Bleakness, Arturo Ripstein's film implies, demands different kinds of labor from a man than from a woman.

A charged, unnerving turn of the screw, The Invitation is consumed by the fear of forgetting.

Kenneth Lonergan's film gradually comes to its sense of exquisitely calibrated, hardened intimacy.

James Schamus's screenplay is rich with culturally specific details that deepen these forking moral predicaments.

It routinely alternating between episodes that contrast exhilaration with exploitation and damnation.

The film is further confirmation of Mia Hansen-Løve’s delicately devastating ear and touch as a filmmaker.

This is a work of art that's as much a cinematic probe, and a challenge to mythologizing past eras, as it is an ancestral history lesson.

It's a film of such multitudinous interests and storytelling pursuits that its unfolding replicates the ecstasy of newfound romance.

Throughout, director Penny Lane strings together telling incidents and anecdotes with a light touch.

John Wick: Chapter 2 remarkably balances its predecessor’s spartan characterizations and plotting with a significant expansion of scale.

A Quiet Passion's accomplishment is in fleshing out the stark context behind Emily Dickinson's ethereal words.

Asghar Farhadi's 2006 film interrogates the tensions between tactility and vision in complex ways.

Eiichi Yamamoto's cult anime strikes a perfect balance between midnight-movie enchantment and arthouse sophistication.

The film enables us to feel the emotional weight of a posthumous letter precisely because we can only imagine its contents.

The film communicates a sporadic sense of violation—of pastiche unpredictably giving way to a raw and primordially intimate emotional realm.

Given its nearly episodic structure, formal choices, and similar thematic inquiries, Sworn Virgin suggests an unofficial remake of Vivre Sa Vie.

Like the work it illuminates, the doc feels formally impeccable yet utterly unstaged, a vivid distillation of a distinct and precious life.

Decolonization in Black Girl isn't only a myth, but also a myth that actually strengthens the consumerist caste systems.

Bi Gan's film is a soulful depiction of China's increasingly rapid pace of cultural and economic transformation.

Roberto Minervini's documentary is as quintessentially American a text as one could hope for in today's divided union.

Aquarius is a critique of a daydream that has the imaginative daring to live that very dream anyway.

The film explores the extent to which Olivier Assayas’s characters have always found, and lost, their identities through the aid of their surroundings.

By its end, Maren Ade's Toni Erdmann is a work of laser-guided social critique and a comedy.

Pablo Larraín has captured Pablo Neruda in all of his pomposity, pretense, courage, and undeniable genius.

Na Hong-jin's The Wailing is a work of thriller maximal-ism, a rare case of more actually being more rather than less.

Director Sean Ellis's film offers a potent examination of the moral rectitude of resistance.

The opaque ethics of The Chaser elide the reductive nature of binary pairs, focusing instead on the far more piquant complexity of human behavior.

Wang Bing intends to give back to the inmates the opportunity for individual expression that society has robbed them of.

The film creates a deeply rooted sense of realism that contrasts the austere, surreal illustrations.

The film has an artisanal intensity that prevents it from turning into a smug and predictable exercise in political revision.

Demon offers a tidal wave of unrelieved longing and regret, with a devilish streak of absurdism.

As with Selma, filmmaker Ava DuVernay has fashioned a work of pummeling and clear-eyed intelligence.

A real yet illusory world is evoked so seamlessly that it also feels just one step away from pure cinematic fiction.

Private Property abounds in inventive low-budget filmmaking while stress-testing a pulpy, dime-store premise.

Much more than a punk artifact, Smithereens is a landmark that showcases how the urge of self-creation and the seduction of reveling in self-destruction dance side by side.

The Lost City of Z links every weathered look that Percy Fawcett throws to the heart of his spiritual yearning.

The film unapologetically warns us at every turn that fashion is nothing but a business, fueled by naiveté and rape.

André Téchiné does justice to the closeness between repulsion and desire, difference and sameness, heterosexuality and homosexuality.

Hamaguchi arranges most sequences around a handful of static, roomy medium shots that subtly suggest emotional dynamics through camera and actor positioning.

In the logic of the film, for the camera to move at all would feel like a betrayal of its contemplative hunger.

It condenses everyday interactions, memories, and dreams into a potent mix of all the major ingredients of a well-lived life.

Despite the film's bleak premise, writer-director Radu Jude finds dark humor within the certainty of death.

Director Kasper Collins imbues this documentary with an ambiguous, unsettlingly empathetic emotional force.

The film buzzes with hand-drawn creativity that's precious in both the pop-cultural and material senses.

Each brief glimpse of the creature’s fleshy, slithering mass imbues the character drama with an aching sexual desire and, as the violent potential of the entity becomes clear, a mounting sense of dread.

Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe's documentary raises important questions about the limits of pedagogy.

Yourself and Yours‘s commitment to its various extreme ambiguities is a crucial facet of the film’s success.

The film doesn't so much bring us closer to the serial murderer as it reminds us of our culpability as spectators.

A wilder, weirder, funnier, more heartfelt and eye-popping, and, above all, more fully realized representation of director Paul King’s eccentric sensibility.

The film makes no concessions about its dissatisfaction with the whole rotten lot of so-called western democracy.

At bottom, Itami’s film is a zesty, albeit wholesomely satisfying, concoction concerned with the virtues of community and cooperation. Nonetheless, Tampopo also explores some darker regions in a number of vignettes that illuminate the often surreal intersections of sex, death, and other human appetites.

Very few films accept the contradicting velocities of gay desire, and present them in such blunt yet graceful fashion, the way Paris 05:59 does.

