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

It’s an emotional, visceral triumph.

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.

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

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

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.

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

It’s sad and sometimes angry, with a heartfelt view of a relationship’s dynamics that some of the director’s prior works lacked.

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.

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.

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

A razor-sharp deadpan comedy suffused with sorrow.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Gerwig manages to honor both the letter and the spirit of Alcott’s tale; Little Women is stuffed with trials and tribulations, yet overflowing with goodwill, just as Alcott described it herself.

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.

Despite its period setting, The Favourite just might be Lanthimos’s most trenchant and relevant work yet.

The highest compliment I can bestow on it is that Corbet’s drive has paid dividends, leaving much for me to puzzle through.

I’d forgive anyone for thinking this all sounds a little too precious, but that’s Rohrwacher’s storytelling skill: She can make such a fairy tale feel familiar without sapping it of its dreamlike charm.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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 Tale is above all a work of profound empathy, as a look inside someone’s psyche would have to be. Fox isn’t just excavating the abuse she suffered as a girl; she’s also engaging with and forgiving herself, reconciling with the damage that she had convinced herself to ignore for years.

It is the script that made the difference here and that allowed Huston to make a better film than he had made in many years.

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

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

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

It’s a movie that actually makes the past look otherworldly, unlike many period pieces, which strive to make history seem easy to slip into.

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.

Marty is vivacious, and the film around him is buzzing at the same frequency: itchy, anxious, yet unbearably exciting throughout, each minute defined by some hairpin plot turn.

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.

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.

For all its eerie focus on the end of our lives, that’s what Johnson’s movie is about: celebrating the people we love.

A gorgeous and impossible puzzle of a movie.

Paddington 2 is gorgeous to look at, smartly written, and gleefully funny, boasting a fierce ensemble of estimable British thespians. For those looking specifically for excellent family entertainment, it’s a must-see; but even other viewers will find this movie well worth their time.

The result is a comedy so black that it recalls the words of the immortal Nigel Tufnel: It could be “none more black.”

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

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.

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.

In depicting the out-of-sight, out-of-mind bubble mentality of Israel’s civilian citizens (and how easily that bubble can burst), Foxtrot is a uniquely powerful work.

Granik’s ability to convey so much about how a community works without didacticism is part of what made Winter’s Bone (which was set in the Ozarks) such a thrill to watch. While Leave No Trace is a more muted drama, it has a similarly firm grasp on its characters and the places they comes across.

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

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

Birdman—I should probably note here that the full title is the punctuationally ridiculous Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)—is a giddy fantasia of themes and genres, and if not all of them fully cohere, then so be it. As the Birdman voice inside Riggan’s head reminds us, sometimes viewers crave pure entertainment, not just “talky, pretentious, philosophical bullshit.”

Can You Ever Forgive Me? may be a muted story, but it is a profoundly memorable one.

With its ever-evolving protagonist, Return to Seoul defies neat categorization. It’s a low-budget character drama with the twists and turns of a high-octane thriller. It’s also a consistently satisfying watch that honors the difficulty of wanting to be understood—and the relief of finally releasing that desire.

As these films have gone on, they’ve become more and more fascinated with Hunt’s essential ludicrousness. Mission: Impossible – Fallout decrees him elemental—a crucial, indefinable component keeping the very fabric of humanity knitted together. The film is so dizzyingly fun that, at least while you’re watching, it seems like a sound conclusion.

Nomadland is a work of exploration, and not just across the sprawling American West. Fern is exorcising her darkest demons, which spring from the systemic neglect that has been visited on so many Americans in recent years. The odyssey makes Zhao’s film a transfixing mix of reckoning and catharsis.

It’s bleak and brutal—and deeply affecting.

Hereditary is a great scare-fest and a middling domestic saga, one that probably needed to be either 90 minutes long and brimming with terror, or three hours long and suffused with glacial, Bergman-esque dread. Aster has charted a middle path, and for a first film, it’s hard to fault the skill he’s shown in doing it.

The world doesn’t really need another Spider-Man movie, which is exactly what makes Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse such an unexpected delight: Here’s the latest entry in a fully saturated genre that somehow, through sheer creative gumption, does something new.

