Binoche and Stewart, who has never before exuded so much mystery or nuance, share the screen for much of the movie, and they make a fascinating odd couple; with the former’s high-strung intensity and the latter’s cool watchfulness, the two are a study in contrasting performing styles.

A razor-sharp deadpan comedy suffused with sorrow.

It's a shattering masterpiece about sexual awakening, heartbreak, and self-discovery.

Hogg is not a sensationalistic filmmaker, but rather someone who can convey tremendous amounts of emotion through total tranquility on-screen.

The lesson of the film is a straightforward one—that in the future, people will still need to rely on each other—but Ad Astra communicates it with staggering profundity.

First Cow is a masterwork of indie cinema—a tale that’s both charming and unsparing, suffused with equal measures of wonder and dread.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire is primarily a romance. But it’s also a film about the deeply personal process of creativity—the pain and joy of making one’s emotions and memories into a work of art.

Weerasethakul is unpacking a sensation everyone has probably experienced at one point in their life: the feeling that something is cosmically out of whack.

A tremendous but chilling achievement from one of America’s great storytellers.

Few filmmakers can manage such a dizzying blend of tones, but for Bong, one of South Korea’s finest directors, it’s a trademark. With Parasite he’s crafted his best movie yet.

Every visual composition is meticulously arranged, and every surreal twist of imagery feels nuanced and earned. But most important, the world around Tár seems real and tangible, so when it slips into chaos, the viewer becomes as overwhelmed as the protagonist.

The Worst Person in the World swerves from bustling comedy to erotically charged romance to bittersweet drama, executing each tonal shift seamlessly even as plot twists seem to come out of nowhere.

Wang, who has made only one prior feature (the little-seen 2014 comedy Posthumous), distinguishes herself as a thrilling new voice in filmmaking by crafting one of the most sensitively told stories of the year.

It pairs his inimitable visual elegance with an impassioned argument about the power of storytelling. And it’s a reminder that Anderson remains one of cinema’s best.

It’s an emotional, visceral triumph.

By its conclusion, Cuarón’s film proves itself both wonderful and fearsome. See it. You will never forget it.

Distance is key to the meditative magic of Past Lives. Song’s film is filled with space—the intangible kind between words, and the physical kind between characters.

May December begins grotesquely . . . It ends delicately, as a portrait of fragile, shattered human beings and the mundane entertainment they inspire.

It is a film that continually complicates and recomplicates itself, denying viewers the comfort of easy moral footing. It is by turns heartbreaking, harrowing in its violence, and very, very funny, and it features Oscar-level performances by Frances McDormand, Woody Harrelson, and Sam Rockwell.

It is hard to imagine a better tribute to this victory of survival than Nolan’s spare, stunning, extraordinarily ambitious film.

It is one of the most moving and mesmerizing films of the year, a meditation on the wonders of nature and human curiosity.

Hard Truths itself is astonishingly sensitive for a portrait of someone who often behaves monstrously.

It’s bleak and brutal—and deeply affecting.

If the erotic thrillers of the past explored the dangers of lust, Park Chan-wook explores the risks of longing. His take on the genre isn’t just sexy; it’s playful and mordant and convoluted—and it begs to be rewatched, for the electrifying performances and for every frame he composes. It’s the kind of film that, like an overpowering attraction, refuses to be ignored. The only relief comes from indulging it.

The arguments Black Panther undertakes with itself are central to its architecture, a narrative spine that runs from the first scene to the last.

Hall seems to have grasped the story as a performer would, prioritizing the potency of the characters’ interior lives over the plot. And perhaps given her acting background, she draws from Thompson and Negga a pair of finely tuned and exquisite performances. In every scene they share, they radiate a tender but perilous chemistry.

The action in Honor Among Thieves is well choreographed. Anyone who enjoyed Goldstein and Daley’s last cinematic directorial effort, the comedy thriller Game Night, knows that they approach spatial geography with more care than do many blockbuster filmmakers. But I was really kicking my feet with glee during the film’s flights of storytelling fancy (its 20-sided die rolls for intelligence rather than strength, if you will).

