As haunting as it is haunted, The Missing Picture leaves viewers’ heads rattling with ghosts.

Its charms, and they are both subtle and many, emanate like perfume.

For those willing to join Reggio in his extended meditation, Visitors offers a sublime, even spiritual experience, as well as a bracing reminder of cinema’s power to create a transformative occasion.

Inherent Vice unfolds so organically, so gracefully and with such humanistic grace notes that even at its most preposterous, viewers will find themselves nodding along, sharing the buzz the filmmaker has so skillfully created.

The bravura gestures work gorgeously in Birdman, as does the humor, which playfully balances the film’s most mystical, contemplative ideas with a steady stream of inside jokes and well-calibrated shifts in tone and dynamics.

As a film that dares to honor small moments and the life they add up to, Boyhood isn’t just a masterpiece. It’s a miracle.

It’s possible to watch Carol simply for its velvety beauty, but chances are that, by that stunning final moment, filmgoers will realize with a start that they care far more about the problems of these two people than they might have realized.

Although the cast is uniformly fine, Hoffman shines in a role that demands not showmanship, but a kind of complexity and contradiction that can be rendered only through the kind of dull character details that he excelled in, accumulating them from the inside out.

As a parable on karma, capitalism and Darwinian corporate politics, Two Days, One Night can often feel brutal. As a testament to connection, service, sacrifice and self-worth, it’s a soaring, heart-rending hymn.

Through it all, Spall is equally enigmatic and transfixing: With his guttural croaks and barks, his Turner is often difficult to understand, but, thanks to Spall’s amazing physical performance and Leigh’s sensitive, information-laden direction, he’s never incomprehensible.

Rich Hill doesn’t just make you feel like you know these boys; it makes you care about them.

This cinematic Macbeth possesses a terrible beauty, evoking fear, sadness, awe and confusion. Presented with the aesthetic of a dark comic book, it’s also a mournful masterpiece, rendering Shakespeare’s spectacle with all the sorrow and majesty that it deserves.

The film serves not only as a mesmerizing escape into another world, but also a compelling, compassionate deep dive into human frailty and self-deception.

In providing audiences a chance to bear witness to unspeakable suffering as well as dazzling defiance and human dignity, Sissako has created a film that’s a privilege to watch.

Magnificently acted, expertly crafted and unerringly sure of every treacherous step it takes, Leviathan is an indictment, but also an elegy, a film set among the monumental ruins of a culture, whether they’re the skeletal remains of boats, a whale’s bleached bones, a demolished building or a trail of lives that are either ruined or hopelessly resigned.

Hoop Dreams is the most powerful movie about sports ever made.

Force Majeure leaves the audience squirming — in all the very best ways.

Liberated from playing the hits, Benjamin eloquently captures Hendrix’s emerging style without having to succumb to jukebox-musical opportunism.

There are several reasons to see Selma — for its virtuosity and scale, scope and sheer beauty. But then there are its lessons, which have to do with history, but also today: Selma invites viewers to heed its story, meditate on its implications and allow those images once again to change our hearts and minds.

The shadow of its past informs the latest incarnation of “Rigby,” a deeply moving, beautifully acted and ultimately mournful meditation on the gulfs that open between people, especially when tragedy falls like a cleaver.

In Kennedy’s scrupulous, adroit hands, Last Days in Vietnam plays like a wartime thriller, with heroes engaging in jaw- dropping feats of ingenuity and derring do.

The Look of Silence is as beautiful as it is bleak.

It’s a masterful example of genre filmmaking’s ability to transcend its limitations, leaving a viewer not just frightened, but also changed.

It’s difficult to make a visually dynamic movie about people listening. But that’s precisely what Pohlad has done with both sensitivity and audaciousness, on the one hand attuning his protagonist to the music of the spheres, and on the other bearing witness to his deepest isolation and sadness.

The tale, from Brazilian writer-director Daniel Ribeiro, is told with such tenderness, such intelligence and such aching honesty that it takes on the weight of something far more significant than puppy love. Like its subject, first kisses and best friends, it’s hard to forget.

The new film is more expansive, more beautiful, funnier, nuttier and — this is the most difficult trick for any comic-book movie to pull off — more touching than the first film.

It’s a movie that, to put it in terms that the film’s screenwriters might appreciate, is Thor-ly needed.

