A rare film with a heart of gold and a fresh perspective on the lives of marginalized people, Support the Girls effortlessly but sincerely sways sympathies for the lives of those one would otherwise never consider.

Cary Bell’s Butterfly Girl is no reality TV show segment, it’s painstaking reality itself, told in confident style.

In its expert blend of vivid cinematography and naturalistic performances, Alcarràs creates a refined study of heritage that understands life’s permanent absence of resolution – with every hard-earned answer comes a new riddle.

Like life itself, Hale County This Morning, This Evening doesn’t lend itself to immediate comprehension. It’s to Ross’ credit that his work remains so thoroughly accessible and engrossing regardless.

In a vast sea of tasteless or mishandled cinematic nonfiction, Simple As Water displays the voice of a talented filmmaker, exhibits a potently important topic, and shines a light on the international plight of families who deserve to be admired for their courage.

The couple’s pursuit of true, deep, sincere beauty in all things — in body and mind — despite these obstacles is infinitely touching.

What is certain is that there’s at least something here everyone should find appealing, even if the film that houses these special moments isn’t quite there.

Despite being shot during the pandemic, In Front of Your Face is one of the South Korean director’s most open films of late, poignant in its use of a simple structure to touch on the eminently difficult question of how to live happily between past, present, and future.

Mudbound soars thanks to the impressive performances of the ensemble cast and, notably, Rees’ intent on depicting the harsh reality of this pre-Civil Rights era, warts and all.

With an incredible ensemble and an elegant eye, Hall’s Passing is a high-wire act of a debut that tackles its several thorny issues with nary a scratch.

What one takes away from My Life As a Courgette might be a casually simple and forward affair, but a deeper, more considered look at Barras’ moving tale reveals an emotional resonance and non-saccharine uplift that is mostly rare in today’s animation world. Consider it a diamond in the rough.

There is an unassuming languidness to Ljubomir Stefanov and Tamara Kotevska’s anthropologic documentary about a rural Macedonian beekeeper, “Honeyland.” It’s a quiet and passive film that’s content to luxuriate in place and revel in solitude, which, in turn, both drags the narrative’s loose pacing and instills a certain natural structure that, once embraced, becomes almost mesmerizing.

Holy Motors keeps kicking into a different gear, much like an eternally waking dream.

While you know where “God’s Own” is going most of the way Lee finds a way to breathe new life into it (to a point).

Even as emotions may overcome the viewer, Hamaguchi never pushes All of a Sudden into saccharine terrain for empty positivity or cheap inspirational aims. It all feels earned.

The strength of Linklater’s films have always been their ability to capture the textures of lived experience, and Everyone Wants Some!! is no different in that regard: it is a confident, hugely enjoyable return to a universe that treats the connection to “Dazed and Confused” not as an obligation or cash grab, but as inspiration to match that film’s level of energy and cast chemistry.

Loznitsa and his creative team have been meticulous in how every shot plays out. And as hinted earlier, the entire motion picture is meticulous to a fault. It’s only a somewhat twisty ending that saves the endeavor from blowing its relevance away.

This is a tremendously well written piece of work, with impressively developed characters, with scene after scene that further enriches and deepens our comprehension of their actions, yet never judges any of them. It certainly helps that Farhadi gets quartet of excellent, pitch perfect performances.

What this collection of bold artists has pulled off is a fascinating portrait of one man coming to terms with his own identity in a genuinely original way.

Taut yet thoroughly laced with levity, Black Bag plays like the filmic equivalent of a skillfully executed espionage mission in how tight and exact it feels.

Wang’s film is intimate, thought-provoking and well-crafted. It condemns the horrors of the policy without condemning those who were brainwashed into being its vessels, and it gives voice to so many families whose agency was stolen from them.

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar grants Dahl’s work a pop-out book feel in its theatrical storytelling.

With The Tree Of Life the director has once again created a cinematic experience that is uniquely his own, often powerful and mesmerizing, at times overreaching and overbearing, but never forgettable.

Decision to Leave is ultimately a seductive romance, one made all the more fascinating by the boundaries the characters tread but never dare cross. Stories of longing are so tantalizing because they hang in that gray space of potential. The build-up is often more gratifying than the release, and Park wrings it for all its worth.

This is far from the sort of cinematic experience one revisits time and time again, and it’s clear that’s not the intention; one viewing is all it takes to leave a lasting impression, like the simple memory of a young girl dancing with her dad.

It’s Spielberg’s most personal film, one that gorgeously revives the memories of his childhood and youth with a lavish sense of wistfulness and an aptly Hollywood-ized, fable-like touch.

