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.