Paddington 2 is a sure-footed, sweet-natured family comedy which isn’t set at Christmas, but which glows with so much warmth and fun that it might well be a staple of festive television for years to come.

It’s a civics lesson that’s subtly delivered within some thoroughly exciting documentary filmmaking.

It’s a searing, mesmerizing and unforgettably wintry mood piece and character study.

That’s Hard Truths, in a nutshell: people. People you won’t forget, courtesy of a handful of remarkable actors and a singular director who at the age of 81 remains a true treasure.

This is an intelligently made film about an intelligent woman, but it’s also emotionally engaging.

A Western epic of breathtaking visual splendor and formidable lyrical cinematic poetry, it’s a work containing all the wondrous, devastating layers of an entire life, which it explores with a gentle grace without hiding from the agony that comes with it.

Cooper and Lady Gaga are dynamite together; this is a story that lives and dies by the central relationship and the instant chemistry that must blossom between them, and these two have it in spades.

Citizenfour finds its strength in both the story and the telling: The information about government spying is chilling, of course, but the movie also gives us the opportunity to get to know the elusive Snowden.

It makes a solid case for itself as filmed entertainment, while also suggesting strongly that it really ought to be seen in person in a theater.

The Father is an unsettling film, but it’s also a compassionate one; family members of those suffering with dementia can turn to it for an empathetic portrait of how that disorientation must feel on the inside. It’s one of the most disturbing films in recent memory, but it’s both understanding and unforgettable.

Samuel Maoz’s Israeli drama Foxtrot is willfully confusing, emotionally chaotic, and occasionally anarchic. It makes complete sense from one angle, but no sense at all from another. In other words, it reflects its subject perfectly.

Granik took a big risk here, making a purposefully small film that rejects familiar notions of dramatic conflict. But her approach works well enough that the most jarring note becomes Foster’s movie-star presence.

Parallel Mothers often finds Almodóvar doing Almodóvar, leaning into all of his tics and obsession for this tale of two women whose lives become forever linked when they meet in a maternity ward.

Hell or High Water is that rare offering that both feels old-fashioned in its action-thriller gratification and in-the-moment about everything else.

Like another breakout independent film this year, “The Tale,” Tan’s documentary attempts to portray her own narrative with objectivity and distance, but she discovers along the way that such a thing may not be possible, that memories will wait years or decades to snag you in their truths.

That the film remains witty and wise throughout its most lurid stretches makes the Venice Golden Lion contender one of the year’s most unexpected heart-warmers. That the filmmakers lavish commensurate attention on all those bawdy embellishments also guarantees you a bloody good time along the way.

Its languid pace befits the Recife setting, and Filho sets many scenes on long walks down the coast or just after a particularly satisfying mid-day nap. His world is filled with music, dance and wine, and if the film takes a some time to get where it’s going, the beachfront setting remains a pleasant place to stay. Call it an escapist tale about stubbornly staying put.

When Black Panther works, it’s thrillingly alive, whether it’s the dazzling colors of the vivid costumes by Ruth E. Carter (“Selma”)...or the eclectic and vibrant music choices.

This small package stands alongside the exemplary feature-length work in one of this generation’s foremost filmographies.

This is sweet, sentimental filmmaking of the old school, but it’s too sincere to get sticky. If “nice” isn’t the kind of adjective to put you off a movie, you’ll probably enjoy Brooklyn, even if you’re occasionally aware of its masterful manipulations.

Miller is after immediacy, not reflection or explanation.

Hers is a lot of life to try to capture in one movie, but Jane Fonda in Five Acts certainly covers her emotional arc with thoroughness and compassion.

Newtown, even coming nearly four years after the shooting, remains devastatingly timely.

This is a film worth grappling with, even if Baldwin’s own talent has a diva-like way of pulling the focus back to his book and away from what we are seeing on the screen.

The director has wisely assembled an ensemble of performers who know how to handle a long take; this will certainly rank among Keaton's career highlights — in a role that allows him to completely dump out his paintbox and show a vast range of emotion — but everyone shines.

