“It’s hard to glean trends from a year’s releases, because what’s released depends on the vagaries of production and distribution—the happenstance of which directors have movies in the works at a given moment, which movies premièring at festivals get acquired by a distributor for U.S. release. Some films that might have made it to my 2024 list (“On Becoming a Guinea Fowl,” “Eephus,” “Misericordia”) are now scheduled for 2025, and others (“Subtraction,” “Suburban Fury,” “Vas-Tu Renoncer?”) have no U.S. distribution. Still, the movies on the list do suggest a shared theme that has been latent in new releases for a while: the expansion of the art.”