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.

A major work played in a minor key, cinematographer-turned-director Marine Atlan’s magnificent, melancholic and moving feature directorial debut La Gradiva is one of those true discoveries that you only get a few times in life.

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.

Both everything and nothing happens in Filipiñana, the cutting, confident, and ultimately formally captivating feature debut from writer-director Rafael Manuel.

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.

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.

I’ve been to whole film festivals with less cinema than Steve McQueen packs into just two hours.

Del Toro’s Frankenstein is a remarkable achievement that in a way hijacks the flagship story of the horror genre and turns it into a tale of forgiveness.

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.

Zola feels utterly contemporary but will no doubt be examined for decades to come, as a marker of both this particularly crazy time in history and of the moment that social media became self-aware. Whip-smart, funny, complicated, and just plain wild, Zola is 90 minutes of brilliance.

Birds of Passage weaves a tale that is both familiar yet unique, yet it is so culturally tied to the Wayúu, it would be impossible to move it outside the Guajira. The film fits very comfortably in the genres of a gangster movie and an epic, with supernatural forces forewarning what’s to happen in the earthly realm.

It handles real-life issues from a place of real compassion and understanding without reducing its characters to mere metaphor.

This fourth entry after a nine-year break for Damon and Greengrass should represent, for those ready and able to separate popcorn mayhem from the grim realities of world headlines, a bruising and exhilarating ride.

Their Finest delivers in a way that would please the Ministry of Information: it’s rousing and emotional, there are laughs and tears, and it portrays people trying and, mostly, succeeding at being their best selves in the service of their country.

Once the spell of Tigers Are Not Afraid ends and the credits roll, its story lingers in the air. It’s a story of sadness, loss and survival, a fairy tale tailor-made for our anxious times.

It’s the faces that stand out in Retrograde, a stylistic and thematic motif that offers an empathetic power to the film as well as an aching poignancy.

The character complexities grow out of Mills’ divinely extraordinary writing.

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.