It seems like a statement that Il Futuro presents simple but intriguing conflicts that nonetheless resolve anti-climactically, denying us an organic end.

Melancholy in shape, but still hopeful, Crosby’s willingness to bare naked his personal struggles on-camera makes for a truly poignant movie.

Aquarela is truly a theatrical experience that benefits from the dark, distraction-free nature of the theater, in which the cycles of water, from frozen lakes to hurricanes, becomes an all-consuming force.

Guzmán's essential thesis seems to be that, in turning its back on the ocean, modern Chile lost a crucial part of its identity. But he also puts forward the extraordinary idea that the water has a memory, and that if you listen closely enough, you can hear the voices of the disappeared.

While bereft of the lurid pleasures that have propelled Saltburn to its ubiquitous social media popularity, Brief History Of A Family is nevertheless a smart and engaging debut feature, and preferable since it has something of value to communicate to audiences.

Other People’s Children is a moving rumination on the pains caused by the unbudging pillars of traditional parenting. It is a rare offering in its enlightened kindness, and a heartbreaking one, too.

At best a handful of transitory pleasures, Sils Maria threads through the peaks and valleys of weighty, interesting topics, but makes no lasting impression on them.

Even though Exhuma may exist as a wellspring threatening to drown in ideas possibly better suited for multiple films, Jang Jae-hyun has still managed to bring to life a compelling story about something that should remain dead.

An exceptionally well-executed and emotionally heart wrenching documentary.

Demon is a film that improves the longer it sits with you, as various images seep into your consciousness and reappear without warning.

With nothing but artful austerity to offer as a tether back to reality, The Ice Tower shatters.

Light from Light is a quiet and modest film with big subjects on its mind and it will reward those viewers with the patience to listen to the faint wavelengths at the end of the dial.

the driving force of this film is rooted in Blair’s wit, which sings to her resilience.

The various marvels of the movie aren’t just the sparks between Redford and Spacek or Waits’ dry humor but often, Lowery’s inspired direction.

The Box lacks the sort of ardor that made From Afar so memorable. Here, not all the major beats amount to substantial commentary on this relationship or the context. However, there are choices and plot elements that confirm the director’s narrative sagacity.

Colin West’s Linoleum is the kind of movie that’s all but impossible to review with any specificity, because so much of its achievement lies in its surprises – how it seems to be doing one thing while slyly doing another, without deception, and then revealing its ultimate intentions with grace and style.

It is almost impossible, however, to watch Other Side Of The Wind without taking its history into account. That makes the final product uniquely captivating.

Smith brings a tone of melancholy to the closing stretches of “Devo,” acknowledging in some way that all revolutions fade and mass cultural subversion will only ever work up to a point. But there is also a lack of sentimentality or resume-burning here, which feels of a piece with the band’s spiky posture and protest mentality.

No matter which way one looks at it — whether at cow-level or not — the lives of these animals are not happy ones. Therefore, the ethical question that remains isn’t about whether these animals are being treated well or not, but simply about what we are willing to live with.

It’s dizzying stuff, and virtually everything that Gomes tries his hand to works: it’s a film that’s moving, sad, exciting, fiery, and funny.

The film is easy to admire, but lacks the kinds of scenes necessary to truly make a emotional connection.

The Falling Sky, in some ways, is also a time travel movie, as we get to peek into the past and see ourselves in people for whom time has stood still.

There’s an enigma here. If we believe anyone in The Lost Leonardo, we believe someone who is only here to cover their tracks. Koefoed knows this and plays up the mystery with compelling results.

Both performances at the film’s center are just outstanding.

Deceivingly complex, with an emotional center that peels away like an onion the longer it unfolds, this is a powerful effort from Mungiu in which love and faith are both different kinds of poison.

It’s a film that not only works as a self-reflective biography and community portrait but also as a testament to the living nature of literature, where a work is able to be interpreted and reinterpreted by the generations to come.

Two things make The Sessions stand out. One is the level of acting...The other is that, while we all know sex is more than boobs and bits and butts, it also does include those things, and The Sessions does not hide behind euphemism or gentle cutaways, montages or misty light.

There is some pleasure in spotting the winks and legends and shout-outs, but as with any biopic, of any figure, you can’t just bank on familiarity— you have to give the unfamiliar viewer (and, considering the platform it’s on, there will be many) reasons to care. By the end of Mank, even I wasn’t sure any of this mattered all that much.