This is a staggering achievement, the sort of nonfiction project that takes unfathomable guts and skill.

Vermiglio is rich in textures and tactile pleasures and is performed with conviction by a cast mixing professional and non-professional actors.

In a film that is so disinterested to conforming to accustomed mainstream movie audiences taste and rhythms, and is committed to its sometimes difficult choices, the bold and exacting Beanpole sometimes feels damn-near radical.

If there’s anyone deserving of hagiography, it’s Rogers. This documentary truly captures the depth of his goodness and earnestness, peeling back layers to reveal an even better person than you remembered. “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” doesn’t cast Rogers as perfect, but it’s hard to imagine a more admirable man.

Fruitvale Station is impressive for a debut, and displays the unimpeachable intent to involve us all in the human story behind a headline. And it certainly displays great promise from its director and accomplished performances from its cast.

Given the unhurried pacing and general underplaying of the situation’s gravity, the film feels like visiting a museum exhibit rather than living through a flashpoint of history. Here, the past’s horrors are but pictures nestled safely behind glass.

A Useful Ghost should first and foremost be enjoyed as the mainstream accessible entertainment it is meant to be, let not its festival trappings deceive you. It will admittedly be a curiosity for Western audiences, but once in tune with its peculiar and particular modes of storytelling, they will find plenty to enjoy and unpack.

It’s a striking and intimate piece of cinema, a heartrending tale of living with and battling neurological disorders, the love necessary to endure it, and the anguished dolor of remembrance.

An intensely pleasurable, lavishly shot dessert tray of utter hokum, The Handmaiden is a prime example of why we should be glad that there’s someone out there still invested in the overwrought Gothic melodrama, and that that person is Park Chan-wook.

Eo is a joyful, experimental, and strangely moving piece of filmmaking that doesn’t always take itself seriously—yet it is nothing if not sincere.

Saad’s sharp psychological character study doesn’t provide the cathartic ending audiences might crave. The perspective is too cold, too ambiguous to give such easy answers. The film, instead, serves as a showcase for Badhon and a platform to examine the limits of unbendable ethics in a sexist culture.

A stirring testament to the necessity of empathy for surviving with any kind of dignity in a particularly undignified time.

Are You There? God It’s, Margaret does an admirable job of honoring a beloved touchstone in the lives of so many young women. Frank yet warm, charming yet brutally honest, Craig’s film pays its due diligence to Blume and her cherished novel.

The Truffle Hunters is a charming, life-affirming film, a look at an enduring folkway that brings fun and flavor to Italians every year.

King comes so close to rendering Hampton’s life and legacy anew for a younger generation. But for all of the film’s eloquent crafts and the audacious performances from a deep ensemble, which includes an under-sung Dominique Thorne as Black Panther member Judy Harmon, Judas And The Black Messiah doesn’t fully encapsulate either its Judas or its messiah.

Having never been entirely won over by the clever-clever period genre revisionism that has been Tarantino’s mainstay since Bill was killed, I was delighted — after all the lurid what-if speculation over the film’s relationship to the Charles Manson story — to find that his latest is, in such large part, a kind of gorgeously lacquered megabudget hangout movie.

After the Storm is a film that invites you in, and clears a space for you at the dinner table while you shuck off your shoes in the hallway.

Tremendously evocative and inherently enchanting, Horse Money is one of the year’s most profound films and an essential step forward for both Ventura the Cape Verdean, and Pedro Costa the artist.

All of the elements of impressive craft blend to make a wholly unique concoction, a bloody, eerie, creepy and yet thoughtful and emotional exploitation movie about demons, ghosts, black magic and haunted things.

Sometimes Leaf asks us to see too much. But Earth Mama is grounded enough and empathetic enough to be worth the bleak toll it exacts.

A radically inspired, hyper-fresh, and even slightly overcooked take on the high school teen comedy... “Booksmart” is something just shy of a sensational masterpiece and miracle.

Boyega is superhuman here. Because no matter the decade, Logan isn’t an easy character to understand with regards to decision making. Yet Boyega’s sincerity holds us in this story, even when we can’t fully understand the why behind Logan.

Stylistically, Ascension borrows from the city-symphony genre at times, with long stretches passing without any dialogue as the camera whips past and through recycling depots, cell phone assembly lines, and poultry plants. There are no talking heads in the picture or any camera-facing reflections to guide the audience along a narrative, making it less cinéma vérité and more direct cinema in style. It is an effective approach.

Ultimately, it’s Sweeney’s show, and she excels in locating small crannies of tacit detail within these offhanded lines.

