The 100 Best Movies of the 2020s (So Far)

“Megalopolis” (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 2024)

As personal and egoless as you could ever hope to expect from an $120 million self-portrait that doubles as a fable about the fall of Ancient Rome, Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis” is the story of an ingenious eccentric who dares to stake his fortune on a more optimistic vision for the future — not because he thinks he can single-handedly bring that vision to bear, but rather because history has taught him that questioning a civilization’s present condition is the only reliable hope for preventing its ruin. Needless to say, the movie didn’t arrive a minute too soon. 

After more than 40 years of idly fantasizing about the project (and more than 20 years of actively trying to finance it), Coppola brought “Megalopolis” to screens at a moment when his chosen medium was — and continues to be — struggling to find a way forward, and the world around it seems teetering on the brink of collapse. Just as in 63 B.C., when an evil patrician named Catiline appealed to a coalition of malcontents in a bid to overthrow the Republic, we are choked by the grip of delusional aristocrats and vertically integrated conglomerates whose lust for power and profit is only matched by their lack of foresight. Even with the past as our guide, we are at imminent risk of allowing the now to destroy the forever. 

“Megalopolis” was labeled a folly long before its “what the fuck was that?” Cannes premiere and disastrous theatrical run, but the constant madness of its folly — and the occasional disaster of its design — serve as conduits for its writer/director/producer/financier’s entire creative ethos. Coppola might lack the imagination required to invent the new cinema that his new movie so desperately wishes it could will into being, but he’s always seen the need for it better and more urgently than any of his contemporaries.

With “Megalopolis,” he crams 85 years worth of artistic reverence and romantic love into a clunky, garish, and transcendently sincere manifesto about the role of an artist at the end of an empire. It doesn’t just speak to Coppola’s philosophy, it embodies it to its bones. To quote one of the sharper non-sequiturs from a script that’s swimming in them: “When we leap into the unknown, we prove that we are free.” —DE

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“Close Your Eyes” (dir. Victor Erice, 2023)

Spanish filmmaker Victor Erice has only made three films since debuting with his extraordinary “The Spirit of the Beehive” in 1973, and while all of them have argued for — and served to remind audiences of — cinema’s unique power as a medium, none have done so more powerfully or more plaintively than “Close Your Eyes.” Erice’s latest stunner tells the story of a retired director who becomes re-obsessed with the unfinished movie that ruined his career, and determines to solve the mystery of why his lead actor disappeared in the middle of the shoot. From that simple premise Erice unravels the most nakedly personal film he’s ever made. At times, it feels like the only film he’s ever made. Or maybe all of them at once. 

Sedate but ultimately shattering by dint of its simplicity (and its absolute slam-dunk of a final scene), “Close Your Eyes” is neither an autobiographical cine-memoir à la “The Fabelmans” nor a teary-eyed tribute to the magic of the movies in the vein of “Cinema Paradiso.” Yet, as if by accident and divine purpose all at once, it also manages to become both of those things by the end. Set at the dawn of the streaming age and shot with the funereal sterility that came with it, “Close Your Eyes” openly laments the loss of a more tactile film experience (the kind that included actual film), but only so that it can honor the way certain images take root inside us when seen under the right circumstances.

As he nears the end of a career that has always been fascinated by the liminal space between artifice and reality, however, Erice is somehow able to fulfill cinema’s miraculous promise as a vehicle of eternal return; as a magic trick capable of keeping the past alive long after it’s already died within us. The movies are real, “Close Your Eyes” insists with the intensity of an old master seizing what might be his last chance to say it. How much of ourselves will we lose if we forget how to project them properly? —DE

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“On Becoming a Guinea Fowl” (dir. Rungano Nyoni, 2024)

Rungano Nyoni’s lucid and incandescently furious “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl” is a stiff middle finger to wishful thinking. Set in a middle-class Zambian suburb that’s located at a well-trafficked but poorly maintained intersection between global influences and Bemba mores, the “I Am Not a Witch” filmmaker’s second feature tells the story of a Westernized young woman who’s forced to hold her extended family tree together by its roots during a crisis that leaves her wanting to rip the whole thing out of the earth with her bare hands.

There are moments of beauty and resilience to be found amid the buried pain she uncovers along the way, but don’t be fooled by the heroine’s Zoom meetings with her British co-workers or her sad penchant for American life hack podcasts: The future might not have all the answers, but it’s the past that she won’t be able to forgive. Which leads us to another fascinating way that Nyoni manages to subvert one of recent cinema’s most calcified sub-genres: The protagonist’s family may be her greatest connection to her cultural memory, but their eagerness to forgive the past ultimately requires them to forget it. —DE

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“Babylon” (dir. Damien Chazelle, 2022)

A dorky Caligulan ode to the early days of Hollywood, Damien Chazelle’s sprawling “Babylon” may begin in 1926, but the movie is soon burdened with a clairvoyance that allows it to become unstuck in time. Several of the epic’s characters are haunted by glimpses of a future they’re powerless to prevent, a curse that its director brings to bear by drawing inspiration from across the entire spectrum of film history.

Burdened with the knowledge that this $80 million studio project could be the last of its kind, “Babylon” refracts Hollywood’s first major identity crisis through the prism of its latest one. It reminds us the movies have been dying for more than 100 years, and then — through its heart-bursting, endearingly galaxy-brained prayer of a finale — interprets that as uplifting proof they’ll actually live forever. It doesn’t have any idea how the movies will do it, or where the hell they might go from here, but its mad conviction is strong enough make us share in that belief. —DE

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“Misericordia” (dir. Alain Guiraudie, 2024)

Alain Guiraudie‘s extraordinary and wonderfully twisted queer noir begins on a long, snaking, winding drive and ends with a man and a woman, who are unrelated and unmarried, in bed, and a light turned out. With “Misericordia,” the director of “Stranger by the Lake” and “Staying Vertical” reunites with cinematographer Claire Mathon (“Portrait of a Lady on Fire”) for a bleakly funny tragicomedy about the unavoidability of our desires and their destructive power. The story of a man named Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) who travels to small-town France in order to pay his respects to his newly deceased old boss, “Misericordia” watches from a smirking remove as its protagonist begins to tug at the knotted psychosexual dynamics he shares with the dead man’s widow (Catherine Trot) and her oafish bruiser of a son. 

Through all of its twists and turns, the film confirms Guiraudie as our keenest, canniest director to bring male longing and its fallouts and physical particulars back to movie screens. This masterful film doesn’t represent quite the shock “Stranger by the Lake” was for many — with unsimulated sex scenes and a marrying of queer love to criminality — but there’s something cozy about “Misericordia” that, even in its most profane moments, leaves you with a knowing grin shared by the movie itself. —RL

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“Dune: Part Two” (dir. Denis Villeneuve, 2024)

With “Dune: Part One” Denis Villeneuve accomplished a seemingly impossible task that had even evaded David Lynch: turn Frank Herbert’s sandy, esoteric sci-fi mythology into mainstream blockbuster cinema without sacrificing what made it unique. But the second part of his adaptation posed an even harder challenge. The first “Dune” film largely followed the beats of a traditional sci-fi film, portraying a young hero (Timothee Chalamet’s Paul Atreides) who gradually comes to accept his destiny. Faithful readers know that the series ultimately takes the character in a far different direction, and “Dune: Part Two” had to begin sewing the seeds of the evil that emerges at the intersection of religious fanaticism and charismatic leaders.

With “Part Two,” Villeneuve delivered a murkier, morally grayer sequel that took a deep dive into constant sacrificing of pawns and knights that’s required to consolidate and maintain power. In the larger canon of cinema history, the film might always be reduced to its incredible sandworm riding sequence — undeniably the most impressive spectacle that the series has captured to date — but its biggest achievement is the way that Villeneuve and co-writer Spaihts make the backroom political and religious dealings seem even more riveting. —CZ

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“The Iron Claw” (dir. Sean Durkin, 2023)

A true-life American tragedy that leverages the summery Texas idyll of “Dazed & Confused” into a larger than life — but heartbreakingly sincere — re-telling of “King Lear,” “The Iron Claw” is a wrestling epic inspired by a legend so sad that writer-director Sean Durkin felt like he had to sand it down in order for it to seem believable on screen. Inverting the fake it so real ethos of a sport that’s long been enjoyed as a form of steroidal theater (its operatic melodrama sustained by the exaggerated nature of its spectacle and vice-versa), Durkin’s film dials back the body count so that the scale of its loss doesn’t make it impossible for audiences to accept that it actually happened, or to exalt in the love that it ultimately left behind. 

Scholars of wrestling’s pre-WWF history might see “The Iron Claw” as an act of erasure, but Durkin’s choice to streamline the Von Erich family saga befits the ecstasy of a sport where the line between truth and fiction is body-slammed from the top rope a dozen times every match. It certainly plays into the powerful kayfabe of a movie about four brothers — there were five in real life, or six if you really want to pour salt in the wound — whose father conditioned them to be so focused on winning that they couldn’t see how he rigged their biggest fights against them. 

Besides, just as a “fake” wrestling punch could probably knock you unconscious, even this “watered down” story about the curse that Fritz Von Erich passed down to his sons like a self-fulfilling prophecy is still powerful enough to pile-drive you with the force of a WWE World Champion. You can call it “‘The Virgin Suicides’ for boys,” you can call it “Louisa May Alcott’s ‘Little He-Men,’” you can even call it an insult to Chris Von Erich’s memory if you want. However you choose to think of it, “The Iron Claw” deserves at least one title that simply cannot be contested: This is one of the heavyweight tear-jerkers of the decade. —DE

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“Evil Does Not Exist” (dir. Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, 2023)

“Evil Does Not Exist” would have been a bold statement for someone to make in the year 2024, but — as it turns out in Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s eerie and elusive ecological tone poem about man, nature, and man’s nature — the statement is not necessarily something the Japanese filmmaker believes. At first, this gently lilting film even seems like a call for compassion; set in a bucolic village on the outskirts of Tokyo it centers on how the village’s inhabitants tangle with a corporation trying to set up a glamping site in their forest, only for the two opposing sides to eventually find common ground. But that entente proves a foil for a much darker twist Hamaguchi pulls in the film’s last act.

“Evil Does Not Exist” is a slow-moving film with little in the way of epiphanies or answers. Hamaguchi’s reverence for nature is reflected in his unhurried views of the village’s flora and fauna, and in the plaintive tones of Eiko Ishibashi’s jazz-inflected score — which, like the film itself, is prone to shockingly unexpected paroxysms of violence. In this case, they convey the underlying dissonance of our world with a clarity that leaves the film’s peaceful surface of fir trees and council meetings feeling like a sinister cover-up. —RL

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“The Settlers” (dir. Felipe Galvez, 2023)

Chile, 1893. A wealthy landowner who’s bought up most of Tierra del Fuego recruits the Scotsman who manages his security to exterminate the Indigenous Selk’nam people on his land. The Scot only wants one man to accompany him, a mixed-race mestizo of Indigenous descent who’s barely out of his teenage years, but the landowner insists that MacLennan also take along a wily Texan with a strong drawl and a big rep. 

So begins one of the most chilling art-Westerns to come along in some time, as provocative for its ideas, dialogue, and characterizations, as for the beauty of its empty landscapes. Felipe Galvez’s “The Settlers” may remind some viewers of a Budd Boetticher film when they’re watching it: following three men on horseback on a cross-country journey, it dramatizes questions of identity and belonging, and how these things can be written in violence. Most Boetticher-like, in a tight 98 minutes “The Settlers” says more than a lot of films double its length. It’s also a deeply felt work of activism with a message that needs to be heard in Chile. Just as nothing about the Pinochet coup in 1973 or the resulting dictatorship is taught in Chilean schools today, so is nothing about the genocide of the Selk’nam, a culture that is considered extinct, with only one living person today able to speak their language. This is a film that shows that, as easy as it is to forget about the past, it’s easier still when it was never taught in the first place. —CB

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“The Substance” (dir. Coralie Fargeat, 2024)

An immensely, unstoppably, ecstatically demented fairy tale about female self-hatred, Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance” will stop at nothing — and we mean nothing — to explode the ruthless beauty standards that society has inflicted upon women for thousands of years, a burden this camp-adjacent instant classic aspires to cast off with some of the most spectacularly disgusting body horror this side of “The Fly.”

If the “Revenge” director’s immaculately crafted debut tried to dismantle male toxicity with a shotgun blast square to the balls, Fargeat’s riotous follow-up turns that same attention inwards, allowing her to take aim at both the pointlessness she’s been conditioned to feel as a forty-something woman, and also at the resentment she’s been conditioned to feel toward her younger self. Squelching with fury at how a woman’s “fuckability’”is used as the ultimate measure of her worth, the result of Fargeat’s mad experiment is equal parts “Freaky Friday,” “All About Eve,” and Andrzej Żuławski’s “Possession” — simple enough for a child to understand, but gross enough to make squeamish adults spew out their lunch. Those with the stomach to stick it out were rewarded with the most sickly entertaining theatrical experience of the decade, one carried by the kind of go-for-broke performance that Hollywood stars only tend to give after they reach a certain age and start running out of options. —DE

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“The Secret Agent” (dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2025)

In his 2023 essay film “Pictures of Ghosts,” a haunted cine-memoir that uses Recife’s once-glorious movie palaces as a lens through which to examine — and to mourn — the cultural amnesia of a country so determined to forget itself, Brazilian auteur Kleber Mendonça Filho somewhat counterintuitively observes that “Fiction films are the best documentaries.” If Mendonça had to make a documentary in order to illustrate that idea, the sober but gripping thriller that it inspired him to shoot next proves the point with gusto.

The focused but sprawling story of a wanted man named Marcelo (Wagner Moura) who travels to Recife in the hopes of collecting his son and escaping the country, the director’s 1977-set period piece is absolutely teeming with the music, color, and style of the “Brazilian Miracle” that marked the height of the country’s military dictatorship. Far from the high-octane spy picture that might be suggested by its title (a title that’s easy to imagine written in giant letters across the marquee of Recife’s São Luiz Cinema), “The Secret Agent” only bumps into espionage tropes as if by accident, and its protagonist seems to be as confused by them as we are. On the contrary, Mendonça’s movie operates at the pace and tenor of a drama in exile, albeit one that’s fringed with B-movie fun and stalked by a pair of unscrupulous hitmen.

“The Secret Agent” is ultimately a tale of “mischief” more than anything else. That’s the word Mendonça uses to identify the time period in the film’s opening title card, and it accurately sets the scene for a story less rooted in the terror of Walter Salles’ “I’m Still Here” than in the wistful barbarity of Wes Anderson’s “The Grand Budapest Hotel.” The joy it takes in exhuming a semi-erased time allows Mendonça to argue that movies can manufacture a meaningful history of their own — one powerful enough to cut through the erosion of truth, and the official record of a country that might be too ashamed of its own reflection to honestly look itself in the mirror. With “The Secret Agent,” Mendonça exhumes the past as the basis for a purely fictional story, and in doing so articulates how fiction can be even more valuable as a vehicle for truth than it is as a tool for covering it up. —DE

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“Between the Temples” (dir. Nathan Silver, 2024)

There is a lot of joy in the Jewish tradition (most of which stems from the shared recognition that it’s somehow managed to survive), but happiness… well, there’s a feeling that happiness might be for other people. God didn’t choose us for that. If we had happiness, it wouldn’t be happiness. At the same time, however, we can’t help but want all the bliss in the world for our loved ones, even if I fear we might lose our ability to recognize them if they actually managed to find it. 

No film this side of “A Serious Man” has confronted that specific fear as directly as Nathan Silver’s “Between the Temples,” a spiky, hilarious, and thoroughly unorthodox screwball comedy about a grief-stricken cantor (a note-perfect Jason Schwartzman) who loses his voice, only to find that he’s surrounded by a chorus of well-intentioned people who are happy to speak for him — most crucially, his grade school music teacher, Carla (Carol Kane). Its punny title pointing towards the kind of latitude that Ben and Carla are begging for in order to find their bliss, “Between the Temples” ultimately isn’t sure if happiness is viable in the long-term. But in focusing less on the happiness we imagine for other people than on the happiness we get to share with them instead, its characters find enough joy in each other to make being alive feel like its own eternal reward. —DE

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“Poor Things” (dir. Yorgos Lanthimos, 2023)

Emma Stone is a woman who gets to start from scratch in Yorgos Lanthimos’ unbound and astonishing new feature, “Poor Things.” For most of us, life is comprised of knowledge and circumstance that take decades to accumulate until we die.  

For Stone’s Bella Baxter, that process happens in very fast motion, thanks to a reanimating procedure that finds her, once a dead woman floating in a river, now alive again with her unborn child’s brain inside her head. Bella, née Victoria, is a living breathing tabula rasa unfettered by societal pressures, propriety, or niceties. And Stone, in her most brazenly weird performance to date, plays her like a toddler taking its first steps and saying its first words — until by the end of “Poor Things” she’s speaking fluent French and studying anatomy, her eyes and ears full of worldliness.  

Boldly realized with taffy-colored production design, brain-bending sets stuffed with enough easter egg unrealities to fill the most difficult 5,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, and wildly over-the-top Victorian costumes that look as if made by a schizoid seamstress on too many tabs of acid, “Poor Things” is also hysterically funny. Lanthimos makes a sexually graphic picaresque that’s part Terry Gilliam, part Ken Russell, about Bella’s pursuit of pleasure but also her selfhood in a patriarchal world. Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, and Ramy Youssef each provide overwhelmingly hilarious turns as the men in Bella’s life — her ridiculous lover, her creator, and her potential husband, respectively.  

“Poor Things” is the best film of Lanthimos’ career and already feels like an instant classic, mordantly funny, whimsical and wacky, unprecious and unpretentious, filled with so much to adore that to try and parse it all here feels like a pitiful response to the film’s ambitions. It’s proof that whatever weird alchemy Stone and Lanthimos are vibing on after “The Favourite” is the real deal. —RL 

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“Procession” (dir. Robert Greene, 2021)

The self-reflexive cinema of Robert Greene has covered a wide variety of different subjects and styles over the last decade, but his most resonant films — from the séance-like portraiture of “Kate Plays Christine” to the collective historical requiem of “Bisbee ’17” — are bound together by a shared understanding of the camera as a conduit to the past. “Bisbee,” in which an entire Arizona mining town is provoked to re-stage the darkest chapter in its history, offers a particularly harrowing example of how Greene’s lens often functions as a portal of sorts. It’s as if his filmmaking process itself collapses space-time through the re-enactments that it compels, transposing now onto then in a way that leaves the two feeling as inextricable as fact and fiction. It meshes them together into a two-way street, or reveals all the ways in which they already are. In “Procession,” that street is revamped into an escape route.

