It’s been a hell of a year of movies.

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Now, can you see the wolves in these pictures?

The Boy and the Heron

The dynamic is altered when Hayao Miyazaki approaches cinema as a wisened Octogenarian and tells us what he knows. You can no longer confuse animation as a toy or a corporate vehicle for on-brand messaging. Because here the animation can expand to any wider definition of what cinema can be, as animation as a medium is given a new lease on life by the sensation of the end closing in. — Calvin Kemph

Enys Men

That’s the film, though: spellbinding. It exists as part of a wider cinematic history, with clear reference points, but it is never anything else than utterly unique. It shifts between genres: is it science fiction? is it horror? is it just character drama? is it psychological study? is it a Matryoshka doll of period pieces within period pieces? It is, fundamentally, its own thing. A completely chilling and transporting watch where lichen becomes a jump scare. It is all from the filmmaking, this astonishing filmmaking that exhibits mastery of mise-en-scène. Everything matters and everything is left to the viewer. An expression of raw cinema that affects in the way only cinema can: an overwhelming barrage of visual and aural ideas that speaks right to your soul. — Stephen Gillespie

How to Blow Up a Pipeline

In the face of a climate catastrophe, something must be done. How to Blow Up a Pipeline, which favours radical action (but also just uses radical action as an excuse to make a stunning thriller), presents a group of (mostly) young adults that are fed up with conventional responses. In a world, this world, where traditional activism has started to feel inactive – futile efforts to chip away at a greater system that profits off of the climate crisis – there is a need to do more. This is event forward filmmaking: characters are initially defined by purpose, the title (adapted from a non-fiction book of the same name into a fictional story inspired by its ideology) makes it clear what is going on and this structure defines the film’s approach to storytelling. Event first; context later. This creates an immediacy befitting of the film’s stakes – it takes this stuff seriously, it (like the characters) is mad as hell and it is not going to take it anymore. — Stephen Gillespie

John Wick: Chapter 4

It has all led to this. This final cavalcade of bullets, this final flurry of fists and flesh, bloodied and battered and left to litter the streets across the globe as one man seeks absolution through an endless oblivion of violent revenge. When the only way out is death, the only path forward is straight through the iron wrought gates of Hell, deeper and deeper into the center of the inferno until Baba Yaga meets the devil himself. The opera of bloodshed has reached its crescendo, a glorious kaleidoscopic vision of lead, steel, and flame — a full force sensory assault of action firing on all cylinders. This is a ballet of violence for the ages, decades of genre perfection distilled into some of the finest three hours committed to bone crunching, blood splattering celluloid in history. — Vaughn Swearingen

Killers of the Flower Moon

The way to make a movie better than the book that preceded it is to find the central perspectives of the story and make that the fixed point the rest of the story revolves around. That’s Martin Scorsese’s method in adapting David Gram’s non-fiction book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI (2017). Gorgeously drawn from early cinema and the bloody pages of history, Scorsese begins with a cinematic framework: the movie starts as a silent movie with intertitles. Then it moves through a sweeping history lesson but with a central framing difference. The story is still about the foundational crimes and investigative units of American history, yes. Still, it moves through history from the perspective of the Osage people, the People of Middle Waters. It so deeply invests in a rich cultural history where an indigenous tribe with exponential wealth draws a scheming organized crime into their orbit. With a big heart and overt specificity, it begins to tell a fuller story about the experience of the Indigenous American without ever losing that central perspective. — Calvin Kemph

Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros

If a movie can be awarded Michelin stars, Wiseman is getting all three. Our best documentarian has made a masterpiece about the world’s greatest food. It doesn’t get much better than that. Like dining at Troisgros, this is going to take all day and you will savor every course of the menu. — Calvin Kemph

Past Lives

The elasticity of time, both as a permanent and inescapable stasis that keeps us locked in our liminal memories and as a languid, meandering cosmic thread that floats and intersects with a million others. We exist trapped in moments, stuck in these definitional instants that refract through every fiber of our being. When these moments intersect, colliding instants in separate existences, they may define or redefine each person in very different ways. For some, one of these instants may be a short lived moment of quiet joy. For others, it may become a burdening weight. It may be quickly forgotten, or it may be what drives the next 24 years of a life. These collisions are happening constantly – everywhere around us, little sparks, little definitional moments, imperceptible but infinitely impactful ripples woven through the fabric of the timeline of our lives. Past Lives begins with a gentle zoom across a dimly lit New York bar, slowly pushing towards protagonist Nora. At the very end of this long, gentle zoom, she looks right into the lens. Right at you. She gives a slight, but knowing smile. In that magical instant, you collide with the film. — Vaughn Swearingen

Perfect Days

Perfect Days is a revelation, a master director reflecting an entire career by managing to pack the emotional resonance of decades of work exploring the human condition into one character. One character who can affect the regretful sorrow of Harry Dean Stanton in Paris, Texas (1984) along with the distant hopefulness of William Hurt in Until the End of the World (1991) and the gentle empathy of Peter Falk in Wings of Desire. One character who can emote all of that and more on the way to work listening to Nina Simone. It also reflects a thoughtful consideration of so much more cinema, a comprehensive image of the way cinema can internalize and impact and inspire, reminding you of a beautiful history of humanism on the screen like the gentle persistent hum of the city outside your window on a warm spring night. — Vaughn Swearingen

Poor Things

Poor Things is cinema at its finest and most endearing, a vibrantly expressive reminder of originality and creativity couched within a lens of lust and comedy – perhaps what Lanthimos considers our most primal states of being. It is wacky and inventive and fascinating, constantly reforming into something new you didn’t think it could be, exploring and leveraging genre tropes while in a mode of endless subversion, floating on a cotton candy cloud of every little design choice that crafts this lavish landscape. It is a lot of things, but most importantly, it is deeply and wholly human. How easily we lose sight of ourselves. Maybe there’s room for all of us to become new again. — Vaughn Swearingen

The Zone of Interest

Levi’s score travels across time and history and reconnects the audience with trauma of the past and present, just as we see current events bridging the gap, so too does The Zone of Interest. It is almost a miracle that it has arrived how it has, when it has, and that it has flown under the radar as one of the most accomplished movies of our time. The Zone of Interest requires your zone of interest. It’s a museum trip: watch it with curiosity, a want to understand, and perhaps even reverence. All movies are art but this one is an expansive multi-layered masterpiece from Jonathan Glazer. Come and listen. — Calvin Kemph