Funny and wistful, this celebration of Swedish auteur Roy Andersson is a treat for movie lovers.

A cradle-to-grave portrait of Ann Lee, the founder of the Christian sect known as the Shakers, the film is, at turns, completely stunning and utterly baffling. At its most successful, though, it doesn’t just depict ecclesiastical fervor – it sweeps you up in it.

It isn't the first time death has figured in an Allen movie, but the way he grapples with it here (leaving each character at a moment of irresolution comparable to staring down the man with the scythe) is much more potent and direct.

A time capsule, yes, and a hallowed memory, perhaps. But gimme shelter.

The movie's real asset is Reynolds himself, utilizing his comedy chops for unexpected levity.

Seymour unfolds like a Jewish Jiro Dreams of Sushi—Bernstein may look like your average NYC grandpa, but he lives like a monk and talks like a guru.

It's a sickening but stunning portrait of combat that looks past notions of bravery or brutality, guilt or innocence, to bear witness to a thoroughly besieged humanity.

Along the way, director Chris Eska provides ample space for his principals to breathe, wisely homing in on the uneasy gaze of the guidance-starved Will, whose struggle will resonate with anyone charged with an unenviable task.

It’s smaller in scale than his last two, 2014’s A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence and 2007’s You, the Living. It also has a more maudlin air to it overall than those others – which, if you’ve experienced their bleak absurdity, you’ll know is saying something.

A strong contender for both the artiest drug movie and the druggiest art movie ever made, Gaspar Noé's tour de force of forced perspectives and free-form grief is, in every sense of the word, a trip.

Any film that can combine questions of mortality with funny, fully alive scenes of sex, social awkwardness, professional screw-ups and throwaway fun is a rich one. Its brilliant, full-on performance from Reinsve deserves to be celebrated far and wide.

When you have an actor as suggestive as Kazan, swallowing up the lens with allure and complexity, your writer-director becomes superfluous.

The running time may make you blanch, but Connie Field’s seven-part documentary about the history and eventual dissolution of South African apartheid is well worth the commitment.

Ultimately, Blue Jean is a non-judgmental tale of self-acceptance, intergenerational solidarity and sapphic power.

Hawn, atypically cast and supported by all-round excellent performances, proves that she can act. But still this bitter-sweet concoction is very much Demme's: not only in the warming celebration of friendship and community values (the unsentimental generosity extended towards the characters positively glows), but also in the assured handling of period, place, music and mood.

The film’s release after weeks of Black Lives Matter protests may be coincidental, but Miss Juneteenth rises to the moment.

This unflinching parable brings the hammer down on its cinematic brethren's fetishization of cell-block Rockefellers. R's final shot says it all: The house wins. The house always wins.

What unites the interlocking stories are their flashes of love and longing – often painfully, tragically unreturned. The film’s emotional side is well-handled, helped by strong performances across the board. But it’s the storytelling puzzle – the pile-up of different perspectives and gradual reveal of the facts – that makes it most worthwhile.

The lengthy final two shots (each running more than ten minutes) rank among the best work this inimitable artist has ever done.

If Frozen was about coming to terms with who you are, Frozen II is about transformation. Does it offer further evidence for those who saw "Let It Go" as Elsa’s covert coming-out anthem? Sadly not, though she remains an intriguingly elliptical canvas on which to project genuinely groundbreaking ideas about empowerment and identity.

Like the musical style it’s named after, it plays slowly. But hang in there and you’ll find an enthralling requiem mass to a dying breed of hardscrabble gangsters and dirty cops that boasts a clutch of juicy performances.

Playwright-turned-fillmaker Florian Zeller continues his one-man war on the world’s tear ducts with another hard-hitting portrait of domestic life in extremis.

Buzzard is both deeply unfun and something you can’t take your eyes off. It gets our edge of recommendation because there’s real focus to it: Marty’s ambitions are so low (his life seems to climax while wolfing down a $20 plate of spaghetti in a hotel room) that you truly fear for the future. Meet the new slacker.