Here, Greene delivers a(nother) sober, powerful, and even disarmingly playful film that hinges on performance as a kind of therapy. The difference is that the subjects of “Procession” — six middle-aged survivors of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of Catholic priests and clergy in the Midwestern United States — see the camera less as a way to commune with the past than a way to shake loose from the traumatic grip its held on them since they were children. At Greene’s invitation, it becomes a tool to dramatize (and even direct) their memories of abuse in a way that might allow them to physically relocate where the trauma is stored in their brains.

In some ways, Greene’s film evokes Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “After Life,” in which the newly deceased re-enact a favorite memory from their time on Earth in order to live inside of it for all eternity. “Procession” is effectively the negative image of that process, as these men are choosing the most cursed memory from their childhood and re-enacting it in order to escape from it. As one of the survivors puts it, referencing another movie with which all of them are assuredly familiar: “‘Spotlight’ was about trying to get in from the outside. In our film, we’re trying to get out.” It’s not for us to say whether they do here, or will some day in the future, but cinema is a collaborative medium, and watching these men crew for each other is more than just a counterbalance to the Church’s unforgivable betrayal — it’s a beautiful work of art unto itself. —DE

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“Minari” (dir. Lee Isaac Chung, 2020)

Told with the rugged tenderness of a Flannery O’Connor novel but aptly named for a resilient Korean herb that can grow wherever it’s planted, Lee Isaac Chung’s semi-autobiographical “Minari” is a raw and vividly remembered story of two simultaneous assimilations; it’s the story of a family — headed by Steven Yeun’s Jacob — assimilating into a country, but also the story of a man assimilating into his family.

Gentle as the stream that flows through the Arkansas land where Jacob parks his trailer, and yet powerful enough to reverberate for generations to come, Chung’s loving — and immensely lovable — immigrant drama interrogates the American Dream with the hard-edged hope of a family that needs to believe in something before they lose all faith in each other. Jacob is too proud to settle for somebody else’s terms; he’ll do anything to prove that he’s leading his family to the promised land, even if no one else shares his vision of success.

From the opening notes of Emile Mosseri’s ethereal piano score to the way that Monica keeps tugging Jacob back to reality, Chung’s immaculate memory play is always poignantly in flux between shared recollections of the past and conflicting visions of the future. This beautiful film posits family as the ultimate journey, only to explore how difficult it can be to agree on a shared destination. —DE

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“Eephus” (dir. Carson Lund, 2024)

Carson Lund’s directorial debut shares its name with a slow-moving pitch that has largely been forgotten by modern baseball players — and it’s a fitting title for a film that embraces the leisurely pacing of America’s national pastime.

Almost too big to even be considered an ensemble film, “Eephus” plays out like a vast tableau of the way the game has shaped multiple generations of men. Lund introduces us to two dozen players of varying ages and ethnicities spread across the two teams, but none of the individual characters are particularly memorable on their own terms. That’s not an indictment of anyone’s writing or acting, but a reality necessitated by the film’s larger point: These men are only showing us the parts of themselves that they bring to the field, and years of playing baseball together has shaped their little platoon into a coherent social organism with its own language, jokes, and rules of both the spoken and unspoken varieties. That’s why the loss of this specific baseball league on this specific field feels so profoundly tragic to everyone. 

One of the most admirable artistic choices that “Eephus” makes is the decision not to blame anyone for the social decay that it portrays. The field is being destroyed to build a school, not some parking monstrosity or shopping mall owned by an evil corporation. An unbiased observer might even conclude that educating kids is a better use of this land than giving grown men a space to get hammered together. The film’s only villain is the passage of time, and its protagonists are simply facing the unpleasant realization that their era is ending sooner than their lifespans. It’s the fate that awaits most of us in one capacity or another, but nobody wants to think about that. So we play those extra innings in pitch darkness, just to say that we did it. —CZ

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“The Delinquents” (dir. Rodrigo Moreno, 2023)

Arguably the first slow cinema heist movie, Rodrigo Moreno’s dreamy and discursive “The Delinquents” might kick off with one of the most low-key bank robberies anyone has ever attempted, but it’s hard to overstate how thrilling it feels once the thief finally tells us about what he stole. 

A middle-aged employee at a musty Buenos Aires bank that seems to have gotten stuck in the 1970s, Morán (Daniel Eliás) decides to walk out of the vault one day with a few dozen bricks of American cash in his backpack — the exact amount he would have earned before retirement if he worked every day for the next quarter of a century, and he plans to hide the money before doing jail time for his crime. It’s just basic math: For the same payout, Morán could either spend three years in prison, or 25 years at the bank. He doesn’t want to be rich, he just wants to be free. Free from capitalism, free from its lopsided farce of a work-life balance, and free from the strictures of conventional thinking, which don’t just affect our schedules but also how we see the world itself. That might seem a foolish goal in a film less creatively unbound than the one Moreno has made here, but this playful three-hour reverie is so happily unmoored from the expectations of everyday storytelling that it’s tempting to think Morán might not be tilting at windmills after all.  

Short by the standards of some recent Argentinian cinema, but still breezy and unhurried in a way that invites your mind to wander around without being leashed to the usual obligations of plot, “The Delinquents” is less interested in the details (or dramatic consequences) of Morán’s theft than it is in how the very idea behind it begins to remap Román’s entire worldview. The gym bag full of money that he stuffs into his bedroom closet doesn’t provoke his greed so much as his imagination. When we’re first introduced to Morán, he’s determined to escape the rat race in which the first thing people ask each other is invariably some variation on “what do you do for work?,” as if that were the only meaningful way of assessing someone’s value. So much as “The Delinquents” can be strictly defined as a film about anything, it’s a film about the search for a better question. Answers are off the table here, all the way through the movie’s wide, wide, wide open ending, but our frame of reference expands a bit further with every passing scene. —DE

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“Love Life” (dir. Kōji Fukada, 2023)

An enormously poignant melodrama told at the volume of a broken whisper, Kōji Fukada’s “Love Life” represents a major breakthrough for a filmmaker (“A Girl Missing,” “The Real Thing”) who’s found the perfect story for his probing but distant style. In that light, it doesn’t seem incidental that “Love Life” is a story about distance — specifically the distance between people who reach for each other in the wake of a tragedy that strands them far away from themselves.
 
Inspired by the plaintive 1991 Akiko Yano song of the same name (in which the Japanese singer croons, “Whatever the distance between us, nothing can stop me from loving you”), “Love Life” introduces us to a domestic idyll that it disrupts with a deceptive casualness typical of Fukada’s work. The bloom comes off the rose slowly at first, and then all at once in a single moment of everyday awfulness.
 
While “Love Life” has its fair share of sharply written heart-to-hearts, many of its most touching moments (and all of its most telling ones) hinge on a certain kind of emotional geography. It’s the way that Park, once unhoused, begins sleeping in the empty apartment across from Taeko and Jiro once the latter’s parents move out of town. It’s the reflections of sunlight that cut across Jiro’s eye-line from across the courtyard, and the way that Taeko is seen speaking to someone just out of frame as the messiness of her feelings spills over the clear borders we’re supposed to dig around them. –DE

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“Beau Is Afraid” (dir. Ari Aster, 2023)

A sickly picaresque guilt trip that stretches a single Jewish man’s swollen neuroses into a three-hour nightmare so queasy and personal that sitting through it feels like being a guest at your own bris (in a fun way!), Ari Aster’s seriocomic “Beau Is Afraid” may not fit the horror mold as neatly as his “Hereditary” or “Midsommar,” but this unmoored epic about a zeta male’s journey to reunite with his overbearing mother eventually stiffens into what might be the most terrifying film he’s made so far.

Mileage will vary on that score — the scares are typically less oh shit Toni Collette is spidering across the ceiling and more oy gevalt, Joaquin Phoenix’s enormous prosthetic testicles are causing me to squirm under the weight of my own emotional baggage — but anyone who would sooner die for their mom than answer the phone when she calls should probably mix a few Zoloft into their popcorn just to be safe. Those people should brace for a movie that triggers the same cognitive dissonance from the moment it starts, often relying on that friction to propel its plot forward in lieu of dramatic conflict. Most of all, they should brace for a movie they’ll love in an all too familiar way: unconditionally, but with a nagging exasperation over why it feels so hard. —DE

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“Annette” (dir. Leos Carax, 2021)

Before “Annette” dives into 140-odd minutes of moody songs and swooning tragicomic twists, director Leos Carax takes charge. In a grumbling voiceover, he advises his viewers to “hold you breath until the very end of the show.”  It’s exactly the sort of impossible request that makes sense for this mind-blowing musical fantasia: “Annette” doesn’t just take your breath away; it keeps your breath hostage until the credits roll.

Combining the energizing compositions of Sparks with Carax’s ever-enigmatic creativity, “Annette” powers through its expressive rock opera conceit with a propulsive Adam Driver at its center. He sings through virtually every scene as if the world depended on it. And for the purposes of this movie, it does: Carax’s first directorial effort that he didn’t write, “Annette” turns on the peculiar balance of the Sparks’ compositions, Carax’s operatic style, and Driver’s deranged performance as a comedian doomed to fail. Sure, there’s also a wooden baby that sings and the occasional cutaway to a melancholic gorilla, but they all exist to support the larger cause.

As a pure experimental ride expressed entirely through song, “Annette” delivers the same surreal blend of haunting beauty and dry, absurdist humor that Carax brought to “Holy Motors.” At times, it trades that movie’s cosmic mystery for a blunter narrative arc. Sparks has apparently been trying to apply their winsome songwriting talent to film for decades, at one point even plotting with the late Jacques Tati, but their musical bonafides don’t equate to a cogent script. Still, marvel at these flaws and the appeal of “Annette” comes to life: With a story less enthralling than the spectacular way it unfolds, the movie often exists in conflict with itself, and the messiness is its greatest asset as Carax and his musical companions map out the trajectory of a man marred by the exact same condition. —EK

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“We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” (dir. Jane Schoenbrun, 2021)

Jane Schoenbrun understands the internet. The filmmaker behind such projects as “A Self-Induced Hallucination” (a 2018 doc “about the internet”), the tech-tinged “Eyeslicer” series, and the dreamy “collective: unconscious” had always found the space to explore the worldwide web with respect, reverence, and a hearty dose of fear. For their narrative feature debut, Schoenbrun expanded their obsessions to craft an intimate tale about the impact of modern internet culture — one that’s part coming-of-age story, part horror film, and also the greatest argument yet for the beauty that “Creepypasta” can inspire.

Both Schoenbrun and their wonderful star, Anna Cobb bring profound empathy to both the film and Cobb’s Casey. We first meet Casey alone in her attic room, as she stares headlong into a computer screen in which Schoenbrun has tucked their camera. Today, Casey is taking the World’s Fair Challenge. For an internet wonk like her, that’s a big deal, and one she hopes might loop her into a wider internet role-playing world. It’s no wonder Casey would go looking for connection and expression online, there’s certainly not much of it to be found in either her suburban sprawl hometown or her unhappy home, neither of which ever appear to be populated by anyone else. So what’s the challenge? Just you wait.

Schoenbrun never traffics in easy explanations of what’s happening, and even mentioning that things grow stranger as the film unfolds isn’t precisely true. The circumstances Casey finds herself in are unsettling, but they’re also human: She’s looking for connection, and the potential cost of that quest hovers inside every frame of Schoenbrun’s fascinating feature. Even the more shocking twists of “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” are rooted in reality, both online and off. —KE

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“Titane” (dir. Julia Ducournau, 2021)

Following the cannibalistic “Raw” with another ravenous film that pushes her fascination with the hunger and malleability of human flesh to even further extremes, Julia Ducournau’s Palme d’Or-winning “Titane” made good on the promise of her debut and then some. Whatever you’re willing to take from it (and it feels like the internet has not been especially kind to this movie in the years since its debut), there’s no denying that “Titane” is the work of a demented visionary in full command of her wild mind; a shimmering aria of fire and metal that introduces itself as the psychopathic lovechild of David Cronenberg’s “Crash” and Shinya Tsukamoto’s “Tetsuo: The Iron Man” before shapeshifting into a modern fable about how badly people just need someone to take care of them and vice-versa.

During the first half of the film, it’s hard to tell if you’re watching the most fucked up movie ever made about the idea of found family, or the sweetest movie ever made about a serial killer who has sex with a car, poses as the adult version of a local boy who went missing a decade earlier, and then promptly moves in with the kid’s still-grieving father. During the second half, it becomes obvious that it’s both — that somehow it couldn’t be one without the other. —DE

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“Dick Johnson Is Dead” (dir. Kirsten Johnson, 2020)

Dick Johnson dies many times in his daughter Kirsten’s poignant and personal documentary, starting with the opening credits. But of course he’s alive the whole time, playacting through an elaborate form of cinematic therapy with his filmmaker offspring as she wrestles with the anxiety of losing him. That concept could easily devolve into a navel-gazing exercise, but Kirsten Johnson (the veteran nonfiction cinematographer who directed 2016’s wondrous collage film “Cameraperson”) enacts a touching and funny meditation on embracing life and fearing death at the same time. Oscillating from intimate father-daughter exchanges to surreal meta-fictional tangents, the movie lives within its riveting paradox, reflecting the queasy uncertainty surrounding its subject’s fate — and, by extension, everyone’s. Alternately hilarious, moving, and revelatory, “Dick Johnson Is Dead” manages to commune with a universal fear of death by transforming it into a celebration of life. —EK

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“Sorry, Baby” (dir. Eva Victor, 2025)

Let’s hear it for concise loglines. Consider the first film from Eva Victor, comedian and social media star, who makes an absolutely major debut with her “Sorry, Baby.” Per official press materials and Sundance releases, the film’s synopsis is: “Something bad happened to Agnes. But life goes on… for everyone around her, at least.” Both simple and secretive, hinting at drama and revelations, and promising to root us firmly in Agnes’ world.

That’s certainly all true of “Sorry, Baby,” but no quick hit of words could ever accurately convey the power and potency of Victor’s debut, a darkly funny and enormously tender film that, yes, is about what happens after the worst occurs, but with plenty of room to weave the light next to the dark. Something bad happens to Agnes, but Victor is a wise enough creator to understand that’s only part of the story, because that’s only part of life itself. And while Victor’s film might be rooted specifically in Agnes’ story and the bad thing at its center, in its specificity, there’s still tremendous room for wider recognition and and revelation. —KE

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“The Brutalist” (dir. Brady Corbet, 2024)

It might seem too easy to observe that Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist” — a 215-minute slab of a film that spans 30 years in the life of Hungarian-Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor László Tóth (Adrien Brody), who flees to America in the hopes of building a better future — has been constructed to embody the aesthetics of its title character. Shot in VistaVision and projected on 300lbs.’ worth of 70mm film stock, Corbet’s epic draws a perfectly self-evident connection between the weight of its raw material and that of the concrete monolith Tóth creates over the course of the story, and the same could be said of its minimalistic framing, its bone-deep aversion to nostalgia, and, most of all, the movie’s efforts to reveal the soul of its subject through the geometry of its design.

But anyone familiar with Corbet’s previous features (“The Childhood of a Leader” and “Vox Lux”) will recognize that the seismic and shuddering obviousness of his style provides its own point. A deadly serious and fetishistically Euro-centric young auteur who’s fascinated by the cyclical relationship between trauma and culture, Corbet delights in the violent cause-and-effect of the 20th century, which shook the Earth off its axis in a way that invited people to reimagine it in their own image.

Private lives were transmuted into public exteriors until it became impossible to ignore how we shape the world by moving through it, with personal experience revealed to be as inextricable from collective history as artists are from their work, as concrete is from a building, or — to put an even finer point on Corbet’s latest greatest (and least hostile) accomplishment to date — as immigrants are from America. László Tóth is “The Brutalist,” and “The Brutalist” is László Tóth. Both of them are brilliant, broken, and immense. —DE

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“RRR” (dir. S.S. Rajamouli, 2022)

India’s powerhouse film industry is now ubiquitous in the world of cinema, but nothing could have prepared anyone for the rousing success of S.S. Rajamouli’s “RRR” (Rise, Roar, Revolt). The Telugu-language epic follows in the footsteps of Rajamouli’s and Vijayendra Prasad’s collaboration on the “Baahubali” films, packed — truly all but overflowing — with spectacular, outlandish action sequences (in the best way), allusion to the Hindu texts, and hypnotic songs.

N.T. Rama Rao Jr. and Ram Charan play two men who become fierce friends (maybe more, depending how you interpret that one montage) while deeply embroiled in India’s simmering independence struggle in the 1920s. Unbeknownst to Bheem (N. T. Rama Rao Jr.), his new confidante is a double agent, dooming this relationship from the start.

In theory, so much of this film could be over-the-top and cheesy (and arguably is) — the terrible English accents, the visceral and graphic violence, the CGI animals, the dance battle to destroy imperialism — but it’s also encased from start to finish in unrelenting sincerity from the writer, director, and performers. “RRR”s greatest revolution is against the award-bait movie archetype both in India and abroad — a spark that could ignite a whole movement. —PK

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“Eddington” (dir. Ari Aster, 2025)

The first truly modern American Western, or at least the first one that has the nowness required to mention Pop Crave by name, Ari Aster’s “Eddington” is also the first major Hollywood movie that’s been willing to see the COVID pandemic for the hellacious paradigm shift that it was — as the moment when years of technologically engineered polarization tore a forever hole in the social fabric of a country that was already coming apart at the seams.

Few other filmmakers would have the chutzpah required to make a “No Country for Old Men” riff that hinges on mask mandates and the murder of George Floyd, and we should probably all be grateful that none of them have tried. But Aster, who’s exclusively interested in making the kind of films that should be reviewed straight onto a prescription pad, is too beholden to his neuroses for his latest movie to play like a cheap provocation. This time, however, there’s a good chance those are your neuroses, too.

