Justin Chang

Directed by Masha Shalinsky, it teases out the connections among four generations of girls and young women who have passed through the same remote farmhouse.

At number 8 is April, from the director Dea Kolumbigashvili.

a tough, bleak, but utterly hypnotic portrait of a skilled OBGYN trying to provide health care for women in a conservative East Georgian village.

It may be set far from the U.S., but the difficulties these women face would resonate in any setting.

My number nine movie is the Zambian film On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, directed by Rungano Nyoni.

It's a subtly mesmerizing drama about a death that takes place in a middle-class household, setting off a chain of dark revelations that threaten to tear a family apart.

And finally, my number 10 choice won the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival.

It Was Just an Accident is a shattering moral thriller from the Iranian director Jafar Panahi.

about a group of former political prisoners who are given a rare chance at retribution.

In the past, Panahi has been a prisoner in Iran himself, and earlier this month, the government sentenced the director in absentia to a year in prison.

I hope that Panahi never sees the inside of a jail cell again, and that his movie is seen as far and wide as possible.

When I was in my early teens, I was both a devout churchgoer and an avid reader of mysteries.

One of my favorite writers was P.D.

James, whose Anglican faith informed her fiction in subtle ways.

For James, the plotting and solving of murder was a grisly yet profoundly moral undertaking.

A detective story, she wrote, confirms our hope that, despite some evidence to the contrary, we live in a beneficent and moral universe, in which problems can be solved by rational means.

The new movie Wake Up Deadman, Rian Johnson's latest whodunit after Knives Out and Glass Onion, is too funny and slyly over-the-top to feel like a Petey James story.

To my knowledge, James never incorporated body-dissolving acid or the old poison beverage switcheroo trick.

But in his own crafty way, Johnson is also using mystery conventions to open up a spiritual inquiry.

The story takes place in and around a Catholic church at a small town in upstate New York, where a junior priest named Judd DuPlentice, played by a terrific Josh O'Connor, has been assigned to serve.