The act of recreating the voice of others, albeit illegally, ultimately empowered Israel to write the well-received memoir on which this film was based. And the act of playing Lee Israel will, with any luck, empower more filmmakers to think of Melissa McCarthy as an actress whose gifts range beyond broad comedy.

The many lessons that Wolfwalkers has to share, whether they’re about the relationships between children and parents or between people and nature, are ones you can never be too old to learn.

The film is one of the most meditative of Almodóvar’s career. ... It makes for less energetic and, yes, less exciting filmmaking. But “Pain and Glory” is a beautiful meditation on past and present, a memory piece that will nourish rather than provoke.

What happens to these spaces when we feel comfortable in our bodies again? Does resurrection always have to require a type of death first? Is there ever a point in our lives where it’s too late to transform? That the film manages to make room for these ideas while lacing it all with enough tacky genre thrills to make it all palatable and thought-provoking is a miraculous feat in its own right.

It’s a dark, disturbing and glorious film about a dark, disturbing and glorious band, and another sign that Haynes knows how to put music onscreen in a way that few other directors do.

What unfolds is a bone-chilling account of what is widely regarded as the largest prison rebellion in U.S. history.

At nearly two and a half hours, it’s designed to test your patience for the things that matter in these movies — violent confrontation, deception, jokey camaraderie, and over-the-top action — but it does so with a remarkably re-engaged fluidity of purpose.

Even if this version never shakes off its stage roots, it does act as a stately jewel box that houses an extraordinary ensemble of performances.

Robot Dreams—as much a movie about coupledom as it is about friendship—sneaks up on you with an ending that both eulogizes the ones that got away and celebrates the memories that they had left behind.

It is an elegy wrapped around a true-crime story; an observational social-justice movie intertwined with an historical retelling that finds the universal in the specific. In braiding these strands together, Brown crafts a film that isn’t one thing or the other but instead dares to contain multitudes.

You don't have to like punk rock to fall in love with We Are the Best!; if a more joyous film comes along in 2014, then it's a good year indeed.

This particular “Bob Dylan Story” proves that at least in terms of the tour, and possibly Dylan himself, what’s on the surface is plenty fascinating no matter how much or little you get at anything underneath.

McQueen and co-writer Alastair Siddons capture that sense that the children of immigrants often have of living with one foot in their adopted country and one in their parents’ homeland.

Below the Clouds is a tone poem paying tribute to a region that is suffused with beauty and haunted by loss. It wanders, to be sure, but in a way that’s the point.

For Zhao, who began her career carving out an intimate and affecting style of filmmaking that didn’t really make or need room for movie stars, Nomadland is both a move in a bolder direction and an affirmation that she’s been on the right road all along.

One of the biggest takeaways from "My Journey” and Tavernier’s enthusiasm for the confluence of image, performance, writing and sound is something hard to ignore the next time you see a contemporary film: the care of shot selection that previous generations deployed, and that barely exists in today’s sloppy, keep-filming-and-figure-it-out-later ethos.

The Banshees of Inisherin is lovely and disturbing in equal measure, turning its darkest urges and blackest humors into a touching and evocative portrait of a time, a place, a community and a pair of crazy men.

Kate Beckinsale and Chloe Sevigny spin intrigues, break hearts and flirt with scandal just as effectively in the 1790s setting of “Love” as they did in “Disco,” which took place in the early 1980s.

With nary a jump scare in sight, Aster has created a moody piece with a delicate but devastating sense of dread.

The film can be confusing, but it’s not meant to be pinned down. And despite the occasionally surreal touches, it’s an examination of how the beauty of tradition can also be an opponent to justice and humanity.

If you can surrender to her peculiar vision, its beauty is undeniable; if not, impatience may set in long before the film winds down just past the two-hour mark.

Caught by the Tides is an elegy of sorts, at times angry and abrasive but more often gentle and reflective.

Jackson is the epitome of a filmmaker whose gaze truly makes everything seem previously unseen. By walking alongside her characters, indeed the salt of the earth, we experience what was always there with brand new wisdom.

So emotionally, dramatically, philosophically complex that it’s tempting to put on professorial airs and focus entirely on its depth. But it is also, just as importantly, electrifying to watch.