The most daring aspect of Weapons is that it answers all of its big questions.

Spielberg’s storytelling has plenty of humor and verve, but it has a devastating sense of self-awareness as well. In focusing on a boy who puts a camera between himself and the world, Spielberg essays both the power in that perspective, and the limitations.

Lady Bird isn’t a movie about any searing issue; it’s just a wonderful, rare character study of a young woman figuring out her identity, and all the pitfalls that follow.

Nolan is best known for spectacle, and some viewers will be able to see Oppenheimer in bone-rattling IMAX, projected on a skyscraper-size screen. But it’s more impressive for how the director has made such a personal narrative feel epic, not just in visual breadth but in dramatic sweep, presenting a story from the past that feels knotted to so many present anxieties about nuclear annihilation.

The Nest is one of the best films of the year: Though it’s set in the past, it’s about the feeling of one’s own home turning against you when the world outside feels all the more hostile—a theme that resonates far beyond its time period.

The final act of Shoplifters, like all of Kore-eda’s best work, is devastating. After seeing the director tease out every strange bond in this makeshift group, investing his audience fully in their future, one finds it that much harder to watch when things fall apart.

Villeneuve’s film is a grand success, working on an even broader canvas than the first Dune—but it’s tinged with deep mournfulness, a quality that sets it apart from its blockbuster contemporaries.

It’s a stunning achievement, worthy of a great director’s twilight years.

Again, Fallen Leaves is a comedy, and a consistently funny one, even if most of its laugh lines are gruffly delivered.

Licorice Pizza is an antic comedy about Alana and Gary tooling around the Valley, but it’s also a bittersweet reminiscence about how difficult embracing adulthood can be.

The film’s long running time doesn’t feel indulgent at all, but electrifyingly necessary, the only way to draw out the restrained sorrows of its insular ensemble. Few filmmakers can make simple conversation a blockbuster moment, but in Hamaguchi’s hands, the audience is hanging on every character’s next word.

The Green Knight is most brilliant in its wordless sequences. Lowery is exceptionally skilled at conjuring otherworldly sights that somehow retain one foot in reality.

Zhao clearly understands that universal conflict between desire and reality, and with The Rider, she’s dramatized it beautifully.

Just as a war movie can encourage its audience to appreciate heroism and sacrifice, Women Talking reminds us of the value of language—its capacity for context, for constructive debate, and, in the end, for collective healing.

Spielberg’s West Side Story is a charismatic showcase for everything he does best on the big screen, and a genuinely thoughtful update, making gentle and incisive rearrangements to justify its brassy sashay back into cinemas.

The film shares some of the unsettling horror of Aster’s first two films, Hereditary and Midsommar, but I’d call Beau Is Afraid a more straightforward comedy—as long as the idea of Looney Tunes crossed with Portnoy’s Complaint sounds funny to you.

What’s important is that the film is alive and awake with energy. This is no marble mausoleum of a movie—it’s more of a bold reinvention than a somber farewell.

What impressed me most about Janet Planet is what a work of cinema it is, visually alive and inventive even with a small budget and fairly languid plotting pace.

Campion never takes a side in the ongoing conflict between George and Phil, instead brilliantly capturing the purpose, and the futility, in each brother’s approach, making The Power of the Dog an inimitable viewing experience.

The final act of The Northman is as violent and intense as a story that inspired Hamlet should be, but all the gore and swordplay would leave no lasting impression were it not for the sincerity of Eggers’s vision.

In brewing such precise discomfort, Kranz forces the audience to concentrate deeply on what's being said and, more important, unsaid.

Wachowski’s gamble is that viewers will enjoy a film that’s heavy on philosophizing and introspection as long as it retains the emotional, romantic hook that powered the first movie. Reeves and Moss sell their reunion as Neo and Trinity persuasively, glowing with the overwhelming chemistry and affection that Wachowski needed to push the film beyond cynicism.

Liu’s intimacy with his subjects becomes contagious, to the point where their small victories are thrilling and their failures feel devastating.

The thrill of RRR is not the density of its storytelling, though—it’s the exuberance of it.

