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.