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.