All of this beautiful animation intrinsically drives at why people create in the first place, highlighting both the life-affirming and deeply messy realities of making manga.

What’s most marvelous about Green Border—aside from its resounding commitment to humanization, buttressed by a thrilling and harrowing narrative—is that it doesn’t let anyone off the hook.

A Prophet has been compared to American TV series like "Oz" for its episodic plot and large cast, but it’s more like a Gallic "Goodfellas": thoroughly absorbing, exciting, even poetic. It’s a full evening’s entertainment.

For all this and more, Oppenheimer deserves the title of masterpiece. It’s Christopher Nolan’s best film so far, a step up to a new level for one of our finest filmmakers, and a movie that burns itself into your brain.

Pawlikowski, who doesn’t waste a shot (nor compose one that isn’t a work of art on its lonesome), creates a gripping present tense from the clarity and efficiency of his storytelling: No matter how often he lurches us forward in time, we remain locked into the emotional sphere of his characters.

While not a masterpiece on par with Kurosawa's best work, High And Low is a fine example of his craft, and further proof that it's not a few masterpieces but the overall scope of a career that defines a great director.

The film is unfortunately about little more than its potentially mind-boggling plot and structure.

In its own subdued, mellow way, Once is just about perfect.

Its fragmented literary structure and Victor’s captivating lead turn cohere theme, form, and content, melding the elliptical episodes into a canny representation of memory.

The power of this material—and of Dern’s devastating performance—stays with you.

In showing us the interest one man takes in everything around him, he’s suggesting that living a life of simplicity and security can be conducive to beautiful expression—even, or perhaps especially, in a place as ordinary as Paterson.

Without ever saying exactly what her heroine is thinking, Holmer captures a lot of what she’s feeling. And what Toni’s going through should be familiar to anyone who had an awkward puberty — which is to say, nearly everyone.

We all lived through this not so long ago; it's an odd thing to make a film whose most striking effect is its ability to bring the feelings of Sept. 11 flooding back, then close on a profoundly disturbing note. A crasser film would have been easier to digest and dismiss. It's hard to do either with United 93, and that's either its genius or its folly.

First-time director Jarecki, better known as the co-founder of MovieFone, skillfully integrates the home-movie footage with his own thorough inquiry, weaving past and present into a patient, deeply engrossing piece of storytelling that's rich in ambiguities.

Though [Guinness's] performance may not immediately announce itself as his best, it's certainly one of his most representative, a thoroughly recognizable character of unseen depths and unexpected capabilities.

American Hustle turns out to be a freewheeling party of a movie, one that never stops adding complications and wrinkles and hungry new players to the mix.

The two main points Persepolis makes are that strife is relative, and all politics are personal.

A surprisingly bittersweet love story at heart, Eternal Sunshine values the sum of experience, which in this case means a thorns-and-all openness to romantic possibilities.

A big, family-style Italian dinner, catered to the broadest tastes, yet satisfying all the same.

In examining the man’s selfless service, Moss uncovers something greater than a vision of a divided community; he’s made a drama as prickly and surprising as any fictional character study.

More "Full Metal Jacket" than "Dead Poet’s Society," the film is an epic battle of wills between two fanatical artists, one doing everything in his power to painfully make a master out of the other.

A different director might have fashioned the same basic material into something grandiose, but Huston errs on the side of understatement. Shot largely on location, this raw, pessimistic portrait of people struggling to keep from slipping all the way down reinvigorated the veteran director’s reputation, and stands as one of his best and most accomplished films.

von Donnersmarck gives his debut feature, The Lives Of Others, no particular style, and the absence of visual risk-taking renders an exciting premise ponderous and stolid.

Hellman gives viewers plenty of time to study every detail, dwelling less on action than on quiet, small-town vistas, rundown diners, and forgotten stretches of Route 66.

Choreographed to the last beat, the action scenes have a depth that the film's thinly sketched characters never quite develop.

It generates a sense of personal immediacy that elevates Minding The Gap above the confines of mere portraiture; his presence facilitates (and sometimes hinders) honest admissions from his subjects.

Two Days, One Night is a small miracle of a movie, a drama so purely humane that it makes most attempts at audience uplift look crass and calculated by comparison.

Killers Of The Flower Moon is as momentous as the country it’s set in and as full of history as the people whose murder it depicts.

Unlike Wiseman’s greatest films, National Gallery never quite finds an overarching theme. There’s a fair amount of material regarding the art/commerce divide, but many scenes have no bearing whatsoever on that subject, and the film generally lacks urgency.

As incisive as it is thrilling, Carpenter’s film is also gorgeous. Carpenter’s imagery is a thing of propulsive beauty that both enhances suspense and expresses his characters’ ever-changing relations to one another. It’s a fleet, ferocious piece of genre craftsmanship.

It's a story worth telling, yes--but after 90 minutes, it's hard not to wonder if the storyteller can talk about anything else.

In the wild and consistently surprising Y Tu Mamá También, anything isn't the half of it.