A film that fulfills the most rote demands of superhero spectacle, yet does so with style and subtexts that feel bracingly, joyfully groundbreaking.

If “Infinity War” was about failure, “Endgame” is, ironically, all about acceptance and moving on. After 11 long years, the Infinity Saga is finally, fulfillingly over. There is no post-credit scene. But oh, what a going-away party these old friends have thrown for themselves.

Enchants on every level: story, voice work, drawing and music.

War for the Planet of the Apes may have the body of an action film, but it has the soul of an art-house drama and the brains of a political thriller.

There is a quality of enchantment to When Marnie Was There that can’t be faked, and that the studio behind this animated feature is justifiably famous for.

One needn’t have first-person experience with, or even approve of, the extremes Minnie pursues to appreciate the honest, forthright way Heller and Powley present a journey that, stripped to its most basic emotional elements, is timeless and universal.

Improbably, The End of the Tour doesn’t just sustain the audience’s interest in Wallace and Lipsky’s exchanges, arguments and moments of bonding, but invites us to care deeply about the men.

Even at its most daft and infectiously ditzy, Mistress America is a sharp, aware and surpassingly kind portrait of the agony and ecstasy of becoming yourself.

More than a testament to the power of cinematic storytelling as food for the human spirit, The Wolfpack also is a portrait of a family that has had to rely on each other to survive.

Soaring, swooning and gently nostalgic, Brooklyn takes melodrama to a new level of reassuring simplicity and emotional transparency.

Propelled by an ingenious script by Aaron Sorkin, given vibrance and buoyancy by director Danny Boyle, Steve Jobs is a galvanizing viewing experience.

Seymour: An Introduction gives viewers a soaring, sublime and enduringly meaningful glimpse of a man who is undoubtedly the real thing.

Haigh knows how to thread a story in a way that makes it feel deliberate and spontaneous, so that when it reaches its climax, viewers feel that it’s both inevitable and utterly devastating.

Like a miniature universe made entirely of millions of tiny plastic bricks, The Lego Batman Movie looks and feels like it could only have been put together by a roomful of mad geniuses, moving in a ballet of well-choreographed creativity: It’s simultaneously epic and humble.

The real star in La La Land is the movie itself, which pulses and glows like a living thing in its own right, as if the MGM musicals of the “Singin’ in the Rain” era had a love child with the more abstract confections of Jacques Demy, creating a new kind of knowing, self-aware genre that rewards the audience with all the indulgences they crave...while commenting on them from the sidelines.

[A] sensitive, superbly constructed, ultimately shattering documentary.

Thanks to his taste, rigor and superb sense of control, Nemes manages to create images that are both discreet and graphic, respectful and confrontational, inspiring and unsparing.

Fukunaga imbues this study of ma­nipu­la­tion and manufactured loyalty with an unsettling degree of visual richness and lush natural detail.

As wrenching as Room is, especially during its grim first hour, it contains an expansive sense of compassion and humanism thanks to the sensitive direction of Abrahamson.

For all of its modesty and dedication to process, Spotlight winds up being a startlingly emotional experience, and not just for filmgoers with intimate knowledge of the culture it depicts.

For all of the outrage that Mustang inspires by its depiction of sexist oppression, it’s still enormously pleasurable to watch, in part because of its enchanting setting (it was filmed in the northern Turkish town of Inebolu) and Warren Ellis’s thoughtful score, but mostly because of Sensoy and her four equally beguiling co-stars.

A diverting, visually dazzling concoction of wily schemes and daring adventures, Toy Story 4 achieves that something that eludes most sequels, especially this far into a series: a near-perfect balance between familiarity and novelty, action and emotion, and joyful hellos and more bittersweet goodbyes.

It’s been a long time coming for Incredibles 2, but the punchline is worth the setup.

Censored Voices is an essential documentary. Its subject is nothing less than loss of innocence, the seeds of hatred and the illusory nature of victory.

This spooky film's ostensible subject—an environmental illness known as multiple chemical sensitivity—is merely a starting place for this mesmerizing horror movie, feminist tract and medical mystery.

"Kubo" is both extraordinarily original and extraordinarily complex.

Dunkirk isn’t comfortable to watch; it never relents or relaxes. At the same time, it’s impossible to look away from it.

