What to Watch: "Resurrection" and most of the year's best films

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I’m still screening stuff to make sure I’ve seen everything for my Best Movies of 2025 post, which will be coming next week. I will note, however, that if you’re hankering to see something truly cinematic, genuinely intoxicating, find an art-house theater that’s showing Bi Gan’s “Resurrection” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐), a 2-hour 40-minute dreamscape, told in six parts, that filmed with staggering beauty and invention. If you’re into the outer edges of narrative moviemaking, you may remember Bi from 2018’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” (no relation to the Eugene O’Neill play), a love story that unfolded in a 3-D netherworld that was as close to what dreaming actually feels like as any movie has ever come. “Resurrection” has a vaguely sci-fi/vaguely Buddhist premise bookending its collection of tales – in the future, the last human able to dream (Chinese actor/pop megastar Jackson Yee)  is reincarnated and sent back to live five lives across the 20th century, each told in a different cinematic style and each loaded with Easter egg references to classic films across the history of the medium. (The opening section, for instance, is a combination recreation of/homage to German Expressionist movies of the 1920s, while the climactic section is as modern as it gets, with a jaw-dropping 30-minute single-take sequence that’s a feat of magic on its own.) Deliriously photographed by cinematographer Dong Jingsong and graced with an Eno-esque score by French electronic-rock duo M83, “Resurrection” is a full-sensory experience; indeed, each chapter is framed around the theme of the six Buddhist senses: Sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch and mind. Bi has said of his movie, “Screens are getting smaller and smaller, and I want to evoke that old feeling of watching films in theaters.” Take him up on his offer if you can – the movie’s currently playing in Boston at the AMC Boston Common after a stint at the Coolidge. It's filmmaking that feels perched on the edge of time.

Speaking of the Coolidge, the Boston Society of Film Critics met there last Sunday to vote on our annual roster of best films and finest performances, and while I held off reporting on the results due to the tragic death of Rob Reiner and the world generally being too god-damned much with us all week, here’s what we voted in, with tips on where to stream the movies in question.