The sparseness of the script matches the modesty of the staging. Because the film lacks lush period detail, or really any specific background visuals at all, the audience’s attention is thrown onto the performances, and the cast rises to the occasion magnificently.

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.

Triet skillfully spins the viewers’ sympathy into a worst-case scenario, literally putting these feelings on trial, and it serves to compound the excitement. It’s a simple question, really: What if a domestic drama got crossed with a courtroom thriller? Anatomy of a Fall is the glorious answer.

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

It's far from the director's richest or most interesting work (that would be Sideways or About Schmidt), but the movie is a pleasure to watch: a melancholic comedy graced with the trademark Payne balance of tenderness and irony.

The dazzling ambition on display, both aesthetically and narratively, justifies the swing. But I won’t be ready to call the Spider-Verse series a masterpiece of the genre until I watch it stick the landing next year—even though I’m a firm believer that it will.

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.

Director W.S. Van Dyke and married co-writers Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich leavened the novel's hard-boiled tone and grim wit. The result is less a detective story with occasional flashes of humor than a light comedy set against a backdrop of murder.

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

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.

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.

Best of all are the car chases, which Wright choreographs with the same blend of wit and technical finesse he brought to the pool-cue, “Don’t Stop Me Now” zombie rumble in Shaun of the Dead.

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.

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.

Despite the grand scale, like all of Jia’s works, Ash Is Purest White leaves questions of good and evil to the viewer—this isn’t a philosophical story, but a personal one.

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

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

What most stunned me about Eighth Grade was how well directed it is. It’s rare that teen movies have the kind of visual acuity and verve that Burnham achieves here.

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.

Mudbound is beautifully shot, well-acted, and surprisingly sweeping for a movie with a relatively small budget of $10 million; if it’s guilty of anything, it’s perhaps trying to do too much at once, which is understandable given its novelistic scope.

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.

A sensitivity to both petty human concerns and striking natural beauty is what makes Honeyland a particularly enthralling documentary.

Although Soderbergh’s approach has an artfulness to it; he’s telling a sweeping story while keeping the excitement mostly confined. The result, while self-contained, is gripping, quietly sexy, and robustly acted.

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.

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.

The film is touching, sometimes saccharine, and other times bluntly honest, but it works best as a fascinating reminder that Rogers was trying to be more than a mascot of American politeness.

That unsettling feeling is communicated by Torres’s devastating, genuine performance.

76 Days is unvarnished and raw, a first draft of a history that’s still being written.

With Judas and the Black Messiah, King has made a thriller that speaks to history without feeling didactic, that keeps the audience in suspense even though the ending was written decades ago.

The result is a surprisingly funny and extremely melancholy hangout film, an elegy for a bygone era that reflects on how all art eventually loses its edge.

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

The film is simply intent on capturing the energy of that special “us against the world” connection that can exist only in high school and unleashing it onto the screen.

Beats Per Minute is specific in topic, to be sure—this is a moving account about the gay experience at a particular point and place in history—but it’s also fascinating to consider from a wider angle, as many people continue to grapple with how to carry out different kinds of political protests.

The film is, as a result, a portrait of how Rasoulof perceives the systematic oppression within his home country, from which he is now exiled. The government’s rejection of its citizens’ efforts for change is personal to him—as devastating and painful, the film suggests, as having a father turn against his own flesh and blood.

I’m all for the studio exploring new concepts and original characters going forward, and setting aside the endless anthologizing of its biggest hits for a good long while. But if I had to get another Toy Story, this is about as strange and beguiling an entry as I could have hoped for.

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

For all its powerful elements, though, Hamnet rings a bit hollow at its core. Perhaps the grand tragedies are just too overwhelming for some viewers to see beyond. I cried, yes, but in the end, I felt no closer to the mysterious bard—let alone to the people he loved, all those hundreds of years ago.

The aesthetic is Twilight Zone, and the plot could be right out of The X-Files. But despite its small-screen influences and tiny budget, The Vast of Night is shockingly cinematic, overflowing with the kind of inventiveness you rarely see from a first-time filmmaker.