A landmark American documentary, Salesman captures in vivid detail the bygone era of the door-to-door salesman.

Look into Ivor Novello’s haunted, kohl-rimmed eyes in Hitch’s most overtly Hitchcockian silent film – his first of many ‘wrong man’ mysteries – and you can see generations of matinee idols coming full circle.

From sombre Islamic prayers to café-touba-fuelled socialising, Banel & Adama is stitched beautifully together from the fabric of rural Senegalese traditions.

Powered by a driving rock score, this is by turns sleek, reckless, and smoothly effective, like a Ferrari with a psycho killer at the wheel.

The director is a huge fan of This is Spinal Tap and although Flux Gourmet isn’t up to the formidable standards of that masterpiece, it boasts one or two Stonehenge moments of its own.

Meirelles injects enough visual snap to remind you that he once made City of God. If the second half gets a little sidetracked by flashbacks, another meaty Vatican scene is never too far away. Watching these two actors chewing over big issues—God, aging, loneliness, celibacy, abuse in the priesthood—under the vast ceilings of this gilded palace is a joy.

As usual, everything is slightly glossy, soppy and hearty, yet not a string is left untwanged.

Of Stallone’s surprisingly tender performance — a definitive late-career triumph — enough can’t be said

It's a credit to both the actors and Franco-Algerian filmmaker Rachid Bouchareb (Days of Glory) that the film never dives headfirst into mawkishness.

It all loses a bit of its circadian rhythm with a tacked-on sci-fi storyline involving social media ‘dreamfluencers’. But as a giddy showcase for a bang-on-form Cage, with some needle-sharp observations about fame in the 21st century, this Ari Aster-produced dark comedy is the best kind of cheese dream.

Stearns saddles himself with a touch more plot than he needs, and some of the film’s late-game twists are more satisfying than others, but Faults never loses sight of the one thing Ansel can’t see: Free will may come cheap, but most people still can’t afford it.

The film’s languorous, tangential flow isn’t for everyone, but you’ll be surprised by how easily you can roll with it, especially if you tune into Zama’s cringe-funny frequency.

Ahmed is at his best in Zed’s darkest hour, as he struggles to hold it together in a hospital cubicle. It’s blistering stuff.

Winocour does brilliant work at enlarging the minute details that define the way the wind is blowing in this relationship.

Finally, someone has returned to The Damned United’s cunning formula for a good football movie: don’t show any football.

Ballour’s presence makes Fayyad’s film inspiring, even as we cringe for her safety with every overhead explosion.

Cuarón, a magician who brought personality to the Harry Potter series, is after pure, near-experimental spectacle.

Amy Berg’s deeply sympathetic documentary on Janis Joplin — a singer whose shredded wail tapped reservoirs of pain — gets so much right, it feels like a major act of cultural excavation.

None of this is pushed into comic relief—the filmmaker lets his drama play out with gentleness — and you smile at the many evolutions.

Full of stunning visuals, the ideas in the film more than compensate for the awkward scene-setting of the beginning.

Monsters University aces a two-part test—first, appealing to kids with gorgeous, hyperrealistic animation that teases out every pink hair on a beastly art student; then luring in parents with several knowing jokes about strumming your guitar on the quad or playing beer pong.

The film reeks of the authentic stuff of jazz, smoky with atmosphere and all as blue as a Gauloise packet.

The flood images are stark, conveying all the terror and pity that modern disaster footage imparts. But Morrison and Frisell infuse the film with warmth and, where appropriate, a touch of wit, causing its subject to breathe anew.

The Beguiled has its jolts and its laughs, but mostly this glides along like a mildly saucy yet poetically made parable, well-dressed, well-designed and well-performed.

Positively glowing, it just might be one of the sweetest gay films to come out of England since Beautiful Thing.

Shot entirely on location with its child actors recruited from the streets, Salaam Bombay! enters into its subjects' lives with rare authority and absolute compassion, the material generated largely from workshops that Nair and her team ran for a period of months prior to filming. A revelation for audiences of any background.

