A major technical accomplishment. But it’s also a major feat of storytelling, one that mentions no dates, place names or famous battles, yet nevertheless manages to evoke a profound sense of connection with its nameless subjects.

Amazing Grace can now be seen in all its aesthetic, spiritual and historical glory. And even more gratifyingly, it is as simple and unaffected as Aretha Franklin herself is in the film.

It is icon, uplift, art of the future, nostalgia, psychedelic journey, Americana, technological triumph, classic.

The title of Never Look Away is deliciously ironic: This is one of the most mesmerizing, compulsively watchable films in theaters right now.

Funny, provocative and chilling, Cold Case Hammarskjold draws the viewer into that helix and manages to be improbably entertaining, even as it becomes increasingly, shockingly uncomfortable. It’s impossible to emerge from this film without being shaken to your core. Mission accomplished: Mind blown.

The Farewell pays delightful, insightful homage to the facades and pretenses nearly everyone adopts in the name of compassion.

A lyrical, visually stunning tone poem to loss, lies, reclamation and making peace with the past, The Last Black Man in San Francisco virtually defies conventional description. To see it is to believe it, even when it doesn’t strictly make sense.

Filmed with extraordinary attention to environmental detail and revealing human interactions, American Factory is that rare documentary that’s not only compelling in its content but a profound sensory pleasure.

Nomadland is the kind of big and big-hearted movie — featuring a central performance at once epic and fine-tuned — that reminds you of how much life one film can hold, when circumstances allow.

This is one of the most exciting breakout films of the year, introducing Attanasio as a vibrant new voice in American cinema. More, please.

To its great credit, the movie turns left when you expect it to turn right, taking a route that is less well traveled, yet more plausible.

Directed by John Ford, The Searchers is widely recognized not only as the greatest American Western but as one of the best Hollywood films of all-time.

It’s rare that a documentary has the ability to take the kind of long view of events that establishes context and consequence.

Who should have access to an artist’s legacy? That’s only one of many good questions that are raised in this mesmerizing exercise in artistic interrogation.

As visually stunning as it is, though, the film's most enduring gift is the simplicity and sensitivity with which it was made by Truffaut. [19 Dec 2008, p.WE29]

As a portrait, Pain and Glory is less a mirror than an impressionistic painting. It’s an emotional rendering of a person, not a literal one.

With Parasite, Bong’s finest work to date, the 50-year-old director clearly articulates a throughline that has been present in all his previous work: there’s no war but the class war.

Fans of the director may be a little mystified by what at first seems like something of a commercial sellout, by a director known for more challenging material. And indeed, The Whistlers has more than enough sex and violence to satisfy the average action movie fan. But dig a bit deeper, and you’ll find a mother lode of meaning just below the surface.

If ever a match were made in cine-literary heaven it would be Charles Dickens and Armando Iannucci, each a master of probing social criticism, slashing wit and floridly besotted love of language.

In an era that seems fatally mired in fear, anger and mistrust, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood arrives as something more than a movie. It feels like an answered prayer.

Even at their most disturbing, Brian De Palma's films have always seemed like brilliant abstractions, sinister theorems from a bloody virtuoso. But Casualties of War, the director's rigorous, unflinching, masterly new film, is something else altogether. It is a film of great emotional power and great seriousness in which all of the filmmaker's talents and interests are in balance. It is a breakthrough work, a signal of an artist's blossoming maturity, and one of the most punishing, morally complex movies about men at war ever made.

This is a “just see it” movie, as in: Forget flowery language, redundant synopsis, clever paraphrasing or hyperbolic praise. Just see the dang thing.

We might go into a Kelly Reichardt movie thinking we’ll be told a story, but we emerge with our consciousness subtly and radically altered.

Waves is as exhilarating and terrifying as the roller-coaster ride of adolescence itself, plunging viewers into a world brimming with music and color and movement and hair-trigger reflexes that feels exterior and interior at the same time.

Rashomon has had such a profound cultural influence that there is even a psychosociological phenomenon named after it.

Fayyad — who directed a team of cinematographers remotely when he was prevented from entering Ghouta himself — films The Cave with a grace and compositional sensitivity all the more impressive for being achieved under the most difficult circumstances.

Binge-watching the first eight installments before you settle into this one isn’t strictly necessary, but I wouldn’t discourage it, either. They’re that good.

The latest in an impressive string of first-rate movies for kids.