Despite its nearly three-hour runtime, it never overstays its welcome and plays out beautifully, maintaining a gripping tone and complex narrative about an ordinary family that doesn’t fall into cliches or repetition. Roustaee’s filmmaking is subtle yet leaves a lasting impression, solidifying him as one to watch.

It’s a lovely, charming, vibrant, sad, bildungsroman tale and roman-fleuve that pays small tribute to Maradona. But more importantly, it manages to both memorialize this agonizing turning point in his life and warmly reminisce on the bliss that came before it.

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.

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.

That ending, poetic and beautiful, is the chronological conclusion of Days; emotionally, it crests a few minutes earlier, as the two men go on a modest dinner “date” after their encounter.

Aligning itself with the director’s prior works, Costa’s cinematic dissertation on the impermanence of life, love as a sacrificial commitment and the existence of God requires a refined attention span and a liberal tolerance for a slow-burning narrative flow, but viewers in search of a visually masterful and emotionally desolate arthouse feature could find Vitalina Varela to be one of the most thought-provoking international features to debut in quite some time.

Featuring two exceptional lead performances from these two boys, first rate beauty-in-ugliness photography and an unusually extraordinary command of tone, Carbone’s picture skillfully articulates the inexpressible.

In the end, it doesn't matter if you believe Alexandrovich's story that a $7 billion weapons system was ultimately the cause of the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown; what matters is that Alexandrovich believes it so completely. And through his eyes (which seem to bug out outside of his skull), the entire Russia/Ukraine relationship takes on a vivid, personal immediacy.

La La Land is a film you simply never want to stop watching. It has wisdom and joy and sadness and such magic, from the evocative power of music to the transportative power of movies.

After Tiller is not an important film just because of its political and cultural relevance, but because of its humane and compassionate approach to telling the stories of these doctors, their work and the women that they seek to help.

This is a brilliantly constructed, whip-smart, and laugh-out-loud-funny romp from a filmmaker whose precision and craft is nearly unparalleled. It’s hard to think of a movie this year that has been as singularly delightful, one that, with each passing moment, reveals something charming or odd or real.

Fearsome and fearless at the same time, Palm Trees and Power Lines practically dares viewers to watch what’s happening on screen without flinching.

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.

Scream VI builds to a powerful third act of grisly mayhem that is one of the best in the series.

Charm City Kings is beautiful and important, unabashedly Black, yet rarely traumatic, and almost always determined statement. Soto has crafted an incredible empathetic narrative, one mile of road at a time.

Sister is as bleak and as beautiful as its snowy, mountainous setting.

The Lego Movie is an absolute blast—a whip-smart, surprisingly emotional family film where the toy property is seen less as a concrete template than a tool for seemingly limitless potential.

Sightseers homicidal holiday isn't just a pitch-black comedy made with skill, will and brains; it's also another demonstration that Wheatley is, to use an all-too-appropriate phrase, going places.

For a movie about government incompetence married to government malfeasance, Costa Brava, Lebanon is surprisingly funny.

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

Wuthering Heights is a model of how to bring a classic novel kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century.

What could have easily been an overstuffed confluence of ideas – a haunted house, a ghost, a witch, a murder, oh my! – comes together so effectively because of McCarthy’s masterful command of what scares audiences.

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.

The movie is zippy and funny...and more emotional than the man himself would ever allow himself to be. It’s a triumph.

Its message is timeless. Its performances? Flawless. And if The Killing of Two Lovers can be described as anything more than a must-see film, it can best be defined as a cautionary tale dedicated to the fragility of the family structure in the United States, a showcase of a radically talented filmmaker and a dedication to the painful reality of love.

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.

For a production founded on a tried and true indie formula – start with your characters, add in existential malaise, substitute plot with antics and awkward conversation – Pet Names is made with remarkable urgency

By the time the curtains draw to a bittersweet close, you’ll walk out feeling rejuvenated, satisfied, well replenished in humor and culture, and already planning your own trip to Italy.

Tarsem’s direction throbs with moral rigor and righteous anger previously not evident in his work.

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.

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

You may not be able to figure it out, but that's part of the point of this sensually-directed, sensory-laden experiential (and experimental) piece of art that washes over you like a sonorous bath of beguiling visuals, ambient sounds and corporeal textures.

This is far more than just a film.

“Boyz in the Wood” is a jolt of irreverent fun that wants you to laugh at the stupid and depraved behavior of teenage boys but also to know that at the end of the day, the kids will be all right.

As a simultaneous introduction and farewell, An Elephant Sitting Still might be one of the best movies that you will only watch once, but won’t ever completely leave your mind.

This terrific and sublime experience, and strikingly original film, is mandatory watching for the adventurous viewer.

Strikingly bold in its dramatic construction, and adept at folding the macro issues into the lives of everyday residents of a tumultuous area of the world, “Huda’s Salon” is contained inside an expertly paced plot that seems ready to combust at any second.

