Pedro Costa’s meditative camera lingers in the decaying home of a recent widow, Bong Joon-ho takes a scalpel to South Korea’s class system, and Martin Scorsese’s epic gangster film wrestles with his long-time fascinations of sin and guilt.
Alfonso Cuarón cements his status as an all-time great director with a black-and-white memory piece, Ari Aster takes the horror genre to a new level with fresh artistic sensibilities, and a hyper-kinetic animation deconstructs decades of superhero stories.
Christopher Nolan shakes up the war genre with his tremendous editing, Denis Villeneuve astoundingly builds on a decades-old classic with a phenomenal sequel, and Paul Schrader’s theological character study features Ethan Hawke in a self-destructive spiral.
Damien Chazelle’s ode to Hollywood musicals becomes one of the genre’s best, Jim Jarmusch’s impressively formal work celebrates the beauty of routine, and Denis Villeneuve finds a new linguistic spin on the alien science-fiction film.
Leonardo DiCaprio transforms into a spirit animal in Alejandro Iñárritu’s awe-inspiring revisionist western, George Miller makes a high-octane career comeback, and Adam McKay turns the Global Financial Crisis into an audacious piece of cinema.
Alejandro Iñárritu’s studies celebrity and ego in his one-take wonder, Wes Anderson throws back to mid-century Budapest with his immaculate pastel artistry, and Richard Linklater’s coming-of-age epic breaks new ground in realist cinema.
Paweł Pawlikowski delivers a haunting meditation on the long-lasting trauma of the Holocaust, Richard Linklater ties off his decades-spanning Before trilogy, and Nicolas Winding Refn’s neon-tinted violence heavily polarises audiences.
Paul Thomas Anderson creates an ambitiously enigmatic work studying symbiotic opposites, Christopher Nolan ends his Dark Knight trilogy with kinetic style, and Sam Mendes delivers the most inspired James Bond film to date.
Terrence Malick delivers a landmark of transcendental cinema, while Béla Tarr and Lars von Trier both impress with heavy, philosophical films contemplating two different apocalypses.
Aaron Sorkin pens the greatest screenplay of his career with David Fincher, Christopher Nolan blows minds with his most visually inventive film to date, and Darren Aronofsky crafts a horrifying character study of ambition and obsession.
