Owen Gleiberman’s Top Five

1. Oppenheimer

How is it that a densely packed three-hour movie about the father of the atomic bomb became a big-ticket blockbuster? The answer lies in Christopher Nolan’s wizardry as a storyteller. He stages “Oppenheimer” as a coruscating light show of history, dazzling in every detail. It’s a film that draws you in with centrifugal force, even as it both celebrates and interrogates the fabled figure of J. Robert Oppenheimer, played by Cillian Murphy as a charismatic mandarin whose scientific genius is matched by his self-justifying insolence.

2. Anatomy of a Fall

For a while, Justine Triet’s brilliant drama is built around a mystery of tantalizing darkness. Samuel (Samuel Theis) has fallen to his death from the upper level of his home. Was he killed by his wife, Sandra (Sandra Hüller), a woman who’s been given ample motivation to resent and even hate him? Or did he commit suicide? Triet stages an explosive courtroom drama that turns into “Scenes from a Marriage” as staged by a 21st-century Hitchcock.

3. Ferrari

Michael Mann brings off a masterful piece of supple ’70s storytelling in this thrilling, humane, high-stakes biographical drama about three months in the life of Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver), the legendary Italian automaker. Driver gives Ferrari a coiled authority, and Penélope Cruz is Lady Macbeth fierce as his wife and business partner, who must subsume her rage when she learns that her husband not only has a mistress (Shailene Woodley) but a secret second family. Money and risk, love and hate — “Ferrari” is a hypnotic ride.

4. Maestro

It’s no exaggeration to say that every scene of Bradley Cooper’s drama about the life of Leonard Bernstein is a lush and vibrant surprise. Cooper stages each moment with great emotional and historical precision (he wants you to feel like you’re right there, eavesdropping). At the same time, the film leaps around with impressionistic freedom. As Felicia Montealegre, who married Lenny with open eyes and stood by him, Carey Mulligan creates an indelible portrait of a love rooted in intimacy and play, empathy and heartbreak.

5. Past Lives

Celine Song’s drama begins in Seoul, where a 12-year-old boy and girl develop an innocent attraction, then lose touch after her family emigrates to North America. Years later, they reconnect. We could swear there are still romantic vibes between the childhood friends, and we wait for them to bloom. But that’s not what happens. “Past Lives” is a neorealist multiverse film — not a fantasy but a moving drama of the universes of love and possibility, from the past and into the future, we carry around inside us.