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.

A magnificent, tight exploration of romance and what it means to walk that path wearing blinders. Most people have done this at one point or another, and Silver’s triumph is that he’s crafted a film that puts his audience both inside of this, but also at a distance where it can be appreciated.

Simply put, Samsara tells the story of our world, but onscreen, it is so much more than that.

Revenge is often described as a dish best served cold, but with the way Mayhem! draws audiences into its compelling story, this film is white hot, and reminds audiences why revenge is on the menu in the first place.

David Byrne’s American Utopia is an ideal world; it’s exhilarating and joyful; and Byrne and Lee actually do make a perfect pair.

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

Though it’s dealing with difficult subject matter, the film teems with life throughout every funny, bittersweet, and wild moment, slapping a smile on your face that won’t go away and you don’t know why.

Afire is the uncompromising work of a master not only on conceptual and stylistic levels but also in terms of his emotional politics.

The Tree of Life spanned eons to capture the entirety of existence, and while the filmmaker works on a tighter four-year canvas this time around, the feeling that the stakes are nothing less than the soul of all humanity has persisted. This is art of salvation.

There have been countless films this summer that have engaged in endless spectacle but Dunkirk is the rare blockbuster that will leave a bruise.

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.

It’s bold, beautifully told, and surprisingly funny.

Told in sumptuously gritty imagery, this epic feat of bold imagination, unconcerned with mitigating its creative force for the sake of unadventurous audiences, has an unconventional film grammar and irregular structure that peers into the different possible outcomes of the would-be paladin’s trek.

Alps has proven Lanthimos to be one of the most fascinating filmmakers anywhere right now.

Facile explanations are absent from Josephine, as they should be, but what lingers is a sense that every gesture of empathy and bravery, no matter how small or imperfect, tips the scales towards good, even if trying feels like a losing fight.

This is a film about anger, felt as deeply by the characters whose lives unspool in front of the camera as by the filmmaker who sits behind it. Such anger is a long river that bifurcates into two opposing forces: violence and empathy.

Hala is keenly observed and quietly powerful, and we’ll be hearing much more from the talented women on either side of its lens.

Riders of Justice ties together gun fights seamlessly with melancholy and masculinity, putting them on similar footing without one gobbling up the others. The effect is complimentary. Remove one theme and the others crumble. Jensen quietly, and nearly constantly, adjusts his filmmaking to suit varying tones, softening for moments where the subject is human suffering and then hardening around muscular elements

The relationship between “Melody” and “Bilel” (also an assumed name) shows the slippery nature of performed online identities, the leveraging of personal grievances into political/terrorist action, and how the immense scale of social media can essentially collectivize and weaponize alienation and anger from around the world into real world terror.

It's a state-of-the-nation masterwork, a vitally important piece of work, and should be seen by as many people as possible.

For all of the blood, guts, and gore, for all of the stomach-cramming gluttony, here’s a story brimming with extraordinary romanticism. What emerges, by the end, is one hell of an ode to giving yourself to the ones you love: your bones and all.

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

Palm Springs adds meaning to the seeming meaninglessness of life, with infectious fun and introspective pleasure to boot.

Charming, witty, beautifully shot and inexplicably captivating.

A stunner of a directorial debut.

It is a loving — and highly entertaining — ode to the outcasts who dream of nothing more than a life filled with fixing whirring gadgets and afternoons spent in “Star Trek” matinees.

We’re left with a prickly kind of harmony that blends mundanity with profundity. There’s no more perfect a note for a film as intelligent, compassionate, and complex as “My Happy Family” to end on than that.

Saleh’s film works on many different levels because it’s a layered blend of various elements from different genres. He has crafted a spy thriller that succeeds as a coming-of-age narrative and can also be an entertaining film that keeps you captivated up until the final breathtaking moments.

Panahi does not paint himself and his practice in a kind or perfectly innocent light here. However, his ability to still clearly identify who the real culprits are is an inspiring testament to his clear-mindedness and his unshaken ability to imagine a better, more just world.

It shows a concern for spatial discrepancies, between characters, between action and intention, between life and death. It’s one of many reasons why The Hurt Locker is one of the most exciting movies you’ll see this year.

Gravity is about as visceral an experience as you can have in a cinema, it’s a technical marvel, and it’s a blockbuster with heart and soul in spades.

Lombroso delivers close, often uncomfortable intimacy. He catches his subjects in the heat of the alt-right’s coming-out period in 2016 and 2017, when the mainstream press was just starting to turn over some rocks and write about what oozed out.

Their latest fusion of science fiction, character drama, dark comedy, and overwhelming paranoia, Something in the Dirt, feels like their most personal film – and not just because they wear so many hats, directing and writing and producing and editing and starring.