This is a documentary that reminds you of the resiliency of the human spirit. The resourcefulness that can take place when you have nowhere else to run.

Annihilation is mesmerizing and its awe-inspiring conclusion will leave your mind blown and splattered against the wall. In its final, surreal biopsychological moments the movie goes to an astonishing interstellar gear.

A film with a universal sensitivity that relates the pangs of first love, the desirous ache of adolescent sexuality and the excitement of not just discovering yourself but finding those kindred spirits with whom you can share your life.

It’s an impressive feat of unfolding this story, though there are a few moments where it loses the narrative thrust and momentum along the way. Still, it’s a remarkable portrait not only of this particular man, but of a culture in a transitioning moment: adapting to new influences and growing older, but continuing, always, to remember.

What Early, who also wrote the screenplay, has his sights on is the hilarious tropes of the movie-of-the-week genre. And he almost completely pulls it off.

The filmmaking is admittedly functional rather than particularly artful, but you somewhat appreciate that Warchus is determined to distract you as little as possible from the story and characters.

This is one of the most thoughtful films about the female experience to debut in recent years, and should be mandatory viewing for anyone eager to engage with confidently-made, skillful art cinema.

This back and forth between assuredness and doubt also makes “Babygirl” a refreshing look at BDSM and questions of consent and desire. Reijn is unafraid to have her characters play out all the wobbles that come with negotiating one another’s boundaries, reinforcing how pleasure comes from good communication. That the Dutch director manages to do so while crafting some of the hottest sex scenes in a major film in years and without dropping the ball in pacing this satire on the era of the politically correct feels almost impossible.

While Kim’s encyclopedic dive may not offer much revelatory information, it nevertheless acts as an insightful and streamlined primer into Paik and his work, allowing fellow artists and critics the time and space to speak about Paik and the radical shift towards video art.

Midnight Traveler is a brutally honest film about the hardship and inhumanity a family endures and their bravery, love, hope, and, above all else, desire to control their own fate.

This isn’t a movie about despair in the face of seemingly implacable problems; it’s about the heavy lifting that constant hope requires. Disappointingly, that surging energy which animates the activists profiled here, in ways both intimate and caught-on-the-fly, never coalesces into the desired blueprint for reform.

Despite some flat moments, Nobody’s Watching is consistently engrossing,

McKellen has been given a wonderful late-career gift in Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers, a role that allows him to deliver one of his best performances in years.

The film feels like the midpoint of Robert Altman and Hal Ashby, and perhaps one of the reasons it’s been overlooked is that it arrived the same year as two similar masterpieces from those directors, in “Nashville” and “Shampoo,” and if this isn’t quite as flawless as those films (it’s admittedly somewhat sprawling and unfocused), it’s nevertheless worth a watch for many reasons.

It’s clear that the Panther legacy lives on, and Nelson’s film is a necessary primer for understanding the party — in it’s own words.

There’s no time like the present for a viewing of The White House Effect, and there is no wrong audience, no one immune to the presence of climate change. For those who already know, take it in. For those on the outskirts, you might wonder if it’s needed. It is.

There's a kind of helpless humility to the presentation of these urban impressions, almost a kind of democracy, that allows you to engage as much or as little as you like with them.

An immigration story that manages to draw in themes about manhood, familial identity, and cultural preservation, director Matias Mariani has crafted a picture that speaks to a broader transient experience that transcends both time and place.

Jackman shines, teasing us with suggestions of just how deep his performance runs.

A Most Violent Year asks you to watch and listen and pay close attention; it also rewards that investment with subtle, real pleasures and provocations. Set in that messy place where crime, business, law and politics intersect — which is to say, the real world — A Most Violent Year is a slow-burn drama about what kinds of compromises you'll make in order to tell yourself you haven't compromised.

While Gone Girl is certainly his slightest film to date, it's nonetheless undeniably gripping. Fincher clearly enjoys turning the screws and rounding the wild corners of the plot from the first frame.

Zhangke's always had a throughline regarding economic inequality and the 21st century-style Chinese capitalism in his work, but Mountains May Depart might be the director's defining statement on the way that his nation has changed over the past few decades. If only he were a touch subtler about it.

At its best moments, the extremely straightforward construction of Cédric Kahn’s The Goldman Case allows for fascinating dynamics and images to occur apparently unforced, as if by themselves, for the viewer to seize on their own.

Once the flood of heavily redacted documents starts flowing in, Boundaoui’s measured but righteous indignation bends toward what she calls the gray “dangerous place” between paranoia and the truth.