Cagney's magnetism stems from his note-perfect combination of broad gestures and subtle shifts of posture, but the keen eyes of his directors are what make his gangster pictures classics.

It isn’t Kurosawa’s best picture, by any means, but it’s almost certainly his most fun.

One conundrum is that Elle is singularly a Verhoeven film, but doesn’t quite look like one.

The movie seems like a perfect found object, as if it had always existed and was just waiting to be uncovered.

After Hours is a caffeinated black comedy with an emphasis on speed. With a small crew and a tight shooting schedule, Scorsese transformed limited means into a staccato burst of creative energy, playing up the extreme paranoia and frustration of a data processor stranded in Soho.

Spike Lee's documentary When The Levees Broke runs four hours, but Lee arguably says what he needs to say in the brilliant opening montage, which cuts together footage of New Orleans in the 20th century, including Mardi Gras parades, segregation marches, and flood after flood.

In choosing cheap gags over incisive cultural commentary, Borat scores more as scatology than satire, but it's easy to overlook its ramshackle nature in light of the explosive laughter.

Minari is that rare slice-of-life drama that contains multitudes without needing to look beyond the borders of its highly specific story.

From a distance, The Farewell can look scattered, a series of ambling vignettes on the tradition-rooted quirks of modern China and the nature of families divided by culture and space. But there are some bright moments of truth, bittersweetly illuminating the grey spaces we create in our expressions of love.

The miracle of Chalamet’s performance is that as brazen, indecent, and dishonest as Marty is, he makes a temporarily convincing case for himself as a thwarted athlete, rather than a crook with an athletic fixation.

A devastating and deceptively simple tale adapted from 10th-century folklore, Isao Takahata’s The Tale Of Princess Kaguya distills a millennium of Japanese storytelling into a timeless film that feels both ancient and alive in equal measure.

It's a cogent, often infuriating explication of how the execution of the war went awry.

For what it sets out to accomplish, across a brisk 98 minutes, Petzold’s film feels perfectly judged. And it builds to an ending that’s just plain perfect.

Diaz makes a mockery of Magellan in his depiction of the revered globetrotter, his take on the Age Of Discovery damning to say the least.

What distinguishes Goodbye Solo, beyond Savané’s larger-than-life personality bumping up against West’s intractable curmudgeon, is the continued particularity of Bahrani’s work.

You won’t learn much from Gunda. It’s an arty pastoral mood piece, not an educational tool. Which is not to imply it lacks a philosophy.

The Power Of The Dog divulges its secrets in deliberate, measured fashion, growing richer with each new reveal.

Nobody can accuse Downhill Racer of lacking artistic integrity. Trouble is, artistic integrity is all it has to offer.

For all its nonsensical qualities, it also contains some of Argento's most hallucinatory images and unforgettable setpieces, as always reason enough to watch even when the usual reasons are nowhere to be found.

Despite years of imitators, sequels (some great, some not so), and edited-for-television broadcasts, Alien has lost none of its power, and the big screen only intensifies its impact.

Come for the breathtaking architectural scenery, stay for the likable pair staring up at it.

It's a beautifully shot, beautifully acted piece of fluff.

There may be no American movie more patriotic than Yankee Doodle Dandy, a jingoistic biopic of famed Broadway star George M. Cohan that transcends its innumerable genre clichés through the sheer willpower of its star.

Foreign Correspondent seems a sterling example of how the director could help the war effort by using current events as a launching point for his signature brand of suspense.

In its own befuddling, bone-dry way, this is a comedy—one that takes fiendish pleasure in puncturing the pomp and circumstance of a cog in the empire-building machine.

The storytelling ends up saying nearly as much as the stories themselves: Not simply capturing and filing memories, the film becomes a portrait of how these survivors have processed their trauma, how they’ve framed the horror of their experiences, and how they’ve coped with survivors’ guilt.

As an autobiography told in pictures rather than words (including occasional glimpses of Johnson’s parents and her children), Cameraperson makes a strong case for the merits of the observational life. As a bonus, it also demonstrates what it looks like when the person who’s holding the camera sneezes.

As in the best films of John Cassavetes, The Mother And The Whore transcends the medium of film altogether and appears to capture life as it is lived, in all its messy, painful, infinite sadness.

That Johnson mostly pulls this off through the lens of black comedy, without succumbing to outright miserabilism, is an achievement. May we all have the opportunity to be present at our own funerals, surrounded by loved ones, before it’s too late.

The Quiet Girl has a meaningful message on nurturing. But with so little of consequence going on, it’s crucial to get the emotions precisely right. Without voiceover narration tying everything together, some scenes feel out of place, random, or offer little beyond aesthetics.

It's hard to explain exactly why Clint Eastwood's Letters From Iwo Jima is so much better than its companion World War II film "Flags Of Our Fathers," except to say that Flags tries too hard to emphasize the ironies of selling a war, while Letters deals with the ins and outs of the war itself.

The Seventh Continent deals with the deterioration of an average middle-class family by focusing obsessively on mundane life details. As images and actions start repeating themselves, it becomes clear to the family (and to us) that their lives are little more than a collection of routines, without joy or meaning. The conclusion they reach is better left as a surprise, but suffice to say, the third act shifts gears completely.

