Marked by evolving degrees of miraculous vivacity, dread, despair, and ultimately hope, Tell Me Who I Am reflects a fraternal relationship equally encumbered by truth and lies but strengthened by love and an unflinching revelation in real time. It is utterly staggering.

It’s a compassionately constructed film — it never looks away from the agony before us, and the subject is of the utmost importance.

Breathing rare emotional truth into on-screen depictions of small children and the parents who raise them, Hosoda’s unassumingly sumptuous Mirai is a hand-drawn miracle, rivaling Pixar and Ghibli’s efforts to devise family entertainment with a complex and humanistic edge.

There are moments in Sunset Song that rank with Davies’ most poignant.

At close to two and a half hours, Uncut Gems is a wild and long ride that refuses to let either the characters or the audience relax. But hey, you don’t go to a Safdie Brothers movie to relax — you go to let them take you on a hell of a ride. Or is it a ride to hell? With these guys, it can sometimes be hard to tell the difference.

If you’re trying to follow it without having read the book, it may not make a lick of sense – and even if you have, Kaufman goes in directions that Reid never did. But as funhouse meditation on who we are and how others figure into our identities, it trots out many of Kaufman’s old obsessions in a way that feels fresh and weird.

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

All Is Forgiven is engrossing, yet it is only after it is over and there is time to think about it that the film starts to really seem dazzling, as an unfolding portrait of loss that leaves us with many questions.

There are moments of real beauty in the film, which is an unassuming and contemplative excursion into how we love, and why. But like the fireworks that greet Asako and Baku’s first kiss, its pop is a modest one.

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

The result is the best kind of fine art: heartbreaking, sophisticated and deeply cinematic all at once.

What’s perhaps most miraculous about this tight and taut film is Domont’s unforgiving economy.

Hardy might be past needing a star-making performance, but this is the kind of work that raises him to highest echelon of actors working in film today. He and Knight remind us that artists can astonish with the simplest of methods.

It’s particularly resonant, packed with emotion and insight that will move the director’s admirers (who should consider watching it alongside their own children) and probably garner her some new ones.

The Lost City of Z feels like a clear artistic advance for Gray, who proves himself here as one of our finest and most distinctive living filmmakers.

Blue is the Warmest Color is subtitled “Adele: Chapters 1 and 2,” and by our last glimpse of this ordinary, extraordinary young woman walking down a street, we can’t help but long to know what she’s going to let herself in for next.

In other hands, this film could go kitsch, could all be a big joke, but Fargeat directs Lutz like no other Rambo-style action hero before her.

Clarke and his collaborators have achieved a historical record in and of itself, documenting not just this compelling bond and friendship but also a crucial period in the Black freedom struggle that should serve as a valuable resource for years to come.

Whether it's the closest you'll get to the beach this year, or you have to tear yourself away from the dunes to enjoy it, it's an essential part of any movie-lover's summer.

What makes Neighbors exceptional, rather than merely great, is its successful attempt to reinvent the studio comedy.

What makes The Two Popes so delightful, other than the very funny script, is watching two seasoned actors play off each other for two hours. Both Hopkins and Pryce illustrate what the craft of acting is really about.

Shults ... wrote, directed and co-edited Waves with urgency and a pulsating life force. His camera expresses the internal worlds of its subjects with such intimacy you almost forget it’s even there — until you are hit with yet another glorious, breathtaking shot.

Kriegman and Steinberg’s incredible access allows you to ride the whole roller coaster.

Walker-Silverman exhibits the sensibilities of a master storyteller, capable of making his splendid writing seem effortless in its construction and then molding it into warm magic via the cast’s remarkable talent. He’s an absolute revelation among emerging voices.

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.

The chemistry between Bale and Damon is what makes the movie move the way it does, along with the script. Bale alone in the race car figuring out how to win and survive is where the film really sings.

Marx Can Wait is a crucial and profound addition to the filmography of one of the greatest living filmmakers, and it ends with a loving reconciliation with the past that is so moving and so convincing because it is so hard-won; this is a movie that has a rare kind of final cathartic authority.

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.

Spiritual and earthy, forged in curiosity yet fortified with empathy, The Rider is why we go to the cinema, and it affirms Chloe Zhao as one of the most gifted new movie artists of our time.

Il Buco is riveting and bewitching, a wholly immersive film, led soulfully by Frammartino’s confidence in saying less.

Ozon manages to instill a measured touch into every argument, outburst, and testimony, matching the naturalistic cinematography (by Manuel Dacosse, “Let the Corpses Tan”) and bestowing on us the most important and assured movie on this treacherous topic made this decade.

Midnight Family is both a compassionate portrait of a working-class family and a frightening ride through a broken healthcare system that risks the lives of both patients and providers like the Ochoa family.

Kim’s Video is so delightful because Redmon and Sabin have taken a subject that might have led to wistful dead ends and follow it through to such an extent that they wound up with a gold mine of material and a documentary that plays like a bold narrative feature.

Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood is big, brash, ridiculous, too long, and in the end, invigorating.

A Hidden Life is certainly the director’s best movie since his 2011 Palme d’Or winner “The Tree of Life” — it’s his most monumental film since then, and perhaps his most sentimental film ever. And it is also slow and meditative, requiring viewers to sink into and surrender to that particular Malick style that some find maddening.

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

This is as essential a historical document as you could ever hope to find. It should be considered required viewing for every American who has the slightest interest in our nation’s history, politics, or culture. And, come to think of it, also for those who don’t.

That a director can summon such emotional maturity paired with grand narrative originality in her first outing, particularly working from a deeply personal standpoint, astounds. Wells, a forward-thinking artist, invites into a vortex of feelings and sensations that fully exploits the language of cinema for its gorgeously humanistic pursuit.

Past Lives is an exquisitely wistful drama that speaks with an honesty so affectingly crisp it will turn your conceptions of love, identity and fate on their head.

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.

It’s a magnificently unflinching film from a master director in the making, whose thunderous strength will surely make waves in Bustamante’s Central American homeland and abroad.

Abbott (“A Most Violent Year,” HBO’s “Girls”) is a revelation, creating a multidimensional character whose battling, sometimes uncontrollable emotions are clear in his warm and expressive eyes.

In a lot of ways, All Of Us Strangers is a poignant, deeply melancholic exercise on the attempt to bridge the past with the present, a cosmic inquiry into resolving all that was unsaid through second chances that never were.

Throughout the film’s warranted nearly-three-hour runtime, Iñárritu writes the cinematic verses of an oneiric love poem to an ever-incongruous homeland while simultaneously investigating his own perceived hubris, insecurities and fractured identity.

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

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.

For its combination of ambition and audacity, this is a glorious piece of cinematic insanity.

It’s that devotion to truth that makes Son of Saul such a difficult watch — and also one of year’s most important masterpieces.

Mucho Mucho Amor is a tribute as inspired and jubilant as its majestic subject, a true original, who “used to be a star and now is a constellation.”

In animation, Simó finds the ideal canvas, one that allows him to recount the most gruesome instances of strenuous filmmaking in more palatable form while also ingeniously enlivening the surreal sequences with glorious hand-drawn work.

Tower is art, first and foremost, a piece about adrenaline, bravery, grief and memory that stands as one of the year’s crowning achievements in emotional, illuminative storytelling.

It does what so little of the dialogue has managed to do: implore audiences to embrace black female survivors and to understand the cultural and painful dilemmas they continue to endure along their avid fight to heal the wounds of the entire black race. Though it’s at times a gutting watch, it’s ultimately about hope and sisterhood.

Aïnouz’s Invisible Life reflects the kind of love story we rarely see on-screen, and it’s a gem worth discovering for yourself.

First love is as much about hesitancy as it is about exuberance – maybe even more so – and Ivory and Guadagnino perfectly capture that sweet turmoil, aided by a gifted ensemble. This isn’t just an instant LGBT classic; this is one of the great movie love stories, for audiences of all stripes.

A gorgeous meditation on girlhood

Minari beams with subtle wonder.

In an era in which sentimentality is a seasoning that filmmakers either shun entirely or employ with too heavy a hand, Gerwig crafts a work about love and family and devotion and empathy that is moving without being manipulative. This is a Little Women for the ages.

Amazing Grace is a movie worth seeing and re-seeing and re-seeing again, a testament to the Queen of Soul at the height of her powers, live, in full color, in rich sound, resplendent.

Talk of accepting truths and moving on will knot your stomach; inevitably, you’ll reflect on your own station in life and weigh whether or not you feel like Ryota, who tells his son, “I’m not who I want to be yet.” And isn’t such evocation the point of all art? With this measure in mind, Kore-eda has created a masterpiece.

Selma is one of the best American films of the year — and indeed perhaps the best — precisely because it does not simply show what Dr. King did for America in his day; it also wonders explicitly what we have left undone for America in ours.

A film whose quietly flooring opening frames of a vast landscape becoming home to a compassionate story of a Hungarian-Canadian family navigating an uncertain world together already signal it as a major work, writer/director Sophy Romvari’s intimate and incisive Blue Heron only grows even greater from there.

As he has throughout his career, from “Slacker” and “Dazed and Confused” to the lovely “Bernie” to the “Before” trilogy, Linklater proves himself as a filmmaker unconcerned with flash and dazzle but thoroughly compassionate and empathetic to a wide range of characters.

The film rides upon the shoulders of first-timers Haim (Anderson has directed several of her band’s videos) and Hoffman (son of frequent Anderson collaborator, the late Philip Seymour Hoffman), and they’re both thoroughly engaging.

An aesthetically imaginative and affectingly breathtaking fairytale for our modern world, Belle envelops you first with its clever mechanics and youthful preoccupations. But as the reflective subtext comes to light, it extends an invitation to reconnect with others offline and to beware the comfort of these surrogate identities.