Stemming from a collective sickness to the same degree that “Beau Is Afraid” was born from some very personal trauma, “Eddington” — the tagline for which reads: “Hindsight is 2020” — only wields its what’s the opposite of nostalgia? specificity as a means to an end. It might set the scene with a little “remember how it felt to wait in line outside the pharmacy?” fun, but Aster’s bleakly funny and brilliantly plotted assessment of how fucked we’ve become since then soon leverages those fun memories into a far more probing story about the difficulties of sharing a town between people who live in separate realities. —DE

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“A Thousand and One” (dir. A.V. Rockwell, 2023)

There are two bruising lines that bookend first-time feature director A.V. Rockwell’s “A Thousand and One,” a vivid portrait of Harlem life from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s.

“There’s more to life than fucked-up beginnings,” Inez, a woman living life in New York on her own terms and brilliantly played by R&B super-artist/actress Teyana Taylor, tells her young son Terry (Aaron Kingsley Adetola). She has kidnapped him out of the foster care system, which has kept them separated after her stint in Rikers Island beginning in 1993, and now hopes to give him a better life. But at the end of the movie, after a decades-spanning, bittersweet bond forms and fizzles between them and shattering revelations are had, she tells the older Terry (Josiah Cross), “I fucked up. Life goes on. So what?”

A searing protest against the inhumanity of gentrification in a city whose policies and policing are already so punitive towards poor Black families, “A Thousand and One” serves as a sobering reminder of how fucked-up beginnings can hopefully bring about better endings. Cross is crucial to the success of the film’s unforgettable final scenes, but it’s Taylor who anchors Rockwell’s direction and screenplay with her powerhouse performance. Taylor has worked with the likes of Tyler Perry in comedies, but her turn here — as fiercely committed to the character as Inez is to Terry — signals a major dramatic talent. —RL

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“Pig” (dir. Michael Sarnoski, 2021)

The most resonant films about loss represent a wide variety of genres and modes, and yet they’re all bound together by the shared understanding of a simple truth: Acceptance may be the last stage of grief, but it’s invariably the longest as well. The acceptance of death is neither a respite nor an exit ramp — it’s a purgatory as infinite and layered as the inferno itself, a maze so vast that most people eventually stop looking for a way out and instead start looking for ways to forget that they can’t escape. The story of a man so lost in the labyrinth that he thinks he’s managed to escape it, Michael Sarnoski’s remarkable “Pig” is nothing if not one of those films.

In a sharp pivot away from the maximalism of his usual performances, Nicolas Cage delivers a career-best turn as Robin Chef, a revered Portland chef until personal tragedy inspired him to trade clout for snout and spend the rest of his days as a reclusive truffle forager in the woods at the edge of the city, where he lives with his beloved pig. People who decide to “Walden” themselves away from modern society always appear as though they understand something that the rest of us don’t, and Robin seems to have found a way to rescue meaning from the clutches of loss. Then some meth addicts steal Robin’s pig, the man goes haywire, and it shifts into focus that he hasn’t accepted his wife’s death at all. On the contrary, we realize that Robin found life without her so hard to stomach that he just left it behind and refused to look back. It’s not denial so much as a slightly more extreme version of the way that most people learn to cope long-term. But that’s exactly why this surprisingly gentle and endearingly mythic tale makes for such an essential addition to the rich history of movies about grief: “Pig” doesn’t see acceptance as the end of one road, but rather the beginning of another — a road so long and winding that even its detours might lead you straight through hell and out the other side. —DE

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“Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” (dir. Johan Grimonprez, 2024)

History isn’t fixed. It has a rhythm and a flow that shifts according to who’s telling the story, who’s listening, and the medium via which that story is being told. True consensus is ever elusive, yet documentary filmmaker Johan Grimonprez has built a career on interrogating history in a bid to find truth amidst the chaos wrought by time and bias. With “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat,” a vibrant film essay that marries jazz and politics to unravel colonial machinations of power in the Congo circa 1960, the Belgian director made use of that rhythm to dizzying effect. 

There’s a lot of ground to cover, but in 150 minutes, Grimonprez forges through huge swathes of time and space to chart how the Belgian monarchy, the U.S. government, and various corporations colluded to assassinate Congo’s premiere prime minister, Patrice Lumumba. As it turns out, they mostly did it with jazz. Legendary African-American musicians like Dizzy Gillespie and Nina Simone were sent as decoys to deflect attention from America’s first African post-colonial coup, unbeknownst to the actual artists of course. As the film notes, “America’s secret weapon is a blue note in a minor key,” and in the same New York Times article, Louis Armstrong was quoted as “its most effective ambassador.” Yet music isn’t just a tool for subterfuge. Drummer Max Roach and singer Abbey Lincoln directly drew inspiration from the independence movement in Africa to later crash the Security Council in protest, and “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” effectively does the same thing by using jazz to reframe the history books that Grimonprez and other Belgians grew up reading.

Cutting between home movies, official texts, historical footage, and Lumumba’s speeches (which were once thought lost forever prior to the making of this film), “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” uses an endless rhythm of rumba and jazz to weave this all together. Without any omniscient narration to speak of, the music becomes a character in of itself, connecting all the various media and many different perspectives into one cohesive whole. —DO

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“Yes” (dir. Nadav Lapid, 2025)

Horrified by the country of his birth and heavy with the weight of its sins, Nadav Lapid has created modern cinema’s most splenetic filmography by fighting his Israeliness as if it were an incurable virus infecting his body of work. That trend seems to have reached its apogee with the deliriously provocative “Yes,” a veritable orgy of self-loathing surrender that reaffirms Lapid as the world’s most visceral director on a shot-by-shot basis.

In a movie that unfolds like an Ecstasy-addled cross between Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom” and the Jim Carrey comedy “Yes Man,” Lapid doubles down on the frenzied violence of his filmmaking at the same time as he fully embraces his growing appetite for submission. The story of a struggling jazz musician and his dancer wife who afford a life for their newborn by acquiescing to every demand made of their talent and bodies by Tel Aviv’s militaristic ruling class, Lapid’s film doesn’t rage against the worst monstrousness of the modern age by speaking truth to power, but rather by volunteering his characters to get crushed under the heel of its boot. And then — with a literalness no one else would dare — by forcing them to lick that boot so clean the whole world can see the dehumanizing nature of Israel’s crimes reflected in its leather. Needless to say, the underside of its sole leaves a memorable impression. —DE

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“The World to Come” (dir. Mona Fastvold, 2020)

As coldly drawn as an atlas yet no less capable of enflaming the imagination, Mona Fastvold’s “The World to Come” is a hard and brittle period love story that thaws into something much warmer — what its hyper-literate heroine would call “astonishment and joy” — as a merciless 19th-century winter blushes into a most unexpected spring.

Tuesday, January 1, 1856. Abigail (Katherine Waterston) mourns the daughter who was taken by diphtheria a few months prior, and journals about a world that feels barren in the young girl’s absence. “The water froze on the potatoes as soon as they were washed. With little pride, and less hope, we begin the new year.” And what a new year it will be for the ever-studious Abigail, who dares to remap herself after meeting her new neighbor Tallie (Vanessa Kirby).

Has Tallie been with a woman before? Has any woman been with a woman before? Abigail doesn’t know the answers to these questions, or even how to ask them. All she knows is that the house seems warmer after Tallie’s visits. The swirling winds of Daniel Blumberg’s incredible clarinet score — which can whip into a winter storm at a moment’s notice — grow as warm and soothing as an orange hearth. And a story that opens with the grief-stricken chill of a rustic horror movie starts to pull focus away from its demons, eventually settling into a harsh but unforgettable love story that is sometimes painful to witness, but always transcendent to remember. —DE

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“Red Rocket” (dir. Sean Baker, 2021)

Former porn star Mikey Saber (Simon Rex) might be “blessed,” at least according to the sore underage girl he’s grooming during a post-coital chat in the flatbed of her pickup truck, but the reality of the situation is that the guy is nothing less than a living curse. He’s a big-dicked, self-obsessed, hyper-opportunistic hex of a man whose puppy dog con artist schtick is so transparent that even naive teenagers can see right through it, which is exactly why people lower their guard and let him in. Into their houses; into their panties; into their dreams for the future that Mikey incepts into their heads for his own benefit. And he doesn’t stop trying to weasel his way deeper into any of those things for a single minute of Sean Baker’s utterly singular and weirdly lovable “Red Rocket,” a roman candle of a movie that wonders if America’s pathological narcissism will ever burn itself out.

It begins with the blaring shriek of NSYNC’s ear-piercing masterpiece “Bye Bye Bye” as a black-eyed Mikey suffers through the long bus ride of shame from California to Texas; from the “who am I here to fuck?” hedonism of the San Fernando Valley to the “why the fuck am I here?” industrial wasteland of Refinery Row. But Mikey isn’t leaving anyone behind so much as he’s coming back home with his tail between his legs (the words “red rocket” are never mentioned in the film, but it doesn’t seem coincidental that the phrase is slang for a dog’s erection).

Baker doesn’t beat a similar retreat. Here, the “Florida Project” filmmaker Baker ditches the corporate utopia of Disney World in favor of a more rustic vision of the American Dream, exchanging the ultra-real harshness of his previous films in favor of a 16mm fuzz that combines the velvet touch of early Spielberg with the invasive eroticism of Italian exploitation. But “Red Rocket” becomes such a blisteringly raw and febrile character study because of how things fluctuate along the fixed orbit of its star. There’s only so much bullshit people can take, and some of the women in Mikey’s life aren’t willing to be jerked around anymore. The film may not end with the fairy tale that Mikey promises his latest protégé, but it’s nice to think that some people are still looking out for each other in a world where so many others will never see past the tip of their own dick. —DE

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“Hard Truths” (dir. Mike Leigh, 2024)

In 2008, Mike Leigh made a movie called “Happy-Go-Lucky,” in which Sally Hawkins played a school teacher named Poppy who was so irrepressibly buoyant and upbeat that her joy seemed like a taunting provocation to the discontent of the world around her. Sixteen years later, the filmmaker returned to similar territory with “Hard Truths,” a searing but indivisibly empathetic drama about a British Jamaican woman so wretched that it might as well be called “Misery-Go-Fuck-Yourself.” 

As played by an absolutely titanic Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Pansy might be the single most vituperatively unpleasant character the movies have ever produced. It would be impossible to overstate the raw spectacle of watching Pansy make her way through the world; a spectacle that Leigh exaggerates further by confining the character to a modest little film that’s only a touch bigger than the working class London home she “shares” with her husband Curtley (David Webber) and their stunted 22-year-old son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett). Jean-Baptiste has stressed the importance of telling stories in which Black families aren’t framed in response to external forces, but the call is no less difficult to answer when it’s coming from inside the house. And while Pansy is obviously troubled (by afflictions both explained and not), her loved ones don’t have the heart to treat her like a problem, as doing so would threaten to betray their unspoken pledge to suffer each other in the face of an insufferable world. 

Per its title, “Hard Truths” doesn’t go in for easy fixes, and the film seems to end in much the same place as it starts. But it doesn’t. Not quite. The earth might quake wherever Pansy goes, but the film’s real power is in watching her family hold on to the shared history that she threatens to uproot. “I love you,” Chantelle tells her. “I don’t understand you, but I love you.” It’s a message that Leigh has been trying to convey to his characters for more than 40 years, and one that has seldom been so natural to accept for ourselves. —DE

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“Anatomy of a Fall” (dir. Justine Triet, 2023)

Premiering on the heels of “Saint Omer” and “The Goldman Case,” Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or-winning “Anatomy of a Fall” makes a compelling case that the courthouse has become the most fertile ground in contemporary French cinema, offering incisive auteurs both motive and opportunity to put social structures on trial. As it calls the institution of marriage to the stand, Triet’s piercing film holds the ambient tensions and illogical loose ends of domestic life against the harsh and rational light of a legal system that searches for order in chaos.

Rounding out her own impressive hat trick, “Toni Erdmann” and “The Zone of Interest” star Sandra Hüller dazzles in a role clearly written with the performer in mind. She plays Sandra, a German-born, France-based bisexual novelist accused of killing her male partner in a way eerily foretold by one of her novels. And if that description calls to mind another icy-blond, the echo is both wholly intentional and entirely irrelevant. Indeed, “Anatomy of a Fall” is filled with such anti-portents –coincidences or clues, depending on who you ask, echoes or empty noise, depending on who’s listening.

“Anatomy of a Fall” is never really about the trial that follows; at its searing best, the film tracks the destruction of a family with cold precision. If an artist relies on memories, why not also share nightmares? Why not build a polar vortex that crushes fact under fiction, that lifts from last night’s argument, today’s viewing of a ’90s classic and tomorrow’s worst fears? It’s a cyclone that sends the mind soaring, and primes the heart for a hefty fall. —BC

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“Sinners” (dir. Ryan Coogler, 2025)

A bloody, muscular, barrelhouse of a vampire movie that throbs like the neck of a blues guitar on fire, Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” is the first story the “Creed” director has ripped straight from his own guts. And yet, it thrillingly continues his post-“Fruitvale Station” tradition of filtering real and imagined Black histories through the prism of blockbuster entertainment, and in a way that recognizes genre as a living connection between the past and the future, as opposed to seeing it as a necessary evil of funding his art in the present.

“Sinners” is nothing if not a film about genre, and the distinctly American imperative of cross-pollinating between them to create something that feels new and old — high and low — at the same time. It’s a heartfelt and viscerally well-researched historical drama that introduces the blues as the devil’s music before fighting to reframe it as a kind of fourth-dimensional magic in its own right. It’s also a ridiculous and horny-as-hell creature feature that leverages Coogler’s enduring love for multiplex favorites like “The Faculty,” “The Thing,” and “From Dusk Till Dawn” in order to convey the hope, heartbreak, and humanity of Mississippi sharecroppers in the Jim Crow South. 

“Sinners” is a movie where the fact of the old Delta’s Chinese-American population is affirmed by the fantasy of watching dozens of Black vampires perform a perfect Irish jig, and a movie in which the agonizing push-and-pull between safety and freedom — a tension familiar to any marginalized community — is perhaps best articulated by a shot of Hailee Steinfeld slowly dripping her spit into Michael B. Jordan’s open mouth. Despite being confined to a small handful of hyper-expressive locations (and the awestriking 65mm cotton fields between them), “Sinners” feels like it had to be shot on IMAX cameras just to fit all the different ingredients that Coogler wanted to mix into the stew. The film he’s made from them is inevitably too much at times, and not always in full command of its many competing flavors, but that too muchness is also the greatest strength of a visionary studio product that sticks its fangs deep into an eternal struggle: how to assimilate without losing your soul. —DE

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“Cloud” (dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024)

An action film as only “Cure” and “Pulse” director Kiyoshi Kurosawa would think to make one, “Cloud” leverages the social disaffection at the heart of his analog horror masterpieces into a sterile — but eventually bullet-filled — morality tale about the dehumanizing nature of digital communication. The first hour is a slow accumulation of the petty crimes (and other various insults) that the internet allows people to commit against one another from a distance, and with the benefit of anonymity. The second hour observes what happens when those petty crimes reach a critical mass, and the animus that’s been welling up on social media spills into the real world with the deadly force of a double-barreled shotgun. Not timely at all!

If Kurosawa’s work has long displayed a morbid fascination with the relationship between diffuse psychic distress and localized physical violence, “Cloud” updates the filmmaker’s signature focus for a modern world that’s enmeshed in an infinite (but invisible) network of small cruelties and bitter grievances — a network so ubiquitous that even the better angels of our nature might drive us straight into hell. Almost too mundane to care about until it becomes impossible to stop watching for much the same reason, this riveting and highly unusual shoot-em-up finds Kurosawa returning to his roots, only to discover that psychological terror isn’t quite as abstract as it used to be. —DE

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“Challengers” (dir. Luca Guadagnino, 2024)

A transcendently sweaty tennis love triangle so turned on by the heat of competition that its sex scenes feel like foreplay and its rallies feel like porn, Luca Guadagnino’s “Challengers” is so much more than just the horniest story ever set in New Rochelle, which is where this movie’s three main characters — two archrivals and the beautiful former player between them — all happen to cross paths during the final match of a dingy U.S. Open qualifier that’s sponsored by a local tire store. They’ve been fucking each other on and off the court for more than a decade by the time “Challengers” unleashes its first serve, and yet, despite winning on every level of their chosen sport, these long-limbed athletes have lost their lust for life at some point along the way. At this point, their lust for each other might be the only force on Earth powerful enough to get their heads back in the game. 

That might sound like the set-up for a relatively straightforward — if refreshingly bi-curious — romantic comedy, but “Challengers” is a far cry from “Wimbledon,” and Guadagnino couldn’t give less of a shit about who comes out on top at the end. On the contrary, the “Call Me by Your Name” director was likely turned on by the sensual backspin of Justin Kuritzkes’ script, which subverts the typical stakes of each match in order to focus on the animating thrill of wanting something with every flooded sweat gland on your body. Watching Zendaya’s Tashi Donaldson get exactly that was one of the most thrilling things we’ve seen this decade. —DE

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“The Worst Person in the World” (dir. Joachim Trier, 2021)

For any millennial who ever pratfell in the face of their own indecision-making, “The Worst Person in the World” holds up a grimacing double-sided mirror that flips between a hard-to-stomach, piercing reality check, and a warm, inviting embrace of relatability for the very same reason. Renate Reinsve gives a full-stop stunning breakout performance (that also won her the Best Actress prize at Cannes) as Julie, a tormented approaching-30-something who waffles between busted professional aspirations and ineffectual lovers, with ultimately no one to come home to at the end of the day but herself.  

Joachim Trier’s formally daring latest is an ode to the romantic dramas of yesteryear, when big-hearted movies could encapsulate the crescendos of a love affair without a necessarily political agenda. But “Worst Person” ultimately does have smart things to say about how economic circumstances and being set up on the idea of “following your dreams” (a pipe dream whose consequences we are all now imbibing) dictate the millennial plights of today. Trier ecstatically darts between rom-com, grief drama, and, at one point, tripped-out psychedelic horror movie, meaning his camera is possessed by the same easily distracted and restless spirit as Julie herself. 

