The collaborative energy between the two makes for an endlessly charming documentary, as “Faces Places” manages to look forwards and backwards with touching insight.

Past Lives shows that living in what-ifs is not good. Instead, it’s important to be grateful for our time with people, even if it’s not forever.

Outside of a few short moments in Ismail Merchant and James Ivory’s “Maurice,” and Ang Lee’s “Brokeback Mountain,” the love and intimacy between two male characters has never truly felt this real or emotionally heartbreaking in a theatrical context. It’s almost revolutionary. It’s cinematic art.

Baumbach pulls no punches, and exhumes a personal calamity, most people wouldn’t have the stomach to sift through again. It’s wrenching stuff to be sure, but it’s also excruciatingly funny, loaded with empathy, compassion, and understanding too, featuring outstanding performances from its leads, Driver and Scarlett Johansson.

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.

Its achievement lies in the space it creates for these children to open up a dialogue they rarely get to have – one that inevitably asks more questions, but that welcomes them as mature thinkers, keen to understand more about those raising them and the conditions in which they are being raised

There are two things that make this movie stand apart: Metcalf and Gerwig.

Kapadia’s gentle voice disguises her subversive spirit.

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

Trying to pick apart his native country’s struggles between tradition and modernity, legality and crime, Kore-eda takes the time to affectionately dissect the way family functions, before carefully deconstructing it and revealing the contoured complexities that live within.

Every family is its own country with culture and customs and embarrassments that seem alien beyond its borders, but the genius of Maren Ade‘s brilliantly funny and slyly crushing Toni Erdmann is that it makes the utterly foreign nation of its central father/daughter relationship feel so much like home.

Uncut Gems is an insane ride with no respite that will grind your senses down to their last nerve.

Inside Llewyn Davis isn't about someone trying to make it big, but someone just trying to make it, and the Coens celebrate the hard road that can inspire great art.

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.

Though not without its blemishes, here’s a timely — and, indeed, timeless — piece about the corrupting essence of power, exploitation, and the burdensome nature of the crown, elevated by a hydrogen bomb of a performance from Cate Blanchett, inarguably at her best since 2015’s “Carol.”

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's the best film McCarthy has ever made: restrained, intelligent and grown-up, but unfolding with the pacing and rhythm of a thriller.

This is a virtuosic piece of filmmaking art that also happens to be almost unbearably moving. Actually, there is no “almost.”

A master of slow cinema, Weerasethakul takes his time with every shot; long stretches of time pass without any dialogue or movement. In so doing, the film inculcates a kind of hypersensitivity in its viewers, who become suddenly attuned to each flitting blade of grass or buzzing fly that enters the shot—as well as to their own posture and breathing.

When you arrive at the final bittersweet destination, swept up in its dizzying collage of history, emotion, time, and space yet floored by the vision you experienced, you’ll find yourself drawn to watch it back all over again.

McElwee probes the very idea of memory itself, and in perhaps his crowning achievement as a documentarian, fails to come up with any definitive answers, yet somehow still moves closer to the truth than he ever had before.

The infectious joy of a long childhood summer is brilliantly and boldly brought to life, unfolding, like Baker’s vital last film “Tangerine,” in a vivid present tense.

For all its value in bearing witness to the kind of atrocious acts that get but little attention on the world stage, this is not mere testimony, this is cleverly crafted and remarkably affecting storytelling.

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.

A marvelous experience for any devoted cinephile.

Presenting a terrifying view of a hidden holocaust and a moral apocalypse in which the most basic humanities have become twisted beyond recognition, The Act of Killing is a towering achievement in filmmaking, documentary or otherwise.

With its uncompromising and full-frontal depiction of the elements that give us life, “De Humani Corporis Fabrica” tests our levels of comfort in accepting we are essentially all decaying entities made of organic material. It also makes us reconsider our relationship with medicine.

What an extraordinary film this is.