This may not quite be the biopic of two women whose achievements decidedly merit one, but it’s an extraordinary story about a man who endured danger, ridicule and desperation to create the circumstances for them to thrive.

Rumours is a strange brew, but there’s a lot of fun to be had if you like its flavour.

The movie works beautifully by bringing forward the delicate subject of guilt via passivity.

It's far from a definitive statement-why does ACT UP, a seminal presence in SF, get such short shrift? - but this oral history provides a righteous cri de coeur for those who perished in the precocktail era.

At times, you'll find yourself wanting more of the perspective of the Cheyenne, but Cooper still does right by his story of historical reconciliation, charting Blocker’s moral transformation plausibly. Hostiles‘ disarming finale packs an earned, radiantly optimistic punch.

The stars here are not the moms, but the kids-and they are truly amazing.

Witty, warm, but never sentimental, it also benefits from being set in the fading glories of the resort town of the title: grand seaside facades behind which lie more mundane realities, surrounded by decay and demolition.

With tinkling thriller music and dramatic voiceover narration, this modest but engrossing first-person documentary comes on like a true crime caper.

For the most part this is a pleasing, polished affair, honest enough to steer a compassionate middle course without succumbing to caricature or conservative sentimentality.

Osika is perfect as Rita, half-child, half-woman, but then Hausner's cool, compassionate, naturalistic script, reminiscent of early Fassbinder, gives her plenty to play with.

It’s weird, in the year 2025, that it seems timely to point out that the Nazis were bad. But Nuremberg, an old-fashioned and satisfyingly complex morality tale in the guise of a courtroom drama and spy thriller, does that job in impressive style.

James Franco makes a brief, charged-up appearance as Mitch, an alum of the fraternity, who laments that his wife and baby keep him away from booze. Schnetzer delivers a quietly devastating performance in the lead role.

A sharply judged edit stitches together three separate timelines, shaping Molly as a complex and razor-sharp character in a world dominated by entitled mansplainers. Forget Rounders—here’s a poker movie to go all-in on.

Nevins's portrait of how a nihilistic movement fostered such nurturing family men resonates beyond its rebels-with-a-cause novelty.

White Heat = Scarface + Psycho.

The filmmaker’s irreverent directness with his subjects makes for a savagely funny and bluntly insightful portrait of those who live with disfigurement.

Coleman's life and work are treated as a continuum, which Clarke pulls from at will.

he wild-eyed Celedón and stealthily empathetic Saavedra introduce a farcical element to this otherwise mournful milieu, but the tonal clashes yield something genuinely cathartic, if also ultimately irresolvable.

It’s no heroic tale; ‘The Mercy’ is thoughtful, uncomfortable viewing.

Marvellous amalgam of sadistic thriller and fairytale romance, drawing on a wild diversity of genres from film noir to Feuillade serial.

Are its cultish mysteries for everyone? Undoubtedly not. But if there’s a place in your heart for dark, folky mind-benders that plug into the cosmic energy of remote, oceanic terrain (ie your favourite film would be a cross between The Wicker Man and The Lighthouse), you should take a trip across Jenkin’s freaky landscape asap.

Nature smiles upon Alamar, just as it did on the simple, unfussy charms of "The Black Stallion" some 30 years ago.

Alice Rohrwacher's debut fictional feature is an uncommonly insightful portrait of nascent womanhood, assisted in no small measure by Vianello's disarmingly naturalistic performance.

In his debut big-screen performance, the warm-hearted and witty Patel – like Aysha – steals the show.

Sister is the one you remember; like the film, she's mesmerizing because of her flaws as well as her charms.

Midnight Special is a movie worth believing in. It's an alternative to the assembly line that turns hot young directors into purveyors of the latest shade of superhero spandex. Little here feels like science or fiction but sci-fi is exactly what this is, from the heart and out of this world.