While Reinsve is the obvious north star of this wonderful, touching, and wholly unpretentious feature, it must be said that Anders Danielsen Lie gives a heart-crushing performance whose inner core can’t fully be explicated without experiencing the movie for yourself. This is a movie people will return to again and again for comfort for the rest of their days — as itchy and discomfiting as its enveloping offerings can sometimes be. —RL 

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“Descendant” (dir. Margaret Brown, 2022)

How should we remember the dead? It’s an ever-present question for the many Black folks living in Africatown, Alabama, where the last slave ship made landfall, as remembering is what they do best. Their shared memory stretches back to at least 1860 — more than five decades after the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves was signed into law — when two rich white men from Mobile made a bet.

Despite the law, these men believed they could sail to Africa, capture the people they found there, and bring them back as slaves without being caught. They ultimately returned with 100 captives and sank the ship, named the Clotilda, in an effort to destroy any evidence of the grave crime they committed. But people are not so easy to erase.

An unblinking documentary investigation that combines local stories with “Erin Brockovich” flair, Margaret Brown’s imperative “Descendant” is compelled by Africatown’s collective determination to rectify that attempt at erasure. The filmmaker’s 2018 arrival in Africatown coincides with a first-of-its-kind, nationwide partnership to search the waters surrounding Mobile for the wreck of the Clotilda, but her focus extends far beyond the ship. The passionate descendants of those Africans still live in the area, and they’ve been itching not just to find the ship, but to seek justice for its final voyage. Is one possible without the other? Can history be reclaimed without a plank of soggy wood to pin it on? Brown’s lucid and piercing film watches along as the people of Africatown look to their ancestors for answers, their search itself emerging as a revolutionary act. —RD

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“Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning” (dir. Christopher McQuarrie, 2023)

It’s no secret that Tom Cruise cares more about the survival of the movie business — or at least the movie business as he’s known it, and helped to shape in his own image — than anyone else has ever cared about anything else. Sure, we’re talking about a guy who seems to care about everything more than anyone else cares about anything, but the fight against the future has grown increasingly personal for “modern” Hollywood’s signature mega-star, whose first “Mission: Impossible” movie helped transmute him into a living emblem of the movies themselves. What others might see as a content-driven culture war, Cruise naturally regards as an existential threat, and the last few years have seen the actor-producer channel his singularly clenched intensity into a holy crusade against the standard-lowering forces of digital technology.

Anyone who saw “Top Gun: Maverick” knows that Cruise isn’t shy about confronting these concerns on-screen, and since everyone saw (and believed) that Best Picture-nominated mega-hit despite the supposed death of cinema, it stands to reason that Cruise’s next blockbuster — the goofy, romantic, and often transcendently committed “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One” — escalated his beef with the machines to hilariously literal new heights. 

“Mission: Impossible” has always taken place in a shadow world where you can’t believe your own two eyes, and so it feels natural for “Dead Reckoning Part One” to take such direct aim at the clear and present dangers posed by our digital future. By re-re-re-affirming how satisfying practical action setpieces can be, Cruise and returning director Christopher McQuarrie set the stage for a story about why technology shouldn’t be fully entrusted with the things that require a human touch. 

Ridiculous from the start but also strangely fresh for yet another 21st century tentpole about a rogue A.I., “Dead Reckoning Part One” may not be the best movie in the “Mission: Impossible” franchise, but this extravagantly entertaining Dolby soap opera nails what the “Mission: Impossible” franchise does best: Weaponizing artifice and illusion in order to fight for a world that’s still worth believing in. Also, Cruise rides a motorcycle off a cliff and then crash-lands his parachute into a moving train. It rules so hard. —DE

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“Zola” (dir. Janicza Bravo, 2020)

If the evolution of creativity in the 21st century means that Twitter feeds can fuel feature-length adaptations, “Zola” is a terrific place to start. Director Janicza Bravo’s zany road trip comedy about a pair of strippers on a rambunctious 48-hour Florida adventure embodies its ludicrous source while jazzing it up with relentless cinematic beats. Bravo, who co-wrote the movie with “Slave Play” breakout Jeremy O. Harris, applies the surreal and edgy sensibilities of her unsettling dark comic short “Gregory Go Boom” and the similarly outré “Lemon” to another jittery look at anxious people driven to self-destructive extremes. Here, their antics result in a rambunctious crowdpleaser made all the more compelling because it’s true.

Well, maybe. In October 2015, Detroit-based stripper A’ziah “Zola” King unleashed 144 tweets chronicling her madcap journey with new pal Jessica, who invited her on a quick jaunt down south to hit the clubs. In King’s account, the impulsive odyssey took an oddball turn when Jessica picked her up with her boyfriend and pimp in tow, as the ensuing trip eventually involved prostitution, gunfights, and even a ridiculous suicide attempt. Though aspects of that drama were embellished, “Zola” embraces the opportunity to exist within their confines, beginning with its title character (a terrific Taylour Paige) gazing at a mirror as she recites the immortal tweet that kicked things off: “You wanna hear a story about why me & this bitch here fell out? It’s kind of long but full of suspense.” And so it is. —EK

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“All We Imagine as Light” (dir. Payal Kapadia, 2024)

The intimate way that women move through a city sprawl gives Payal Kapadia’s drama about two nurses in Mumbai a deeply romantic gauze. This romance has to do with the way that people occupy their space in this world, whether alone or sharing it with others. The younger nurse Anu (Divya Prabha) comes in from the rain and, although she is giving her roommate Prabha (Kani Kusruti) the silent treatment after an earlier insult, she is still comfortable stripping her top off in front of her, in order to change into something dry. All the while Prabha is trying to make good, saying that she has made Anu’s favorite dish.

This casual everyday vignette is brimming with a sensuality (the rain, the clothes, the food, the women) that people don’t tend to notice when caught up in the rhythm of life. Kapadia shows it to us. She focuses our attention on the tiniest details while interweaving a tight meshwork of stories about love and loneliness. Discrete episodes resonate with quietly infinite multitudes. 

Consider the secret rendezvous between Anu and her Muslim boyfriend. Rather than showing overt scenes of the Hindu nationalism that India’s Prime Minister Modi has proudly brought to the mainstream, Kapadia lets its impact play out impressionistically via the furtive way that her star-crossed lovers meet. First and foremost, a master of image creation, she uses this secrecy as an opportunity to mount a compelling dialogue-free sequence of love hiding in plain sight. A busy traffic intersection is filmed with the long lens of a private detective. We see Anu first then glimpse a figure walking through the bustle until he — Shiaz! — is holding her hand. Without acknowledging each other, they keep walking together, touching but not speaking, until they are a safe distance from the hospital. In this scene, and others, Kapadia rescues her characters from the thrum of city life and invites us to co-exist with them in their dreams. —SMK

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“Passages” (dir. Ira Sachs, 2023)

Not long into Ira Sachs’ “Passages” — sometime all too shortly after a restless, self-involved filmmaker (Franz Rogowski) leaves his much softer husband (Ben Whishaw) for the earthy and new woman (Adèle Exarchopoulos) he meets at a dance club after a stressful day of shooting — Tomas launches into a post-coital chat by telling Agathe that he’s fallen in love with her. “I bet you say that a lot,” she replies, bluntly sniffing out his bullshit in a way that suggests this Parisian school teacher doesn’t understand how far most artists would go to convince their audience of an emotional truth. “I say it when I mean it,” Tomas counters. “You say it when it works for you,” Agathe volleys back. They’re both right, but that’s not the problem. The problem is that they’re saying exactly the same thing.
 
A signature new drama from a director whose best work (“Keep the Lights On,” “Love Is Strange”) is at once both generously tender in its brutality and unsparingly brutal in its tenderness, the raw and resonant “Passages” is the kind of fuck around and find out love triangle that rings true because we aspire to its sexier moments but see ourselves in its most selfish ones. –DE

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“Return to Seoul” (dir. Davy Chou, 2022)

Few movies have ever been more perfectly in tune with their protagonists than Davy Chou’s jagged, restless, and rivetingly unpredictable “Return to Seoul,” a shark-like adoption drama that its 25-year-old heroine wears like an extra layer of skin or sharp cartilage. The film spans eight years over the course of two hours, but you can feel its bristly texture and self-possessed violence from the disorienting first scenes.

Played by plastic artist and first-time actress Park Ji-Min (who gives a towering performance worthy of the same attention that Cate Blanchett and Michelle Yeoh will receive for their work this fall), the French-raised Freddie arrives in Seoul without context, which leaves us the fool’s errand of trying to “solve” her identity over a few too many glasses of soju with her new friends.

Some clues are easier to decipher than others. While Freddie may have been born in the country — and carry what some of her drinking buddies agree is “a typical Korean face” from “ancient, ancestral” times — it’s clear that this is her first trip back since she was adopted as a child, and that she neither thinks of it as home nor speaks a word of the native tongue. Less obvious is the agenda behind Freddie’s sudden return. Her flagrant disregard for local customs suggests that she isn’t there to get in touch with her roots, and when someone suggests that she contact the local adoption agency, Freddie doesn’t just change the subject, she completely transforms the energy of the film itself. 

Like Freddie, Chou’s drama is vulnerable and dauntless all at once. Lovable and hostile. Earnest and absurd. It’s the rare movie that can drop a long-take dance sequence into the middle of a pressing conversation without seeming the least bit mannered or aloof; the rare movie that only feels more honest as a result of its most flamboyant choices, and only makes its heroine more empathetic as a result of how she pushes other people away. That “Return to Seoul” ends on a note as wracked and ambivalent as the ones that crescendo towards it might frustrate anyone still waiting for a cleaner sense of catharsis, but Chou’s plaintive coda feels like a resoundingly true finale to the story of a woman who’s driving forwards in reverse, and won’t know where she wants to go until she can see the full view of who she’s always been. —DE

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“Petite Maman” (dir. Céline Sciamma, 2021)

Dreamed up during quarantine, limited to a small clutch of studio sets and autumnal exteriors (including a the same woods in which Céline Sciamma played as a child), and running just 72 minutes, “Petite Maman” is a far cry from the kind of blank check that we’ve been conditioned to expect from someone hot off a popular favorite like “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” and viewers who were expecting to have the wind knocked out of them by the same kind of emotional gut-punch might have been disappointed by a story that peaks with two slaphappy kids making pancakes.

But the joys of this lightly magical-realist story are boundless. It begins with eight-year-old Nelly (Joséphine Sanz) sitting in the backseat of her mother’s car outside of the nursing home where her beloved grandmother has just died, and watching through the window as her young parents (Nina Meurisse and Stéphane Varupenne) share a tender embrace. She wonders what they mean to each other, and what it feels like to lose someone forever, and whether her mother ever sat alone in a car on a gray fall afternoon and watched as her mother was consoled over her mother’s death. Nelly understands that her mom didn’t become 31 without being eight along the way, but why is that so hard to imagine? It’s like looking at a bird and trying to picture when it was a dinosaur.

Nelly doesn’t breathe a word of this, but she doesn’t have to; we’ve only known the girl for a few short minutes, and yet the screen between us has already melted away as if we’re sharing in her experience first-hand. This is at least part of what Sciamma does better than just about every other writer-director working today. Her characters open like pores soaked in hot water, and the hyper-real worlds around them reveal themselves with such an acute sense of discovery that even the most everyday moments assume a life-altering charge. In her hands, 72 minutes is enough to contain several lifetimes. —DE

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“Oppenheimer” (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2023)

At first it seemed that if J. Robert Oppenheimer didn’t exist, Christopher Nolan would probably have been compelled to invent him. The exalted British filmmaker has long been fixated upon stories of haunted and potentially self-destructive men who sift through the source code of space-time in a desperate bid to understand the meaning of their own actions, and so the “father of the atomic bomb” — a theoretical physicist whose obsession with a twilight world hidden inside our own led to the birth of the modern age’s most biblical horrors — would seem to represent an uncannily perfect subject for the “Tenet” director’s next epic. And he is. In fact, Oppenheimer is so perversely well-suited to the Nolan treatment that I soon began to realize I had things backwards: Christopher Nolan only exists because men like J. Robert Oppenheimer invented him first.
 
Which isn’t to overstate the degree to which Nolan’s first biopic feels like some kind of grandiose self-portrait (even if the Manhattan Project sequences can seem broadly analogous to the filmmaking process, as large swaths of “Inception” and “The Prestige” did before them), nor to suggest that the director sees himself in the same regard as the man he describes in the “Oppenheimer” press notes as “the most important person who ever lived.” It’s also not to glibly conflate one of the most controversial figures of the 20th century with one of the most controversial figures on the r/Movies subreddit, even if the industry-changing success of “Batman Begins” surely inspired a “now I am become death” moment of Nolan’s very own.
 
Paced like it was designed for interstellar travel, scripted with a degree of density that scientists once thought purely theoretical in nature, and shot with such large-format bombast that repetitive scenes (or at least Nolan-esque slices) of old politicians yelling at each other about expired security clearances hit with the same visceral impact as the 747 explosion in “Tenet,” “Oppenheimer” is nothing if not a biopic as only Christopher Nolan could make one. Indeed, it would seem like the ideal vehicle for Nolan’s career-long exploration into the black holes of the human condition — the last riddles of a terrifyingly understandable world. –DE

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“April” (dir. Dea Kulumbegashvili, 2024)

There isn’t a horror director alive who wouldn’t kill to create frames as tense, ominous, and viscerally captivating as those of Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili, who applies her talents toward elemental character studies about rural women suffering under the yoke of patriarchy at the foot of the Caucasus Mountains. 

Her debut feature, 2020’s masterful “Beginning,” tells the story of a disillusioned Jehovah’s Witness who starts to unravel after her church is firebombed by extremists in the very first shot, a static tableau held for several minutes before its Haneke-like remove is shattered with a molotov cocktail. Kulumbegashvili’s even more accomplished and terrifying follow-up “April” — which concerns a hospital obstetrician (Ia Sukhitashvili as Nina) whose career is put at risk when a rare stillbirth threatens to expose her unsanctioned night job as an abortion provider — requires even less time to crush your entire being in its brace. It opens on the sight of a faceless (but visibly female) skin monster slouching through a void as Matthew Herbert’s asynchronous score breathes down your neck, and it only grows more arresting from there in a film where life and death are braided together in the tension of each moment, and Nina is suspended in the air between them like a songbird flying headlong into a window. —DE

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“The Fabelmans” (dir. Steven Spielberg, 2022)

Has any divorce had a more profound impact on the American imagination than the one between Steven Spielberg’s parents? It was the breakup that launched a million blockbusters. That made daddy issues into a spectacle all their own. That led directly to “E.T.,” “Catch Me if You Can,” and the last scene of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” while also paving the way toward any number of iconic films about the meltdown of the nuclear family — which any multiplex would tell you was the middle class’ defining crisis of the 20th century.

And so it stands to reason that “The Fabelmans,” in which Spielberg finally addresses his parents’ divorce head-on through the eyes of his stand-in Sammy Fabelman, would feel like our story as much as it does his own. I’d say this playful yet nakedly personal coming-of-auteur epic was trying to split the difference between memoir and crowd-pleaser, but it seems even more determined to reconcile the two: What else would Steven Spielberg’s ultimate divorce movie be about if not the hope for some kind of reconciliation?

Eventually — after the Fabelmans have moved from New Jersey to Arizona, from Arizona to Northern California, and from happy-go-lucky Shabbat dinners to the classic American discord of forcing your mom to admit that she’s fallen in love with Seth Rogen — someone will turn to Sammy in a difficult moment and say: “Life is nothing like the movies, Fabelman.” By that point, however, we know that’s not entirely true. Not only because Spielberg spent the last 50 years making all sorts of extraordinary films that sting us with a profound sense of personal recognition, but also because “The Fabelmans” so delicately blurs the line between life and the movies that it becomes impossible to tell the difference between Spielberg’s memories and the film he’s finally made about them. That too is a kind of reconciliation, and one that not even Judd Hirsch’s Uncle Boris could imagine being torn apart. —DE

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“A Different Man” (dir. Aaron Schimberg, 2024)

A caustically funny cosmic joke of a film about an insecure actor who finds a miracle cure for his facial disfigurement, only to be upstaged by a stranger who oozes self-confidence despite (still) having the exact same condition the main character had once allowed to hold him back, Aaron Schimberg’s ruthless and Escher-like “A Different Man” might have felt cruel if not for how cleverly it complicates its punchline. 

Are we supposed to be laughing at someone — someone who’s been treated like a monster for his entire adult life — just because they couldn’t resist the opportunity to shed their skin? Anyone familiar with Schimberg’s “Chained for Life,” which similarly defenestrated the notion of disabilities as “God’s mistakes,” already knows the answer to that question. Besides, who among us would pass up the chance to look like Sebastian Stan? 

In that light, it’s more tempting to interpret “A Different Man” as a dark and damning satire of our social conditioning, which has convinced us to see asymmetry as ugliness, and internalize ugliness as inhuman. But while that might be a more accurate distillation of what Schimberg is doing here, leaving it there would fail to convey the full ambition of a deliriously surreal psycho-thriller that complicates its own identity at every turn. By refracting Brian De Palma’s self-reflexiveness and the Coen brothers’ mordant fatalism through the prism of his most personal obsessions, Schimberg creates a house of mirrors so brilliant and complex that it becomes impossible to match any of his characters to their own reflections, and absolutely useless to reduce the movie around them to the stuff of moral instruction. —DE

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“Benediction” (dir. Terence Davies, 2021)

From painting working-class portraits to sketching urbane artistic figures like Emily Dickinson, the late English filmmaker Terence Davies was always public about his discomfort with being gay and his feelings of banality toward life in general. He wasn’t an especially hopeful storyteller, but his pessimism and insatiable hunger for redemption found their purest expression in “Benediction,” the last feature he completed before his death.

This riotously funny and deeply despairing portrait of World War I-era English poet Siegfried Sassoon follows him from the fringes of the Bright Young Things, into middle age, and up until his death in 1967, Catholic and bereft. He outlived many of his peers but left a legacy in words and in lovers — including the poet Wilfred Owen, socialite flaneur Stephen Tennant, Welsh musician Ivor Novello, and actor Glen Byam Shaw.  

