Justin Chang

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

My number 9 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.

In her moving 2020 novel, Hamnet...

The Northern Irish writer Maggie O'Farrell explored the possibility that a real-life tragedy may have inspired one of the greatest fictional tragedies ever written.

William Shakespeare's son, Hamnet, died at the age of 11 in 1596, a few years before the first recorded performances of Hamlet at the Globe Theatre in London.

From these facts, O'Farrell spun a historical fiction, a mix of research and speculation, into Shakespeare's personal life, starting with his rapturous romance with a farmer's daughter, Anne Hathaway, the arrival of their three children, and the effect of Hamnet's death and Shakespeare's career on their marriage.

Now O'Farrell has co-written an adaptation of her novel with the director Chloe Zhao,

and it plays like a more somber and realistic version of Shakespeare in Love.

Call it Shakespeare in Grief.

The chief focus isn't really Shakespeare at all, though he's sensitively played by Paul Meskel.

The heart of the movie is Anne, though here, as in certain historical documents, she's referred to as Agnes.

She's played by an extraordinary Jesse Buckley.

Agnes is a gifted healer with a deep connection to the earth.

She's most at home wandering the woods near her family's farmhouse in Stratford-upon-Avon.