The result is an embittered look at our world through the eyes of someone who’s increasingly horrified to be a part of it, and a film that’s one of the most searing cinema experiences of the year.

Blade Runner 2049 is terrific, a worthy heir to one of the great science-fiction films of all time.

For all its body horrors and apocalyptic conclusions, High Life is one of Denis’s most loving and tender creations.

The film can be unrelenting: Several graphic scenes make it challenging to watch, and more than once, I caught myself holding my breath. As the story’s weeks stretch into months, you can see the tension gather in Anne’s piercing gaze. It’s as if her eyes might set the screen aflame with her frustration, fury, and—eventually—panic.

It’s Hawkins’s wordless performance that holds the movie together and grounds its wilder fancies in a semblance of emotional reality. By turns gentle and curious, vulnerable and fearless, she provides the film with a heroine whose humanity is profoundly irresistible—no matter what your species.

Good One shows that growing up can begin with a single conversation that illuminates, for someone like Sam, how far she has left to go.

The film more than earns its commanding title: You will not want to look away.

The film ends on a remarkably touching emotional note. Had it held to the strength of its convictions—and it is immensely obvious why it did not—it might have been the best ending of any superhero movie to date. (No, the bar’s not terribly high.) But it’s nonetheless awfully good, and we can still look forward to, mid-credits, the world’s best-ever Green Lantern joke.

September 5 is effective because it doesn’t claim to say anything original about the perils of reporting and consuming breaking news. It’s simply—and bluntly—showing how easily those familiar perils can be overlooked.

It’s true that Isle of Dogs is a film about scapegoating, political hysteria, and deportation. But it is also—and at its best—a film about dogs. May they never go unpetted.

Soderbergh’s unorthodox film release and cheap, idiosyncratic shooting style are ideal fits for the director’s fascinating, speculative story about the future of the NBA.

The Bone Temple is gnarly, challenging, and an incredibly impressive swerve, with Garland’s grim worldview beautifully captured by the director Nia DaCosta.

Sinners had me cheering for every thrill and spill, all while mulling the deeper concerns threaded through it.

Reichardt’s grasp of realism is peerless. She’s long excelled at building simple story lines toward profound revelations. Showing Up is a terrific example of how she documents low-stakes vagaries . . . What initially seems to be a slice-of-life drama eventually reveals itself as a paean to the difficulties, and rewards, of making art.

Peele is not just making an inventive sci-fi thriller. Nope is tinged with the acidic satire that suffused his last two movies, as Peele examines why the easiest way to process horror these days is to turn it into breathtaking entertainment.

Above all else, it lodges itself into one’s brain and seems primed to reward repeat viewings. The biggest compliment I can give Guadagnino is that he’s made a Suspiria that appears destined for the long-lasting cult status already enjoyed by the original.

The genius of the movie is that it seeks to do no more than record an escape from the burdens of the real world.

If Beale Street Could Talk is an impressive, mature, and determined work that ably reaches the great heights it sets for itself.

It’s a specific character study told with the ambition that small, arty projects are rarely afforded—a complex and deeply realized story that not only demanded a second film but actually got one.

Cooper’s biggest innovation in this remake, which he wrote with Eric Roth and Will Fetters, is his emphasis on partnership. He interweaves Jackson and Ally’s relationship with the music they create together, so the audience’s investment in both is palpable.

Despite the wistful tone, it’s a bitingly funny viewing experience. Shrunken to Hart’s height and given his balding pate, Hawke is transfixing in the role; as Hart, he holds everyone’s attention whenever he’s monologuing.

It is not—if my description has somehow failed to make this clear—an easy film to watch. But it is a forceful and unsettling addition to the cinema of the Holocaust, a film that digs deeply into the gruesome workings of the death camps and ponders questions about duties to the living and duties to the dead.

Each element is carefully calibrated, but deployed with consummate grace—this is a film to rush to, and to then savor every minute of.

The art of a cinematic murder mystery is to make the act of putting clues together seem suspenseful and worth watching. In the hands of Craig at his most gleeful, de Armas at her career best, and Johnson oozing love for the genre, Knives Out rises splendidly to the task.

