Whatever thematic clarity the added footage may confer is prosaic or didactic and intrusive; this stuff hit the cutting-room floor the first time around for good reason.

This tough-minded, forthright and exquisitely tender film transcends polemics. It’s the odyssey of a lost child in poorly charted territory.

Against all odds in an era of machine-made spectaculars, Mr. Jackson and his collaborators have created a film epic that lives and breathes.

It’s lacerating, a master class in how to show without showing.

The third film of the trilogy turns out to be gorgeously joyous and deeply felt.

His film makes it clear that these monstrous humans are very much a part of our species. In a way, I wish I’d never seen The Look of Silence, because now I won’t be able to forget it. But that’s the point, and the film’s purpose—calling attention to the cost of staying silent, and willfully forgetful, in the face of implacable evil.

Rich, evocative, crafty and exciting, it’s one of the few standout movies of the year.

The whole film feels magical in the way it gets at intangible, invisible, ineffable things without naming them, and tells a gripping story of obsession at a poet’s pace, without need of conventional explanations.

What it is can be summed up in a word that’s often used loosely but fits the case here—a masterpiece, a mysteriously enthralling creation that keeps you guessing about where it’s going, then reveals its essence with astonishing clarity.

The director has considered how good people are to respond to brutal injustice, and created in the wake of his own nightmare a movie of bracing anger and empathy. Mr. Panahi’s victimization by Iran’s government may well continue, but this is a film of emotional and political truths that can be crushed by no regime.

Throughout this dry, dull and bloodless movie, nothing like an honest grappling with the depravity of killing one’s own infant ever seems to occupy anyone’s attention.

A sociologist might call Time a longitudinal study, a document whose value is enhanced by the decades it spans. I’d call it a joyous tribute to love and resilience, and a case study in eclectic technique.

Giddily funny in a singularly American idiom, and shot, by Lance Acord, with an eagle eye for cultural absurdities, Ms. Coppola's film is also a meditation on love and longing, shot through with a sensibility that's all the more surprising for being so unfashionably tender.

Good movies summon up worlds. Son of Saul, a great movie and a debut feature by László Nemes, summons up a world we may think we know from a visual perspective we’ve never encountered — the willed tunnel vision of a Jewish worker in a Nazi death camp.

Mr. Jonze approaches perfection in the department of deadpan humor. In other hands, his premise could have been a clever gimmick and little more. But he draws us into Theodore's world, then develops it brilliantly, by playing everything scrupulously straight.

Ms. Gerwig’s reimagining — and provocative restructuring — of the American classic is all ablaze with ferocious purpose, urgent passion, boisterous humor and the nourishing essence of family life in good times and bad.

The film, with its dazzling musical energy, its complex narrative sweep and its dizzying cast of characters, finally emerges as a tragedy: a story of promises broken and trust betrayed, echoing into our own era with all the force and feeling of a ballad from Armstrong’s horn.

A single seeing isn't enough to take in the eccentric marvels of The Triplets of Belleville, an animated feature by Sylvain Chomet that creates a visual language all its own.

We are all snapshooters these days, highly placed spectators to tragedy that seems to be beyond our comprehension, let alone control. Flee takes us down to sea level.

It is the library as an urgent idea, and the obligations that the institution’s leaders have embraced, that win Mr. Wiseman’s admiration and attention.

Tótem is neither tragedy nor tearjerker, exactly, though tears will probably be shed. It is an expression of life, deepened by death and rendered with an unusual and unerring sensitivity.

Repetitive, meandering and dull, Mr. Ross’s film keeps steering attention to its director at the expense of narrative by relying on two tics that quickly wear out their welcome.

The Boy and the Heron, while typically bursting with imaginative elements, is also narratively tangled and a bit confusing, and falls far short of Mr. Miyazaki’s best work.

Pawel Pawlikowski's Ida, a compact masterpiece set in Poland in the early 1960s, gets to the heart of its matter with startling swiftness.

As a character portrait, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is absorbing, but as an argument it fails.

An absolute stunner, a feature-length animated documentary, from Israel, in which the force of moving drawings amplifies eerily powerful accounts of war, shaky remembrance and rock-solid repression.

What gives the film its distinction is the grace and intimacy with which it depicts the cousins’ girlhoods, and the quality of the performances—superb throughout, remarkably well-matched at every stage of each character’s life, and, in the case of a homeless wanderer who was once a lovely, ardent child, nothing less than extraordinary.

Though Anora frequently sparkles, it’s also inconsistent, so it falls short of becoming a classic of its genre. Still, thanks to its appealingly youthful energy and its earthy performances, it’s one of the spiciest comedies of the year.