Redford, already a giant, has never been more suggestive. His character’s misadventure — might be a kind of cosmic penance. It’s the salvation of the moviegoing year.

Perhaps Kubrick's most perfectly realised film.

A marvelous movie, shot in stunning black-and-white by Freddie Francis.

A saturated picture that courses with the raw energy of found footage while still feeling artfully composed, a movie that punches with the skittering violence of dubstep but careens through L.A. with the unbridled freedom of bebop jazz.

Co-writers, co-directors and brothers Alex and Andrew J. Smith—who outdo The Revenant for sincerity, depth and gorgeousness—mount their tale with enough confidence to cut away from the action.

It's a bold, significant piece of work: an investigative thriller with a grave finale that stuns you into silence, then, hopefully, something more.

We are in the presence of a new classic.

William Friedkin’s full-throttle adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s novel works because it fuses the extreme and the everyday.

An epic, often funny testament to creative fearlessness.

As much as any surrealist arthouse flick, Texas Chain Saw feels like a nightmare made real, an inescapable but entirely authentic vision of pure hell.

Defiantly intellectual, complex and true to the shifting winds of real-world governance, Lincoln is not the movie that this election season has earned-but one that a more perfect union can aspire to.

Effortlessly moving from comedy to serious social comment, eliciting excellent performances from a large and perfectly selected cast, and making superb use of music both to create mood and comment on the action, Lee contrives to see both sides of each conflict without falling prey to simplistic sentimentality.

Marrying the biting frenzy of Terry Gilliam’s film universe with the explosive grandeur of James Cameron, Miller cooks up some exhilaratingly sustained action. But the key to this symphony of twisted metal is how the film never forgets that violence is a sort of madness.

Vertov’s experimental essay proclaims its ‘complete separation from the language of theatre and literature’ in the opening titles. What follows is cinema in its purest form: movement, sensation, action and visual trickery.

The result is a gritty but giddying human drama that plays like a glorious mix of ‘Precious’, ‘Girlhood’ and ‘The 400 Blows’ – a huge-hearted coming-of-age story that serves as an inadvertent throwback to the easygoing buzz of hanging out with your friends in the city you call home.

Rare is the profile that captures so much oddness with so little judgment. You owe yourself a chance to be challenged.

Featuring powerhouse performances by Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver, Noah Baumbach's divorce drama is a bruising tour-de-force.

Ideally, though, it should prove as gruelling a test of its audience's moral and political conscience as it seems to have been for its makers.

The ambition of Under the Silver Lake is worth cherishing. It will either evaporate into nothingness or cohere into something you’ll want to hug for being so wonderfully weird.

Beating with a wild and restless energy, the film’s fearsome but ferociously beautiful heart marks the emergence of a rare and remarkable talent.

The grandeur of this movie is off the charts. For a certain kind of old-school film fan, someone who believes in shapely, classical proportions and an epic yarn told over time, it will be the revelation of the year.

It’s a lot of plot for one sitting, but Widows will remind you of how massively entertaining crime movies can be, especially when they’re animated by the spirit of cool-headed capability, on and offscreen.

The details are gripping, presented with respect for an audience's intelligence.

Director Nora Twomey’s film is about the ways we try to cradle each other from the harsher realities of life. This is a day-to-day survival story that stirs the heart and fires the imagination.

Using the same breathless pacing, rushing camera movements and nerve-jangling sound effects as before, Raimi drags us screaming into his cinematic funhouse. Delirious, demented and diabolically funny.

Funny and heartbreaking, this is a movie that would have made the '80s-era Jonathan Demme, attuned to American anxieties, blush with pride.

It’s a film of stark, superbly judged and beautifully sustained contrasts, the soundtrack hopping confidently from Tammy Wynette to Chopin as Bobby and his waitress girlfriend Rayette (Karen Black) travel from the lusty, sun-baked south to the cerebral, rainswept north to pay final respects to Bobby’s dying father.

Almodóvar fills this poignant tapestry of recollections with bold colours and infuses them with emotional detail. It’s a deeply intimate experience and it’ll pierce your heart.

It seems reductive to call this one of cinema’s great ‘lost’ works because this is one of the great films period, taking its place in the canon with urgency since its re-emergence in the 1990s.

It’s Carpenter’s direction that makes Halloween tick, and resulted in it becoming (still, possibly) the most successful indie film ever made.

The rare film possessed with the courage required to shine a light into that abyss knowing full well that down is the only way out.

You may often find yourself second-guessing the film, questioning how—and if—it will all come together. But by the time of the intense and impassioned climax, a storm of emotion is ensured: a great movie rising before you like a delusion, like a dream.

It sits at the mature end of Tarantino’s work, bringing his tongue-in-cheek storytelling together with exquisite craft and killer lead performances from Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio. And yet, it’s still very much a Tarantino film, trading in genuine emotion one minute, unapolegetically silly the next.

Much of the movie’s revolutionary impact should be credited to the city itself: The Dakota looms menacingly, every bit the Gothic pile as any Transylvanian vampire’s mansion.

It’s a more self-consciously artful film than its predecessor, an admirable spectacle rather than an entrancing human story. But as a work of pure, imaginative cinema, it comes close to genius.