A work of immense and intense emotional vigor, sprinkled with fun-loving traits and intellectually stimulating prowess, The Duke of Burgundy is the stuff dreams are made of.

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

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.

What makes Joe Berlinger’s riveting new true crime doc Whitey: The United States vs. James J. Bulger such an eye-opener is that it isn’t just about a bad guy who did bad things, but the layers of corruption and moral ambiguity that stacked up on both side of the law.

Everything matters in Cronenberg's Cosmopolis, but not everything is necessarily the same as DeLillo's book. And that makes the film, as a series of discussions about inter-related money-minded contradictions, insanely rich and maddeningly complex. We can't wait to rewatch it.

Collette delivers one of the best performances of her already impressive career in Glassland.

By allowing Ejiofor the time and narrative space, even allowing many of the sermons to play out in full, to express Pearson’s confliction, Marston has created one of the more restrained explorations of faith in quite some time.

Transition works as both a personal accounting of Bryon’s journey and a fascinating exploration of how gender is treated within conservative societies. That the film can account for both, drawing out the parallels, schisms, and nuances that exist within a society that strongly believes in a gender binary, is something of a minor miracle.

Marcello brilliantly captures the circular nature of the perpetual expanse between the working class and the elite in the dense characterization of his subjects and the dialogue surrounding the rejection of Martin’s early writing.

It’s a searing series of accounts from dignified patriots, weary politicians, and desperate civilians stuck in a frantic situation, and a remarkable piece of work that should be seen by everyone who thinks they know everything about the Vietnam War.

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.

A brilliantly unflinching look at a society built on extreme disparities that reads more like an omen than a far-fetched fantasy, New Order repeatedly subverts any hope of redemption. It guts you with the worst of human nature, like Franco often does, but within a larger sociopolitical scale, and for that, it’s utterly unshakable.

There may be romantic closure at the end of “Fire Island” but not a sense of finality, just a vision of endless possibilities—a horizon tinted by a sunset that stretches as far as the eye can see.

The film does not stab as deeply in laying bare the schizoid moral hypocrisy of the perpetrators of the Indonesian genocide as its peerless predecessor, but instead offers an extraordinarily poignant, desperately upsetting meditation on the legacy of those killings, and on the bravery required to seek any kind of truth about them.

This movie will fill your heart up. Casarosa is an artist with a true perspective, fearless in his creative impulses and limitless in his compassion, and Luca is a pure expression of these sensibilities.

Hanging By a Wire is a nail-biting watch, one that never allows itself to become bogged down in excessive setup or backstory.

Whether a viewer might be a fan of Wham! or not is ultimately irrelevant, as Chris Smith has produced something as incendiary as any of Wham!’s hits.

Pure power, John Wick: Chapter 4 is as exhilarating as it is exhausting. With this wildly satisfying world tour de force, Reeves’ Wick transcends icon status delivering the perfect bone-crunching crescendo to one of the great action franchises in cinema history. It’s pure gold.

Winner of the Caméra d’Or for the best first feature film last month at the Cannes Film Festival, writer-director Pham Thien An’s Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell is a deeply felt three-hour spiritual odyssey about grief in its many forms.

It is a film that feels movingly personal while speaking to the ubiquitous tussle between duty and desire, and that does so through the gnarling of fresh and guts and bones to find what is buried deep within one’s being: a throbbing vein of wanting, undeniably alive, and that, once freed, will not stop until its thirst is quenched.

The kind of brainy, absorbing, all-out thrilling cinema that’s in dangerously short supply these days.

A luminous and soul-nourishing microcosm built on profound love in the face of impending grief, the film reveals itself in the charged interactions between its multiple characters.

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.

Days is the first in a loose trilogy including In the Mood for Love and 2046, but here, amidst all the exquisitely deliberate, drippingly sensual imagery that would become Wong’s trademark, there is still the grit and grain of real life, and it makes this perfectly enigmatic film feel somehow thrilling.

Focusing on the indigenous community of the Pine Ridge reservation, Zhao reimagines the entrenched masculine persona of the cowboy. The result is an entrancing, deeply moving effort, one that is certain to steal the hearts of audiences on its wider release.

The genuinely revelatory combined effect of the interviews, concert footage, and pure elation aside, there remains an undercurrent of bristling frustration bubbling beneath the film’s surface. 52 years? That’s how long “Summer of Soul” sat unseen, hidden from the public? If work this important can be squirreled away from view for this long, and if we let our imaginations run wild, then who knows how many other stories lie buried in anonymity, or where.

The film team is so strong and the direction so fine that it’s simply hard to believe this is actually Talbot’s first full-length feature film. And to detail much more would spoil the genuine surprise of their many on-screen artistic contributions.

This beautifully structured fable may be focused on the specific pain, of a specific child, during a specific moment in time, but it blows up every fragment of its premise into heart-stirring universal appeal.