Almost never offscreen, Hüller — and Braun, who has less screentime but is no less affecting — navigate unfamiliar situations with small, precise choices and reactions that cut through the deliberately alienating period setting, imparting an emotional energy that feels both current and relatable.

It’s incredibly thrilling to watch, impressively emotional throughout, and easily the best Spider-Man movie since “Spider-Man 2.”

If there’s a quibble with this graphically imagined The Tragedy of Macbeth, it’s one common to the movies Coen made with his brother: It’s ruthless, intelligent, and entertaining, and mightily drinkable as filmmaking, without necessarily raising the emotional temperature past a clinical, grim efficiency. Often, even with the never-not-human Washington going for it, dazzlingly so.

Even the quietest moments of 'Flow' are tainted by existential threat. It’s suspenseful and pensive and painful in a way few films strive for, and fewer still achieve.

Life Itself paints a captivating portrait of a man who embraced life and art, whose spirit never flagged even when his body did. You don't have to be a film critic to find inspiration from Roger Ebert's extraordinary life.

There’s something here for lovers of all kinds of movies — even silents and musicals — but the director transcends mere pastiche to craft a work that feels like the product of our collective film-going subconscious.

You’ll walk away from Rewind shaken by the story, and haunted by the face of a little boy with a world of hurt and nowhere to run.

Many might come up with a sequence that overlays gangster and horror tropes with bursts of violence and dance; few would then toggle between first-and third-person perspectives; and only Bi Gan would have that first-person camera start singing karaoke.

My Golden Days is lovely and thoughtful, yet it has elements of a thriller, too.

Writer-director Ruben Ostlund (“Play”) brilliantly mines this dark material for awkward hilarity.

This is a movie that notices things and people that we are trained to ignore, and you are not likely to forget it.

The film bustles along through a series of reveals – a storytelling technique that can lose an audience’s sympathy or suspension of disbelief pretty fast, but which works flawlessly here because the filmmakers and the performers know exactly who their characters are and what kind of world they live in.

Larson excels at determined despair, simultaneously evincing vulnerability and fearlessness. It’s an exciting, tour-de-force performance by an actress who announces herself as one of the best of her generation. If only the film around her were as bold.

In both concept and execution, The Wolf House will render you awestruck.

There’s nothing flashy about the way these stories are assembled or told, but the cumulative power becomes overwhelming.

Part thorny family story, part whodunit, part courtroom drama and part meditation on the nature of truth and fiction, Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall takes two hours of conversations and makes them both provocative and propulsive.

Throughout, Kaurismäki shows his usual complete control of a delicate tone that could easily go awry if it didn’t work so well.

It’s a triumph of maximalist filmmaking, using in-your-face techniques to craft a gigantically intimate story. A wonder to behold, a shock to the senses, a thrill to one and all.

All the performances are terrific and lend the film a vérité so keen it may leave you as uncomfortable as the titular outcast.

The Babadook is the rare horror tale that's also a triumph of empathy.

Little Men is a deceptively slight movie which brings us towards the revelation that life is disappointment, and that happiness comes in being ready for it.

Advocacy meets suspense in Welcome to Chechnya, a chilling examination of both the brutality that the Chechen LGBT community is forced to face on a daily basis and the difficulty of leaving the country for peace and safety.

Chasing Coral is not impartial. It’s staunchly pro-life, in the truest sense of the term.

Marriages have been used before as prisms of a wider critique. But Loveless has a careful alchemy of psychological acuity and societal insight that imbues nearly every shot (a close-up of a face, an epic vista, a tension-filled pan) with a gathering insight into the ripple effects of turning private miseries into petty wars.

Showing Up is perhaps Reichardt’s most grounded and least impressionistic film, but it is still more than thoughtful and enjoyable and beautiful.

EPiC is Elvis through the Baz lens, where big and bold is always preferable to straightforward and where going over-the-top is never considered a bad thing. If it’s not revelatory for people who’ve seen the existing films from the era, it’s the most imaginative, generous and entertaining look at a time in which Elvis’ comeback still had real life to it.

It reaches inside your imagination and stirs it around, making new connections between familiar concepts. It’s not just great, it’s fascinating and revelatory.