It’s beautifully observed stuff – its fractured but tender family dynamics and depiction of parental pain reminded me a little of Ang Lee’s "The Ice Storm" – as it gradually lets you into a world of well-heeled suburbia that’s carefully shorn of all the usual Sydney landmarks.

Sheridan can’t quite shake a hint of Silence of the Lambs–esque familiarity, but that’s a wonderful standard to be reaching for. More to his credit, he fills his thriller with sharp observations among his Native American characters (not merely paid lip service), as well as the sudden crack of gunfire. You learn to look for tracks and clues; it’s a film that makes you a better viewer.

It still works its way under your skin and, by the time the highly disturbed Frank’s casualties come back to haunt him en masse, cuts sanguinely to the heart.

It’s a story of dehumanisation, children in cages, and the blurting, vote-craving policy-making of government by id – and it’s shattering to experience.

One of the most absurdly earnest exercises in paranoia you'll ever have the good fortune to see.

Every scene is shot in Pine Ridge, and the cast is entirely comprised of first-time actors from that community – and it’s these factors that really give the film a raw authenticity rarely found in film depictions of reservation life.

Whether it’s the filmmaking pair’s insider/outsider dynamic working to keep the story accessible to non-Aussies or just the depressing universality of Goodes’s experiences, The Australian Dream echoes far beyond national boundaries. So, in a much more positive way, does the man himself.

Blessed with an improbable-but-true story that functions on many ironic levels, this clever documentary ultimately conveys more about the complex American character - shifting between intimacy and criminality - than a whole shelf of fiction films.

Happy End is more meandering and less contained, though, and it doesn’t have a central, gripping mystery like The White Ribbon to make you lean in more than you recoil. Rather, it’s a more diffuse film, and a more despairing one, although there are flashes of gallows humor to lighten the pileup of downers. As for the happy end? Happy hunting.

Hitchcock breezes through a tongue-in-cheek, nightmarish plot with a lightness of touch that’s equalled by a charming performance from Grant (below), who copes effortlessly with the script’s dash between claustrophobia and intrigue on one hand and romance and comedy on the other.

Vintage Hitchcock, with sheer wit and verve masking an implausible plot.

Stopmotion feels born out of the sheer mental challenge of being trapped in a room with macabre creations that come to life over weeks of painstaking labour.

Deadwyler shows us the essential truth of being Black in 1950s America: that it was a tightwire, living-on-tenterhooks ordeal. Frighteningly – and this may be Till’s most vital message – it’s a reality that exists even today.

It may be a stretch to call the filmmaker a forgotten genius, but if nothing else, Le Grand Amour makes a case that Étaix was a fertile clown, overdue for a bow in the spotlight.

They get at the essence of Vertigo, haunting us via ghostly transmissions.

It's a contemporary movie musical that makes you feel genuinely sky-high.

Field captures the sense of outrage to perfection, puffy-eyed, screaming and plotting escape. Appropriately enough, the film is strictly deglamorised; combined with the lack of sympathetic characters, it all adds up to difficult, compelling viewing as we're drawn into the deepening nightmare.

Sweetie confirms Campion as a highly original movie talent.

Like any good Western, Slow West percolates with the constant threat of violence, but debuting feature director John Maclean wrings the genre for its mythic value.

Dirty Wars leaves some deeper questions unexplored, mainly the philosophical struggle between security and secrecy, but makes up grandly with raw data and one correspondent’s passion.

Battle offers both a sobering portrait of personal revolt (notably through activist Daniel Goldstein, whose eviction fight landed in the State Supreme Court) and a searing case study of a community dismantled by racial and economic tensions. Alas, it's not much of a battle; more like "Requiem for Brooklyn."

Puzzling and provocative, Alps has a lingering power and an effect that is thrillingly difficult to define.

Richly entertaining and blackly funny but told with sincerity and heart, the half-dozen Western tales packed into The Ballad of Buster Scruggs show the Coen brothers loading up their six-shooter and firing barely a blank.