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.

Bong delivers a stunning return to form with this newest venture, which takes bold leaps between tenors and tone, but holds together beautifully thanks to the director’s unparalleled visual/spatial sophistication, and his unsparing social indictment.

Alfonso Cuarón has created a heartfelt masterpiece of mood and nostalgia, one that reminds us that his gifts as a storyteller and an interpreter of the human experience are not dictated by scale of production.

You can come for the music and stay for the politics, or vice versa; either way, it’s a vibrant document of an inspiring event that never loses sight of what that event meant for a community, a city and a culture.

A movie that, if never exactly a cathartic experience, carries you along in its clenched grip with an undeniable power. It’s sad and funny and real.

McQueen and co-writer Courttia Newland, working with a talented cast and crew, bring us in so close that we can smell the smoke and the sweat, and swoon over the sensuality of slow dancing.

It’s possible, maybe even likely, that Paul Thomas Anderson has stuffed so much into one movie that a lot of people will find something to take away from it. All I see is the lack of focus.

Visually ravishing ... [A] piercingly intelligent treatise on art, agency and queer love in the 18th century.

In the end, The Whole Bloody Affair doesn’t do enough (or perhaps does far too much) to justify its existence to the everyday cinephile. However, Tarantino superfans will undoubtedly lap the film up like cream and, in the end, a director got the opportunity to finally share his true vision with the rest of the world. That’s a net win here.

No movie is going to fix the world, but films like I Am Not Your Negro demand accountability from its audience, both on a personal level and as a community of human beings.

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.

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

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.

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.

Most essential to telling this story are Rampling and Courtenay, both of whom convey pages and pages of backstory and emotion with the most fleeting of glances.

This is a movie that’s rife with characters, with incidents, with ideas, with history, and as such, it will benefit from multiple viewings. But even after the first watch, The Irishman hits hard, and it’s a reminder that nearly 30 years after “GoodFellas,” Martin Scorsese still has fascinating mob tales to tell, and fascinating ways to tell them.

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.

A stronger structure underpinning these emotions run amok would have benefitted the film, but then what would feelings be without a little messiness? For many viewers, giving their own Joy and Sadness a workout will be enough to make Inside Out a valuable experience.

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

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.

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 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.

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

The musical is as malleable and eclectic a genre as any other, and Chazelle reminds us how effectively it can be applied to intimate moments as well as huge ones.

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.

Gerwig has an eye for every step of this character’s journey, and in so doing, sets out on her own path toward what promises to be an exciting directorial career.

Like all of Byrne’s work, it is sly performance art masquerading as rock ‘n’ roll, or maybe it’s sly rock ‘n’ roll masquerading as performance art; definitions are elusive but the impact is both cerebral and visceral, just the way Byrne likes it.

Not only does Shoplifters skillfully entwine several disparate threads he’s explored over his prolific career, it does so with the understated confidence and patient elegance of an artist who has fully matured.

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.

Toni Erdmann is a thoroughly confident and impeccably executed comedy of oddball family functionality.

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

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.

Well, it sounds a bit obvious to praise another Cate Blanchett performance – when is she not on fire? – but in this case circumstances force our hand. More otherworldly than Galadriel, more regal than Elisabeth, and more devilishly unrepressed than Carol Aird, Tár might just be the actor’s signature role.

If Panahi makes us understand Jafar, he also recognizes the rippling effect of his choices. Such is the dense and intricate layering of this deceptively simple film, which has a no-budget aesthetic and a novelistic sprawl.

Spotlight is that rare journalistic procedural that deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as “All the President’s Men,” and while the movie never glamorizes or makes saints of its hard-working newsgatherers, it does stand as a reminder of the power and importance of a free press, particularly in ferreting out local corruption and malfeasance.

It is cinema that, if you let it, can check our heartbeats, frustrate our minds and connect with our very souls.

Few films have been more unsparingly intimate.

The bottom line is that this is probably the most satisfying of the three versions, a visceral but surreal journey into madness that feels monumentally alive.

