Love & Friendship is easily the funniest movie Whit Stillman has ever made. His bristling screenplay — which shows shades of Noël Coward and Evelyn Waugh — has so many impeccable one-liners that it would take three or four viewings to catch them all.

The Handmaiden is film at its most exhilarating by a director at the height of his powers, and it’s the kind of singular rarity that must be savored when it comes around.

What makes Toni Erdmann, the finest comedy in recent memory, so wonderful and beguiling is the deep undercurrent of sadness that informs its eventual life lessons.

[A] truly remarkable film.

Krisha, directed by first-timer Trey Edward Shults, is a masterful opera of discomfort and hurt feelings.

It’s a transcendent love story, and a work of overwhelming empathy.

Sicario works on every level. It’s also fairly prescient, coming at a time when America rages on about the ethics of border control and the mounting war on drugs.

Leave it to writer, director, and professional expectation-defier Charlie Kaufman to make existential angst so completely delightful.

In Andrea Arnold’s sublime film American Honey, freedom is relative, but every once in a while it can feel so damn good that the whole world disappears around it.

Few films are ever as enjoyable and endearing as Sing Street.

This is that rare film that has the power to transform, to shake one’s belief system so thoroughly that one feels like a slightly different person walking out of the theater.

This is a filmmaker’s film, a fully realized statement that oozes with the assurance and confidence of a hungry visionary who not only knows what he wants to do but how to do it.

Not only has George Miller made an effective return to the wasteland of the Mad Max universe with Mad Max: Fury Road, he has surpassed most action films released … well … ever.

A cold, visceral, and overwhelming piece of cinema.

Ejiofor is truly incredible from start to finish. McQueen’s approach to Solomon’s struggle is seamless, eschewing onscreen titles or obvious discussions of lapsed time or virtually anything that could briefly detach a viewer from their immersion into Solomon’s real-life nightmare.

Under Jenkins’ direction, Moonlight is both haunting and poetic, a bittersweet elegy for what could have been. His unflinching camera, which tends to follow the film’s characters like a ghost, gives the film a startling immediacy and emotional power.

No Hollywood suit and no diehard fan could have had the foresight to picture something like this, namely because nobody but Wright had any idea what this was supposed to be. This is something that’s been brewing inside his head for over two decades, and that unquestionable dedication, confidence, and passion fuels each and every scene of Baby Driver.

Despite the gender gap between the film’s creator and his subjects, the film is beautifully perceptive and, at times, deeply poignant. Mills has created the kind of comedy in which you laugh with recognition because its dilemmas feel so familiar.

Profound and illusory, Silence shows Martin Scorsese at the confessional, in sensationally cinematic style, delivering perhaps his most intimate work to date.

It’s a perfect marriage of direction, performances, and writing, the kind of comedy that people eagerly wait for. Its solutions aren’t easy, and its paths unusual, but it’s a love story that completely earns its emotional peaks, and the kind of comedy that makes you wish every single one of them were this great.

I Am Not Your Negro is the kind of documentary that could open ears, eyes, and hearts with its moving agony and historical empathy.

This is pitch-perfect filmmaking, the kind that turns a hungry visionary into a popular last name. Rest assured, it’s all earned. Manchester by the Sea is a hearty, rewarding drama audiences will remember for years.

Holy Hell ropes us in with tales of delusion before chilling us with tales of terror.

Guided more by emotion and imagery than by any conventional plot, A Bigger Splash is a wicked, mysterious, ceaselessly sexy, and experiential carnal summer whirl.

A Ghost Story is filmmaking that challenges and exhilarates, a potent reminder of how many new places film can still be taken even after a century of people working in the medium.

The Invitation is supremely well-crafted.

The Lure somehow manages to seamlessly assemble a film equal parts hilarious, affecting, and grisly while trading and warping aesthetics and tones by the scene.

The film possesses a quiet, considered tension that draws the viewer in.