Warm, soulful, funny and quietly insightful, Boyhood shines in its engrossing, experiential understanding and it’s a special achievement that should be cherished and acknowledged.

Like Brokeback Mountain a decade ago, Moonlight is a piece of art that will transform lives long after it leaves theaters.

Superbly executed, Quo Vadis, Aida? is a masterful high wire act of tension and devastating humanism.

A demented and often-uproarious class-conscious satire, Parasite falls slightly short of Bong’s greatest work.

This is personal filmmaking taken to such an extremely minute level that at times it can almost feel prurient, like we’re accidentally eavesdropping on things too private for our ears, like we’ve intercepted an embrace sent back through time and not really meant for us at all.

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.

This revolving door of graphically rendered brutalities might feel like its own punishment if not for an array of astonishing performances that’s practically a one-stop Oscar-nomination shopping spree.

Manchester by the Sea is the kind of movie that doesn’t seem to be headed anywhere in particular for long stretches. And then, almost unexpectedly, it arrives.

Nashville boasts some of the director’s most memorable and emotionally multifaceted characters —not to mention a first-class soundtrack of country, blues and gospel hits.

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.

Lover’s Rock is a personal love note, not only to an era and a culture, but to the days of youth and all-night parties.

Fierce and unrelenting, Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” burns as both an incendiary action epic and a tender family drama, alive with humor, conviction, and revolutionary spirit. And amid all its pandemonium, Sergio’s reminder that “freedom is no fear” lingers as the film’s quiet truth, a mantra passed down like a torch. Few films this year feel so vital, so breathtaking in scope and soul. Viva la revolución, indeed.

Sciamma ... has a magnificent capability for elegant prose that wouldn’t feel out of place in a classic novel, the kind of dialogue that simmers long after it is spoken.

While other directors make grand gestures about societal inequities, dating themselves with their stories and form, Jude is happy to launch a Molotov cocktail at everything that came before him. He is one of the freest filmmakers working right now—unencumbered by rules, politesse, or good taste. Contemporary malaise has rarely been captured on screen with such thrilling vividness as in Do Not Expect Too Much From The End Of The World.

Bold acrobatics in editing and ambitious creative choices feel all the more superfluous next to Mescal’s effortless charisma.

The beat is infectious, these girls’ stories a resounding celebration.

Amour is nevertheless the work of a filmmaker who isn't afraid to ask the big questions about human nature, and coming out of Amour it seems the director has hope for us yet.

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.

An electric, sprawling and ambitious effort that's easy to become absorbed by, and a picture that should impress those keen on the director's intelligent, composed and determined brand of filmmaking.

Clear-eyed and clinical without being detached from the human cost, this is a riveting drama of catastrophic amorality told with a cold fury.

Made of crystal and suppressed tears, shot eternally through windows and mirrors and half-closed doors, Todd Haynes' Carol is a love story that starts at a trickle, swells gradually to a torrent, and finally bursts the banks of your heart. A beautiful film in every way, immaculately made, and featuring two pristine actresses glowing across rooms and tousled bedclothes at each other like beacons of tentative, unspoken hope.

Richard Linklater's Before Midnight isn't the most digestible picture, but its challenging, funny, painful, very present and alive depiction of relationships at 40 is so honest and real that we wouldn't have it any other way.

Amazing Grace is a showcase of one of America’s greatest talents and a rush of pure spiritual uplift. There are only so many ways to praise Franklin’s voice and they all fall short – just go and hear it for yourself.

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

A movie so simple, so elegant, and yet so devouringly empathetic that you might not notice its full magic until a few hours later.

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.

Mr Turner, though not without flaws, is something of a twilight culmination of Leigh's work, and very much one in which the filmmaker turns his lens on himself, as is so often the case when directors make movies about artists.

The Irishman, which feels like the work of an older, wiser, less flashy filmmaker, is much more preoccupied with the soul of Frank Sheeran and reckoning with his choices.