Prepare to fawn at Bergman’s most metaphysically profound film; you may even laugh.

Matthew McConaughey finally locates his perfect métier as the town's Fordian skeptic, a district attorney who smells a rat.

Like the wood-grained farmhouse itself — a beautiful piece of production design by Julie Berghoff — The Conjuring has an analog solidity that makes the terror to come almost unbearable.

Turning the on-location Tokyo streets into the perfect backdrop for a cartoonishly colorful version of hardboiled drama - call it Pulp Art - House of Bamboo keeps its story line about an undercover Army cop (Stack) battling a gangster (Ryan) on the lean and mean side.

This San Fernando Valley palimpsest is so buoyant and bubbly, it practically floats off the screen. It’s the giddiness that grabs you in the Californian’s latest gem, and the dizzying sense of possibility and innocence. It left me with a contact high.

The beauty of this movie, both a nostalgic romp and a futuristic scream, is its stubborn insistence on getting all the trapped-in-amber details right.

Whatever your favourite side to the limitlessly faceted David Bowie, this magnificently mind-bending film serves it up in a 140-minute career-spanning opus that races by in a snap of the fingers. It’s almost as extraordinary as the man himself.

The understated film builds into a gut punch that’s more painful than anything in the superficial, recent Roger Ailes exposé "Bombshell."

Nothing about the film’s coming-of-age narrative, nor the rise and fall of its core romance, is intrinsically new or daring, yet Kechiche’s freewheeling perspective on young desire is uncommon in its emotional maturity.

The entire film is less moulded in light than carved in stone: it's magisterial cinema, and almost unbearably moving.

A remarkably assured debut for Coen, formerly assistant editor on The Evil Dead.

It’s Robinson’s mastery of tone that makes Withnail endure

She’s charming, authoritative, and ferociously intelligent. ‘I think she captured the essence of what it means to be human, to be alive and to be here on this Earth,’ says Winfrey. She’s speaking about one of Morrison’s characters, but it goes double for the author.

There’s an edge to The Circus that suggests a man gazing deep into the void, laughing at the darkness and urging us to do the same.

The Lighthouse leaves you dazed, terrified and elated, and it signals Eggers as one of the most exciting directors working today.

An epic indictment of media manipulation, this avant-doc delivers its coup de grâce once the camera finally demands accountability - leaving the disgraced despot staring into the lens, and the abyss of history staring back into him.

The trial scenes are scripted and played with electrifying skill, as every turn and twist is amplified through Close's emotions. But it is much more than a courtroom picture. These days it is almost unheard of for a movie to keep you guessing until the last frame, but this one does, partly because Marquand plays it so beautifully straight.

Though it runs an epic five-and-a-half hours (it was made for French TV), Carlos books like no film since "Goodfellas." You will not be bored, ever.

An astonishing, compulsive film, directed with a crackling energy.

A sweet, deeply personal portrayal of female adolescence that's more attuned to the bonds between best girlfriends than casual flings with boys, writer-director Greta Gerwig’s beautiful Lady Bird flutters with the attractively loose rhythms of youth.

It remains a how-to model for making something that fancies itself a slow-burn thriller—until it isn’t slow-burning whatsoever.

Beautifully written and directed by Bergman, this paradoxically modern slice of nostalgia energetically revives the long mourned 'oddball' comedy. For once, Cage is pleasantly understated, playing the straight guy beset by nine shades of madness: lunatic mothers, deranged mobsters, singing Chieftains, and sky-diving Elvis impersonators by the dozen, they're all here in this joyous, uplifting romp.

There’s a touch of diet Brando about Elgort’s reformed bad boy-turned-lovebird, but Zegler brings a lovely brand of innocence and conviction to Maria. And don’t be surprised to see Moreno winning another Oscar. Or, for that matter, Spielberg.

The journey is often challenging, but the rewards—heady, emotional, provocative and invigorating—are endless.

It's McConaughey who is the real revelation: All Grim Reaper strut and cutthroat stare, he savors each of Letts's vividly ghoulish lines.

Only Pedro Almodóvar could wrap a cry of pain about Spain’s inability to come to terms with its recent dark history into a gorgeous-looking melodrama about two mothers drawn by fate into a complicated, painful and ultimately nourishing relationship.

It’s at once intimate and expansive – a film with a big heart and not a bad word to say about anyone.

Like Nomadland, another film that maps out rocky terrain with impressionistic grace, Hamnet is a deep-felt ode to loss and resilience. Zhao doesn’t just tell you about the healing power of art, she shows you. Prepare your tear ducts accordingly.

Subtly, the film draws you into the science. You’ll be nervously eyeballing ticking velocity numbers in the corner of the screen. But always, Apollo 11 is about people working together in a single-minded spirit of peaceful ambition.

There’s a once-in-a-lifetime feeling to the trio’s every interaction—not only as characters but as performers—that makes the film’s casually tragic climax that much more devastating.

Moonlight takes the pain of growing up and turns it into hardened scars and private caresses. This film is, without a doubt, the reason we go to the movies: to understand, to come closer, to ache, hopefully with another.

