As a piece of both cultural history and film history, David Byrne's True Stories takes its place alongside two other films from the mid-'80s that are also steeped in a surrealistic other-worldly place, Repo Man and Blue Velvet.
Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski's Cold War, a sweeping romance, is equally indebted to grand spectacle and the practical compromises of wartime Europe.
Adam McKay's gonzo Dick Cheney biopic satire, Vice, won't be compared to Shakespeare, but it shares the Bard's disinterest in supervillains' motivations.
Barry Jenkins' If Beale Street Could Talk is a near-perfect success both as a grand statement of solidarity and as a gorgeously wrought, long-overdue story of black life and black love.
Alfonso Cuarón's edgily political black-and-white epic of a family in 1970s Mexico City is as masterfully choreographed as Children of Men but more personally intimate.
Robert Christgau is the rare critic who can write insightfully and passionately about a sweaty performance by a popular Congolese soukous band and a magisterial show by Senegal's Youssou N'Dour. That magic is captured in his latest anthology, Is It Still Good to Ya?
Imagine John Yoko is a beautifully curated recollection of a song, an album, successive films, and the legacy of peaceful idealism from the people who made it happen and carry on with the message.
Burning is more interested in exploring ennui and desperation in the abstract than offering distinct answers about its characters, and it's all the more riveting because of it.
The series of small and large triumphs snatched from the teeth of social inertia leaves one elated at human potential. Eight Hours Don't Make a Day is Fassbinder's version of a "feel-good" film.