Anchored by an elegant performance from Jack Lowden as Siegfried, “Benediction” is not a biopic so much as a melancholy what-might-have-been-but-never-will-be melodrama that freely plucks incidents from the poet’s life and plays around with them in time — and it’s filled with silver-tongued zingers and maxims that only Davies could devise. The filmmaker’s protagonists were almost always stand-ins for himself, but that doesn’t mean he was necessarily working out his issues. As Sassoon says in this gorgeous, ruminative emotional epic: “The moment passes, but the hole remains.” —RL

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“The Matrix Resurrections” (dir. Lana Wachowski, 2021)

It’s fitting — maybe even fate — that “Spider-Man: No Way Home” was the biggest and virtually only movie in the world on the week that “The Matrix Resurrections” was released. Both are mega-budget, meta sequels that feed on our collective familiarity with their respective franchises. One is a poison, the other its antidote.

One is a safe plastic monument to the solipsism of today’s studio cinema; an orgiastic celebration of how studio filmmaking has created a feedback loop so powerful that it’s programmed audiences to reject anything that threatens its perfection (and to clap like seals for anything that reaffirms it, even if that means cheering for the “unexpected” return of heroes and villains they were once eager to leave behind). The other is a jagged little red pill of a blockbuster that exhumes its intellectual property with such a pronounced sense of déjà vu that the comforts of its memory start to feel like the bars of a cage, and the perfect circle of its feedback loop blurs into a particle accelerator spinning faster and faster in order to create something new and romantic. One is a crowd-pleasing testament to the idea that even (or especially) the biggest fictions can shrink our imaginations. The other is a fun, ultra-sincere, galaxy brain reminder that we can only break free of the stories that make our lives smaller by seeing through the binaries that hold them in place — us vs. them, real vs. fake, corporate product vs. personal art, reboot vs. rebirth, etc. vs. etc.

If “No Way Home” is the snake eating its tail with such reckless abandon that it fools itself into thinking it’s full, “The Matrix Resurrections” is the rare blockbuster that dares to ask what else might be on the menu. It remains the boldest and most vividly human franchise sequel since “The Last Jedi” (if also messier and more postmodern than Rian Johnson’s miraculous addition to the “Star Wars” canon), and continues to be the most divisive as well. Doubling down on the “Alice in Wonderland” spirit of its franchise, this is a movie for people interested in seeing how deep the rabbit hole goes; anyone simply looking for more “Matrix” wasn’t just shit out of luck, they were in for an experience that toyed with their expectations for more than two hours without fulfilling a single one of them. And thank God for that. —DE

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“Dahomey” (dir. Mati Diop, 2024)

When Europe’s great powers raced to colonize a continent in the so-called “Scramble for Africa” just before the First World War, the tiny coastal Kingdom of Dahomey in the south of modern-day Benin was high on France’s shopping list. Only 85 French soldiers were killed when it was taken in 1894, while as many as 4,000 Dahomeans lost their lives. Nearly 300 years of culture and history were extinguished, and thousands of the nation’s most valuable treasures shipped to Paris.

Running just 67 minutes long, this dense and remarkable documentary isn’t about the theft itself, but rather the 2021 return of 26 Dahomean treasures to Benin from the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris — a journey that director Mati Diop brings to life with new urgency by restoring these statues their stolen voices. They speak in monologues written by the Haitian author Makenzy Orcel, the artifacts reflecting on their trip home with a mix of pride, horror, and confusion between long scenes in which modern university students debate the meaning of their country’s pilfered heirlooms. The artifacts may be a living expression of Benin’s past, but this memorably bold meditation on history is all the more powerful for how it puts them into conversation with the present. —AS

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“EO” (dir. Jerzy Skolimowski, 2022)

For decades, “Au Hasard Balthazar” has been the preeminent movie about the perils of being a donkey. Along comes octogenarian Polish auteur Jerzy Skolimowski to prove that two can play this game. Without ripping off Robert Bresson’s 1966 classic, Skolimowski finds his own modern approach to chronicling his titular animal hero as he journeys through a human landscape generally disinterested in his well-being.

From his circus origins to various other forms of servitude and the occasional bursts of freedom, the innocent EO gazes on a world with a subtle gaze that grows more poignant and tragic as the story goes on. Paired with other recent cinematic contemplations of animal intelligence, “Cow” and “Gunda,” Skolimowski’s movie is the latest evidence that simply watching the world through another species’ eyes can be illuminating enough to change the way we see the world. But “EO” isn’t some kind of bland veganist plea; it’s a wondrous plunge into the nature of consciousness itself, and with its remarkable audiovisual design, shows how only the movies can take us there. —EK

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“Barbie” (dir. Greta Gerwig, 2023)

Greta Gerwig’s zeitgeist-changing smash hit opens, of course, with an homage to Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.” A dazzling sunrise stretches over a barren desert, populated exclusively with sad-eyed Dust Bowl-era girls and their unblinking baby dolls, as Helen Mirren (!!) narrates us through what life was like pre-Barbie. It wasn’t just boring (though it was certainly boring), but it was limited (oh, was it limited). For so many little girls, dolls were only ever baby dolls, which meant that their playtime could only ever revolve around motherhood, servitude, and no fun whatsoever.

But just as Kubrick’s apes eventually met by an alien monolith that utterly changed their world and worldview, Gerwig’s little girls are about to be descended upon by a world-altering and brain-breaking new entity: a giant, one might even say monolithic, Barbie doll, in the form of a smiling Margot Robbie, kitted out like the very first Barbie doll ever made. And thus spake Barbie. That’s where Gerwig’s funny, feminist, and wildly original “Barbie” begins. It will only get bigger, weirder, smarter, and better from there.

“Barbie” is a lovingly crafted blockbuster with a lot on its mind, the kind of feature that will surely benefit from repeat viewings (there is so much to see, so many jokes to catch) and is still purely entertaining even in a single watch. It’s Barbie’s world, and we’re all just living in it. How fantastic. –KE

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“The Green Knight” (dir. David Lowery, 2021)

A mystical and enthralling medieval coming-of-age story in which King Arthur’s overeager adult nephew learns that the world is weirder and more complicated than he ever thought possible, “The Green Knight” is an intimate epic told with the self-conviction that its hero struggles to find at every turn. Stoned out of its mind and shot with a genre-tweaking mastery that should make John Boorman proud, it’s also the rare movie that knows exactly what it is, which is an even rarer movie that’s perfectly comfortable not knowing exactly what it is.

The surreal genius of David Lowery’s “filmed adaptation of the chivalric romance by anonymous” (to quote the on-screen text) is that it fully embraces the unresolved nature of its 14th century source material, contradictory interpretations of which have coexisted in relative harmony for more than half a millennium. Is it a paganistic tale about the fall of man, or is it a Christ-like quest about the hope for salvation? Does it bow to chivalry as a noble bulwark against man’s true nature, or does it laugh at the idea that a knight’s code would ever be a sound defense against his deeper urges? Is it a misogynistic poem about manipulative witches, or a proto-feminist ode to women’s power over men?

To all these questions and more, Lowery rousingly answers “yes!” And yet what makes “The Green Knight” grow in your mind (like moss; like rot) for days after watching it is that Lowery never equivocates at any point along Sir Gawain’s journey from the Round Table to the forest citadel where his fate awaits. Instead, he pulls tight on the tangled knots that have bound this saga to our collective imagination for so many centuries, and braids them all into a timeless fantasy about the struggle to make sense of an irreconcilable world. Hypnotic from its fiery start to its gut-punch of a finale and polished with a hint of heavy metal that makes the whole thing shimmer in the darkness like a black light poster in the basement of your friend’s parents’ house.  —DE

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“Our Body” (dir. Claire Simon, 2023)

It’s right there in the title: Claire Simon’s stunningly personal documentary “Our Body” might generally be about her own health journey, but it’s really fixated on the communal experience of occupying a female body. Our body. While academics have tried to uncover the mystique behind women’s physiques, and narrative filmmakers have grappled with the “male gaze” permeating the female form, Simon’s “Our Body” positions the body in its strictly anatomical purposes, ranging from reproduction to even death.

Simon uses the film as both a personal journey through her own cancer diagnosis, and as a general observation of the everyday operations of a gynecological ward in a public hospital in Paris. Eventually, she becomes inextricable from the fabric of the documentary she’s making, and that conflation provides the root of its inestimable power. “I shared my subjects’ destinies as a patient,” she narrates. “This is the reason why it appeared essential to me to be filmed naked, just like the others. … It’s important to see the others, to not be a woman left all alone to face the questions raised by her body, the confrontation with the doctors and the hospital as an institution — to know that there are others, that there’s a large, and strong, community of us out there.” “Our Body” makes that all but impossible to forget. —SB

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“It Was Just an Accident” (dir. Jafar Panahi, 2025)

In his first project since the Iranian regime ostensibly lifted its restrictions on his art, filmmaker Jafar Panahi draws from his different experiences as a dissident prisoner for a raw and blistering moral thriller about a hard-working Azeri man whose most tormented memories come rushing to the surface when he hears someone walk into his place of business with the same haunting squeak of his former torturer’s prosthetic right leg. Played by Vahid Mobasser, a TV station programmer and part-time cab driver, Vahid impulsively abducts the man (Ebrahim Azizi, the only professional actor in this extraordinary cast), drags him into the middle of the desert, and digs a hole big enough to bury his pain alive.

But — as he begins to suffocate the hostage under a small mountain of dry earth — Vahid is confronted with a stab of doubt. And so, however cathartic it might be to simply commit murder and call it vengeance, Vahid feels as though he has no choice but to stuff the man into a wooden crate, load him into his minivan, and drive around Tehran in search of other ex-prisoners who might be able to help verify the captive’s identity.

So begins a gripping and tightly scripted misadventure that unfolds like something of a cross between Park Chan-wook’s “Lady Vengeance” and Panahi’s own “Taxi” (with a little “Waiting for Godot” thrown in for good measure), as Vahid’s one-man truth and reconciliation commission grows to include a handful of other people whose skin carries the scars of “Peg Leg’s” violence. From the plot description alone, it’s obvious that “It Was Just an Accident” finds Panahi working in a very different register than he had to while “banned” from making films. This one still had to be shot in secret in order to skirt government approval, but it takes great pleasure in replacing the self-reflexivity of Panahi’s illegal work with a slightly more formal sense of composition, even if it remains impossible to separate the final product from the personal experience that informed it.

Truth and fiction exist side-by-side in this movie to much the same degree, as Vahid and his team are made to live among the men who so brutally dehumanized them as enemies of the state. Panahi’s tense and woundingly distressed new film draws so much of its climactic power from the sense that hell will always follow Vahid like a whistle ringing in his ears, no matter what becomes of the man he’s abducted. And even more of it from the implication that heaven must therefore be hiding somewhere close by. —DE

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“Bergman Island” (dir. Mia Hansen-Løve, 2021)

A young Parisian filmmaker whose delicately personal work (“Eden,” “Things to Come,” “Goodbye, First Love,” et al.) illuminates the unbearable lightness of being with the soft touch of a late summer breeze, Mia Hansen-Løve may not be the first 21st-century auteur who comes to mind when people consider the portentous legacy of Ingmar Bergman, a man whose cinema stared into the void in the hopes of seeing its own reflection, and shouted down God’s silence with such howling rage that even his comedies are probably still echoing in eternity. And yet, “Bergman Island” — a triple-layered meta-romance about a filmmaker (Vicky Krieps) who flies to Sweden with her partner (Tim Roth) and pitches him a screenplay about her first love — is such a rare and remarkable movie for the very same reason that you wouldn’t expect it to exist in the first place.

Set on the remote skerry in the Baltic Sea that Bergman adopted as his home and began to terraform with his artistic persona after making “Through a Glass Darkly” there in 1961, Hansen-Løve’s zephyr-calm story of loss, love, and artistic reclamation draws such an extreme contrast to the scorched Earth films that have become synonymous with Fårö that even its nighttime scenes reveal the shadows that fiction has the power to cast across reality. No simple homage to Bergman, Hansen-Løve’s film is simply enraptured by the immaterial yet utterly transformative effect that Bergman’s cinema has had on the quiet ocean rock where so much of it was made. Through the disconnect between the physical fact of Fårö’s existence and the imagined fog that has settled over it in her mind’s eye, she discovers a perfect nexus for the personal and creative universes that have long overlapped in her semi-autobiographical — or perhaps more than semi-autobiographical — fiction. The result is a heart-stoppingly poignant movie that beats from deep inside a body of work that has always been seasick with the bittersweet vertigo that comes from looking at the past through the smudged lens of memory and imagination. —DE

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“Hit the Road” (dir. Panah Panahi, 2021)

A family road trip movie in which we never quite know where the film is heading (and are often lied to about why), “Hit the Road” may be set amid the winding desert highways and gorgeous emerald valleys of northwestern Iran, but Panah Panahi’s miraculous debut is fueled by the growing suspicion that its characters have taken a major detour away from our mortal coil at some point along the way. “Where are we?” the gray-haired mom (Pantea Panahiha) asks into the camera upon waking up from a restless catnap inside the SUV in which so much of this film takes place. “We’re dead,” squeaks the youngest of her two sons (Rayan Sarlak) from the back seat, the six-year-old boy already exuding some of the most anarchic movie kid energy this side of “The Tin Drum.”

They aren’t dead — at least not literally, even if the adorable stray dog who’s come along for the ride seems to be on its last legs — but the further Panahi’s foursome drives away from the lives they’ve left behind in Tehran, the more it begins to seem as if they’ve left behind life itself. A purgatorial fog rolls in as they climb towards the Turkish border, and with it comes a series of semi-competent guides (one amusingly trying to steer a motorbike from behind a sheepskin balaclava) who show up to give the family vague directions as if they were clueless interns for the ferryman on the river Styx. We may never know why Khosro (Hassan Madjooni) and his wife so urgently fled their home in order to smuggle 20-year-old Farid (Amin Simiar) out of the country and away from the autocratic government their introverted first-born kid must have offended somehow, but it’s clear that this family is speeding down a one-way street. 

So it goes in a beautifully tender comedy that tears your heart in half with a featherlight touch — a film that swerves between tragedy and gallows humor with the expert control of a stunt driver, and knowingly sabotages all of its most crushing moments with a deadpan joke in order to keep Khosro’s family from running out of gas. “Hit the Road” is a story about people who have to laugh in order to stop themselves from crying, and Panahi commits to that dynamic with the unwavering dedication of someone who knows that his characters don’t have any other choice. —DE

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“Past Lives” (dir. Celine Song, 2023)

Of all the writers retreats in all the summer towns in all of New York, he had to walk into hers. As the sun fades on a perfect Montauk night — setting the stage for a first kiss that, like so many of the most resonant moments in Celine Song’s transcendent “Past Lives,” will ultimately be left to the imagination — Nora (an extraordinary Greta Lee) tells Arthur (John Magaro) about the Korean concept of In-Yun, which suggests that people are destined to meet one another if their souls have overlapped a certain number of times before. When Arthur asks Nora if she really believes in all that, the Seoul-born woman sitting across from him invitingly replies that it’s just “something Korean people say to seduce someone.”

Needless to say, it works. But as this delicate yet crushingly beautiful film continues to ripple forward in time — the wet clay of Nora and Arthur’s flirtation hardening into a marriage in the span of a single cut — the very real life they create together can’t help but run parallel to the imagined one that Nora seemed fated to share with the childhood sweetheart she left back in her birth country. She and Hae Sung (“Leto” star Teo Yoo) haven’t seen each other in the flesh since they were in grade school, but the ties between them have never entirely frayed apart.

On paper, “Past Lives” might sound like a diasporic riff on a Richard Linklater romance — one that condenses the entire “Before” trilogy into the span of a single film. In practice, however, this gossamer-soft love story almost entirely forgoes any sort of “Baby, you are gonna miss that plane” dramatics in favor of teasing out some more ineffable truths about the way that people find themselves with (and through) each other. Which isn’t to suggest that Song’s palpably autobiographical debut fails to generate any classic “who’s she gonna choose?” suspense by the time it’s over, but rather to stress how inevitable it feels that Nora’s man crisis builds to a bittersweet quiver of recognition instead of a megaton punch to the gut. Here is an unforgettable romance that unfolds with the mournful resignation of the Leonard Cohen song that inspires Nora’s English-language name; it’s a movie less interested in tempting its heroine with “the one who got away” than it is in allowing her to reconcile with the version of herself she once left with him as a priceless souvenir. —DE

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“The Shrouds” (dir. David Cronenberg, 2024)

Inspired by the loss of the director’s wife, “The Shrouds” is a grief story as only David Cronenberg would ever think to shoot one: Sardonic, unsentimental, and often so cadaverously stiff that the film itself appears to be suffering from rigor mortis, as if its images died at some point along their brief journey from the projector to the screen. And really, what else would you expect? I suppose it’s possible that the story’s deeply personal context might have spurred Cronenberg to push against the tender sterility of his recent features, or even dare to expose the soft underbelly that’s always been hiding inside his tumorous body of work and its many layers of scary-beautiful new flesh. If so, it almost immediately becomes clear that he had zero interest in accepting that invitation.

A quintessentially late film from an artist who’s always been ahead of his time, “The Shrouds” is Cronenberg at his most inhospitable; so far as the project’s emotional availability and commercial appeal are concerned, it makes “Crimes of the Future” seem like “Barbie” by comparison. And yet, as with so many of Cronenberg’s most resonant movies, its morgue-like coldness eventually reveals itself to be deeply comforting to some degree — if not while you’re watching it, then perhaps as its big ideas begin to seep into your bone marrow during the days and weeks that follow.

Between its paranoid scramble of a plot and a protagonist who becomes increasingly difficult to see as anything more than an avatar for its auteur, “The Shrouds” lends itself to a sort of delayed appreciation; its story only makes sense with the detached perspective that might begin to develop in the time between the death of a loved one and the funeral service at which they’re laid to rest. Body is reality, Cronenberg likes to say, but what becomes of that reality when the body in question is buried six feet under the ground? —DE

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“Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World” (dir. Radu Jude, 2023)

It takes real flair to concoct visual-gag-after-visual-gag within episodic riffs on the raw deals suffered by the gig-economy-classes in modern day Bucharest. Like a sharper Romanian riposte to Ruben Östlund, Radu Jude blends absurdist humor with keen social integrity, as the trials of a dangerously overworked production assistant named Ange (Ilinca Manolache, sensational) builds to a 40-minute final shot in which tragicomedy is heaped upon tragicomedy to unbearably brilliant effect.