Despite a heavy-handed cocoon motif that sometimes spells out the story’s themes to a fault, Haynes has done something spellbinding here: heady, grown-up and committed to a refreshing dose of moral ambiguity at a time in cinema where moral pandering sadly seems to be the default.

The result is an always engaging, sometimes enraging, and occasionally revelatory doc, stretching from Civil Rights to Substack, that every so often reveals something more jarringly (and appealingly) adversarial.

Don’t let the name fool you: April is a wintery affair. By far the most uncompromising vision to play at this year’s Venice Film Festival, director Dea Kulumbegashvili’s slow cinema horror show might also be the most audacious.

By centering the real-life experiences of his actors, Costa’s conscientious cinema lives in a fully humane space. Material deprivation and unrelenting night provide a blackened backdrop for quiet intimacy and dignity. Costa rejects voyeurism and condescension in favor of a form of storytelling solidarity with his actors, one where there’s no buffer of irony, no distancing effects.

To call it a difficult watch would be an understatement; it often feels, in its stark honesty, like a horror film.

The Lost Daughter is a masterwork in perception and all that society places upon mothers and motherhood.

While The Big Sick isn’t always a complete success — it’s another film bearing the name of Judd Apatow (he produced with Barry Mendel) that could stand to lose 15 or 20 minutes — it’s the kind of sweetly funny love story that’s so bizarre that it has to be real.

In his 2014 Palme d’Or winner, Ceylan unpacked thorny issues of ethics and morality with a surgeon’s steady patience; he employs a similar approach here, only the territory is much less fertile.

My Imaginary Country is as much about the causes, participants and outcomes of a collective awakening in search of a more promising future as it is about an artist allowing himself to feel hope for a homeland that has forever been the focus of his artistic preoccupations.

Following a failed father and filmmaker attempting to connect with his daughters by turning the former family home into a set, Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value is a subtle yet sweeping tapestry of art, family and connection that takes the breath away.

As information-age documents go, it’s as necessary a glimpse of 21st century heroism and ideology warfare as you’re going to encounter, and a brutally effective argument for compassion toward those forced from their homeland.

Even when Ford strongly foreshadows future revelations, Strong Island holds narrative jolts, many fueled by shocks of betrayal. In losing William, the family also lost their faith in their country, their community, and in themselves.

Steve Bognar and Julia Reichert have produced in “American Factory” an invaluable snapshot of a moment where history is repeating itself, and trying to write a new, possibly dystopian ending. But it’s also a film full of beautiful human beings, trying desperately to make good for themselves and their families regardless of their nationality and culture.

Paul Schrader has always been a faith-based filmmaker in the truest and most challenging sense, and First Reformed is the sort of stimulating work that a writer-director of a certain age can deliver when he returns to his creative sweet spot; rejoice, Schrader fans, rejoice.

Rarely do we see a filmmaker start so strong only to end with a whimper. All in all, though, Baby Driver is still worth seeking out, if only for that first hour. Inside those opening 60 minutes is the best action-comedy of the last ten years — full stop — featuring a breathtaking amalgamation of rip-roaring combat, a star-making performance by Ansel Elgort, and a string of clever bits.

MacLachalan weaves a tale of human frailty and strained connection rare in its avoidance of judgmental histrionics and embrace of what makes all of us unknowable yet worthy of forgiveness.

Thanks to Crip Camp, we can all get a window into how a struggle is unified, people are emboldened, and differences are made.

Like a weaver on a loom, Hansen-Løve loops these moments together, threading small moments of thought-provoking social commentary throughout, revealing the larger picture only once the process is done, offering a snapshot of a moment in time, a profound and captivating portrait of love, lost, found, and ever-remaining.

The action meanders, but there’s always an undercurrent of dread. And while many of the episodes are down to earth, the filmmaking lets things flow from image to image with lines that search for deeper truths but don’t advance the plot.

Though the film only provides a snapshot of a moment in time, Culkin’s performance is so spectacular that it makes it feel as though we have known Benji forever.

If the narrative can sometimes wane, the film’s enveloping atmospherics remain tight throughout.

While there’s a lot of commendable chutzpah and curious longing baked into The Green Knight, the movie’s never as compelling as it is unusual.