After the youthful splendor of last year’s The Souvenir Part II, Hogg returns with a magnificent achievement of a more inconspicuous kind: a striking phantasm of affection, regrets, and remembered accounts that might be factually inaccurate but emotionally unfeigned.

One of the year’s most thought-provoking and spellbinding releases, Our Time is calibrated for patience and observation with ideas as concrete as such an ambiguous storyteller like Reygadas can offer.

Detroit has a vital sense of authenticity, rooted as it is in history, conveyed via Bigelow’s meticulously crafted cinema vérité style that, essentially, thrusts the viewer into the tense events. She is an expert at managing suspense and deftly blending sensitivity with a journalistic sense of details.

I cried, dear reader. I cried so much. Not just because the story and characters were wonderful, but out of the joy of discovery.

The film is utterly singular to American design—as is the policing system in question—and a masterclass in effective documentary work that exists solely to deliver an impalpable truth.

Moratto’s concise firecracker of a movie is straightforward in its soul-crushing blows and an essential piece of social-realist cinema for our times.

By showing the tangled relationship between a mother and her dysphoric child, L’Immensità writes a love letter to the lonely.

Grandma is both smart and sweet, mature and bawdy, knowing its characters’ flaws yet open to the possibilities of people acting upon their best instincts. It is without a doubt one of the year’s best films.

End of the Century is a sublimely haunting experience that will make you sigh in recognition of the what-ifs in your own life.

For all of the film’s ideological richness, what Neptune Frost discusses is far from impenetrably abstract. The directors not only hack cinema, a medium historically dominated by white storytellers, to make a statement, but they also reposition its lens to center a fresh crop of artistic voices in a mesmerizing battle cry of a film set to the inextinguishable beat of the drums.

Nolan has crafted a film that’s sensational in every sense of the word; it aims for both the heart and the head, to be sure, but arrives there via the central nervous system.

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.

With Marriage Story, Baumbach cements his reputation as one of this generation’s leading humanist filmmakers.

It is an uncommon thrill to watch a charming film that comes by its charms organically. Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris knows that fluff is much more satisfying when it has depth, so you can truly sink into it and feel the overwhelming comfort.

This was, undeniably, a risky proposition; no one wants to airbrush history. But by thoughtfully employing cutting-edge technology, Jackson has instead created an essential portal connecting audiences of the present to his subjects in the past.

Writer-director Tobias Lindholm knows how to keep a human perspective in his storytelling, no matter how outsized the drama or the dilemmas facing his characters.

Jones and Murray (who previously teamed on Coppola’s “A Very Murray Christmas” special) achieve the kind of effortless rapport that spawns “I want them to go solve mysteries” memes, and the key ingredient of that chemistry is that Jones never allows Murray to steal the show.

If good intentions or even pragmatism aren’t enough to make the wealthy and powerful think about income inequality, New Order suggests, there’s always fear.

La Chimera is a pictorial delight to luxuriate in, as it is a philosophical wonder on the unknowability of time. The earth belongs to the past and the future, this miracle of a film quietly suggests. We just live in it.

The craft is meticulous and the level of detail elaborate, but the story itself is simple as can be.

Fire of Love is a wholly satisfying, overwhelming documentary, as disarming as it is explosive.

With extraordinary performances, Hamnet not only tackles grief but also explores single parenting, the lustful love that turns sour due to absence, and what it takes to revive love in its original form.

López Estrada and company not only subvert lazy assumptions about their misunderstood metropolis and who lives and thrives there, but they also entirely shift the focus to the unheard and unseen for a wonderful reinvention. You’ll never see L.A. the same again and that’s for the better.

A film like Rebel Ridge reminds us that you can lose yourself in exciting, engaging, stimulating entertainment while still keeping your brain completely on.

Both haunting and sweeping, Carol represents another masterwork from one of this generation’s great filmmakers.

It’s an exciting ride, but with a wallop of genuine feeling underneath that makes it one of this year’s best films.

The Ground Beneath My Feet is essential viewing for our anxiety-ridden times.

Ultraman: Rising is a contender for best animated movie of the year, one of the best superhero movies in years, and one of the all-time greatest American adaptations of a Japanese franchise.

The cultural subtleties Wang inserts purposefully elevate The Farewell to have not only emotional impact but also revelatory social significance.

It’s a consistently powerful ensemble, with Wright reminding us yet again that she has that indefinable something that makes a character actress a movie star.

A wonderfully humane, funny, and moving chapter in Varda’s documentary phase.

It’s the story of the conflict between Robbins and Mostel that unveils another layer of how the odds were truly stacked against the show.

The approximately 270-minute running time becomes a hushed demand for the viewer to sit with historical cruelty and listen as its victims teach to the future, its effect a cumulative cry of warning for today.

It’s a humanist film; it’s about people, and it’s got a pulse. It presents characters as idiosyncratic, domineering, but mostly fearful — timid creatures ambling through life in the hopes of finding refuge.