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.

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.

What makes the French masterpiece Portrait of a Lady on Fire — one of my favorite movies ever made, and the perfect Valentine’s Day date movie — so good is that it’s both a great romance and a great love story. The two bleed into each other so skillfully that you’ll almost miss where the romance begins and the love story ends.

It’s a remarkable addition to the small but growing canon of American films that aren’t afraid to stare straight into an abyss with all of the implications — moral, ethical, political, and religious — that are required for this moment in our history. First Reformed is a confounding stunner of a movie and richly deserves our full, serious attention.

The Souvenir clearly stands out as one of the year’s best films: pointedly personal art that somehow manages, in its specificity, to hit on something universal.

Lady Bird is the rare movie that manages to be affectionate, entertaining, hilarious, witty, and confident; it’s one of the best films of 2017, and certainly my favorite.

A horse might not be able to feel love for a teenage boy, but Lean on Pete makes sure you know how deeply a teenage boy can feel love for a horse. It’s one of the best films of the year.

Terrific concert documentary...The film that resulted — a roughly though not strictly chronological document of the much-publicized event — is an outstanding documentary, a joyful musical experience and a playful artifact of an era. [2019]

Watching Lovers Rock is like being at the party at which the film takes place.

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

Driveways is surprising at every turn. It’s a modest and gentle story about a boy who feels out of place, and the weak ties he forms that gradually become strong ones.

It’s one of the best, most gripping, and smartest films of 2020.

Nolan’s Oppenheimer barely qualifies as a biopic, at least not the thudding Hollywood variety. Instead it’s a movie — a masterful one, among his best — investigating the nature of power: how it is created, how it is kept in balance, and how it leads people into murky quandaries that refuse simplistic answers.

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.

Grief and love coexist in The Farewell, as do truth and fiction, past and present, sorrow and joy. It’s an outstanding, quietly devastating, deeply personal story, and one that’s destined to put Wang firmly on the map.

The result of all this careful questioning is stunning. To say Scorsese has made a great movie is to announce that water is wet, but there’s a kind of unfolding grief to Killers’ tone, a steady feeling of dread and sorrow, that only works in the hands of a master. You aren’t told how to feel so much as you’re made to feel it and then, in the end, be walloped with indignance over what happened to the story of the murders and many stories like them.

The film, which is structured as a series of set pieces that Alana and Gary stumble into and out of, is far too strange and specific and sometimes cringey to simply be made up, even by someone with as fertile an imagination as Anderson.

It summons an erotic orientation toward the world with all its power, and then pours it onto the audience. It is, undoubtedly, Guadagnino’s masterpiece.

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.

Emotional complexity, the manifold feelings her character is experiencing, and her well-trained attempts to stay cool, flash across Sweeney’s face. We start to really see what she’s thinking, and that leads to a bigger, more unnerving demonstration of the abject failure of the systems meant to protect us to do anything like that.

In Asteroid City, Anderson builds several worlds mediated by layers of performance, artifice, and technology, in which nonetheless real humans grieve, long for one another, fall in love, get hurt, and feel wonder. The layers they’ve put between themselves and their emotions crack and crumble.

Glazer – whose previous film was the brilliantly unsettling Under the Skin – replicates the characters' internal distance through the movie's images and sounds. The result is unsettling in the extreme.

Coppola’s talent is in taking this story — much harder-edged when translated to Versailles — and giving it the rosy sheen of a girl’s memory, of feeling the intensity of a star’s rays on her so keenly that there’s nothing to do but bask in it, at least for a while.

A Ghost Story isn’t all sorrow and grief. There’s a kind of deadpan humor throughout — the sheet ghost is comical, and there’s no getting around it — that complicates the film and rewards a rewatch.

One of 2021’s best movies.

Its rough-hewn, side-glancing characters are full of secrets and unspoken intentions, thinking thoughts it didn’t even occur to you to imagine are in their heads. It’s a gothic thriller wrapped in a Western. It’s outstanding.

Inside Out is as beautiful as it is abstract, as daring as it is intelligent. It's also the best movie of 2015 so far.

It’s not just a blast to watch — and it truly is a blast. It’s another tiny step in reclaiming the full history of America, expanding the context of our present not just for people who remember the past, but people who never knew about it in the first place. We’re fools if we don’t think burying the era-changing import of events like these is as much a part of American history as the events themselves — and movies like Summer of Soul fight back bringing the past vibrantly to life.