Low Tide isn’t groundbreaking or unique, but it knows its setting and characters enough to make the journey authentic despite its lack of surprises.

In My Room is not so much about loss, but self-discovery.

It demystifies an important part of movie magic with a diverse group of veterans of the craft, many who got their start as an apprentice for the best in the industry.

The Irishman’s ending illustrates that even the toughest men, or the most celebrated filmmakers, still crave a sliver of light to guide them through the encroaching darkness.

The Disappearance of My Mother is a bit too rough around the edges, but it’s as honest as it is persistent.

Loro has a ton of style and effective performances across the board.

It’s part torture chamber, part hangout picture, part Bring Me The Head of Those Three Crooked Murderers.

With an unhinged Weaving chewing the scenery as Nix and a perfectly cast Radcliffe doing his best to survive while also finding it impossible to keep Miles’ snarky thoughts in his brain out of his mouth, it’s hard not to be entertained.

This is powerful stuff that transcends time and place despite the production design being impeccably executed.

Helped by a strong lead performance that’s neither too big nor too small (just look at the pitch-perfect pinched reactions from Rohl every time she’s challenged on her lie) the film maintains a strong sense restraint amidst all the deliberate discomfort.

A movie stuffed to bursting with sumptuous movie-movie atmosphere, the swoony charge of ideas about art, love, and espionage, and good-enough storytelling solutions.

Drawing from Tubman’s devout belief and history of seizures and visions, the film makes much of her visions, divine interventions which seem to appear anytime it’s dramatically convenient, alerting her to danger with considerable specificity. This magical-thinking approach to religion is a dramatic crutch for a film that maintains a hindsight perspective on Tubman, leaving a lot of blanks in its historical account and delegating much of Tubman and the Underground Railroad’s process and organization to supporting characters to handle offscreen.

Few films come out in any given year with creative choices as baffling as the ones made by Edward Norton’s Motherless Brooklyn.

Bad Education is a roller coaster ride from start to finish as the surface sheen of success is peeled back to reveal the proverbial bodies buried to achieve it.

Howard’s personality overpowers reality for so long that when reality finally hits it is genuinely shocking and painful.

This is a very personal story to Marder and it shows in the intricate ways he uses sound to place us within Ruben’s plight.

The wisdom of Stoll and Whiteside’s América is that it may not have answers but it dares to observe and listen.

A film casting stones at excess, Greed is hardly without sin itself.

This film is fascinating because of how those genre thrills are complicated by these off-kilter, idiosyncratic formal choices that trigger not just a lurid dreamscape and uncomfortable humor (that singing head in the hall of mirrors!) but also a vulnerability in the face of alienation and suffering.

Seberg never quite makes the case for its own existence, nor does it demonstrate to the audience why its protagonist’s political beliefs were so revolutionary.

Ema is Larraín at his most freeform.

Rather than have the plot manipulate his characters, Johnson lets them manipulate it. That’s an extremely rare Hollywood feat.

The film is an emotional knockout that will leave even the most stoic viewer on the verge of weeping, but the shifts of the film’s second half are ultimately uplifting. Waves is a tremendous film, one that finishes with an appropriately transcendent final shot.

This is a very quiet and contemplative film driven by characters above plot.

Benson and Moorhead removed all excess—great for propulsion, but a detriment to investment. Actions become almost robotic at times as their inclusion is more about advancement than character building.

Ford v Ferrari is an easy film to scoff at; there is nothing new here, and there is no debating that fact. Instead, we have a compelling story told in simple, intelligent fashion. It deserves a spot on the list of great racing dramas, and the list of the year’s most entertaining dramas.

So even though the whole can feel a bit cutesy at times, there’s real weight beneath that façade.

The final result is a movie that feels as paranoid, cruel, ludicrous and radiation-poisoned as its characters; the kind of movie that is on an irregular and grotesque wavelength of its own making and will leave people not just in disbelief about what they just saw but what any of it meant, if it meant anything at all.