Observing a nation’s shortcomings is not typically this fun. Yet — unlike latter-day miserabilist works by the likes of Ken Loach — Jude’s “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World” and its barbs stick entirely because Jude trusts his audience to appreciate tonal scope. There are no arch-villains, but plenty of morons with too much power, and Jude’s script is ripe with delicious character notes. This is a work by someone totally secure in their thinking, and able to afford punchlines to all kinds of ghoulish pen-pushers without fear of confusing the film’s ideological clarity. —SMK

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“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” (dir. Laura Poitras, 2022)

Laura Poitras is best-known for directing bracing profiles of Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, disruptive activists who challenged the systems around them. Swap the intelligence world for underground art and Nan Goldin fits right into that trend.

The acclaimed photographer and visual artist is the centerpiece of Poitras’ remarkable storytelling achievement, which simultaneously revisits Goldin’s career evolution and her more recent protests against the Sackler family and its Purdue Pharma, manufacturer of OxyContin. These efforts led to the creation of her nonprofit organization P.A.I.N., and several successful “die-ins” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, and other cultural institutions that had the Sackler family name on their walls. Most of them don’t anymore thanks to Goldin’s efforts.

The movie is a better superhero story than anything you’ll find in the MCU, as Goldin — herself a survivor of an OxyContin overdose — faces down a powerful horde of billionaires and doesn’t flinch. It’s a riveting testament to the power of creativity to change the world, and she isn’t done yet. —EK

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“Everything Everywhere All at Once” (dirs. Daniels, 2022)

“Everything Everywhere All at Once” is as overstuffed as its title implies, even more juvenile than its pedigree suggests, and so creatively unbound from the minute it starts that it makes Daniels’ previous efforts seem like they were made with Bressonian restraint by comparison (for context, their last feature was a sweet fable starring Harry Potter as an explosively farting corpse).

It’s a movie that I saw twice just to make sure I hadn’t completely hallucinated it the first time around, and one that I will soon be seeing a third time for the same reason. I don’t ever expect to understand how it was (or got) made, but I already know that it works. And I know that it works because my impulse to pick on its imperfections and wonder how it might’ve been different eventually forfeits to the utter miracle of its existence.

It’s a movie… about a flustered Chinese-American woman trying to finish her taxes. Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) is being audited — first by the IRS, and then by the other great evils of our multiverse. She and her stubbornly guileless husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan, a sublime revelation in one of his first major roles since the days of Short Round) immigrated to California in pursuit of happiness after Evelyn’s overbearing father, Gong Gong (James Hong, 93 years old and yet still in his prime) forbid the marriage, but their dreams of a brighter future were soon quashed by the realities of running a small business and raising a child of their own. —DE

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“Licorice Pizza” (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson, 2021)

Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza” is undeniably a coming-of-age movie — his first clear-cut contribution to a genre defined by the kind of pathological self-invention and animalistic need for acceptance that have also fueled each of his eight previous features — but it’s not really about growing up. For one thing, both of its leads have already grown up (or at least aggressively sideways) to a certain extent, and just need someone to recognize the people they’ve become in the process. For another, there’s always been a terminally childish quality to even Anderson’s oldest characters.

Gary Valentine might be younger than the likes of Reynolds Woodcock, Doc Sportello, and Frank T.J. Mackey, but he isn’t necessarily any less mature. A latchkey goofball who looks after his little brother like a step-son and starts no fewer than three separate businesses over the course of this film (some of them moderately successful!), Gary either understands how things work better than anyone. He’s like the fish at the poker table who keeps winning hands because he doesn’t know enough to fold. “Just say yes,” he advises his older crush Alana while prepping her for a meeting with a half-cranked talent agent played by “Phantom Thread” showstopper Harriet Sansom Harris, “you can always learn how to do something once you get the part.”

What these characters learn from each other will last a lifetime. “You’re never going to remember me,” Alana tells Gary soon after they meet, and it’s a testament to this film’s immediate electricity that we can already tell that she’s wrong. “Stop using time as an excuse,” Gary fires back. In “Licorice Pizza,” time isn’t something that keeps people apart — it’s the only thing that allows them to find each other in the first place. And this euphoric movie doesn’t waste a minute of it. —DE

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“Anora” (dir. Sean Baker, 2024)

Anora — or “Ani,” as she prefers to be called — is a brassy, 23-year-old Russian-American stripper who shares a small house with her sister in Brighton Beach. Ivan — or “Vanya,” as he uses interchangeably — is the 21-year-old son of a Moscow billionaire who stays in his father’s cocaine mansion on the far side of Brooklyn whenever he’s in New York, which if it were up to him would be always. She works seven nights a week at the Manhattan strip club where she’s the only Russian-speaker. Ivan, meanwhile, has clearly never worked a day in his life. She’s the child of a mom who lives in Miami and a dad who doesn’t exist, while he’s a hyper-juvenile nepo baby who may never be mature enough to graduate into a large adult son. 

There’s probably an effervescent rom-com to be made about these two wildly mismatched kids meeting over a lapdance and falling in love with each other after Ivan pays Ani $15,000 to be his “very horny girlfriend” for a week, but Sean Baker isn’t the least bit interested in settling for that story. Splenetically hilarious for more than two hours before reality catches up with it in the film’s unforgettable final scene, “Anora” has next to nothing to do with romance, and almost everything to do with the kind of working-class heartache that a modern Hollywood studio would never even try to get right. 

It’s a heartache that Mikey Madison’s towering lead performance allows to hide in plain sight, even — or perhaps especially — when she isn’t wearing anything that might help to disguise it. By the end of the movie, even her character’s name feels like an open wound, its ethnic origins preventing her from reaching the full potential of her fantasy, and/or the fantasy of her full potential. At one point someone googles the meaning of “Anora” so that he can explain it to her, but our heroine isn’t interested. “We don’t care about names in America,” she replies. In this country, who we are runs a distant second to the promise of who we might become. And that promise is growing emptier by the day. —DE

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“The Taste of Things” (dir. Tran Anh Hung, 2023)

There is something to be said for a simple dish made with the best ingredients by a trusted hand. Just as a perfect omelet made by a lover is more satisfying than an eight-hour feast laid on by a Prince, so it follows that a film like “The Taste of Things works, not in spite of, but because it focuses on executing its basic premise with enrapturing attention to detail. This is a story about love and food, which it presents as the same thing.

Sight unseen, it was always a mouth-watering prospect: two delicious French actors – Juliette Binoche as a cook and Benoît Magimel as her long-time lover and food-obsessed employer – feeding each other in Tran Anh Hung’s adaptation of a 2014 graphic novel reputed to be food porn. The promise of this set-up is delivered with gusto as the kitchen of a 19th century French manor house becomes the stage for the most elaborate foreplay you’ve ever seen. What “Call Me By Your Name” did for peaches “The Taste of Things” does for syrup pears. Belonging to a fine tradition of intoxicating food films such as “Babette’s Feast”, “Julie & Julia”, and “Like Water For Chocolate,” “The Taste of Things” pushes the notion of bonding through vittles a step further. Certain dishes are so inscribed by their creators that they act as memory itself, says the film, a sentiment that leaves a beautiful after-taste. —SMK

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“Saint Omer” (dir. Alice Diop, 2022)

“Saint Omer,” named after the northern French town where it’s largely set, creates a suffocating atmosphere to reflect the degree to which its central figures are trapped. Laurence (Guslagie Mulanga) is a Senegalese immigrant accused of murdering her 15-month-old daughter. Covering her trial is Rama (Kayije Kagame), a novelist, who sits in the gallery each day for the grim proceedings as Laurence and others stand in the witness box to recount what led up to the death.

The women never exchange words, but first-time narrative feature director Diop creates a kind of dialogue in close-ups between them as Rama tries to process Laurence’s life and experiences. Rama clearly recognizes, and empathizes with, much of Laurence’s struggle as a Black woman in a (far from) post-colonial present day France, and understands the difficulty of, like Laurence, being in an interracial relationship. But she also finds Laurence’s murder of her child incomprehensible: just as two seemingly conflicting things can be true at the same time, so is it that you can understand someone and also be absolutely mystified by them.

Alice Diop, who previously made documentaries before this, brings exacting rigor to austere long-takes of Laurence in the witness box recounting her story. Bresson’s “The Trial of Joan of Arc” will come to mind. But Laurence is no martyr, and Diop is not interested in snap judgments but the close observation of ambiguity. A formalist work that never shies away from messiness as humanity’s default state. —CB

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“The Lost Daughter” (dir. Maggie Gyllenhaal, 2021)

Honeyed Grecian sunshine has nothing on the icy pragmatism of Leda Caruso, a steely careerist on a solo beach holiday in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s impressive directorial debut. Based on the novella by the mysterious Italian novelist Elena Ferrante, whose true identity is one of the literary world’s greatest mysteries, “The Lost Daughter” is as elusive as its author. As an actress, Gyllenhaal’s inspired casting choices were her first boon, and she doesn’t hem her actors in with time constraints. Like the days on vacation, time washes away as Gyllenhaal peppers the film with lingering shots of weighted pensive moments. Oliva Colman is engrossing and ferocious as the complicated Leda — as her interest in Dakota Johnson’s restless young mother simmers over into a scorched folly, Leda challenges even the most malleable allegiances. It’s hard to take your eyes off of Jessie Buckley as young Leda, whose failed juggling of motherhood and ambition explains — but can’t quite soften — the older woman’s motives. The sacrifices of womanhood, embodied wrenchingly in three very different performances, can never be fully forgotten, even in the most beautiful landscape. —JD

“All Light Everywhere” (dir. Theo Anthony, 2021)

“All Light Everywhere” winds its way through fragmentary observations about modern surveillance society, unearthing a wide range of amorphous connections about its subject. However, Theo Anthony’s ambitious documentary unearths one brilliant connection — a fascinating lineage between the camera and the gun — and roots it in historical fact.

For that reason alone, the filmmaker’s strange and alluring rumination on the ways technology exerts control over human life is a worthy follow-up to his 2016 debut “Rat Film,” which used Baltimore’s rodent infestation as a savvy metaphor for gentrification.

“All Light Everywhere” investigates how little we see about the way the world looks back at us, careening from a warehouse that develops tasers and police body cameras, to training sessions for officers who wear the devices, the machinations of a spy plane entrepreneur, and the history of camera pigeons in WWI.

In the most compelling passages, Anthony journeys back to the late 19th century, unearthing the little-known history of astrophotography and mug shots, finding a remarkable set of connections between camera technology and weapons of war. All of that comes full circle in a climactic confrontation about the nature of privacy in a world governed by corporate power, as the film coheres into a compelling riff on the ominous forces governing everyday life that’s both alarming and awe-inspiring at once. —EK

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“Killers of the Flower Moon” (dir. Martin Scorsese, 2023)

Martin Scorsese may like to think of “Killers of the Flower Moon” as the Western that he always wanted to make, but this frequently spectacular American epic about the genocidal conspiracy that was visited upon the Osage Nation during the 1920s is more potent and self-possessed when it sticks a finger in one of the other genres that bubble up to the surface over the course of its three-and-a-half-hour runtime.

The first and most obvious of those is a gangster drama in the grand tradition of the director’s previous work; just when it seemed like “The Irishman” might’ve been Scorsese’s final word on his signature genre, they’ve pulled him back in for another movie full of brutal killings, bitter voiceovers, and biting conclusions about the corruptive spirit of American capitalism. But if the “Reign of Terror” sometimes proves to be an uncomfortably vast backdrop for Scorsese’s  more intimate brand of crime saga, “Killers of the Flower Moon” excels as a compellingly multi-faceted character study about the men behind the massacre. Over time, it becomes the most interesting of the many different movies that comprise it: A twisted love story about the marriage between an Osage woman (the indomitable Lily Gladstone) and the white man who — unbeknownst to her — helped murder her entire family so that he could inherit the headrights for their oil fortune (Leonardo DiCaprio, giving the best performance of his career as the dumbest and most vile character he’s ever played). 

Finding the right balance in this story is a challenge for a filmmaker as gifted and operatic as Scorsese, whose ability to tell any story rubs up against his ultimate admission that this might not be his story to tell. And so, for better or worse, Scorsese turns “Killers of the Flower Moon” into the kind of story that he can still tell better than anyone else: A story about greed, corruption, and the mottled soul of a country that was born from the belief that it belonged to anyone callous enough to take it. —DE

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“I Saw the TV Glow” (dir. Jane Schoenbrun, 2024)

Sinister and liberating in equal measure (and often at the same time), Jane Schoenbrun’s ultra-lo-fi “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” leveraged the inherent loneliness of webcams and the performative danger of online creepypasta into a haunting portrait of the potentially dysphoric relationship between screens and identity in the internet age. The kind of sui generis shot in the dark that feels like it could only have been made by someone who wasn’t sure if anyone would see it, Schoenbrun’s first movie is one of the rare coming-of-age films that manages to embody the full dread and possibility of self-recognition, and for that reason it almost immediately resonated with an audience of people — trans people in particular — who’d been waiting for something like “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” since before they had the language to know how much they needed it. 

Another, more explicitly trans meditation on the role that media can play in revealing people to themselves, Jane Schoenbrun’s astonishing follow-up manages to retain the seductive fear of their micro-budget debut and deepen its thrilling wounds of discovery even while examining them at a much larger scale. If “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” was a 360p snapshot of dysphoria in motion, “I Saw the TV Glow” is an intimate landscape shot with the ultra-vivid resolution of a recurring dream; it marries the queer radicality of a Gregg Araki film with the lush intoxication of a Gregory Crewdson photo, and finds Schoenbrun holding on to every inch of their vision as they make the leap from outsider artist to A24-stamped auteur. Anchored by some of the most arresting scenes in recent memory (including a Jack Haven monologue that burns with singular intensity), this is a movie that knows it will be seen, and yet, to an even greater degree than Schoenbrun’s debut, it’s also a movie about how the things people watch can have the power to see them in return. Even the parts of themselves they might be hiding from. Even the parts of themselves they aren’t ready to name yet. —DE

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“Jackass Forever” (dir. Jeff Tremaine, 2022)

The joyous fourth movie in a death-defying franchise that continues to find the sweet spot between “Magic Mike XXL” and “Salò, the 120 Days of Sodom,” Jeff Tremaine’s “Jackass Forever” opens with a sequence that accurately sets the tone for the motion picture magic to come. As with all of the sketches that compose this plotless clip reel of brilliant American idiocy, you know that something foul and/or unfathomably painful is about to go down in the cheesy “Godzilla” parody that kicks things off — longtime “Jackass” fans might even be able to guess what it will be — but it still hits with a childlike wave of wonder and revulsion when you see it unfold. It’s no wonder that the film’s biggest laugh comes when someone reacts to a wildly elaborate prank by shouting, in all sincerity, “I knew that was gonna happen!”

In this case, the gag is that the kaiju terrorizing downtown New York is actually Chris Pontius’ flaccid penis (painted green and puppeteered on strings with on-screen help from “Being John Malkovich” director Spike Jonze), and the monster’s legs are played by his wrinkled balls, which groan in response to the miniature rockets fired at them by ringleader Johnny Knoxville and other members of the cast. This will not be the strangest torture inflicted upon Pontius’ junk during the film — a film in which it’s actually Steve-O who suffers the worst of the genital hijinx, thanks to a stunt that I memorialized in my notes as “Candyman’s dick” — but it anticipates a work of art in which nostalgia and shock go as well together as old friends and pig ejaculate. Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world I feel like I can’t take it. —DE

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“Flow” (dir. Gints Zilbalodis, 2024)

There’s a moment near the end of Gints Zilbalodis’ “Flow” that powerfully tugs at the heartstrings. It’s when the film‘s central character, a black cat who you’ve come to have a profound emotional connection with, rediscovers a lost ball that he and his animal friends had been playing with earlier in the movie. He thought he’d never see it again. And suddenly he does. Sometimes, lost things can be found again.

If you thought that emotion elicited without cloying manipulation was something lost in animation, it is found again in “Flow” as well. A movie brimming with sentiment but not sentimentality, this is one of the most moving animated films in recent memory — evocative, beguiling, and majestic in its fable-like story about a motley crew of animals trying to survive in a flooded world. They speak volumes without ever having to say a single word. —CB

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“Sîrat” (dir. Oliver Laxe, 2025)

Filmmaker Oliver Laxe brings a kind of humbling brilliance to “Sirât,” a sui generis work that evades any classification and emanates from a wholly personal vision of cinema. Born in France to Galician parents, and shooting the majority of his work to date in Morocco, Laxe’s work operates in the interstices of borders and cultures, but wholly bypasses appropriation. It’s always visually transportive and grimly sublime, focusing on simple plots and conflicts that provide ample space for philosophical and existential contemplation. And “Sirât” is undoubtedly his most fully realized work in his regard, notable too for folding in the visceral pleasures of contemporary genre and even blockbuster cinema.

The world Laxe creates is finely rendered in both the fore- and background, revealing much greater scope than its initial set-up lets on. Luis (Sergi López, in another powerful performance) is another variety of a recurrent character in cinema and television now: the stricken father, forced to bring his emotions further to the surface than he’s typically comfortable with, and responding in disbelief to his offspring’s opposing values. —DK

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“Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” (dir. George Miller, 2024)

You can’t unkill the world. Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa learned that lesson the hard way when she commandeered a rig full of Immortan Joe’s precious war brides and sped across the desert towards the matriarchal eden from which she was stolen as a child. She and her motley crew of reluctant allies drove as far as the highways of Valhalla would take them, only to discover that the Green Place of Many Mothers wasn’t beyond the uninhabitable swampland they had passed to get there — it was the uninhabitable swampland they had to passed to get there. There is no going back, but sometimes you can only find the path forward by looking in the rear-view mirror.

And so it stands to reason that inveterate madman George Miller has followed the most spectacular action movie of the 21st century not with a sequel that continues where “Mad Max: Fury Road” left off, but rather with a prequel that paves the way to where it began. Instead of trying to outdo the orgiastic mayhem that brought his Ozploitation franchise screaming into the 21st century all shiny and chrome, Miller has chosen to do something even crazier and more rewarding: He’s created a symphonic, five-part, decades-spanning revenge saga so immense and self-possessed that it refuses to be seen as the mere extension of another movie.