As striking as Mudbound's combat scenes are, they largely exist as setup for the postwar-set second half of the film, which scrutinizes the way that the atrocities witnessed in Europe laid bare the unsustainable hypocrisy in America's own bigoted divisions.

Writer-director Francis Lee captures not only what masculinity does and how it comes undone, but the complex apparatus that keeps it into place: the family’s surveillance, the silence, the shame.

Mapping the intersection between history and emotion, Michael Almereyda finds himself in Alain Resnais terrain.

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

Rarely have source material, director, and leading actress been more in alignment than in Orlando.

Mike Ott and Nathan Silver's film has a ghostly, tremulous quality that eats under the skin.

Trading on the already-resonant associations engendered by a famous face, Garrel's film responds by forging a new, deeper connection between an actress and her public, resulting in that rare moment of cinematic alchemy where the line between fact and fiction has not only blurred, but ceased to matter entirely.

Writer-director Boo Junfeng casually reinvigorates the prison drama, boiling its elements down to their primal essence.

Anocha Suwichakornpong earnestly and ambitiously attempts to redefine cinema’s conventional grasp of consciousness.

With Gemini, Aaron Katz does his cover of the Los Angeles-set murder mystery, homing in on the genre's evocative loneliness.

In its visceral purity, Jairus McLeary's film drags male toxicity up into the light, offering it as a cure for itself.

The film is the finest balance yet of Martin McDonagh's bleak sense of humor and offbeat moral sincerity.

The film's screenplay is impressive for how crucial plot points emerge as backdrops to the explicit purpose of a scene.

Subscribing to the belief that the eyes are the windows to the soul, Tarkovsky locates Stalker’s spiritual center in his protagonists’ weathered countenances.

As with most Hong Sang-soo films, it engages in intellectual gamesmanship while courting emotional pathos.

The Safdies play with time like it’s an accordion, stretching out notes of bliss and anxiety while compressing the daily lives of their characters in order to convey the constant state of hustle and stresses necessitated by being poor and hungry for drugs, cash, or a bite to eat in New York City.

The film follows its refugee subjects closely but with a physical and narrative distance that respects their independence.

The film celebrates the unrecognized willpower and perseverance that undergirds low-wage service work in this country.

The Long Riders takes more than a few cues from John Ford, favoring laconic characters whose projected confidence masks an inability to vocalize basic desires.

One feels in the film's punishing bleakness a yearning for transcendence.

Sean Baker spends much of The Florida Project charging in vigorously nimble fashion up and down the stairs of the Magic Castle, in and out of its rooms, investing the minutia of the down-and-out lives within this little ecosystem with a bittersweet energy and significance.

Movement and progress are the organizing principles throughout Abbas Kiarostami's final, posthumously released film.

The film is full of astute, and poetically staged, critiques of the parallel worlds resulting from Iran's police state.

Claire Denis finds the inexorable beauty (and sadness) in that most corrosive and fugacious of feelings.

It may be Piñeiro’s most inspired and thrilling work to date, exhaustive in its means of keeping the viewer off balance and yet rich in its emotional implications.

The film is yet another of Phillippe Garrel's densely anecdotal studies of romantic fidelity.

Hong Sang-soo's film is governed by a narrative circle that suggests relief as well as entrapment.

Throughout, direcgor Bill Morrison mixes documentarian detail with an ecstatic sense of poetry.

One hundred and six minutes is entirely too short a time span for Sheridan to cover Christy's entire life, but the performances are so profound they successfully fill in any and all gaps.

Agnès Varda and JR's film develops into something approaching a manifesto for the possibility of shared happiness.

Even though it’s not as tidily satisfying as Get Out, the new film is both darker and more ambitious, and broader in its themes.

Equally self-reflective and enjoyable is the score by Marc Shaiman and Thomas Richard Sharp that cuts a sweeping western theme into the waltz and college-sports tunes that color the film’s animated title sequence and then throughout its more comic set pieces—not even cutting out entirely during Crystal and company’s rendition of the Bonanza theme song. Rather, like the film itself, it beautifully accents Crystal’s high notes.

Throughout Harmonium, writer-director Kôji Fukada works in a rapt and lucid hyper-textural style that suggests a merging of the sensibilities of Alfred Hitchcock and Yasujirô Ozu.

A preoccupation with the totemic materiality of cinema runs through Michael Almereyda’s documentary.

The film's thematic organization suggests the cinematic equivalent of a short-story collection, with haunting tangents and stray notes of poetry.

Long takes are used frequently, whether in a seven-minute exchange between Rose and Huston in bed or a staggering high-angle shot that frames Rose in front of a football field while using a payphone, before craning down to capture her in close-up. These visual cues, along with Midler’s presence, give the film an immediacy and dynamism.

Lee’s first film statement conveys the communal experience.

It advocates risk and consciousness as the only means to overcome the cold, repressive hand of so-called normative thought.

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.

The Last Detail is so perfectly tailored to the star that it could’ve been mapped out from a Pythagorean theorem.

There’s something liberating about such a steady creative hand that rejects justifying the twists and turns of a storyline, which becomes in 4 Days in France something akin to cruising itself.

It’s a testament to Nathan Silver’s keen sense of observation that we don’t want the film to turn decisively into thriller terrain.

Redford ultimately holds Downhill Racer together with the performance of his career.

A uniquely American comedy, Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird is testy, humane, and firmly rooted in its time and place.

In directly requesting the audience's trust, Travis Wilkerson initiates a not-particularly-inviting proposition for the viewer, and specifically the white American viewer.