Maddin mixes personal reminiscences with elaborate fantasies of Masonic rituals and collectivist brothels, to construct a vision of Winnipeg as a city of sleepwalkers, roaming through mazes of snowbanks. In the end, it’s the “my” that matters more than the “Winnipeg.”

It catches, in the most authentic and democratic way possible, a collection of people who’ve developed a strong taste for revolution, but are still trying to figure out what to do with it.

Evans is a revelation here, delivering a haunted performance that his previous work has only suggested he had in him. He gives the film a solid center, allowing others in the cast to explore the extreme.

It is, in short, a strange and unrepeatable success, driven by its own uniqueness as much as anything else.

Stray Dogs evokes the whole of Tsai’s filmography, but also pays off his collaboration with Lee, who shows a side of himself that’s been hidden away for all these years.

While the film’s individual moments and images are often fantastically wrought, the story elements often seem as unintegrated as the moral exegesis.

Fantastic Mr. Fox may be his most purely pleasurable film to date, evoking the Dahl books and Rankin-Bass productions that so transported him as a kid.

Showing the best of humanity and the worst of humanity doesn’t mean denying one in favor of the other; taken together, Salgado’s photographs have the scope and perspective of someone who can genuinely say he’s seen it all.

A master class in structure, a meticulously constructed period piece, a powerful anti-war film, and rarest of all, a thriller whose tension and suspense feel genuinely earned.

Taken as a whole, Blackfish does an admirable job of preaching without force-feeding, seamlessly blending opinion with reportage, and addressing its central issues from enough angles to make a series of end-runs around dubious viewers.

Morgen isn’t interested in rehashing the facts and highlights of Cobain’s life and career, or in providing chin-scratching insights via music scholars and other talking heads. He’s made an impression of Cobain, which is a much more intuitive and vital enterprise.

For a film that clearly required a small army to make, it often feels thrillingly off-the-cuff, which keeps with The Lego Movie’s themes of creativity and weirdness: Nobody’s following an instruction book with this one.

While Gloria lacks impact, urgency, or any sense of rising and falling action, it’s beautifully rendered through Benjamín Echazarreta’s warm lens and García’s subtle performance.

The Selfish Giant is a harsh movie, but it isn’t devoid of hope, because Barnard understands that everything has value—even if it can’t be realized until after an object’s been tossed out.

Teerink’s reserved, spare form mirrors LeWitt’s work, which gives it tremendous impact.

Alternating interviews, observational passages, and conversations with past students, Hawke’s low-key film never pushes too hard for effect and lets any drama emerge slowly.

Part of the reason Grey Gardens—named for the dilapidated East Hamptons mansion Little Edie shares with her mother, Edith “Big Edie” Bouvier Beale—is so deep and endlessly rewatchable is that the Beales’ pleasure in being seen is matched by the Maysles’ joy in watching. These exhibitionists found the perfect voyeurs, and vice versa.

Burning Bush is a rare accomplishment. It’s a political film with clear heroes and villains, and true to its HBO roots, it works as a fleet-of-foot juicy plot-delivery system.

Cutie And The Boxer chronicles a marriage that’s extraordinary in many ways, and ordinary in one—it’s a constant work in progress.

The extraordinary achievement of Under The Skin is that while Laura develops some human qualities, Glazer resists the temptation to turn this alien’s story into the story of what it means to be human.

If nothing else, this film makes the case that the Cold War—however Fetisov or Polsky respectively choose to define it—robbed American sports fans of the chance to watch and appreciate one of the greatest collections of athletes ever assembled.

However much the film breaks with Disney tradition, it’s still a winning effort that mixes cuteness with dry wit in the service of a fast-paced, emotionally charged adventure tale.

Mitchell’s deft handling of the relationships in It Follows gets threaded into an ingenious and exceedingly skillful creepshow.

The film is essentially a war of attrition between emotion and pragmatism, the rare thriller fueled by stress rather than speed.

While 20,000 Days On Earth never finds the real Nick Cave, it’s because it knows better than to try to look for it.

Viewers can walk away with something more precious than factoids: an emotional, aesthetically striking experience that cuts more deeply than words. And if they crave more information, that’s what the Internet is for.

This is a small film about a society of castoffs, and while it’s beautifully acted and often moving, it’s also predictable, because it keeps wresting itself into familiar forms.

The simplified, handheld camerawork and the idea of “cutting for emotion” rather than continuity gets the most out of his actors, who are free to clash and improvise within a scene without worrying about hitting their marks.