Maestro

Carey Mulligan delivers a quietly devastating performance as Felicia Montealegre — a woman who loved Leonard Bernstein fully knowing the complexity of who he was, and paid the price. A meditation on art, marriage, compromise, and aging in the shadow of genius.

Why it’s here: Carey Mulligan’s performance is the reason — she plays Felicia Montealegre across the decades into her fifties and her death from cancer, making the film as much a portrait of a woman’s aging, artistic sacrifice, and reckoning as it is Bernstein’s story.