[Anderson's] unobtrusive aesthetic, calibrated to highlight his actors and, of course, the fashion, belies its deceptive luxuriousness. This is a movie you’ll want to live in for the pure joy of reveling in Anderson’s effortless mastery.

Chris Kim’s skittering collage of a documentary Wojnarowicz doesn’t explore his career from the outside but rather works ground up through his art to present an experiential plunge into the raw tumult of the New York art scene just before and following the onset of AIDS.

A masterwork of self-introspection through the canvas of cinema, The Souvenir: Part II is a meta epic of delicate proportions that constantly folds into itself and reveals the murky waters that border fiction and the reality that inspires it, sometimes, like in this case, more directly than others.

For all its sprawling ambition, Schilinski’s sophomore feature is most effective and moving on a human scale. A dissociative film, it recreates the febrile sensation of a mind splintered by too many painful truths, which continue to linger in the body long after they’ve vanished from memory.

This is far more than just a film.

Mangrove is rebellion. Mangrove is liberation. McQueen’s Mangrove, in its every personal minute, is love and devotion, not just to the now, or even the past, but for the progress of Black generations yet to come.

Holland has made a righteous, masterful work, arguably her best since “Europa Europa,” but it’s not for the faint of heart or those inclined to turn a blind eye to suffering. And again, that’s the point.

Oppenheimer lands with nothing short of the mighty impact suggested by its legendary stature. But Nolan is less interested in reifying myths so much as he’s invested in rectifying them.

The minute-to-minute detail is absolutely stunning, from the period costumes to the on-set locations, there’s a searing authenticity to the time period that is undeniably absorbing. However, the almost too tightening restraint he gives his film forces us to quickly witness its events rather than be enveloped or moved by them.

The most remarkable aspect of Victor’s accomplishment with Sorry, Baby isn’t her wry sense of humor and deft observations about the inherent awkwardness of human social interactions (although it consistently pops). Instead, it’s how she emphasizes the seriousness of the events while staying true to Agnes’ unique personality.

Boynton's film is refreshingly complex.

Fox knows firsthand the events that occur to Dern’s character in her feature narrative debut because they happened to her. And beyond its creative success and failures, her willingness to tell her own story in such graphic detail is a startlingly brave act.

An unfeasibly charming film full of little wisdoms and quiet comforts where we might expect to find provocations, its only deception is that it is so much richer than it seems at first glance.

There's vision here, clearly, and through the use of eye-catching frames and a standout score, "The Fits" works like magic as an experimental performance piece. As an engaging work of well-rounded cinema, however, there are more than a few missteps.

Although movies like “Goodfellas” are indisputable forebears for Russell’s decadent tale of crime and punishment, the filmmaker distinguishes himself by creating a complex and compelling web of manipulation between the characters that eventually supersedes any of their scheming or con artistry.

The Overnighters is starkly bleak and devastatingly humane, and an indelible American documentary.

The quest to be the best is a familiar film story, but if director-writer Chazelle has achieved anything here, it’s a deeply and richly different take on that journey—not only examining the cost of struggle but the reward of it, showing both what it takes to be great and what happens when you don’t have it.

perhaps the greatest achievement is in how brilliantly the film balances the trademark Dardennes social conscience with a conceit that plays out almost like a ticking-clock thriller, as well as being a deeply felt character study.

The Killers of the Flower Moon, a visceral epic, is the story of the wreckage of a people, the evil in white men’s hearts and the poison they spread, and the erasure that occurs when their stain touches you. It’s powerful, even when you’re left wondering if someone else could’ve spread the gospel.

Wiseman's film is the most nourishing example of cinematic brain food you'll have all year.

The list of the film’s transgressions against the culturally acceptable is almost gratuitously long. But the spine of self-aware intelligence that runs through even its most grotesque, exploitative, and offensive twists, and the basically incredible, irreplaceable central performance from Isabelle Huppert, make this queasily hilarious mass of contradictions just about cohere.

The Aftermath may lack the novelty of the first film and often takes on more than its runtime can account for, but it also successfully adapts the genre of espionage thriller to the documentary form with riveting results.

There is barely a manufactured minute in the film. Everything fits together organically and in a narrative film that is much harder to pull off than it sounds.

