Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse(Bob Persichetti & Peter Ramsey & Rodney Rothman)
Peterloo(Mike Leigh)
Isle of Dogs(Wes Anderson)
Infinite Football(Corneliu Porumboiu)
Rojo(Benjamín Naishtat)
Avengers | Infinity War(Anthony & Joe Russo)
Overlord(Julius Avery)
Bisbee '17(Robert Greene)
A Quiet Place(John Krasinski)
Incredibles 2(Brad Bird)
If Beale Street Could Talk(Barry Jenkins)
Loro(Paolo Sorrentino)
All Is True(Kenneth Branagh)
Freaks(Adam Stein & Zach Lipovsky)
Galveston(Mélanie Laurent)
Ant-Man and The Wasp(Peyton Reed)
Dogman(Matteo Garrone)
Hereditary(Ari Aster)
Piercing(Nicolas Pesce)
Greta(Neil Jordan)
The Bleeding Edge(Kirby Dick)
La flor—Part 2(Mariano Llanás)
The Commuter(Jaume Collet-Serra)
Keep an Eye Out(Quentin Dupieux)
Ray & Liz(Richard Billingham)
Diane(Kent Jones)
Asako I & II(Ryûsuke Hamaguchi)
Your Face(Tsai Ming-liang)
Hidden Man(Jiang Wen)
Long Day's Journey Into Night(Bi Gan)
Ash Is Purest White(Jia Zhang-ke)
American Animals(Bart Layton)
Wildlife(Paul Dano)
3 Faces(Jafar Panahi)
Unsane(Steven Soderbergh)
Asher(Michael Caton-Jones)
The Seagull(Michael Mayer)
JT LeRoy(Justin Kelly)
Donbass(Sergei Loznitsa)
Ready Player One(Steven Spielberg)
Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot(Gus Van Sant)
Transit(Christian Petzold)
Hearts Beat Loud(Brett Haley)
The Standoff at Sparrow Creek(Henry Dunham)
Ayka(Sergey Dvortsevoy)
Widows(Steve McQueen)
Non-Fiction(Olivier Assayas)
A Family Tour(Ying Liang)
Tea With the Dames(Roger Michell)
The Fall of the American Empire(Denys Arcand)
Pass Over(Spike Lee)
White Boy Rick(Yann Demange)
A Private War(Matthew Heineman)
The Prayer(Cédric Kahn)
A Faithful Man(Louis Garrel)
Won't You Be My Neighbor?(Morgan Neville)
Halloween(David Gordon Green)
Tully(Jason Reitman)
The Old Man & the Gun(David Lowery)
The Man Who Killed Don Quixote(Terry Gilliam)
Everybody Knows(Asghar Farhadi)
Shock Waves—Diary of My Mind(Ursula Meier)
By the Grace of God(François Ozon)
Unfriended: Dark Web(Stephen Susco)
The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then The Bigfoot(Robert D. Krzykowski)
The Nightingale(Jennifer Kent)
Happy as Lazzaro(Alice Rohrwacher)
Minding the Gap(Bing Liu)
The Wild Pear Tree(Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
Thunder Road(Jim Cummings)
A Star Is Born(Bradley Cooper)
Climax(Gaspar Noé)
Yomeddine(Abu Bakr Shawky)
Searching for Ingmar Bergman(Margarethe von Trotta)
Assassination Nation(Sam Levinson)
Bad Samaritan(Dean Devlin)
Stan & Ollie(Jon S. Baird)
Leto(Kirill Serebrennikov)
A Million Little Pieces(Sam Taylor-Johnson)
The Front Runner(Jason Reitman)
Hotel Mumbai(Anthony Maras)
Birds of Passage(Cristina Gallego & Ciro Guerra)
Monrovia, Indiana(Frederick Wiseman)
Pope Francis—A Man of His Word(Wim Wenders)
The Trial(Sergei Loznitsa)
At War(Stéphane Brizé)
Girls of the Sun(Eva Husson)
Juliet, Naked(Jesse Peretz)
Trial by Fire(Edward Zwick)
The Command(Thomas Vinterberg)
Our Time(Carlos Reygadas)
Mandy(Panos Cosmatos)
La flor—Part 4(Mariano Llinás)
Mary Magdalene(Garth Davis)
Meeting Gorbachev(Werner Herzog & André Singer)
First Man(Damien Chazelle)
High Life(Claire Denis)
Knife + Heart(Yann Gonzalez)
An Elephant Sitting Still(Hu Bo)
Operation Finale(Chris Weitz)
Suspiria(Luca Guadagnino)
Victory Day(Sergei Loznitsa)
Relaxer(Joel Potrykus)
At Eternity's Gate(Julian Schnabel)
Paul, Apostle of Christ(Andrew Hyatt)
Vita & Virginia(Chanya Button)
Graves Without a Name(Rithy Panh)
Capernaum(Nadine Labaki)
The Heiresses(Marcelo Martinelli)
Never Look Away(Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck)
The Image Book(Jean-Luc Godard)
Retrospekt(Esther Rots)
The Happy Prince(Rupert Everett)
Green Book(Peter Farrelly)
Donnybrook(Tim Sutton)
The Death & Life of John F. Donovan(Xavier Dolan)
The Outsider(Martin Zandvliet)
Grass(Hong Sangsoo)
Ophelia(Claire McCarthy)
Clara's Ghost(Bridey Elliott)
Maya(Mia Hansen-Løve)
Gotti(Kevin Connolly)
Human, Space, Time and Human(Kim Ki-duk)
Rather than dramatically “unveiling” a top ten list sometime in January (as if anybody who reads this site didn’t already know what it was gonna look like), I revise the sucker as I go along. Here is what my list would look like if (god forbid) I were forced to make it today.
For archival purposes, I file everything by the year it had its world premiere. Many of these films will have been commercially released in the U.S. a year or two later, so my lists won’t always match up with other folks’ lists.
Films I haven’t yet rated on that scale are marked with if I currently think they belong in my top ten. These films are subject to being shifted around or yanked altogether at any moment, after I revisit them and they get a numeral. If a film isn’t currently in my top ten, and I haven’t yet rated it, it ain’t here. There are a whole lot of those — if you’re wondering whether or not I’ve seen the masterpiece you can’t believe I omitted, check my master list.