying degrees of slipperiness, he nevertheless manages to bring shades into the inherently monochromatic saintliness of the role with life-sized, profoundly felt gravity and dignity, all while executing that marvelous, peculiarly British trick (remember Robert Donat in Goodbye, Mr. Chips) of seeming to age from within.

Leave it to a documentarian to find subjects who profess a similar faith in the power of ecstatic rather than merely objective truth.

Lafleur denies Nicole the angsty treatments given similar characters in films like The Graduate and Frances Ha by refusing to saturate the film with an undergirding sense of charm, where the issues being faced are merely points of spasmodic uncertainty that will erode over time.

The Venerable W. is at times downright dowdy, but there’s an ever-present sense of rage and despair burbling beneath its placid surface.

Kirill Serebrennikov’s blackly comedic fantasia paints a none-too-rosy picture of Russia, or its Soviet past festering just beneath the surface.

Jane Campion upends staid genre convention with an impressionistic approach to character.

The film is one that fully recognizes the power of a lingering gaze, a suppressed smile, the slightest movement of the littlest finger, and one which uses them all to maximum effect.

Across the film, you can feel the push and pull between a master technician who built his career on the patient, delicate plucking at our heartstrings and his newfound desire to please a wide audience with the broadest of affective strokes.

In their best films, the Coens mine the depths of loneliness and egotism and frailty and solipsism. But in THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS there's a noticeable lack of deeper insinuation, a lack of curiosity.

Dan Sallitt recognizes that even the sturdiest of friendships are inevitably tested by time and the evolution of personal responsibility.

The film is an unambiguous endorsement of violent revolt as the only effective response to such inhuman savagery.

The Plague is vividly, terrifying attuned to the way children create a social order that resists sensible adult intrusion and influence.

The First Slam Dunk is able to throw a relentless series of new gambits, twists, and reversals at the screen that will keep even seasoned sports film fans on the edge of their seat.

The filmmakers' perspective is firmly aligned with the views of liberal Zionism, as the leftist peace activists are given the most screen time.

For Hong Sang-oo, In Our Day is a gesture toward recognizing the beautiful, awful, and uncanny.

It never bothers to attempt the one thing we'd expect and hope from a documentary about Ricky Jay: It doesn't try to bamboozle us.

How to Have Sex winds up delivering on the promise of its title, as this is a truly instructive film about sexual politics, though a remarkable one for largely leaving emotions unresolved and relationships feeling messy.

As is so often the case in Jim Jarmusch's films, simply spending time in the company of his creations proves engrossing.

Lake Bell holds the thing together through sheer charisma, and in fact the foibles of the movie only start to show when she absents herself for extended stretches of time.

Olivier Meyrou’s ironically titled documentary weaves a tightly constructed story about success, power, and mortality.

What will make the film essential for future generations isn't mere flashpoint topicality, but the way it aligns an old struggle with a current one.

The film attests to George Miller’s enduring aptitude for utilizing the ridiculous to achieve the sublime.

Poltergeist's most canny conceit is how it takes the concept of a haunted house—up to that point a gothic, remote icon (you practically had to accept a dare and then drive halfway across the state to ever find yourself in one)—and plops it in the middle of the most mundane of all possible locations: American suburbia.

The pangs of romance, eroticism, anguish, and longing (both for the stolen moments of private passion and for the sense-making schematics of Empire) transcend any period of cinema Tabu may evoke.

Walking Out is modest in scope, its concerns limited to man’s attempts to live both morally and harmoniously with nature.

Thom Andersen attempts to establish unity by effectively bridging vast swaths of film history into one cohesive body of work.