It’s Wang’s singular gift for life’s simplest moments which makes The Farewell ring so truthfully bare, funny and emotional.

Marty Supreme isn’t a moral fable about discipline and sportsmanship; it’s a portrait of ambition as a living, breathing necessity—something Marty must manifest into existence, from his lips to God’s ears. Throughout the madness, Safdie finds an unexpectedly human pulse within the chaos, transforming it into an ecstatic, white-knuckle rollercoaster ride.

It's a remarkably gorgeous piece of work.

Despite a very frank and welcome illustration of gay sexuality rarely seen in modern media (in this manner at least), Greater Freedom continually teases us with storylines and subject matter by choosing to frame this era through a relationship that it cannot rationalize.

Petzold distills a familiar atmosphere to create a work veiled in vibrant, cohesive, sensitively stimulating power.

While Magellan is still a haunting vision, the ghosts of a more impactful film you remember most are also the ones that can feel pushed to the margins of the frame.

In Western, the filmmaking philosophy remains the same, but the subject is new and different, and the storytelling is deeper, nuanced, and honed by experience.

It’s cinematic poetry, if there ever was one, bourgeoning in meaning the more you linger in its shadow.

Still Scott’s greatest film and better than James Cameron’s sequel, the director’s sci-fi horror is an exercise in minimalistic terror, manifesting it in the most unknowable, terrifying extraterrestrial creature ever seen on screen.

A gentle but sharply defined story, brimming with grace, compassion and performances of perfect naturalism, it is unashamedly intellectual yet deeply human.

The formal control is remarkable, but sometimes almost stultifying, as though Martel had spent every moment of this intervening decade plotting how to pack each scene more densely, to the point it feels like Zama” could maybe stop a bullet. It will certainly deter the less persistent viewer.

Humanity permeates Cameraperson, thanks to Johnson’s presence, so as experimental as it is, it’s also stirring and poignant, with a tangible sense of empathy intact in every frame.

It’s when Johnson strays from strict adherence to the concept that the most profound insights come.

Gorgeously realized and crafted with homespun care, this delicate and heartbreaking drama is one of the year’s best films.

Kaufman and fellow director Duke Johnson strike the right balance here, deftly mixing spiritual crisis and despondency with moments of painful awkwardness and biting hilarity.

While Long Day’s plot seems an afterthought, the experience is all that matters: the audience gathers all the clues, rummage through them to soak up the atmosphere and enter a world unlike any seen before. Make no mistake about it, Long Day’s Journey Into Night is a flat-out masterpiece.

A poetic meditation on film, history, and loss, Three Minutes – A Lengthening gives a glimpse into a lost world and then unpacks just how much can be learned from that brief fragment.

Nielsson’s documentary portrait is a tragic look at the broken political process in Zimbabwe.

Crime + Punishment isn’t without hope, but it anchors that hope to the unflattering realities of American policing.

Azor itself is a code word meaning “to not say too much” or “to keep one’s cards close,” a trait that the film and its protagonist so excel at, viewers will be kept guessing until the last moment.

Paul King‘s marvellously rousing, deeply satisfying sequel — is not only another warm, friendly, massively good-natured family-friendly film, but it’s deeply caring, here to give everyone a light and entertaining diversion during these taxing times.

What Wiseman’s film boils down to, in many ways, is a much-needed dose of competency porn – a snapshot of government officials trying their very best to do better, and to be better. And that might be the story he’s really telling: a reminder that government, for all of its speed bumps and snags, can work. It can help. The people running it just have to want it to.

The Death Of Stalin is a grim reminder that we are never too far away from history turning back on progress. It’s not an easy lesson to reconcile, but Iannucci at least has us laughing for a good while before delivering his devastating blow.

While the Turkish director seems ever-fascinated with gloomy, nihilistic anti-heroes, he does vest more hope in human relationships than usual.

You believe this woman exists. And Leigh and Jean-Baptiste ensure she will haunt you.

What immediately comes to the forefront is that McDonagh has choreographed an almost impossible feat of a brutally dark comedy that, thanks to both Rockwell and McDormand, elicits an emotional response you simply don’t see coming.