You know a filmmaker is in supreme command of her medium when what she creates feels less like a movie than a candid glimpse of ongoing lives that will continue to play out long after the lights have come on.

Captain Fantastic leaves viewers with the cheering, deeply affecting image of a dad whose superpowers lie in simply doing the best that he can.

Manchester by the Sea is a film of surpassing beauty and heart. Even at its most melancholy depths, it brims with candid, earnest, indefatigable life.

In addition to her exquisite eye for casting, Holmer knows how to film actors and environments in ways that are expressive enough to make up for her minimal dialogue.

In the hands of director Julie Dash and photographer Arthur Jafa, this nonlinear film becomes visual poetry, a wedding of imagery and rhythm that connects oral tradition with the music video. It is an astonishing, vivid portrait not only of a time and place, but of an era's spirit.

Blade Runner 2049, the superb new sequel by Denis Villeneuve (“Arrival”), doesn’t just honor that legacy, but, arguably, surpasses it, with a smart, grimly lyrical script (by Fancher and Michael Green of the top-notch “Logan”); bleakly beautiful cinematography (by Roger Deakins); and an even deeper dive into questions of the soul.

Whether by dint of his source material or his own maturity, the filmmaker has invested the surface sheen with tenderness and emotional depth. It’s no surprise that Julieta is marvelous to look at, but it possesses just as much substance as style.

The power of the film is cumulative, as the filmmaker spins a mesmerizing morality tale from the dross of daily life. In his skillful hands, the ordinary turns out to be anything but.

Intimate, moving and superbly underplayed, Loving is every bit as soft-spoken and subtly implacable as its protagonists. It lives up to its title as a noun and a verb, with elegant, undeniable simplicity.

What becomes clear in the course of the movie is that Jarmusch has constructed his own version of a poem, with recurring images and themes that allow him to delve into the nature of commitment, artistic ambition and how inner life is shaped by the tidal pull of place and history.

You don’t need to be familiar with Assayas’s previous work to enjoy Personal Shopper. It works in two realms: as an engrossing ghost story and a drama that addresses profound matters of life and death.

Aided by co-screenwriter Anthony Frewin, Ellis takes his time in this slow-burning thriller, which often feels more like a character study.

Albert Brooks may be the Woody Allen of the 1980s. His extraordinary first feature, Real Life, demonstrates a potential genius for movie comedy and is animated by a peculiarly fertile and subtle imagination.

Both grimly naturalistic and infused with classical values at their most thoughtfully composed, Land of Mine is epic but deeply intimate; elegant but tough.

It is a triumph for director Ron Howard, underwater photographer Jordan Klein, the writers and even the guy who made Hannah's latex tail (Robert Short). And it's surely the stairway to superstardom for costar John Candy and the lovely leading nyad. Splash, a departure for struggling Disney Studio, is as irresistible as the siren's song. [09 Mar 1984, p.23]

Directed with superb control and insight by Jenkins, Moonlight achieves the near-impossible in film, which is to ground its story and characters in a place and time of granular specificity and simultaneously make them immediately relatable and universal.

This bracing movie...gets off to a spirited start and rarely lets up, sharing with viewers a little-known chapter of history as inspiring as it is intriguing.

In a mesmerizing series of images, encounters and delicate juxtapositions, Cameraperson testifies to a world in which it would be clear to see that we’re all connected, if only we took the time to look at one another with reverence and simply listen.

For Kieslowski, subtlety is a religion. He hints or implies -- anything to keep from laying his cards on the table. With "Blue," you never feel he's shown his whole hand; not even after the game is over.

Kryzstof Kieslowski's White...is a continuing testament to the Polish director's poetic mastery. Like all of Kieslowski's works, White articulates a whole language of sensations, images, ironies and mystery -- often with a minimum of dialogue. But it is no rarefied, abstract exercise. The movie...aches with human dimension.

In this final installment of a glorious trilogy (which includes the films “Blue” and “White”) he has saved his greatest for last.

The Double Life of Veronique is a mesmerizing poetic work composed in an eerie minor key. Its effect on the viewer is subtle but very real. The film takes us completely into its world, and in doing so, it leaves us with the impression that our own world, once we return to it, is far richer and portentous than we had imagined.

Ringing with both ancient wisdom and searing relevance, Fences feels as if it’s been crafted for the ages, and for this very minute.

