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.

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.

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.