A24

Another love story, but a bleaker one, focused on a 21-year-old aspiring filmmaker (Honor Swinton Byrne) in 1980s London, who gets drawn into an intense but toxic relationship with an older man (Tom Burke). Written and directed by Joanna Hogg, an undersung virtuoso of domestic dramas, the film is a semi-autobiographical work that excavates her most brutal recollections without being cringeworthy. The Souvenir is a darkly sympathetic coming-of-age narrative that catalogs the pain and pleasure of being young, occasionally stupid, idealistic, and openhearted.

Neon

Bong Joon Ho is no stranger to tonal mash-ups. Still, when your movie might be both the comedy of the year and the thriller of the year, you know you’ve made something major. Even with Bong’s sterling track record, this is the best film the Korean auteur has ever produced—a dizzying satire about two families in Seoul who struggle to co-exist under the same roof, and a salient tale of the gulf between the rich and the poor. Parasite can be madcap in one moment and sweetly sad the next, but always retains its humanity; though the wildly inventive script eventually erupts into violence, Bong somehow keeps every one of his characters from coming off as a villain.

Sony / Columbia

Quentin Tarantino’s film swung into cinemas this summer feeling like both a celebration and a swan song for the traditional moviegoing experience. A shaggy tale of two actors in 1969 Hollywood—one on the rise (the very real Sharon Tate, played by Margot Robbie) and one in a professional spiral (the very fictional Rick Dalton, played by Leonardo DiCaprio)—Once Upon a Time in Hollywood could be a commentary about the end of any era, but it’s especially fitting for today’s shifting filmmaking landscape. Throughout his meteoric career, Tarantino has collected nostalgic objects from his pop-culture past and made them cool again; here, one can see him wondering how many more times he’ll be able to pull off that trick.

A24

5. Uncut Gems

The Safdie brothers, directors of grimy indie yarns such as Heaven Knows What and Good Time, are experts in cranking up tension higher than I ever thought cinematically sustainable. Uncut Gems is as relentless and gritty as those earlier projects, while also possessing the weight of a Shakespearean tragedy. It’s buoyed by Adam Sandler’s never-better work as the diamond dealer Howard Ratner—an ambitious, compulsive fool who simply cannot get out of his own way—and by the Safdies’ perfect sense of time and place. They turn the Upper East Side of the early 2010s into a neon-lit Dante’s Inferno and elicit a charming supporting turn from the basketball star Kevin Garnett. What’s not to love?

Netflix

Martin Scorsese’s supersize funeral for the gangster movie is another magnificently elegiac piece from a Hollywood titan. Netflix’s The Irishman lacks the baroque energy of Goodfellas and other prior Scorsese triumphs, but that’s by design: This is a cold-eyed look at the dehumanizing realities of life in the mob. The film’s hero, Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), is a man given to mythmaking, especially when it comes to his fraught relationship with Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino). But Scorsese is more interested in stripping Sheeran’s tough-guy image away, staging the film’s best and most tense sequence around a very personal betrayal that is electrifying, and upsetting, to behold.