Falk and Rowlands—in performances of almost indescribable intensity—detail a marriage anchored by love, but tossed by the expectations of others and the unpredictable swell of madness.

Many will guess the resolution of Michael and Lisa’s affair well in advance. That scarcely matters, though, given how beautifully distinctive Anomalisa is from moment to moment.

From his wonderfully idiosyncratic bits of silent comedy at a storefront window to a brilliant one-take of Malkovich watching a calamitous scene unfold, de Oliveira seems determined to exit on his own terms.

What Coppola achieved is a psychodrama about the dangers of being locked in your own private world, of slipping on noise-canceling headphones of any variety. Listening and hearing are not the same thing. Confusing one for the other can have dire consequences.

It helps that the actors' faces are so mesmerizing, particularly Manjinder Virk as Lorraine.

Though his symbolism sometimes errs on the side of obviousness, Bi shows an uncommon knack for recreating and exploring the space of a dream—its transforming identities and places, the unreality made more transportive by the 3D format’s underutilized potential for creating dramatic space, matched by the mutations of the camerawork from close-up to tracking shot to crane shot and back again.

The imagery runs backward and forward, gets freeze-framed, goes through different filters, and is blown up, reduced, diced, and re-assembled like playing cards. But director Bianca Stigter fully commits to this formalist dare—and it pays off tremendously.

A technically groundbreaking collaborative work with humor, heart, and talent showing through in every carefully chosen line.

An important act of historical preservation, a focused and effective film that brings back a dark, important moment in history with startling clarity.

Wild Strawberries remains a surprisingly optimistic and affirmative movie about getting old: It’s only natural for people at the end of their lives to reflect on the roads taken or not taken. And there’s peace on the other side.

There’s a lot going on in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, with its striking imagery, bawdy humor, and grim suffering; it’s a humane film about the inhumane inevitability of death. I’m still not much of a cinephile (this is my second Bergman film, and I only watched The Virgin Spring so I could compare it in an essay to The Last House On The Left), but I’m coming to realize that the difference between a good movie and a great one are those moments of intense personal connection where it seems like the filmmaker is reaching out to you through the screen and whispering (or yelling, or cajoling, or demanding, or pleading) in your ear. As if there is no real distance between you and the director, time has changed nothing, and the moment remains as pure as it was on the day it was filmed.

Though the formulaic treasure-hunting plot sometimes gets out of hand, it doesn’t muddle the intended message.

A fun, albeit unspectacular, animated movie, filled with Disney staples like cute animal characters, a scenery-chewing villainess, and a small-nosed pixie heroine who yearns to travel to distant lands and marry a large-nosed hunk prince.

It’s giving ordinary citizens the floor that makes the difference, and City Hall truly comes alive when Wiseman’s out on the street.

WQholly a Coen brothers movie, in that it’s full of exaggerated characters and comic cruelty, anchored to a way of looking at the world that seems to posit a fundamental absence of meaning. And yet there’s something sweet and even a little heartening about the movie, too.

Capote begins as a sprawling, vivacious comedy-drama in which Hoffman's Capote is only one of a number of fascinating characters, including Chris Cooper's upstanding, ramrod-straight lawman and Keener's tough, blunt assistant/sidekick/foil/author.

The situational humor is more varied than in In The Loop, even if it still largely comes down to a lot of people badgering each other in hallways, offices, and banquet halls. But the dialogue lacks the earlier film’s vicious, creative, lighting-fast profanity.

In the battle of the classic Hollywood Christmas movies, It's A Wonderful Life feels charmingly ancient, fixed in an early-20th-century America that scarcely anyone today remembers first-hand. Miracle On 34th Street feels more modern, with slangy dialogue and naturalistic asides, and a general awareness of how Christmas has become about the intertwined stresses of shopping and selling.

A beautifully choreographed and photographed story about tradition and modernity in rural Asia.

It’s a boldly uncompromising work that strips some of the more cheerful elements to the bone. Yet despite this, there’s still a sense of warmth, of optimism, of quiet humor that shows how this deft storyteller can still surprise and enthrall, incorporating another exceptional ensemble willing and able to do the work to bring his lines to life.

For better and worse, Maysles and his team don’t impose any sort of grand philosophical thesis on these random encounters. The notion of wanting to pick up stakes and restart your life in a new location recurs throughout, but the film (which runs a brisk 76 minutes) is mostly content just to sample the populace, trusting in humanity itself to hold the viewer’s interest.

Landing closer to Coens country, Three Billboards is more of a slow-roasting tragicomedy about grief and culpability, with higher stakes, a lower gag count, and emphasis on the tragic. But McDonagh still lives for detours and digressions, for the opportunity to stall the plot and humorously slow play a conversation.

By the end of Quest, I felt melancholy about saying goodbye to the Raineys and sad that I wouldn’t know where their lives would go from here.

It's arguably Malle's masterpiece, marked by a shooting style with little wasted motion or complication, emphasizing tiny, memorable details.