Avoiding the same traps that have made too many recent franchise offshoots feel like just less of the same (in part because it was fully written before a frame of “Fury Road” had ever been shot), “Furiosa” doesn’t try to reverse-engineer one of the most propulsive cinematic experiences ever conceived so much as it scours the Wasteland for the emotion that will be required to fuel it. Whereas “Fury Road” was driven by the search for hope, “Furiosa” is an even more glorious film about why people need it in the first place. —DE

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“The Souvenir Part II” (dir. Joanna Hogg, 2021)

An extraordinary work of meta-fiction which continues where the previous film left off, and subverts the fastidiousness of its construction to illuminate why Hogg felt the need to make it in the first place. As vulnerable as its predecessor and textured with the same velvet sense of becoming, “Part II” adds new layers of depth and distance to the looking glass of Hogg’s self-reflection, as it follows Julie through the fraught process of making her graduation film… a short which just so happens to be the tragic story of a 25-year-old London girl’s relationship with an older heroic addict.

Not only is the set in Julie’s film virtually identical to the apartment from “The Souvenir,” it is the apartment from “The Souvenir,” only this time the camera pulls back to reveal the airplane hanger that surrounds it. In essence, Hogg is making a movie about her younger self making a movie about her younger self’s worst heartbreak, which is effectively a remake of the previous movie that Hogg made (the press notes adroitly refer to “Part II” as “a deconstruction of a reconstruction”). And while the view through that infinity mirror of romantic dramas isn’t nearly as confusing as it might sound on paper, or at all, it also further complicates itself in dazzling fashion by the end, as slavish re-creation gives way to a richer synthesis of memory and imagination. —DE

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“I’m Thinking of Ending Things” (dir. Charlie Kaufman, 2020)

“You can’t fake a thought.” Those words appear twice in the opening paragraphs of Iain Reid’s 2016 novel “I’m Thinking of Ending Things,” and so you don’t even have to turn the first page before it’s clear why Charlie Kaufman was so drawn to the book. The filmmaker’s career has always been shaped by a fascination with the tortured — if tragicomic — relationship between the life of the mind and the world that’s filtered through it; Kaufman is obsessed with the cracked echo chamber of human consciousness; with the feeling that everyone is talking to each other through a two-way mirror; with the perverse irony that our inescapable ego-centrism is the one thing we all have in common.

From “Adaptation” and “Anomalisa” to his recent novel “Antkind” and all points in between, Kaufman’s work hinges on characters who are (often literally) trying to break free of their own brains and/or bodies and bridge the divide that isolates us from each other. Some of them succeed, some of them make peace with that gap, and some of them swan dive into it under the delusion they might eventually crawl out the other side. But at the end of the day, every Charlie Kaufman story effectively unpacks a different attempt to bust out of the same prison. As Millicent Weems put it in “Synecdoche, New York”: “This is everyone’s experience. Every single one. The specifics hardly matter. Everyone is everyone.” Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich.

If “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” feels like both an act of self-parody for its director and also a radical departure from his previous work, that’s because it takes Kaufman’s usual fixations and turns them inside out. While this leaky snow globe of a breakup movie is yet another bizarre and ruefully hilarious trip into the rift between people, it’s not — for the first time — about someone who’s trying to cross it. On the contrary, Kaufman is now telling a story about the rift itself. The result is a surreal, erratic, and strangely moving experience that circles around a realization it dances around until the bitter end. —DE

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“Sentimental Value” (dir. Joachim Trier, 2025)

“It’s hard to love someone without mercy.”

Sitting across the dinner table from his actress daughter after sweeping back into her life with a high-concept plan for reconciliation, acclaimed filmmaker and absent father Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård) offers that wisdom to Nora (Renate Reinsve) as if directing her on how to forgive him. And in the wake of his ex-wife’s death, that’s precisely what Gustav intends to do — not by apologizing for his decision to leave their family when Nora was still just a child, but rather by casting her in an autobiographical Netflix drama about his own life.

Exploitative as that sounds, Gustav isn’t just hoping to make Nora say the words he’s always longed to hear from his firstborn daughter in exchange for a cut of Ted Sarandos’ money. On the contrary, his plan — like everything else in the transcendently moving “Sentimental Value,” the masterpiece that “The Worst Person in the World” director Joachim Trier has been working toward for his entire career — is layered with a delicate sense of personal history. Because the (once) great auteur Borg doesn’t intend for Nora to play a version of herself in his movie. No, he insists on using her as a stand-in for his mother, who committed suicide in the sun-bathed Oslo house that has belonged to their family since at least the start of World War II.

From that premise, Trier spins the richest and most emotionally overflowing film that he’s made so far — one that comes to involve a bit of “Vertigo” when Nora rejects her father’s offer, only to watch him cast an American starlet (Elle Fanning) to play the role Gustav had written for her. Few recent movies have more elegantly literalized how the love that parents are able to share with their children — and vice versa — can be limited by their ability to express it. And by the time that “Sentimental Value” arrives at its soul-melting final sequence, almost none have more beautifully explored the role that making art can play in facilitating that process. —DE

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“Never Rarely Sometimes Always” (dir. Eliza Hittman, 2020)

With the third film of her career, Eliza Hittman cemented herself as one of contemporary cinema’s most empathetic and skilled chroniclers of American youth. Hittman’s trio of features — “It Felt Like Love,” “Beach Rats,” and “Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” her first studio effort — have all zoomed in on blue-collar teens on the edge of sexual awakening, often of the dangerous variety. Hittman’s ability to write and direct such tender films has long been bolstered by her interest in casting them with fresh new talents, all the better to sell the veracity of her stories and introduce moviegoers to emerging actors worthy of big attention.

With “Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” Hittman continued her traditions with her most vivid work yet, one all the more impressive for its studio pedigree. Newbies Sidney Flanigan and Talia Ryder star as a pair of close cousins who are forced to deal with an unexpected pregnancy and a small town not at all interested in offering up any alternatives beyond having the baby. Despite its subject matter, the film isn’t just the wrenching drama many might expect. Yes, it’s a searing examination of the current state of this country’s finicky abortion laws and the medical professionals tasked with enforcing them (from the small-minded to the big-hearted), and if art can have any impact on its consumers, the film will stick with many of its viewers, perhaps even changing long-held beliefs. But it’s also a singular look at what it means to be a teenage girl today, and with all the joy and pain that comes with it. —KE

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“Pacifiction” (dir. Albert Serra, 2022)

It would be a severe understatement to say that Albert Serra’s Polynesia-set “Pacifiction” avoids the touristic travel-porn clichés of most films about foreigners in a tropical locale. A drifting and rigorously introspective study of colonialism at the edge of apocalypse, “Pacifiction” stars Benoît Magimel as De Roller, dispatched from Paris to serve as the High Commissioner of a country that’s still controlled as a vestige of the French empire. Over the course of the film’s droning 163-minute running time, De Roller’s rudderless existence is capsized — gently at first, and then with soul-crushing force — by rumors that France is preparing to resume nuclear testing near his adopted island nation.

Serra has invoked the ’70s conspiracy thrillers of Alan J. Pakula when talking about “Pacifiction,” but the specter of nuclear weapons testing isn’t what the film is “about” as much as it contributes to an atmosphere of uncertainty and fragility. It’s a narrative throughline on which Serra hangs other issues and ideas in this very episodic movie. Think of a Frederick Wiseman documentary but as a narrative feature; Serra almost made it like a documentary, filming 180 hours of footage (via three cameras at once for each scene, so really 540 hours of footage), and with the script revised and improvised on the fly.

“Pacifiction” is far too oblique to be fully an heir to the Pakula conspiracy thriller tradition. After all, it’s possible weapons testing will never resume here. But isn’t it disturbing enough that it’s considered at all? “Pacifiction” is vital because it’s a movie for a culture constantly patting itself on the back but in desperate risk of repeating all its previous mistakes. Where every little bit of progress is imperiled. We delude ourselves into thinking colonial exploitation was left behind in the 20th century (along with nuclear tests). Or maybe we choose to ignore what’s right in front of us. —CB

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“La Chimera” (dir. Alice Rohrwacher, 2022)

The third and most romantic installment in Rohrwacher’s informal trilogy exploring the relationship between Italy’s past and present, “La Chimera” finds the Tuscan filmmaker returning to the rustic charm and eternal regret of “The Wonders” and “Happy as Lazzaro” in order to stretch them across a richly textured canvas that spans from ancient Etruria to “The Crown.” 

It begins with a man played by Josh O’Connor (never better) as he dreams of the woman he loved and lost. His name is Arthur, her name was Beniamina, and there is no hope of them reuniting on this mortal coil. But Arthur isn’t one to give up. Legend tells of a buried door that connects this world to the next, and this surly archaeologist is so hellbent on finding it that he’s become the leader of a ragtag gang of tombarolis — lovable grave-robbers, essentially — in the small village where his Beniamina once lived. He offers the group his sorcerer-like ability to dowse the location of ancient treasures, and in return they do the digging for him. What he ultimately turns up is a lush and lived-in adventure that beats Indiana Jones at his own game while posing the question that Rohrwacher has been circling for so long: Does the past belong to everyone, or does it belong to no one? —DE

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“Armageddon Time” (dir. James Gray, 2022)

Only a true Francis Ford Coppola fetishist like “Ad Astra” director James Gray would saddle a modest self-portrait about his memories of sixth grade with a title that makes it sound more like “Apocalypse Now” than any other film ever has (a reference to candidate Reagan’s nuclear hawkishness, “Armageddon Time” borrows its name from a 1979 Willie Williams reggae jam famously covered by The Clash).

Pivoting away from the biggest production of his career with a melancholy return to the kind of small-scale New York stories that first put him on the map, Gray revisits his childhood years in Queens and all of their related ghosts with this unsparingly well-remembered coming-of-age story about a pre-pubescent Jewish boy named Paul Graff (Banks Repeta), his loving relationship with his maternal grandfather (a heartbreaking Anthony Hopkins), and his friendship with the slightly older Black kid (Jaylin Webb) he meets on the first day of school in September 1980. Bolstered by difficult, unflinching performances from Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong as Paul’s hyper-assimilative parents — in addition to one very pointed cameo from Jessica Chastain — “Armageddon Time” weaves a painfully honest memoir about conditional whiteness and the moral compromises demanded by the American Dream. It’s all the more impressive in the context of a movie that could easily have become the Jewish-American “Belfast” if not for its Talmudic moral streak and fierce aversion to sentimentality. —DE

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“Asteroid City” (dir. Wes Anderson, 2023)

Like any movie by Wes Anderson, “Asteroid City” is the epitome of a Wes Anderson movie. A film about a television program about a play within a play “about infinity and I don’t know what else” (as one character describes it), this delightfully profound desert charmer — by far the director’s best effort since “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” and in some respects the most poignant thing he’s ever made — boasts all of his usual hallmarks and then some.

A multi-tiered framing device, diorama-esque shot design, and Tilda Swinton affectlessly saying things like “I never had children, but sometimes I wonder if I wish I should have” are just some of the many signature flourishes that you might recognize from Anderson’s previous work and/or the endless parade of A.I.-generated TikToks that imitate his style.

Let’s just say that all of the people in Asteroid City will be more directly confronted with the unknown than anyone in a Wes Anderson film has been before. Imagine if Mr. Fox’s encounter with the wolf on the hill came at the end of the first act instead of the end of the third, or if Steve Zissou came face-to-face with the jaguar shark that ate his friend just a few minutes after the jaguar shark ate his friend. Imagine if any of Anderson’s most resolute yet vulnerable characters — all of whom have devised intricate systems of living in order to impose some degree of control over a chaotic universe — were forced to reckon with their own helplessness right from the start. —DE

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“The Beast” (dir. Bertrand Bonello, 2023)

Compelling evidence that every major arthouse director should be required to make their own “Cloud Atlas” before they die, Bertrand Bonello’s sweeping, romantic, and ravishingly strange “The Beast” finds the French director broadening — and in some cases challenging — the core obsessions of his previous films into a sci-fi epic about the fear of falling in love. 

Split into three lightly intercut parts that trace the connection between two star-crossed souls (embodied by Léa Seydoux and George MacKay) from 1910 to 2044, Bonello’s latest and most accessible movie begins by literalizing the same basic premise that has undergirded previous work like “House of Tolerance” and “Zombi Child”: The past is always present (a dialectic explored here with the help of a machine that encourages people to purify their DNA by purging themselves of any emotion left over from their past lives). 

The genre elements at play here allow Bonello to take for granted what his earlier films had to earn, and “The Beast” makes the most of that head start by knotting its overlapping temporalities into a story that’s suspended between the baggage we have from yesterday and the anxiety we have for tomorrow. As its title might imply, “The Beast” is a fairy tale of sorts — one whose moral instructs us to live in the moment, lest we not live at all. —DE

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“The Power of the Dog” (dir. Jane Campion, 2021)

In 2021, long-dormant auteur Jane Campion returned with a poison-tipped dagger of a Western drama wrapped in rawhide and old rope; a brilliant, murderous fable about masculine strength that’s so diamond-toothed its victims are already half dead by the time they see the first drop of their own blood.

The shiv-like stealthiness of Campion’s approach may stem from the 1967 Thomas Savage novel on which “The Power of the Dog” is based, but it perfectly suits a filmmaker who’s long been fascinated by how weakness can be force’s most effective sheath. The Wellington-born filmmaker is drawn to characters — artists, but not always — who make beautiful homes for themselves in the middle, even if the rest of the world simply assumes they must be lost. To that end, perhaps the most basic (and least harrowing) of her latest film’s razor-fanged pleasures is how “The Power of the Dog” proves that no one is better at finding these people, or at recognizing how their supposed defects often provide the perfect disguise for their unique potential.

Set on a Montana cattle ranch in 1925, Campion’s sinewy adaptation depicts a four-sided death waltz between a tortured cowboy (Benedict Cumberbatch), his softhearted brother (Jesse Plemons), the widow he marries (Kirsten Dunst), and the delicate-seeming teenage son who comes with her (Kodi Smit-McPhee). The story that unfolds from that scenario is equal parts wish fulfillment and cautionary tale, and since it’s told without a dominant point-of-view — in a way that feels almost anthropological — it’s able to be each of those things for different characters at the same time.

For all of the film’s biblical grandeur, “The Power of the Dog” never insists upon itself. There isn’t a moment in the movie that lacks vision, but the whole thing exudes a tremblingly quiet strength. Just as Savage’s plainspoken novel found the author flexing the invisible muscles he developed over a lifetime of fighting his own desire, Campion’s equally poignant film leverages repressed passion into an unexpected show of strength. “The Power of the Dog” sticks its teeth into you so fast and furtively that you may not feel the sting on your skin until after the credits roll, but the delayed bite of the film’s ending doesn’t stop it from leaving behind a well-earned scar. —DE

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“No Other Land” (dirs. Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Rachel Szor, 2024)

Born in the small Palestinian community of Masafer Yatta, 28-year-old Basel Adra has never known a life that wasn’t under threat of forced removal — or worse. But the freshness of his memory can also be attributed to the fact that Adra has never known a life that wasn’t being documented for his own protection. The most dehumanizing episodes of his existence have all been captured on camera by his family and their fellow villagers, the footage preserved and shared in the hopes that the world might witness their suffering and prevail upon Israel to let Palestinians live in peace (“I started filming when we started to end,” Adra intones, perhaps repeating the same words his father said the first time he picked up his own camera).

Against all odds, that hope continues to persevere — not only among the survivors of Masafer Yatta, but also through “No Other Land,” the lucidly enraging documentary that Adra has co-directed about Israel’s decades-long attempt to erase them from the earth as completely as it erased them from its maps. The first major film about the occupation of Palestine since the start of the Israel-Hamas war in October of 2023, this intimate and harrowing portrait of endurance is all the more powerful for its focus on the decades of colonial degradation that paved the way for the current nightmare.

Eligible for a spot on this list thanks to the film’s brief qualifying run at a single New York City theater, “No Other Land” is still without permanent U.S. distribution. There’s a profound shame in that, but also a rea; sadness as well. Witnessing is the most effective defense people have against occupation, as occupiers — like all thieves — wilt in the face of being watched. The footage is out there, and it’s rarely or never been assembled into a more concise, powerful, and damning argument than it is here. Now it only needs to be seen. —DE

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“Nope” (dir. Jordan Peele, 2022)

How do we live with some of the shit that we’ve been forced to watch on a daily basis? Why are we so eager to immortalize the worst images that our world is capable of producing, and what kind of awful power do we lend such tragedies by sanctifying them into spectacles that can play out over and over again?

While Jordan Peele has fast become one of the most relevant and profitable of modern American filmmakers, “Nope” is the first time that he’s been afforded a budget fit for a true blockbuster spectacle, and that’s exactly what he’s created with it. But if this smart, muscular, and massively entertaining flying saucer freak-out is such an old school delight that it starts with a shout-out to early cinema pioneer Eadweard Muybridge (before paying homage to more direct influences like “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”), it’s also a thoroughly modern popcorn movie for and about viewers who’ve been inundated with — and addicted to — 21st century visions of real-life terror.

The only sci-fi movie that might scare and delight Guy Debord and Ed Wood to the same degree, “Nope” offers a giddy throwback to the days of little green men and hubcap U.F.O.s that hopes to revitalize those classic tropes for audiences who’ve seen too much bloodshed on their own screens to believe in Hollywood’s “bad miracles.” It’s a tractor beam of a movie pointed at people who’ve watched 9/11 happen so many times on network TV that it’s lost any literal meaning; who’ve scrolled past body cam snuff films in between Dril tweets; who’ve become accustomed to rubbernecking at American life from inside the wreckage. —DE

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“Memoria” (dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2021)

“Memoria” begins with the first jump scare in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s career, but the sudden impact isn’t as relevant as the way it resonates in the silence that follows. Anyone familiar with the slow-burn lyricism at the center of the Thai director’s work knows how he adheres to a dreamlike logic that takes its time to settle in. The Colombia-set “Memoria,” his first movie made outside his native country, does that as well as anything in “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” or “Cemetery of Splendour.” But this time around, there’s a profound existential anxiety creeping in.

