Key Highlights
- It was a year defined by daring, by filmmakers who trusted audiences to lean in rather than sit back.
- Start with the consensus triumphs — films that felt instantly canonical.
- Chloé Zhao’s “Hamnet” is a masterwork of grief rendered as poetry.
- Jessie Buckley delivers a performance of almost unbearable emotional clarity as a mother splintered by loss, yet somehow still breathing.
- Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” is something else entirely — muscular, ambitious and alive.