It’s Prince, though, who lifts the movie into another realm. It’s no exaggeration to say that hers is one of the most noteworthy child performances in recent — or, for that matter, distant — memory. She is so charismatic, and so unfailingly natural, that every one of her scenes feels organic.

Formally, Tsai’s approach is as spare as possible while still maintaining a loose sense of narrative.

Hittman wades into one of the more charged subjects of our time — abortion access — with the kind of sensitivity, focus and detail that will ensure its place as a dramatic standard for how to put a human face on a controversial topic.

Neither provocation nor counter-point, The Zone of Interest is instead a furtherance, a new take on an ungraspable madness we must never let ourselves forget.

This is history from the inside, told by people who don’t always look like they’ve gotten past it, and it’s what makes “Let it Fall” so memorable.

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

The Look of Silence feels more like an extended DVD extra to his genre-defying previous film than a stand-alone documentary.

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.

Its messiness is part of its charm and part of the point; a film that took itself more seriously than this one wouldn’t let a climactic gun battle turn into an almost cartoonish grand guignol splatter-fest.

You get the sense that Hamaguchi is playing with the idea of prologues, of elements that sit just beyond a narrative arc that shades everything that follows. It’s a wonderful impulse that works beautifully in the film — perhaps a little too beautifully, however, because the prologue outshines everything that comes next.

The bracing thing about It Was Just an Accident is that it has married Panahi’s wit and humanism with real anger; if many of his previous films lulled you into realizing his points about oppression and injustice, this one is downright confrontational.

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.

In her narrative debut, Diop has found a way to mix her hard-hitting documentary style with fiction to raise a mirror to society. This new arena, with its wider reach, makes Diop an exciting filmmaker to watch.

A meditation that measures social failings in the toll they take on individuals, Time builds to scenes that are almost shocking in their intimacy. It stays away from polemic but hits all the harder for its restraint.

Through bursts of comedy, poignancy, conflict, song, dance, and theatrical whimsy, what emerges is akin to a homespun symphony of soulfulness.

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

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.

If this is indeed his final film — this time for real — what a way for Miyazaki to launch into retirement, with a swan song so personal, artful and ultimately timeless.

There’s nothing else out there like Patrick Wang’s two-part, four-hour labor of love, A Bread Factory, and that’s wholly a good thing.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed remains, at heart, a simple and intimate profile of a woman who sees art and activism as one and the same.

Panahi and cinematographer Amin Jafari take familiar tropes of contemporary Iranian cinema and rework them with refreshing twists.

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.

A thoroughly fun and provocative time at the movies.

Watching these three fiercely intelligent women, played by a trio of powerhouse actresses, is endlessly fascinating, as the goalposts constantly shift and their true selves become more apparent.

Taken as a whole, The Brutalist both mourns and celebrates American ambition –the ambitions of an immigrant class trying for a new life with no guarantee of success, and the ambitions of a filmmaker filling a canvas with a lifetime of obsessions.

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.

This is a film of unfolding delights, providing a terrific canvas for the actors.

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.

Challenging the foundation of a “law and order” culture is not easy, but hopefully The Alabama Solution shows that mass incarceration is not the way to build a strong nation, and that the real fight is between the haves and the have-nots, those in power against the powerless.

Reichardt and her outstanding team ensure that we are fully invested in her striving heroes, and equally anxious for their promising young country, as well.

Where Fury Road stands apart from so much of today’s action cinema is that the human element remains front and center.

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.

Greene’s film explores not just the ability of art to repair emotional and sometimes physical injuries but also the resiliency of the human spirit and the solidarity of a group of individuals collaborating to provide comfort for themselves and each other through shared, unimaginable pain.

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.

An elegantly stitched romance of vector-crossing emotional neediness, it’s set in an evocative ecosphere of haute couture fashion. But by the time it reaches its appetizingly perverse end, the film primarily reaffirms Anderson’s own skill at hand-crafting exquisitely conflicting interior and external worlds.