It is Olshefski’s humanist portraiture of one family’s quotidian lives that is certain to stir audiences.

Mostly this is a thrillingly compassionate, deceptively simple, and wholly invested look at a capable older woman with a lively mind coping with a series of common misfortunes. Where that could be depressing, or at least overridingly melancholy, here it is strangely hopeful.

As off-kilter affecting as we found its nostalgia for a world of charm and dash that really only ever existed in the movies, and as terrific as almost all of the performances are, as a whole package it fell just slightly short of the promise of its parts.

A good film captures merely a life. A great film like Train Dreams encompasses an entire way of life. Bentley’s modest, moving epic of the common man is a thing of rare beauty.

The overwriting of every single discussion smacks less of realistic debate than of a writer/director in the throes of a fit of didacticism who simply never trusts his audience to get his meaning without it being iterated and reiterated to the point of white noise.

It’s a powerful, infuriating document of a family’s resilience in the face of massive communal pressure and to the notion that these types of small, necessary shifts can add up.

The star that is truly born here is Cooper as a director.

This is a movie primarily concerned with numbers and the way that information is fed, processed, and acted upon. But it plays like the greatest paranoid thriller since "All the President's Men."

Every shimmy, kick, spin, hook and sweep; every sideways glance and smirk, every stretched neck tendon, every warm smile; they’re all there for us to soak in. The combined effect is a cure-all for woe. “Hamilton” can’t solve the problems staring us down. That’s a ridiculous thing to expect. But it can give us a brief respite from those problems, and even provide a new framework with which to understand them.

Despite the efforts of Hopkins and an outstanding ensemble, Zeller can’t divorce his feature directorial debut from its theatrical origins.

It’s a film that can swing between absurdist humor and brutal gut-punch sadness in a way that’s rare and, at times, truly profound.

Sweet Country is unmistakably a western in iconography and spare, taciturn tone, but it is also an incendiary slave narrative, in which the poetry of the filmmaking can barely contain a simmering fury and disgust at this most shameful of human institutions.

Leave No Trace is a universal, unforgettable experience.

In a world turned careful and considered (not by choice but by necessity) this extravagant, exuberant, magnificently messy movie, punch-drunk on story and delirious with drama, is the antidote to a cinematic lethargy you may not even have known you were feeling, until one of its legitimately insane plot pirouettes forcibly reminds you just how much dimension and chaos and vitality a flat beam of light projected onto a wall can contain.

Hell or High Water might walk over familiar ground with second-hand boots in terms of character development and structural beats, but it does so with great personality and zero pretension of wanting to be anything more.

Shirkers is a film that should be experienced more than explained. That sounds like a cop out, but it’s an inspiring documentary about the process of filmmaking, the love of outsider art, but also a cautionary tale about trust and shadiness in the filmmaking world.

Not only is Poor Things one of Lanthimos’ most refined philosophical musings, but it is his most accomplished visual work, too.

Braga is simply riveting in this gift of a role.

The murky moral dimension of the Black Panther world is wonderfully rich and complex and it gives great pause for its new king to reconcile. And yet, all this intricacy is resolved in rather simplistic fashion in the end. It’s just a superhero movie, one might say, but if you’re going to set up this fertile ground, you might want to really follow through.

It is so lived-in and authentic in its real-world detail, and so enigmatic and mysterious in its diversions and sidelong glances, that it's difficult not to see it as overridingly personal, not just to the director but to the viewer. It's a true act of the most optimistic communication and communion.

This is Almodóvar, and so the magnificence is worn lightly, with irony and mischief and a cheeky little moral about how to be a modern woman trapped in the very unmodern role of spurned lover: be hysterical if you want, be philosophical if you can, but never underestimate the liberating power of a little light revenge.

A heartbreaking and poignant story about choices, country, commitments, sacrifice, and love, Brooklyn is a superb, luminous, and bittersweet portrayal of who we are, where we’ve come from, where we’re going, and the places we call home.

This is a rousing, essential viewing experience that reminds us of exactly what humanity is capable of when we work together toward a single, world-changing goal.

This film is an important historical record, and an important reminder of an event in American history that could have changed everything, that should have changed everything. There’s no reason why it still can’t. Newtown is a crucial reminder of that.