This meditation on the emotions that bind and the economy that separates is a worthy representation of the risky business of holding onto humanity in contemporary society.

This is Strickland’s grand act of prestidigitation; he coaxes out something like poignancy from the peculiar, just as he conjures the visceral and unknowable from ordinary groceries.

Avoiding easy answers and engaging on various levels, Policeman is exactly the kind of film that makes one excited about the art again.

It would be easy to turn “Ricky” into something more, a commentary on recidivism and the hardships of a criminal coping with life in this day and age. Still, by only touching on these, a simple story performs the heavy lifting, unfolding as it does. We want to hope for Ricky, cheer his successes, and wish him a better life, not only for Ricky but for all those who are the same.

Copa 71 may be just another documentary, but in telling the story of the 1971 Women’s World Cup, it is absolutely a success.

It’s an American film that talks about race with strong feeling, common sense and good humor; it’s an indie screenwriting-directing debut as polished as it is provocative; it’s a satire that also lets its characters be people; it’s a showcase of clever craft and direction as well as whip-smart comedic writing brought to life by a dedicated, charismatic cast that also conveys real ideas and emotion.

There is a kind of violence in resistance and a kind of violence in complicity, too, and to that end, the characters in Ahed’s Knee are trapped in a perpetual dance with their own identity and nationality, a never-ending negotiation of morality and belonging.

As polished a film in terms of craft and performance as Nichols has ever made, the director’s trademark considered intelligence shows itself in how subtly it reworks and refreshes the tired conceits of the historical biopic, while still remaining a conventionally appealing and, yes, Oscar-y example of the genre.

If immaculately realized, Silence is also an increasingly monotonous, patience-testing slow-burner, with characters repeatedly voicing their fears about God’s silence (often in voiceover), debating the merits of apostatizing in service of a compassionate cause, and suffering in quiet.

The Crash Reel can never be accused of being dry or boring, but Walker brings an energetic style that also complements its subject.

Hitchcock is essential; Truffaut is essential; the book is essential; Kent Jones' Hitchcock/Truffaut is not quite so, but it's a very enjoyable appendix.

Combined with a narrative with a more defined ending, this darker tone suits Sang-soo’s minor-key ruminations, injecting more tension and pathos into his trademark conversations.

Feels Good Man is an intriguing look behind an online curtain that rarely gets pulled back, and is investigated critically even more infrequently. Slick animation graphics and well-paced interview testimonials bolster the effort and paint a very clear (if regrettable) picture of how art can sometimes get away from the artist.

Through the eyes of the Mexican filmmaker, the familiar fable is made anew, carefully carved by the hands of an artist eternally enamored with his craft. This loving relationship between creator and creation imbues the film with the type of contagious excitement that brings one back to the joy of the early days of cinemagoing, a thrilling jolt of nostalgia that only emphasizes the miraculous nature of this fresh recreation.

What is truly, and thrillingly, new here is Morris’s thematic interest. The deeper he goes into the rabbit hole with Cornwall, the more his true subject becomes apparent, as the picture becomes a penetrating investigation of the idea that great artists freely use fiction to work through the very real pain of their own lives—even in work that’s not explicitly or even transparently autobiographical.

Aside from its phenomenal script and performances, Night Comes On delights with stunning visuals.

Immense, remarkably captivating, imposing, and right on the edge of overblown, filmmaker Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune: Part Two” is a spectacular blockbuster epic in the grandest sense of the tradition.

It really is a celebration of Judy Blume. There are tough subjects they cover, but you ultimately leave the movie feeling really touched by her work and the compassion she has for her readers and fans, even if you’ve never read her novels.

Drive works as a great demonstration of how, when there's true talent behind the camera, entertainment and art are not enemies but allies.

Director Pavich, his first time at bat, has crafted an unalloyed pleasure of a documentary, especially for those of us who care about "Dune," about sci-fi, and about the value and power of creative passion.

Matching Fukunaga's proven storytelling grace with a story truly worth the telling, the result is explosively authentic and yet lyrical, making an utterly inhumane and alien situation both completely real and completely abstract.

The jankiness of this structure is a bit much, at least on first viewing, drifting into memoir material for so long that it the picture feeling shapeless for a good long while. But then again, that’s our Linklater, and complaining about narrative aimlessness is kind of like coming out of a Scorsese movie bitching about all the voice-over. It’s a new Linklater, is the point, and that’s good news indeed.