This second part is lighter, more playful, growing in confidence along with its protagonist, in a terrific performance from Byrne. But it’s also full of gentle, cherished acts of memory . . . that build up powerful reminders of the past.

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.

What you will piece together during the first viewing—including marvelous grace notes such as Oppenheimer’s taste for syrup-dipped cocktail glasses—will be enough to keep you glued to the action.

If it doesn’t feel as fresh and bracing as “Ida” did, that film may have been the perfect combination of form and content. Cold War, which is Pawlikowski’s first entry in Cannes main competition, is in some ways more familiar, but the spin he puts on it is distinctly and beautifully his own creation.

It’s a film that almost entirely takes place in a handful of locations, but it feels vast in scope as the first-time filmmaker taps into deep existential questions about how you carry on after experiencing cruelty that nobody seems to care about.

A small, cyclical film about the value of a small, cyclical life, Jim Jarmusch‘s Paterson is a perfect version of itself. His ode to small pleasures and the simple life comes in the form of a simple film that is a small pleasure.

Though it deals with complicated emotions surrounding acceptance and individuality, Holmer’s movie, which she wrote with Saela Davis and Lisa Kjerulff, is a model of control, not unlike its strong, watchful central character.

Whiplash redefines the teacher movie (to say nothing of the young-musician movie) with a brutal energy and no easy resolutions. It's a challenging tune that will nonetheless get stuck in your head.

If, for whatever reason, 63 UP were the last, it would be a perfectly satisfying summing-up of what’s proven to be the surest motive for any of its participants to keep filling us in on their personal lives, issues of class and destiny be damned — they did it because time, love, and just enough fortune allowed it.

Minding the Gap, which is brilliantly edited by Liu and Joshua Altman, has a floating, grab-bag style that collapses the time frame into a kind of momentum-driven arc, but while the pieces are often bite-sized, and not always delineated by a year or person’s age, the collage has a distinctive chronological feel.

The chasm of the wealth gap and the slow destruction of the middle class should matter to us all, and films like Two Days, One Night remind us of the human faces affected by corporate greed.

Killers of the Flower Moon is vast and vital in its scale, purpose and emotional scope, a Western-thriller and ensemble piece that is every bit a Scorsese crime picture as one can dare to imagine.

The footage, as personal as it is horrific, is often hard to watch.

The film is riotously funny, and Isabelle Huppert has never been better.

Aftermath is the work of a stronger and more assured director. It drops mind-boggling revelations about the extent of Russian doping and the lengths to which Vladimir Putin’s administration will go to silence dissidents and whistleblowers, but it’s also a deeply touching portrait of a man whose life was shattered because he got tired of being part of a system that ran on lies.

Minari beams with subtle wonder.

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

Shallow self-congratulation for American moxie at the expense of everyone and everything around us.

An exquisite, hand-drawn marvel and an alternatingly jubilant and heartrending epic pastoral.

The conclusion of Great Freedom manages to finesse the flaws of the movie, and it winds up feeling genuinely tragic.

For a movie that appears to stop and start as it shifts its focus a few times too many, denying us longer introspection into its most magnetic man-to-man rapport, The Power of the Dog thrives on having actors so submerged in the fiction that they are creating a reality. Their subcutaneous labor translates what’s unsaid into fleeting but telling gestures.

A minimalist film like Columbus depends almost entirely on the shading of the characters and the depths of the performances. By that metric, it’s a too-delicate creature, tickling and piquing instead of fully thrusting us into the realm of feelings.

For all its clear-eyed representation of the fears and horrors of aging, Dick Johnson Is Dead is nonetheless an ultimately joyous experience.

The ending of The Quiet Girl is modestly dramatic compared to what has preceded it, but the emotional charge we are presumably supposed to feel has been cut off by all the contemplative long shots that have kept us for so long at arm’s length.

Long Day’s Journey Into Night is a mesmerizing hallucination of a film, a journey through one man’s memories for a truth that may not exist.