Like Barry Jenkins similarly set Medicine for Melancholy, The Last Black Man in San Francisco supplies positivity to the struggle.

Remains a primo example that cinema actually traffics in truthiness 24 frames per second.

Try to get Siegel’s masterful camera rise out of your head: gun-happy Harry looming over his jabbering perp, who screams like a stuck pig as the shot recedes high into a dense night fog. This is not a cop film. It’s a monster movie.

For all the clammy grip it exerts, this thrillingly original film is more interested in trapping you in its psychosexual maze and immersing you in the relatable pains of self-discovery.

French actor-filmmaker Jacques Tati’s 1967 masterpiece still holds up as a feast of subtle sight gags, playful noise and, above all, visual wonders.

The cumulative effect is so stunning and antithetical to anything Hollywood is doing at the moment – the equally audacious Barbie aside – that it feels like a completely different art form. And, frankly, hallelujah for that.

While it’s unspooling, The Souvenir feels like the only film in the world—the only one that matters.

By allowing viewers to step into the shoes of a wall-climbing Jackie Chan, a parkour-sprinting Daniel Craig or a bullet-spraying Ahnold, it does something that live action has never attempted before. The carnage flies—it’s possible to miss a lot of it. But if action movies are meant to be stunning, Hardcore Henry can proudly take its place among the giants. Even better, it lets you stand with them.

There’ll be moans from horrorheads that it’s not scary throughout, but in deepening his exploration of family life in the ‘burbs, Cregger sharpens his twisted scares to a dagger point. And the frights, when they come, really land.

A grippingly violent parable, a touching, tragic romance and – thanks to legendary cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond and an unprecedented attention to historical detail – quite simply one of the most beautiful, immersive films ever made.

Wheatley, underplaying his stylishness, goes for a subtle national satire about geeks gone wild, and that’s the fun here: On as mild-mannered a vacation as two Brits might devise, a killer comes along—and, after a while, is politely welcomed in, the kettle simmering.

An unassuming masterpiece, nominally based on Hemingway's novel and set in Martinique during World War II, this is Hawks' toughest statement of the necessity of accepting responsibility for others or forfeiting one's self-respect - the sum total of morality for Hawks - and the perfectbridge from the free and open world of Only Angels Have Wings to the claustrophobic one of Rio Bravo.

The tunes, flooding every frame, remain perfect.

Polley has gone further into the thorny subject of forgiveness than any of her peers. Her movies ache with ethical quandary; Stories We Tell aches the most.

Wonderful stuff.

Set in the Broadway jungle rather than among the ‘sun-burnt eager beavers’ of Hollywood, Joseph L Mankiewicz’s film dissects the narcissism and hypocrisy of the spotlight as sharply as Wilder’s, but pays equal attention to the challenges of enacting womanhood.

It's a witty, exciting and deeply moving masterpiece.

On purely formal grounds (the ones on which the genre lives or dies), Kent is a natural. She favors crisp compositions and unfussy editing, transforming the banal house itself into a subtle, shadowy threat.

Enveloping you in its vintage folds, Peter Strickland's hypnotic horror film turns fashion into a death sentence.

The Coens nod at some familiar stylistic tropes – florid swearing, sexual euphemism, crusty, aged characters – but the film’s potency is rooted in quiet precision and detailed realisation.

It’s a sexy concept that will thrill Assayas neophytes, but the director’s longtime fans will find its pleasures virtually pornographic.

Brava, Mia! The exceedingly talented Ms. Hansen-Løve (the writer-director of Father of My Children) is sure to win many more fans with her latest feature, an incisive, exhilaratingly frank examination of l'amour lost.

Those Dardenne brothers…still making great movies with second-nature ease.

It's hardly the first movie to deal with thimble-size protagonists, but it's one of few animated fairy tales to genuinely transport the audience into their world and, in the process, let us see our own with fresh awe and respect.

Like its thematic companion, Orlowski’s 2012 doc on melting glaciers "Chasing Ice," the sober and urgent Chasing Coral is thankfully far from discouraging. Instead it’s a motivating wake-up call that makes one want to drop everything and join the onscreen crew, rebelling against today’s political priorities

It’s a film that makes you want to sharpen your barbs and sling sass with the adults.

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

Ryan Gosling in a physical action-comedy? Whoever thought of the idea should be crowned genius of the year. With dynamite timing and uproarious gestures, Gosling mines his diverse abilities and becomes a blast in The Nice Guys.

Czech director Ivan Passer’s use of late-summer light is rich and entrancing, while Bridges and Heard give their all: the latter delivers a performance of spectacular rage and intensity. The result is nothing less than a modern masterpiece, and a film ripe for rediscovery.

It’s a film that oozes clear-eyed empathy and has the lived-in feel of a story, director and cast working in strong harmony.

Masterfully addressing the American racial divide, past and present, director Raoul Peck’s six-years-in-the-making documentary, I Am Not Your Negro, is a galvanizing, ominous film, thrumming with a sense of history repeating itself.

This is a great movie, an austere masterpiece, with Delon as a cold, enigmatic contract killer who lives by a personal code of bushido.