As a celebration of personal and social history, 20th Century Women takes the audience back. But it also lifts us up on a wave of openhearted emotion and keen intelligence. It bursts with the sad, messy, ungovernable beauty of life.

Handsomely filmed, intelligently written, accented with just a dash of outright hokum, Darkest Hour ends a year already laden with terrific films about the same subject — including the winsome comedy-drama “Their Finest” and Christopher Nolan’s boldly visual interpretive history “Dunkirk” — and ties it up with a big, crowd-pleasing bow.

Superbly shot and accompanied by an alternately angular and lyrical score by Mica Levi, Jackie would have been an exceptionally smart, intriguing movie as an astutely conceived, well-crafted meditation on political mythmaking. In Larraín and Portman’s hands, it becomes something deeper and more emotionally potent.

Oldroyd’s brilliance (and Pugh’s) is to probe this age-old archetype — the Gothic antiheroine, the adulteress — and find pathos and cruelty. It’s also to uncover the complex web of hierarchies — of race and class, as well as gender — that ensnare and empower her.

A brilliant piece of filmic writing, one that bursts with fierce urgency, not just for the long-unresolved history it seeks to confront, but also in its attempt to understand what is happening here, right now.

Weird and wonderful, zigging where it should zag and zagging where it should zig, this wildly imaginative flight of fancy strikes an admirably poised balance between whimsy, screwball comedy, social satire and generous meditation on the foibles and highest aspirations of human nature.

It may not sound like it, but calling this barely 70-minute Swiss stop-motion film “heavy” — as in substantial and almost swollen with feeling — is a true compliment.

Detroit is an audacious, nervy work of art, but it also commemorates history, memorializes the dead and invites reflection on the part of the living. In scale, scope and the space it offers for a long-awaited moral reckoning, it’s nothing less than monumental.

It’s a movie that not only puts human imperfections and incongruities on display, but also revels in them.

An almost sinfully enjoyable movie that both observes and obeys the languid rhythms of a torrid Italian summer.

This is a big movie, about big emotions and ideas, which Rees evokes and explores through an extraordinarily rich tapestry of atmosphere, physical setting, visual detail and sensitive, subtle performances.

City of Ghosts provides a grim reminder of what journalism should look like, and why its stakes are literally life and death.

Although news reports presented police use of rubber bullets and tear gas as justifiable responses to increasingly volatile crowds, Whose Streets? offers a useful alternative view, with citizen journalists capturing what look like unprovoked attacks on demonstrators by law enforcement officers woefully unprepared or unwilling to de-escalate sensitive situations and engage.

A soaring, heart-bursting portrait of a group of intrepid Baltimore high school students guaranteed to bring audiences to their feet — whether out of vicarious triumph, overpowering pure emotion, or simply to pay tribute to the superheroines at the core of its infectiously inspiring story.

The comedy, while unflinchingly honest and prone to bandying about such terms as “intracytoplasmic sperm injection” and “follitropin,” is never really about technology, though. Rather, and to its great credit, it’s always about the people involved.

If the film has an MVP, it’s Bob Odenkirk, who does a splendid and quietly amusing job of playing The Post’s unsung Pentagon Papers hero, assistant managing editor Ben Bagdikian.

Far from lazy, it is a fairly brilliant sendup of comic-book action movies, as well as also being an excellent example of one.

It proves how smarts and style can elevate even the pulpiest material into something shrewd, socially attuned and bracingly observant. Rarely has a movie been so illuminated by a single character simply breaking into a smile, and rarely has a smile been so unequivocally earned.

A great picture, 113 minutes of stirring stuff, set to the ironic lilt of Jean "Toots" Thielemans's harmonica and Harry Nilsson's theme tune, "Everybody's Talkin'."

Platoon is a triumph for Oliver Stone, a film in which a visceral approach to violence, which has always set him apart, is balanced by classical symmetries and a kind of elegiac distance. This is not the Vietnam of op-ed writers, rabble-rousers or esthetic visionaries, not Vietnam-as-metaphor or Vietnam-the-way-it-should-have-been. It is a movie about Vietnam as it was, alive with authenticity, seen through the eyes of a master filmmaker who lost his innocence there.

My Left Foot is gloriously exultant and hilariously unexpected...Sheridan and his great young star have universalized their broken hero.