Justin Chang

It's a sprawling yet intimate portrait of several Russian independent journalists in the harrowing months leading up to President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

As a portrait of anti-authoritarian resistance, it pairs nicely with my number six movie, The Secret Agent, an emotionally rich, sneakily funny, and continually surprising drama from the director Kleber Mendonca Filo.

Set in 1977, it lays bare the personal cost of dissidence during Brazil's military dictatorship.

At number 7 is the German drama Sound of Falling.

Although not a horror film exactly, it qualifies as the best and spookiest haunted house movie I've seen this year.

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.