Challengers is a great example of how a director can temper his preoccupations just a little in order to reach beyond the art-house crowd.

Horrifying, transfixing, and ultimately, to use Tony Kushner’s immortal phrasing, intestinal.

A meditative two-and-a-half-hour art film might not sound like a plausible candidate for the year’s best thriller, but Burning is exactly that—its story moves patiently, but engrossingly, before cresting with a shocking denouement that wouldn’t make sense were it not for Lee’s meticulous craft.

That Warfare is, in dramatically rendering a true story, visceral is hardly a surprise. What’s fascinating is how so much of the film commits to the waiting that exists during battle: the taxing, dull tension of knowing that something might happen any minute.

Fincher didn’t set out to make a movie about today’s politics; he’s telling a universal story about trying to change an industry (and a world) in which every system seems freighted with inertia. Mankiewicz isn’t quite a radical, nor is he especially principled. Still, in trying to make sense of his experiences with Hearst through a Hollywood narrative, he transforms a familiar tale about shattered idealism into a revolutionary work of art.

A few belly laughs abound, but it’s the deep care for its characters that makes The Holdovers really sing.

Ferguson is the star of the show, imperious one moment and fragile the next, torn between nurturing her son’s purpose and protecting him from becoming a monster.

Oldboy is mostly absorbing because of the intense anguish radiating off the screen at all times; Park’s ability to effectively communicate obsession, and put the audience in the head of someone who has almost entirely lost touch with his sense of self, feels unparalleled to this day.

Minari is a tale that will feel familiar to many, but Chung grounds it in brilliant specificity.

Eephus is an elegy, but with just the barest hint of sentimentality—a shrugging send-off that simultaneously cares deeply about America’s pastime.

It’s difficult to make a work that confronts, or even acknowledges, the rusting but seemingly immovable structures of institutional sexism. It’s even harder to do that and address how race and class are inextricably bound up in those oppressive systems, and it’s even harder still to accomplish that without delivering a hectoring lecture to the audience. Support the Girls somehow manages to do it all, and in the form of a breezy, heartwarming workplace comedy to boot.

The central conceit of Old has so much juice, and Shyamalan gets to explore so many fun—if sadistic—avenues over the course of one very long day. It’s his most ambitious work in years, wrapped in the delightful, tawdry packaging of a pulpy thriller.

The film is a visceral, ruminative, and emotionally satisfying epilogue in which the broken Jesse reconciles with his past and searches for the hope and humanity he’d lost—or, rather, been denied by Walt.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things is long (two hours and 14 minutes) and often frustrating, but it’s also incredibly satisfying on rewatch, which makes its Netflix release a boon. There’s a weird thrill to getting lost inside this movie, only so you can study every odd detail from new angles, over and over again.

It’s wiser, and it has the looser silliness that comes with middle age—but it’s looking up at those imposing father figures, tycoons or no, with awe and fear all the same.

Anderson directs with an understated elegance worthy of the House of Woodcock.

It’s rich with feeling, shrouded in darkness, but not despairing as it digs into the trials the Von Erichs faced, without merely dismissing the family as cursed.

What J. B. has aced is clearly not the art of persuasion or thievery. His real specialty, The Mastermind suggests, is his ability to tune out everything but his own wants and needs.

Out of the Past is more than just an exemplary noir. It exceeds its genre even as it typifies it.

Rye Lane may be the most unconventional conventional romantic comedy in years, delivering the genre’s trappings in such fizzy, gleefully inventive ways that even predictable beats feel new.

The current implications of A Hidden Life feel most pressing here: Malick is asking the audience (and himself) if they would capitulate in the face of tyranny or make Jägerstätter’s sacrifice. It’s a decision Malick memorializes beautifully, in a film that is his most affecting effort in almost a decade.

There’s absolutely nothing else like it in theaters this year, which I mean as both a hearty endorsement and a necessary forewarning. Zama is a viewing experience that can be frustratingly inaccessible at first, but it blooms in bold, surprising directions.

First Man is about Armstrong’s landmark achievement, but it’s just as much about a country’s grinding, maniacal fixation on getting him there.