With Tilda Swinton’s puzzled gaze as its guide, “Memoria” amounts to a haunting, introspective look at one woman’s attempts to uncover the roots of a mysterious sound that only she can hear. More than that, it’s a masterful and engrossing response to the rush of modern times and the collective amnesia it creates — one that builds to a last-minute reveal for the ages. Anyone frustrated by its patience only serves to prove the point —EK

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“Decision to Leave” (dir. Park Chan-wook, 2022)

One of the most romantic movies of the decade is… a police procedural? That’s just how it goes when “Oldboy” director Park Chan-wook — whose operatic revenge melodramas have given way to a series of ravishingly baroque Hitchcockian love stories about the various “perversities” that might bind two wayward souls together — decides to make a detective thriller. 

Which isn’t to suggest that “Decision to Leave” is some kind of whodunnit. On the contrary, Park’s funny, playful, and increasingly poignant crime thriller is less interested in what Hae-joon (Park Hae-il) knows about his suspect than in how he feels about her. By the same token, widowed caretaker Seo-rae (played with deliciously uncertain purpose by Chinese “Lust, Caution” star Tang Wei) seems less troubled by the idea that Hae-joon might discover some damning evidence about her late husband’s death than she is by the fear that he might stop investigating her. 

And so the stage is set for Park to orchestrate a psychologically complex procedural about a proud detective brought to life by a crime he doesn’t want to solve, and a rootless murder suspect who’s mastered the art of leaving things behind. What starts as a rather open-and-shut case, however, soon evolves into something much richer, as Park leverages the killings (plural!) into a gripping investigation of a mystery that no police department could ever hope to solve: How does a romance survive between two people whose only hope for a future together depends upon them leaving the past unresolved? It’s a mystery that Park unpacks with uncharacteristic restraint, if only because its ultimate payoff — more of a sinking realization than the kind of sudden bombshell that often detonated at the end of his earlier films — requires these characters to remain firmly lodged in the real world, where their adult longings might face adult consequences. 

On the other hand, “Decision to Leave” is only able to stir up such unexpectedly immense emotions during its final moments because of the complications that Park creates for his characters along the way, which sink into Hae-joon and Seo-rae with the same visible weight that a wave of ocean water saturates into the dry sand it finds onshore. If “Decision to Leave” initially seems to be investigating how their feelings for each other can survive despite being so unresolved, a different picture emerges at high tide — one that suggests there’s no other way for them to stay alive. Love can last a lifetime, but longing never dies. —DE

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“Drive My Car” (dir. Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2021)

When’s the last time you saw a three-hour movie you wished could be longer? Drive My Car” not only inspires that wish, it grants it: even though the credits roll around the 180-minute mark, the world of Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s film, and its wayward characters, keeps unspooling in your head. That’s fitting because “Drive My Car” is filled with characters who can’t let things go in their own lives either: Hidetoshi Nishijima plays the acclaimed theater director Kafuku, who accepts a residency to direct a new, multilingual adaptation of “Uncle Vanya.” Recently widowed, he’s obsessed over why, before her death, his wife had an affair with a young matinee idol, whose intellectual capacity seemed, well, beneath her. Kafuku casts the scandal-ridden stud as the title character in his “Vanya,” which seems an ill portent. Keeping the director grounded, though, is his 23-year-old driver Misaki (Toko Miura), whose employment is a liability precondition of Kafuku accepting the residency. She’s stoic enough to suggest early on she’s haunted by something.

In “Drive My Car,” everyone else is too. And Hamaguchi’s approach isn’t so much to tell a story, but to let you find it in the midst of his trademark lengthy conversation scenes, in this case built around rehearsals of the play, long stints at the wheel, and energy-sapped bar visits. Based on a Haruki Murakami story, “Drive My Car” shows why more filmmakers should lean on the long-take — Hamaguchi lets his characters breathe, with enough quiet moments to allow you to fill in what isn’t said, just the way you’d put down a book to sit and think for a moment. As arresting a literary adaptation it is — and this is one of the young century’s finest literary adaptations to date — it’s the images that’ll stick with you just as much: two hands thrust through a Saab’s moon roof clutching cigarettes, two figures perched atop a cliff-like snowdrift, a young woman hanging back, rapt, as actors rehearse in a park. So many works of art emphasize our disconnection, but “Drive My Car,” its title a quiet invitation, suggests a path back to one another. —CB 

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“Time” (dir. Garrett Bradley, 2020)

On its surface, Garrett Bradley’s “Time” asks a simple question: How can you convey the full length of 21 years in the span of a single film, let alone a documentary that runs just 81 minutes? And from its degraded opening images — borrowed from the first of a thousand video messages that a Black Louisiana woman named Sibil Fox Richardson (aka “Fox Rich”) recorded for her husband as she waited for him to be released from the State Penitentiary — offers a similarly simple answer: You don’t measure it in length, but rather in loss.

You measure time in absence. In the undertows of anger that swirl under the water and threaten to sweep you out to sea. In the punitive aftertaste of forcing six boys to grow up without a father. In the way that their mother, a determined but soft-spoken 27-year-old when she made that initial tape, has hardened into a social justice warrior of such indomitable strength that she could single-handedly restore that term to the power it implies. You don’t think of time as a bridge that stretches between past and future, but as the boundless present that flows below; infinite along one axis, but so narrow along the other that you can barely see the distance between shores.

Swirled together from 18 years’ worth of MiniDV tapes (in addition to the newer, more pristine footage the filmmaker shot of Fox and her family before that incredible treasure trove of home video was dumped in her lap), Bradley’s monumental and enormously moving “Time” doesn’t juxtapose the pain of yesterday against the hope of tomorrow so much as it insists upon a perpetual now. And while the documentary never reduces its subjects to mere symbols of the oppression they represent — the film couldn’t be more personal, and it builds to a moment of such unvarnished intimacy that you can hardly believe what you’re watching — Bradley’s Tralfamadorian editing flattens time in a way that contextualizes mass incarceration on the largest of continuums. “Time” in name and timeless in style, this liquid history streams centuries of subjugation into a single confluence of dehumanization until slavery and the prison-industrial complex become two separate brooks that feed into the same river. —DE

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“Top Gun: Maverick” (dir. Joseph Kosinski, 2022)

Hollywood may still be in trouble, the box office might still be a mess, and the definition of “blockbuster” in the year 2025 might still be very much in flux, but no one can deny the raw power of Joseph Kosinski’s bonafide mega smash hit, “Top Gun: Maverick.” No, really, no one, as the long- (long-, looooong-) gestating sequel to Tony Scott’s raucous 1986 extended music video about abs and Naval aviators managed to charm both critics and audiences alike. The third time this writer saw the film in theaters it was like being at a Broadway show on opening night, the entire crowd abuzz, atwitter, basically beaming, and that was while they were simply buying their popcorn and buckets of soda. Such glee is contagious, and by the time “Danger Zone” pumped through the massive IMAX speakers, it was clear that everyone was there for a damn good time.

Even more thrilling: Kosinski’s film delivers that good time, over and over and over again. How do you make a good sequel? It’s a question that has plagued Hollywood for decades, and one that Kosinski’s film deftly answers. By making a good movie. There, formula complete.

While a previous affection for Scott’s movie certainly helps in enjoying “Maverick” – if nothing else, understanding the fraught and profound emotional bonds between Tom Cruise, Val Kilmer, and Anthony Edwards’ characters and how they carry over to this new entry, is good – viewers could still walk in cold and appreciate the level of bombastic “wow, that’s a fucking movie!” on display in the feature. By now, Cruise’s obsession with cranking up the dial on each and every of his action outings is well-documented, and he’s joined on that quest by a wily group of flyboys (and girls!) as he returns to Top Gun to right some wrongs, kick some ass, and take some names. High-flying aerial stunts literally soar, emotion runs high, and Lady Gaga is there to sing along to all of it. Now this? This is a movie. This is a blockbuster. We miss them, but they rarely were any better than this one. —KE

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“Lovers Rock” (dir. Steve McQueen, 2020)

In 68 minutes, Steve McQueen made the most intricate, joyful movie of his career, dance-party salute to Black joy and teen energy that doubles as a meditation on hidden history. In the year’s most exciting, audacious use of music onscreen, teenager Martha (Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn) and her peers hit the dance floor for a soulful rendition of Janet Kay’s 1979 single “Silly Games.” But when then the tune stops and their a cappella rendition takes over — for five mesmerizing minutes! — one woman’s high-pitch wail resolves on the same bluesy note, the feet stamping coalesces into a mighty beat, and the collective performance transforms into a dazzling, hypnotic representation of cultural solidarity. Martha’s wild night out in the Notting Hill neighborhood circa 1980 hits a few hard times, but it builds to a giddy, romantic finish that lets her get away with the excitement of discovering herself in piecemeal.

Stitched into the broader tapestry of McQueen’s five-film “Small Axe” miniseries about the experiences of West Indian Londoners across the decades, “Lovers Rock” certainly feels like a concise puzzle piece in some vast tapestry designed to make up for years of underexplored territory. At the same time, the movie — and there’s no point in questioning whether it deserves that designation — stands on its own as a poetic snapshot of life as vivid as anything in “Roma” or “Boyhood.” McQueen has told many rich, unsettling stories over the years. But with “Lovers Rock,” he funnels those same lyrical powers into a celebration of living in the moment, and we’re right there with him. —EK

“The Boy and the Heron” (dir. Hayao Miyazaki, 2023)

How does someone follow one of the greatest and most profoundly summative farewells the movies have ever seen? By definition, they don’t. They retire, or they die. Or they retire and then they die. In some rare cases, it even seems like they die because they retired. And then there’s 82-year-old filmmaker and Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki, always in a category of his own, who’s formally or informally quit the business no fewer than seven times of the course of his illustrious career, most recently after the 2013 release of his magnum opus “The Wind Rises.” That film — a fictionalized biopic about aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi — ended with someone concluding “we must live,” in spite of all things. Miyazaki’s new last film (for now) asks how, and then offers its own kind of answer.

The story of an angry and grieving child named Mahito who loses his mother in a 1943 hospital fire and then moves to the Japanese countryside so that his father can marry the boy’s aunt, “The Boy and the Heron” kicks into high gear once an Iago-like bird lures Mahito into a parallel universe with promises of reuniting with his mother. Already one of the most beautiful movies ever drawn, Miyazaki’s film becomes transcendent from that point on, resolving into a dream-like adventure that finds its creator nakedly reflecting on his legacy. And while this dream-like warble of a swan song may be too pitchy and scattered to hit with the gale-force power that made “The Wind Rises” feel like such a definitive farewell, “The Boy and the Heron” finds Miyazaki so nakedly bidding adieu — to us, and to the crumbling kingdom of dreams and madness that he’ll soon leave behind — that it somehow resolves into an even more fitting goodbye, one graced with the divine awe and heart-stopping wistfulness of watching a true immortal make peace with their own death. —DE

“Tár” (dir. Todd Field, 2022)

Lydia Tár may not be real (despite a worrying number of deeply unfunny essays that unfurled in the wake of the release of Todd Field’s masterpiece), but she will indeed endure. It’s nearly impossible to explain why “Tár” works so well — explaining the film’s plot involves lots of buzzwords that seem to, if not entirely miss the point, at least miss great chunks of it — but let’s try. First, there’s Cate Blanchett, who stars as the titular Lydia Tár, the world’s foremost classical composer-conductor (and she’s a woman!) on the cusp of yet another major professional milestone. Sound snoozy? Hardly. Blanchett’s kind of intensity, both warm and repellant, is on full display here; hell, it’s at its full glory.

Lydia (or “Linda” if you’re in the know) has ruthlessly shaped every aspect of her life and work. The composing and conducting? Just part of the overall performance of being Lydia Tár, and what an electric performance it is. But what happens when the cracks start to show? Field thrillingly opens the film during a long-form interview with Lydia that drills down into her many accomplishments and what’s next for her, and her face can’t help but betray every thought and feeling she’s got associated with them. And that’s all before she gets, in contemporary parlance, “canceled” for trading professional favors for sex.

At best, Lydia doesn’t have scruples; at worst, she’s an actual abuser, and how she — and we — attempt to navigate that line carries us through the rest of the film. Despite seemingly heavy subject matter, this is a film that flies right by, dark humor at every turn, immersive sensibilities plunging us into her world, and a sort of inevitability that lands Lydia at a hilarious and horrible crossroads.

Field and Blanchett often get surreal and even silly, but what’s more surreal and more silly than watching your life be destroyed — the life you built — because of who you are, the person who created it, the person who could end up absolutely nowhere else? That’s a question that will endure. —KE

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“Aftersun” (dir. Charlotte Wells)

A stunning debut that develops with the gradual poignancy of a Polaroid, Charlotte Wells’ “Aftersun” isn’t just an honest movie about the way that we remember the people we’ve lost — fragmented, elusive, nowhere and everywhere all at once — it’s also a heart-stopping act of remembering unto itself. Here, in the span of an oblique but tender father-daughter story that feels small enough to fit on an instant photo (or squeeze into the LCD screen of an old camcorder), Wells creates a film that gradually echoes far beyond its frames. By the time it reaches fever pitch with the greatest Freddie Mercury needle drop this side of “Wayne’s World,” “Aftersun” has begun to shudder with the crushing weight of all that we can’t leave behind, and all that we may not have known to take with us in the first place.

When Sophie (remarkable newcomer Frankie Corio) thinks of her father, she thinks of the Turkish holiday they went on together in the late ’90s. That was the trip when she turned 11, and Calum — played by “Normal People” breakout Paul Mescal, who makes an indelible leap into dad roles with tremendous poise and a triggering sense of parental mystery — turned 32. We get the impression that she may never have seen him again. Now they would be about the same age, which might be why adult Sophie feels compelled to rewatch the MiniDV footage that she and her father recorded on that vacation, eagerly scanning the standard-definition video in search of the clues that a child might have missed at the time. 

The eerily static home videos and the semi-imagined 35mm scenes that “Aftersun” wraps around them both suggest that Calum was struggling with a demon of one stripe or another, and that he was doing his best to hide that struggle from his daughter during their too-rare time together. Whatever the case, Wells denies us the details. Like Sophie, all we can do is sift for meaning amidst the rubble and hope to fill in the haunted spaces between the man she knew and the man she lost. 

“Aftersun” is able to follow its characters through the strobe light of lost time because Mescal and Corio make it so tempting for us to complete their performances for them — to bridge the gaps of Sophie’s understanding with the same urgency that we might want to bridge our own. Few movies have ever ended with a more tempting invitation to do the impossible, but even fewer have found so much truth and tenderness in the futile act of trying. —DE

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“The Zone of Interest” (dir. Jonathan Glazer, 2023)

Holocaust cinema has so implicitly existed in the shadow of a single question that it would no longer seem worth asking if not for the fact that it’s never been answered: How do you depict an atrocity? Is seeing necessary for believing, or are some things too unfathomable to adequately capture on camera? 

A Holocaust drama that’s defined by its rigorous compartmentalization and steadfast refusal to show any hint of explicit violence, Jonathan Glazer’s profoundly chilling “The Zone of Interest” stands out for how formally the film splits the difference between the two opposite modes of its solemn genre — a genre that may now be impossible to consider without it. No Holocaust movie has ever been more committed to illustrating the banality of evil, and that’s because no Holocaust movie has ever been more hell-bent upon ignoring evil altogether. There is a literal concrete wall that separates Glazer’s characters from the horrors next door (those characters being the commandant of Auschwitz and his family), and not once does his camera dare to peek over it for a better look.

The authorless quality of Glazer’s images frees the characters within them from the emptiness of moral judgment. The evil on display is never the least bit in doubt, but its failure to recognize itself as such is only so able to take shape in the absence of its limiting obviousness. By the end, “The Zone of Interest” insists that all of history’s most abominable moments have been permitted by people who didn’t have to see them, and while the film’s ultimate staying power has yet to be determined, its vision of normality is — as Hannah Arendt once described that phenomenon — “more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.” —DE

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“Nickel Boys” (dir. RaMell Ross, 2024)

A leaf twirls through a pair of fingers. A deck of playing cards is bridged together in extreme close-up. A dry-cleaned suit hangs out the window of a parked car like it’s waiting for its body to come back. A boy named Elwood studies his reflection in his grandmother’s steaming iron, and later in the window display of the local Tallahassee electronic shop whose TVs are broadcasting a speech by Martin Luther King, Jr. The year is 1962, Jim Crow laws are still in full effect across the South, and young Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herisse) can’t help but see himself in the world around him — he can’t help but think he can change it. 

In the news, Elwood sees men shooting themselves into outer space. At home, Elwood sees his defiantly ebullient Nana (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) dance around the kitchen as if nothing here on Earth could take the song out of her step. At school, Elwood sees pencils stuck in the ceiling of his classroom, where his teacher has the students cross out the most damaging lies from their history textbooks, and encourages Elwood to attend a free college for high-achieving Black kids. While hitchhiking there on the kindness of strangers, Elwood sees the man behind the wheel begin to panic when a cop pulls them over. The car was stolen. “Look down,” the driver tells him, but Elwood doesn’t. He needs to see this too. And that means we do as well, because in RaMell Ross’ faithful but visionary adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s “The Nickel Boys,” a novel about the bond that forms between two teenagers at a barbaric Florida reform school, the story is almost exclusively told through the eyes of its two lead characters. 

One still believes in America’s potential. The other is convinced that our country is already — and has always been — fulfilling the original promise of its cruelty. Ross’ formal approach (don’t call it a “conceit”) quite literally forces us to see both of their perspectives, but the epic banality of his pointillism denies any trace of didacticism between them. Pure sense and subjectivity in a way that evokes the same visual magic of Ross’ documentary work, “Nickel Boys” so viscerally and fundamentally centers the experience of its young Black characters that even the most racist brand of revisionist history could never hope to deny their truth. 

In its way, and in the context of a mainstream film that Amazon MGM Studios released into hundreds or thousands of theaters across the United States, Ross’ aesthetic is as radical as Whitehead’s reimagining of the Underground Railroad as an actual train line. It’s also every inch as successful. Collaborating with the brilliant cinematographer Jomo Fray (“All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt”), who shares his prismatic attention to detail, Ross has devised an astoundingly effective way to express the relationship between how we see things and what we glean from them. The result is a rare testament to the transformative potential of cinematic adaptation (Ross co-wrote the script with Joslyn Barnes), and a staggeringly poignant reminder that America’s most enduring narratives are only subject to change when people are invited to look at them in a different light. “Nickel Boys” extends that invitation to the world with an open hand. It’s among the most extraordinary films of this young century. —DE