Critics’ choice: The year’s top 10 movies

‘One Battle After Another’

“Sometimes you can tell a movie is going to work from the first frame,” said Alissa Wilkinson in The New York Times. Paul Thomas Anderson’s comedic thriller, in which Leonardo DiCaprio plays a former revolutionary trying to protect his biracial teenage daughter from white supremacist
goons, piles up its pleasures. It’s propulsive. It’s also packed with “spot-on needle drops” and “virtuosic” performances. Still, “what makes One Battle the best film of the year is how these all lock together to tell a truth we rarely dare to acknowledge: No generation, no matter how idealistic, will ever solve the world’s problems.”

‘It Was Just an Accident’

Be sure not to miss Jafar Panahi’s Palme d’Or winner, said Adam Nayman in The Ringer, because “no other movie this year feels more ferocious from beginning to end.” Soon after a mechanic in Iran kidnaps
a man he believes was once his cruel imprisoner, the film “mutates—unsettlingly and hilariously—from a stripped-down revenge thriller into a piece of existential slapstick.” Is the captive even the right guy? Panahi
has been a political prisoner himself, and he’s inviting all of us to consider vengeance and mercy more deeply.

‘Sinners’

“Not merely a great movie but an eternal movie,” Ryan Coogler’s bluesy
period-piece horror musical proved that a smart, fun original drama can still fill theaters, said Amy Nicholson in the Los Angeles Times. When twin brothers played by Michael B. Jordan open a juke joint in the Jim Crow–era South and a small clutch of vampires take notice, “we’re expecting a
big, bloody brouhaha, and we get it.” But Sinners also serves as “a hymnal about the struggle to create something beautiful during your time on earth,” and a haunting tribute to oppressed people who refuse to become monsters themselves.

‘Marty Supreme’

Leave it to Timothée Chalamet to deliver one of this century’s “most colossal movie performances” while making it look easy, said David Ehrlich in IndieWire. Josh Safdie’s first feature since Uncut Gems has
the same “quicksilver” energy as its young star, who plays Marty Mauser, an aspiring 1950s world table tennis champ ready to steamroll anybody in his path. Marty’s mad dream repeatedly puts his life at risk—until
the movie turns its focus to “how sublime it can be for driven people to start living for something bigger than themselves.”

‘Sentimental Value’

Joachim Trier’s “truly remarkable” new work will speak to anyone who has struggled with parental baggage—“by which we mean everybody,” said David Fear in Rolling Stone. Stellan Skarsgard plays a filmmaker who, after failing to persuade his actress daughter to star in his auto-
biographical latest project, hires an American starlet instead and starts shooting in the family homestead. Skarsgard and Renate Reinsve make every father-daughter exchange sting, and Trier “uses their prickly
dynamic to explore how storytelling can both mask hurt and facilitate healing.”

‘The Secret Agent’

Kleber Mendonça Filho’s genre blender “takes the shape of a thriller, but is something more mournful and strange,” said Alison Willmore in NYMag.com. Wagner Moura is sad-eyed but magnetic as a father
on the run from the dictatorial powers-that-be in 1977 Brazil. As the former academic fraternizes with fellow dissidents and corrupt officials alike, Mendonça’s “beguiling masterpiece” becomes “an elegy for a
dark stretch of the past and for all the relationships it severed.”

‘Hamnet’

“For a movie about enduring the loss of a child, Hamnet is surprisingly warm,” said Shania Russell in Entertainment Weekly. As in Maggie O’Farrell’s novel of the same name, William Shakespeare loses a young
son and channels his grief into writing Hamlet. But Chloé Zhao’s movie isn’t tragedy porn. The Nomadland director “thrives in the details: the earthy magic of the countryside, the warm flush of first love.” Somehow, co-stars Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley display immense restraint “while
letting raw emotions run wild.”

‘If I Had Legs I’d Kick You’

“Sometimes the best films are the ones that are most difficult to describe,” said Lindsey Bahr in the Associated Press. In this dark comedy, Rose Byrne delivers an “utterly fearless” performance as a mother
pushed to the edge by multiplying challenges: a sick daughter, a stressful job, a disdainful shrink, and even a belligerent hamster. “An exposed nerve come to life,” I’d Kick You is also “one of the most audacious films of the year.”

‘Caught by the Tides’

Actress Zhao Tao “has a silent-film star’s affecting eloquence,” and her director husband, Jia Zhangke, uses that talent well in this beguiling picture, said Justin Chang in The New Yorker. During the decades Jia has been making movies, “a staggering human parade has passed before his camera,” and he has repurposed some of his footage into a “turbulent” romantic drama in which Zhao’s character, seen in three different life passages, becomes the viewer’s guide to a ceaselessly changing China.

‘Blue Moon’

“In essence, it’s the story of a man sitting in a bar,” said Dana Stevens in Slate. On the night when his former songwriting partner is enjoying a major Broadway debut, the great lyricist Lorenz Hart drinks alone, waiting for the after-party to start while “alternately charming and
boring whoever he encounters.” But Ethan Hawke’s “body-and-soul transformation into the witty, painfully insecure Hart” is captivating, and as the night continues, director Richard Linklater and his star “quietly reinvent the artistic biopic, custom-tailoring it to fit this one instantly
unforgettable character.”