The film delves deep into the soul of a fundamentally important cause, with a slice-of-life look at a time in history that feels incredible urgent in today’s torn-up world.

Throughout this journey across North Africa, Laxe peppers the film with moments that touch on pertinent themes such as the power of a chosen family, Western society’s naive self confidence when confronting the environment, and perhaps most poignantly, the fallacy that because we have so little control, we can dance away as the world crumbles around us.

A victim of a politically motivated jail sentence for supporting the 2022 Masha Amini hijab protests, Rasoulof‘s latest feature will likely anger the Iranian government even more. Especially considering how brilliant “Sacred Fig” is at deconstructing the rampant injustice in the totalitarian state.

Ryan Binaco’s screenplay is full of tiny, keenly observed touches, but its greatest virtue is its attitude towards her addictions, the way it occupies her space with her, looking on passively but not judgmentally. It’s a movie that understands the desperation of alcoholism.

Harmonium builds to something peculiar and unusual by its close, and has a melancholic, discordant, uneasy sustain that lingers long after.

Heart Of A Dog is at turns a haunting, hilarious, muddled, disparate, and deeply emotional film about a woman, her dog, their bond, and the deaths that continue that haunt her.

The current of informed anger, directed at those who stand by while injustice and bigotry flourish, is unmistakable and turns the whole film into a kind of clever folk fable-cum-protest song.

Blending a surrealist perspective of battle-tinged faith with the harrowing tale of one girl's resilience, the film is a laser-focused fable threatened occasionally by its drifts into character shorthand, but equaled by a wrenching lead performance by Rachel Mwanza that results in one of the finest of the year.

Cooley bursts out of the gate in his directorial debut with high energy, tight storytelling, a rousing adventure, laugh out loud comedy, charming new characters, and most importantly, a tender, and dare I say personal, core.

While the focus of any work about sexual violence should be on the survivors rather than the reporters, the directors could have made their case even more airtight with a little more transparency into their own subjective positions.

The vibrant singing and dancing aren’t what makes this musical so special, even though Puerto Ricans can be known for their incredible ability to move their bodies to just about any sound. “In the Heights” pulls off the impossible as it accurately represents the Dominican, Cuban, Puerto Rican, and many other Latin diasporas in the United States.

The Krafft’s globetrotting love story exists at its most ardent in proximity of their mutual passion.

Zhao has fashioned a masterwork that, once again, straddles the line between narrative and cinematic art in a manner few of her contemporaries can match.

A deeply impressive first film by director Robert Eggers, “The Witch” is immaculately constructed, evinces an exquisitely ominous tone, and is unequivocally haunting. It’s exacting look at the dissonance of human nature is terrifying.

Perhaps the most thrilling thing about Looper is watching Johnson really grow leaps and bounds as a filmmaker.

An excoriating, gripping, intricately plotted morality play, Mungiu’s film is less linear, more circular or spiral-shaped than his previous Cannes titles...but it is no less rigorous and possibly even more eviscerating and critical of Romanian society, because it offers its critique across such a broad canvas.

Kubo and the Two Strings feels like a miracle, evoking joy, surprise and wonder in its audience.

Somehow one of the effects of our current state of topsy-turviness has been to bring us closer into alignment with Kaurismäki’s skewed vision; if his movies are all, in their way, like pictures hanging crooked on a wall, with The Other Side of Hope we don’t have to tilt our heads anymore: the whole house has moved around us.

While it nods to everything from ‘The Twilight Zone’ to ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind,’ Patterson’s movie is more a tribute to the romance of a breeze-whispered sprawling night and the shivery thrill of not knowing what nameless threats it hides.

The entire, whippet-lean film feels like an experiment in impressionist condensation, as though Ramsay is testing the limits of how little she can give us, and how weird it can be, while still delivering a recognisable revenge thriller.

A Ghost Story has the structure and rhythm of a musical suite, with Lowry working variations on the same themes, the same characters, and the same location. The result can be lyrical and poetic, or more naturalistic and minimalist. In both cases, A Ghost Story is absolutely mesmerizing, with an anything-goes quality that’s endlessly fascinating.

The Square gives us the context of Egyptian uprisings, full of heart and hope, but the crux of the Revolution remains muddy.

Widows is definitely a good film and one that often has greatness in its grasp. But it often feels like, at some point in the process, McQueen needed to decide if he was making wallpaper or art.

Although Boys State provides its four leads some talking-head reflection moments, the documentary is largely verité and linear. This gives the project a decidedly honest and organic feeling, but yet it does slow it down at times, depriving it of momentum.

