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.