This period epic...is so full of dazzlingly intricate visual poetry, so teeming with sensory spirit, that trying to review it is a bit like trying to review all of life. Which may sound a bit grandiose, but Cuarón’s magnum opus provokes such turgid sentiment.

Lovers Rock is a love letter to the joy of being alive, and young, and at least momentarily, free.

In Sciamma’s gifted hands, the film escapes cliché and becomes something glorious—a study of forbidden love that grandly highlights how much has been lost under the crush of hetero patriarchy.

The film isn’t merely some metatextual exercise, though. It’s deeply felt, a warm embodiment of a liminal time in life when our conceptions of ourselves and our loved ones come pinging into focus while also, somehow, drifting into new confusion.

Amazing Grace is a rare object: something truly mythical, something we’d only ever told stories about, that having finally arrived somehow lives up to its name. That’s saying something. The film is just as exhausting and beautiful as the recording sessions it documents, just as overflowing with those inexplicable qualities—that unquantified ability to reach directly into the soul that only the greatest art approaches.

I found myself reluctantly taken by the movie, and the way Scorsese uses it to maybe, just a little bit, atone for some of his own past blitheness about violence. In The Irishman, a merry darkness slowly becomes an elegy, ringed with guilt. And what could be more Irish than that?

Past Lives is not concerned with regret. It is instead a thoughtful, humane rumination on what may be fixed in personal history but remains forever fluid in the mind.

For all its strife and sorrow, Marriage Story is a generous film. It sensitively acknowledges the ways people fail each other, and the ways they don’t. It’s well worth your time. Maybe don’t watch it with your spouse, though.

American Utopia is an outstanding collaboration between two essential artists; I can’t believe there’s anyone alive who won’t be moved by this document. Byrne’s career is a testament to never resting on one’s laurels, to always searching for creative expansion—but more than anything, American Utopia proves how electrifying he still is as a performer. Same as it ever was.

Uncut Gems is a movie that lives in the gut, where shit makes a name for itself, where anxiety, folly, and instinct are borne out without morality or restriction.

TÁR is breathtaking entertainment, beautifully tailored in luxe, eerie Euro sleekness by production designer Marco Bittner Rosser and cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister, and ominously scored by Hildur Guðnadóttir (who gets a little meta shout-out in the film). That fine craftsmanship is all anchored by Blanchett’s alternately measured and ferocious performance, a tremendous (but never outsized) piece of acting that is her most piercing work in years.

It handles a tricky topic with so much persuasively unadorned compassion that it has the genuine potential to change hearts and minds about one of the country’s most contentious battles.

Zone of Interest is a prodigiously mounted wonder, gripping and awful and terribly necessary to its time.

It’s not a demure film, by any measure, nor does it shy away from hard truths. What it does is allow the Riches the loveliness and grain of their individual being, and lets that be enough. The rest of the film’s mission, then, is what we in the audience do with what Bradley, and Rich, have graciously shown us. Time appeals to heart and mind. It also, hopefully, convinces us of their capacity for action.

It’s a paean to the loving of a thing, rather than a movie that gives that thing an entirely new existence, free-standing and self-possessed in its own right, despite Gerwig’s narrative tinkering.

What’s most arresting about Flee isn’t its animated sequences, but Rasmussen’s detailed and attentive recording of Amin’s vocal expressions. However conversant he is in several languages, from Dari to Russian to Danish, Amin has a way of letting silence interrupt.

Nickel Boys is perhaps a rebuke to the idea that violence must be plainly stated in order to be understood. Here, it is palpably present in every negative space. What Ross instead affords these young men is the dignity of a point of view, drawing the viewer into the bracing immediacy of mind and body.

The emotional punch of The Boy and the Heron is a heart-swelling assertion of cosmic purpose, even amidst sadness and ruin. But it’s delivered after a lot of digression, which can make this swan-song film seem like more a collection of Miyazaki’s disparate, previously unused ideas than a discrete film with a focused mission.

It’s a wild, profane blast. But Baker is also zooming in, very slowly, so that in the movie’s startling, disarming final scene we are forced to reconsider what we’ve just watched. Was it a raucous chase movie or a quiet tragedy?

The Favourite is a pleasure to watch. It’s weird without being alienating, dirty without being cheap. And you’d be hard-pressed to find a better acting trio this fall. What fun The Favourite is, while still striking a few resonantly melancholy chords here and there.

Brody and Pearce vividly manifest Corbet’s arguments about the clash between art and money, between the old world and the new. When they are blazing away on screen together, The Brutalist swells to epic size—two craftsmen prodigiously working to realize their architect’s flawed and awesome vision.

Trier pulls a lot of stylistic tricks in the film, but they somehow never play like gimmicks, like adornments merely there to show off the talent of their creator. The film has a lilting, lively rhythm; the glimpses we see of months and years in Julie’s life ably provide a whole picture.

It’s a lively, messy coming-of-age story which turns the clashing elements of its title into reflections of a certain youthful folly and daring, a penchant for base gross-out humor and big, revolutionary thinking.

It manages to be about a great many things—but above all, it’s a movie about two men, two bodies, and the masculine, economic codes of the West. Which, in retrospect, feel so much more moveable and introspective than our usual depictions of the period allow.

For all of its piercing insight and arresting performances, its steamy sex, its devastating conclusions, the film operates at a remove, from behind a pane of glass. Perhaps because Haigh gives Adam so little tether to the realm of the real; so much of the film is lost in plaintive reverie.

What initially seems like another alienating P.T.A. outing reveals itself, in quiet but glorious bursts, to be a wry and heartfelt love poem.

Mangrove is not a lecture, or a polemic. There’s a gracefulness to McQueen’s technique that gives the film a poetic lilt; even when the worst things are happening, or the biggest speeches are being made in court, McQueen manages to avoid the starchy stuff of so many political and legal dramas.

No matter its broader effect, Oppenheimer is a mainstream offering of uncommon resonance, sending the viewer out of the theater head-spun and itchy-eyed, ears ringing from all its sophisticated, voluble explosion.