Steering an astonishingly accomplished path between the small steps and the giant leaps of the Apollo 11 mission, reigning Best Director Damien Chazelle opens the 75th Venice Film Festival with First Man, an immersive, immaculately crafted, often spectacular and satisfyingly old-fashioned epic that may well become the definitive moon-landing movie.

A visionary, thrilling work.

Unlike other political documentaries, “Lowndes County” isn’t afraid to end on a bleak, truthful note. One that challenges our modern perception of what is better and what is merely different. It is, quite simply, one of the best documentaries of the year.

These young performers are always true to themselves. Honest and bare without inhibitions. Which is fitting for a movie that’s about rebuilding oneself and one’s connections to the world by telling yourself that the pain is okay. The hurt is real. And the love we give never dies. Park’s The Fallout is a resilient character study of grief in all its forms.

It’s timely, it’s entertaining, it’s a blast of energy, but Weiner also drills down into the unique nature of American politics in the media saturated, smartphone-enhanced, Twitter hot-takes age.

“Star Wars” has always been about destiny, fate, and legacy. However, perhaps like no film in the franchise yet, The Last Jedi seriously considers the hubris that comes with certainty, and how knots from the past that can keep you bound from moving forward.

The filmmaking here is almost impossibly well-realized, right down to the evocative sound design, adding up to an fairly unforgettable experience.

The Blue Caftan deftly explores the complexities of interpersonal and romantic relationships. Halim, Mina, and Youssef share a love for each other and for their shared craft. They want to find happiness in this life without any regard for how society dictates they should. Touzani’s film is a rich, vibrant ode to love in all its many forms.

De Palma is a joy: a hit of garrulous cinephile cocaine so pure you want to do a Tony Montana, fall face-first into it and inhale it all in one go.

What’s most remarkable about His Three Daughters aren’t the performances. As you’d suspect, Coon, Moss, and Lyonne complement each other perfectly (although we should note this is without question the best work of Lyonne’s career). It’s the fact that Jacobs and cinematographer Sam Levy have crafted a drama that takes place almost entirely in one enclosed space and somehow avoided the dreaded claustrophobic aesthetic that makes one feel like they are watching a filmed play.

At its heart, the film is a love story. A love story about two souls who need to trust each other if they want to survive.

Though the film doesn’t quite overwhelm as horror, the thematic implications are dense enough in this case that it ends up leaving a lingering aftertaste anyway.

The Forbidden Room is a cinephile’s delight, another Maddin dream fantasia that’s visually distressed, suffused in feverish melodrama, and strangely poetic. Surrender yourself to its demented genius. The Forbidden Room will trap you in its bewitching spell, and you’ll be better for it.

Although Tamhane’s sedate pacing might put off those expecting a more visceral dive into the culture of Hindustani music, The Disciple is profound in its microcosmic world-building, slowly creating Sharad’s life through individually realized moments, adding up to an extraordinary portrait of a failed artist.

If it presents an accurate picture of this reality, then it feels like it’s a reality that is unstable, so far cut off from the mainstream of life that it has begun to fray into the surreal and the magic at the edges.

Ultimately, Between The Temples is achingly, evenly deceptively sweet and from the heart. It’s a dexterously comic but moving examination of a life interrupted, seemingly demolished, and a life of unfulfilled dreams, clashing, colliding, and perhaps finding a tender togetherness that suggests second chances and no term limits on coming of age

It might not be the director's most immediately accessible films, but it's among his most fascinating and beguiling.

Deadpan has never crackled with such life as it does in this miraculous movie, a stunning synergy of story and style to which all films tackling sensitive social situations should aspire.

By the time that the sun is up and Peggy Lee is singing “Is That All There Is?”, Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets has proven to be an impressively affecting and even slightly tragic piece about the homes away from home that provide comfort, as well as just how fleeting that comfort can feel in the bright light of day.

It’s a ravishing ode, too, to gestures, touches, smiles, and pithy, pointless conversations; in Soul the tiny human interactions that we so often brush over come under the magnifying glass.

Though the structure of the vignettes can grow repetitive as the film moves along to a scene nearly identical to the one that came before, Terrestrial Verses never falters in challenging traditional notions while simultaneously providing a glimmer of hope.

The Salt of The Earth is a mesmeric and unforgettable look at the world and it sufferings through the eyes of a remarkably insightful and honorable artist.

Rat Film doesn’t really make an impassioned political statement. Instead, Anthony assembles striking, allusive pictures and sounds into a one-of-a-kind experience, meant to provoke thought.

Gandbhir could have arranged all of this like a book report with a foregone conclusion, yet she trusts in the truth of this story and the intelligence of her audience to pull apart the necessary history and sociopolitical context of it all.