Jenkins captures the humor, verve, and considerable complexity of the prose.

It’s borderline miraculous.

Out 1 isn’t just exploratory in its filmmaking methods; exploration is its dramatic essence.

Though heartbreaking to watch, if not triggering, Aftershock remains essential viewing as it reveals another, underseen front in the unending battle for equality in the United States.

Israel, as noted by her own writing, had a caustic wit that works with McCarthy’s comedic talents. She also brings a depth of emotion to Israel that comes to a head in a wonderfully composed scene with Grant at the end of the film.

Not only is Wolfwalkers easily the best animated film of the year, but a stirring masterwork, as stunningly gorgeous as it’s philosophically profound.

If some elements are more successful than others in achieving a balance between the public and the private, between the story of a nation’s ruination and that of a family’s annihilation, it remains a shocking, poignant and soulful tribute to lives ended and to innocence lost in the country’s notorious Killing Fields.

A beautiful, full-hearted celebration of the craft of filmmaking.

Return to Seoul begins as an intimately off-the-cuff stranger-in-strange-land story and becomes a sprawling epic of personal discovery. It’s one of the best films of the year.

The VU feels like it’s told from the perspective of the band members and is always veering far away from talking-head doc standards.

If Sen were to better connect Nadeem and Saud’s faith and civic identities with the kites and other animals’ desperate fight for balance in an urbanized nature, All That Breathes would be an excellent documentary.

Despite all the craft and care it seems just slightly deflating that Fire at Sea can elicit a relatively complacent reaction when it is such a thoughtful, deeply-felt and exquisitely observed film, set right in the eye of a raging storm.

There’s a delirious joy in watching this much action, this well executed at every level.

The theories in Level Five simultaneously thrive in realms of computer science, ethnography, and cognitive psychology, while the picture remains cloaked by the emotional weight of a historical tragedy that marked an entire nation.

Its radical sweetness arises from a wellspring of empathy. Its radiant colors and lucid conception of vulnerability in the face of a largely inconsiderate world, sink deep beneath the skin in the liminal space between the soul and the heart that can make animation such a wondrous medium. Berger’s “Robot Dreams” is its stunning reality.

Cardona’s brilliance emanates here. His performance is contingent on facial expressions and physical tics rather than words. His alluring face is juxtaposed by painful weariness, sullen eyes and a sense of humanity like no other.

At its heart, Jane is powerful feminist statement about a woman’s passion for and dedication to her career in the face of structural opposition.

To an even greater degree than in most Hong films, the film’s scenes of casual small talk, awkward silences, polite smiles, and glasses clinked to change the subject, open up faultlines in the characters’ lives.

The film is a breath of fresh air — there is a lovely awkwardness to the coming-of-age tale that makes it feel almost like an enthusiastic early effort from a talented neophyte as opposed to the eighth feature from an established, albeit arthouse, director.

Containing some of his most open reflections and most electric performances, Rolling Thunder Revue is a terrific addition to the Dylan film canon and an absolute must for Dylanophiles.

Education ends “Small Axe” on unsuspectingly grand terms. Yet the compact 63-minute coming-of-age film never loses its soft devoted touch. And McQueen, already an incredible filmmaker, shows another facet to his immense range.

As usual, Anderson offers a stirring, compelling counter-example to mainstream film, eschewing familiar, conventional character or plot-driven storytelling, mobile camerawork, or traditional editing. Instead, Anderson has deliberately embraced a rigorously minimalist, austere approach: deadpan-inflected, satirical vignettes, one-shot/one-scene camera set-ups, and occasional fade-to-blacks or abrupt cuts to mark the ending of one abstractly connected scene or idea to another, all meticulously planned, filmed, and edited from Anderson’s beloved Stockholm-based soundstage.

A wise, beautiful film summoned up entirely from things authentically seen, felt, and thought.

While perhaps not perfect by Farhadi’s standards, About Elly is a classic tragedy that can be devastating and draining, and in that sense is an immersive, almost emotionally exhaustive experience.

As uneven as it can be at times in its last fifteen minutes, Marielle Heller has crafted a super promising debut that evokes the idea of unlocking the secret world of teenage girls and letting us live inside the special little jewel box if ever so briefly.