Dick Johnson Is Dead suggests that learning to confront reminders of death, to even conjure them for yourself and examine them closely, takes some of the sting out of death and replaces it with love. To love someone is to accept that one day, death will part the two of you. The pain of knowing that is built into the act of loving. But we go on loving anyway.

The Death of Stalin is Iannucci’s most complex and almost nihilistic rendering of what politics is: A team of bumbling and weak-minded people who lack any real conviction other than a desire for power and position.

Every performance in this movie acknowledges that while tragedy is what prompted the film’s events, its contours, characters, and conversations are pure, inky black comedy. Absurdity makes for good humor, and the screwed-up world in which these characters live is nothing if not absurd.

The movie works best, above all, as a melodrama about the limits and possibilities of love, and how love can make us into the best and worst versions of ourselves in the very same moment.

Leave No Trace is the story of a bond between a teenage daughter and her veteran father, but in the background is another kind of bond, something that keeps the world from spinning apart. That’s Granik’s subject, and Leave No Trace explores it simply but unforgettably.

It’s a mesmerizing, fascinating story that also feels like an attempt, on Tan’s part, to reclaim the film from Cardona, putting it back in the hands of its rightful owners: herself and her friends. In that way, the new Shirkers is a kind of punk feminist project — a deeply personal, fabulously engrossing, visually assured bit of first-person creative nonfiction filmmaking.

It has plenty of the bizarre visual flair Lanthimos cut his teeth on, from his signature extreme wide angles up to and including a bulldog with the head of a duck frolicking through a grand living room. Yet Poor Things, based on a 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray, is joyous in its weirdness, joyous in its exploration and celebration of its strange, strange world. This movie is incredibly fun to watch.

Coogler and his talented cast and team tell a story that dazzles, one that dares its audience to dream of a world unrestrained by our own stifling reality, without ignoring how the pain of the real world informs those joyful dreams.

Elegiac and lovingly wrought, If Beale Street Could Talk is darkness laced with light, a story that has not stopped being true in the years since it first was told.

The only thing that can conquer fear is love, and Wolfwalkers loves its characters, their world, and the stunning beauty of human life. But most of all, it loves the truth that is buried within the myth.

It’s a gorgeous film, and Chou’s camera moves in a way that frames and heightens Freddie’s emotion. This is a mood piece, at times one with almost abstract aims, and it’s a joy to be swept away in it.

In addition to the absurd stunts and convoluted plot machinations, what makes the Mission: Impossible movies work in general, and Fallout in particular, is that they let their characters be characters, driven by a number of complex factors, even when they’re chasing an enemy or trying to get out of a scrape.

The best plays are often more situation than plot. They capture, unravel, and singe the edges of the power struggles between people who are standing on shifting sand, letting the upper hand change from moment to moment. In retaining the feel of a play, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom hangs onto that inherently theatrical quality.

What Descendant demonstrates is how ignoring the real story — the ship sunk to the bottom of the river by people who find its truths uncomfortable — doesn’t just steal people’s history from them. It impoverishes the future. More than that: without facing the past with courage, exploring it without succumbing to emotional panic, there is no future.

Education becomes a portrait of a community disappointed by the country they came to with eagerness — and determined to make something of themselves, and their culture, in spite of it.

It’s a piercing look into a country that’s becoming less and less inhabitable for its older men and women, and more stingy about who gets to dream. And, fundamentally, it’s a poignant portrait of a broken heart.

The break between Colm and Pádraic works on its own terms, but it’s also a startlingly violent fight between men who are basically brothers, a fight that has a logic to it and yet is heartbreaking precisely because of the depth of history between them. It’s the conflict in microcosm.

The movie lingers in the mind and sits like a lump in the soul. And it’s deliciously twisted along the way. Hereditary has nightmare fodder to spare, and nobody, in the end, gets to escape.

The result is a realist tale about labor, class, and cruelty, while also being a moral fable with a fantastical core.

With its risky visual storytelling and tender script, Into the Spider-Verse earns the greatest honor that one can bestow on a Spider-Man movie: It somehow makes you want to see more Spider-Man movies. Including at least a few more for Miles Morales alone.

Del Toro always renders his films’ social critiques in fantastical and imaginative images, and The Shape of Water is among his best, with a creature that’s both fully reptilian and strangely human.

Bisbee ’17 is a fierce, lyrical probe into the soul of a town haunted by a history it would rather forget. It’s also an unsettling cipher for America, in a year when the ghosts of our past revealed themselves in frightening ways.

Throughout Beyoncé’s career, it’s been made to appear that this woman is something closer to deity than one of us. She is the closest thing to perfection, a once-in-a-lifetime talent. But what’s made her so spectacular to us is, privately, exhausting. Renaissance is the merging of the two, showing us the sheer amount of determination and work it takes to produce a show like Renaissance, and the toll it takes on the very human woman behind it all.

It challenges ideas about great power and responsibility, stories about the worlds we live in and the things we’re searching for, and our concepts of heroism and morality. And it does so with a gorgeous, imaginative animated style that makes each world seem limitless.

Showing Up is a knowing nod at everyone who finds making creative work a nearly impossible task amid the mundane distractions of ordinary life.

If May December were less self-aware, it might belong in the category of camp or failed melodrama; if it were less earnest, it might earn the title of tongue-in-cheek satire. But ultimately, the movie’s discordant aesthetic isn’t coy. It’s about revealing the nightmarish circus that Joe has survived with quiet resilience.

The movie captures the spirit of the novel well. It’s suspenseful, but it’s not a thriller; there are elements of obsession and eroticism, but they never quite go where you expect. The end is deeply ambiguous, neither punishing nor condoning its characters’ behavior. It simply asks us to sit with them — to pay them the respect of attention, and learn something about ourselves in the process.

The Big Sick feels authentic because it isn’t afraid of complexity.