McQueen is a haunting story of extravagant talent and inescapable private sorrow, made with exquisite craftsmanship worthy of its subject. While a narrative biopic has been in development for years, this excellent documentary delivers an eye-popping, emotionally wrenching experience that paints a fully dimensional portrait of a complex artist.

The 20th-Fox release will be one of the movies' all-time hits, one of the all-time great pictures. It restores your faith in movies. If you sit quietly and let it take, it may also restore your faith in humanity. It does this with infectious wit, with consistent gaiety, with simple and realistic spirituality, with romance of heartbreak and heartmend. This is set against the most beautiful scenery you have seen in your life. The Sound of Music is quite a picture.

Pairing his usual boundary-pushing sex-and-drugs fixation with a vital presentation of wildly exuberant dance and movement, Gaspar Noe has made a film that’s seductive in its rhythms and bold visualization of his young dancers’ sometimes beautiful, other times brutal somatic expressiveness.

An intriguingly structured, multilayered road movie in which an ordinary working-class dude looks back over a nation-wandering decade of his life, this second collaboration by the writer-directors is a cumulatively engrossing and ultimately very moving work of clear-eyed political intent.

George Cukor's direction, briskly paced, combines heartbreaking tragedy, out-of-this-world musical entertainment and rib-splitting comedy into a coordinated whole that can only be compared for sheer cinematic know-how with Gone With the Wind. This is a picture that's worth seeing over and over again.

It's both a pulse-pounding depiction of the deadly attacks that shook Norway in 2011 and a sober investigation of the aftermath, evolving into a gripping courtroom drama and a tremendously emotional personal account of one family's struggle to move on.

Meditative and dreamlike yet gem-sharp, director Rob Tregenza's fifth feature in 30 years is an elegantly told story that churns with emotion beneath its deceptive stillness.

Hal Ashby's direction is perfect in realizing the offbeat humor and gentle satire of the piece.

Dead Souls is thoroughly focused and tightly structured. And it is an immensely perceptive piece about the history of China and its multitude of discontents.

Through wit, surprise and an irrepressible ballsiness comes a scorching humor that neither curdles nor becomes exhausted.

Gorgeously shot and produced, impressively acted and with a lot of fascinating things on its mind, this is yet further proof that the 35-year-old Mascaro is one of Brazil’s most audacious and gifted filmmakers of his generation.

This is an illuminating (self-)portrait of a young artist as well as a mesmerizing chronicle of a consuming, destructive relationship that steadily inches its way under the viewer's skin.

Densely informative yet always grounded in deep personal investment and clear-eyed compassion, this is a powerful indictment of a traumatic social experiment, made all the more startling by the success of the propaganda machine in making people continue to believe it was necessary.

It’s a comedy and a tragedy, though the people involved aren’t necessarily on rigid opposite sides. Better to say that everyone has some level of fluidity, not just in terms of personal belief, though they’ll speak their dogmatic minds if the occasion demands it.

Like a crafty predator, the Danish knock-out Holiday lays patiently in wait as long as it needs to — in this case nearly an hour — before stunning its prey, the spectator, with a shocking scene that catapults the film to a whole different level.

The picture is exquisite, extraordinary, a unique gem of filmmaking.

This C.V. Whitney production is undoubtedly one of the greatest Westerns ever made. For sheer scope, guts and beauty I can think of no picture of the Indian Wars of the Southwest to compare with it.

Full of eye-opening musical performances, the film also sparkles with tongue-in-cheek humor, and features contemporary interviews that are often far from what they seem. You have to go back to After Hours to find a Scorsese film with a similarly mischievous wit.

Assaying [Sciamma's] first period film, an exquisitely executed love story that's both formally adventurous and emotionally devastating, she sticks the landing like a UCLA gymnast in peak condition. It's so good you'll want to watch again in slow-motion immediately afterwards just to see how she does it.

A drama of such searing human empathy and quotidian heartbreak that its powerful climactic scenes actually impede your breathing.

Giant stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the great ones.

This densely packed, exquisitely executed and just a teensy bit batshit film is peak Pixar. It's a vintage mix of the company's intricate storytelling, complex emotional intelligence, technical prowess and cerebral whimsy on dexamethasone.

Marriage Story puts you through the wringer, but leaves you exhilarated at having witnessed a filmmaker and his actors surpass themselves.

While not a lot happens in First Cow by the standards of most two-hour narrative films, and some may wish for a less open-ended conclusion, the drama's rough-edged lyricism kept me rapt the entire time.

Technically, it wouldn't be wrong to call Waves a "teen drama," but that generic label doesn't begin to convey the emotional scope of this tender, bruising, exuberant film.

What Kovgan's utterly transporting film does, through a thoughtful and dynamic combination of curated material and new performances, is radiate the rapturous power of dance.

Dick Johnson Is Dead is a funny, touching and, to be sure, unique film, and the Johnsons are a very fortunate father and daughter

The best film about the wages of aging since Amour eight years ago, The Father takes a bracingly insightful, subtle and nuanced look at encroaching dementia and the toll it takes on those in close proximity to the afflicted.