The resulting film is truly as real as it gets. For a movie about the apparent world beyond our own, that’s saying more than any psychic could ever predict

Lafleur maintains a bouncy, consistently funny tone that you'd describe as featherlight, were there not real weight grounding it all. It's a near-miraculous trick, and evidence of the immense talent on display here: he has a real talent for making comedy work visually, and as you might expect from a former editor, a sense not just for landing a joke, but for creating a unique and distinctive rhythm.

Petrov’s Flu is fascinating partly because of the chunky muscularity – the inherent masculine brawniness – of Serebrennikov’s filmmaking, in which dreams are as solid and hard-edged as reality, and reality is a blockish, jostling thing.

A fitting follow-up to “Minding the Gap,” Liu and Altman’s All These Sons is a sharp, deeply personal piece, equal parts devastating and inspirational.

Taking a mental note of every loose thread “Monster” introduces is a demanding task that may confuse some viewers, but it’s an immensely satisfying and emotionally resonant watch to see how the pieces fit together.

Taken individually, there are cherishable moments and performances scattered throughout “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” like so many flecks of gold amid the silt. But as a whole, the film has to be chalked down to a perplexingly minor addition to one of the most beloved cinematic canons of our time.

Fourteen generates important insights on time, mental illness, and relationships, proving, through a tableau of exquisitely staged moments, that friendships deepen over time no matter the circumstance.

Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World is a slick documentary that presents a compelling argument about the problems presented with institutionalized journalism, yet it somewhat fails to present the full picture. Nevertheless, it’s a documentary worth seeking out, suggesting the possibility of amateur investigators with the possibility to change the course of global events.

An exciting, splattery, funny genre movie that somehow never once feels disposable.

The Plague is a movie-movie, rather than a genuinely searching or affecting film about that most awkward age when fitting in with a group can seem like the most important thing in the world.

The people in Sang-soo’s latest are given the time to exist within the frame without having to respond to the sometimes constricting expectations of fiction, the director’s observational style a perfect match to the film’s titular purpose: to observe a not-so-regular day in the lives of regular people.

By bringing to the screen a conversation painfully reserved to private spaces built upon the frail structures of shame and guilt without ever losing the type of loving lightness one can only get through unwavering support, Molly Manning-Walker confidently steps out of the gate right foot forward.

It’s an offbeat, fun, and frequently very funny film, lifted out of disposability by some wonderfully rich production design, music cuts and photography, and by the cherishable performances of the leads.

While the film is hysterical, its real strength lies in the way it is able to deal with an issue like sexism in the industry and work it out in a funny, honest and very real way.

Selma is vital correspondence, filmmaking lived on the streets where brutal facts were ignored then reported, and now snatched back from history to sustain a spirit few films can or will possess. It is stunning humanistic cinema on a mainstream scale... It has inventiveness, urgency, humor, and most of all emotion that draws effortless parallels rather than leaving its lesson up on the screen.

Taylor-Joy also has to convey a tremendous amount of character arc in what is often a non-verbal performance (Miller recently revealed she only has 30 lines in the movie). No surprise, she absolutely kills it. But, miraculously, for a movie that doesn’t seem to leave the door open for further adventures, she’ll teasingly leave you wanting more.

The film is all at once a genuine, crowd-pleasing barnstormer and an uncomfortably identifiable personal theme park 4D experience.

Charming, witty, beautifully shot and inexplicably captivating.

Pay a thought to kids growing up during wartime. Gornostai captures a snapshot of their everyday heroism on film, embalming it for future generations.

Clinical in nature and matter-of-fact (but still affecting), The Assistant is essentially a procedural about being a personal assistant to a powerful Hollywood man and all that entails.

In truth, the deeply absorbing and thematically rich ‘Apes’ sequel is more akin to a drama than an action film, but it's one that still satisfies the desires and demands of big, blockbuster filmmaking.

The subjects of Kokomo City are quote machines, but their strength is that they make you listen to what they are actually saying and digest their opinions. Oh, no, they are not just here to entertain you. Points will be made.

What elevates Hustlers from an entertaining con job flick to something noteworthy is that the racket isn’t inherent to the story Scafaria wants to tell. Many filmmakers will say their film tackles female empowerment, but few do the legwork to make an integral and authentic part of the story.

Denis and Binoche have made a film that’s both smart and sexy, imbuing new excitement and wonder into the emotional connections that define us all.