Critics’ choice:

The Power of the Dog

Jane Campion’s “sinewy, cold-blooded” Western “sticks its teeth into you so fast and furtively that you may not feel the sting until after the credits roll,” said

David Ehrlich in IndieWire.com. Benedict Cumberbatch plays a cruel rancher in 1920s Montana who bullies his kindhearted brother and his brother’s new wife but unexpectedly softens toward another newcomer. Kirsten Dunst co-stars in this murderous fable, and “the whole thing exudes a tremblingly quiet strength.”

Drive My Car

“Drive My Car is one of the most ineffably beautiful films to come along in years,” said Joe Morgenstern in The

Wall Street Journal. Based on a Haruki Murakami story, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s subtitled masterpiece follows a widowed theater director from Tokyo who is reenergized by an unlikely friendship with his taciturn chauffeur, a young woman coping with her own grief. “Among many other things, it’s about figuring out who other people are, and why they do what they do, by first understanding ourselves.”

Summer of Soul

Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s directorial debut is “a near-peerless concert film,” said David Fear in Rolling Stone. In 1969, the summer of Woodstock, a different concert festival drew Stevie Wonder, Sly and the Family Stone, Mahalia Jackson, Nina Simone, and huge crowds to a public park in Harlem. Buried in a basement for 50 years, the rediscovered footage captures a moment in African-American history and reminds us “just how much the music acted as a salve for state-institutionalized violence and a catalyst for change.”

The Worst Person in the World

A comedy-drama about a young woman’s quarter-life crisis might sound like a small film, said Alison Willmore in NYMag.com. In this case, “it feels anything but,” because director Joachim Trier has found a “radiant” star in Renate Reinsve and spun out around her “an artistic work