Peter Travers

Brady Corbet’s engulfing masterpiece about an immigrant architect (an Oscarbound Adrien Brody) is the best movie of the year, but it’s also way more than that— an unsentimental; uncompromising thunderbolt of pure cinema that Corbet has built to last.

There is something uniquely unforgettable in the way Linklater, Hawke and Delpy (equal collaborators on the script) find nuance, art and eroticism in words, spoken and unspoken. The actors shine.

Joachim Trier’s scintillating Oscar contender from Norway, led by a captivating new star in Renate Reinsve, sets a new gold standard for romantic comedy just before it sneaks up and hits you like a shot in the heart.

Darkness stays on the edges of Hollywood town in Paul Thomas Anderson’s screwball comedy explosion about the serious business of first love. Newbies Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman light up the screen in one of the very best movies of the year. They’re to die for.

Only Yesterday comes from a quieter, less demonstrative place. As he did in his most recent and reportedly final film, "The Tale of the Princess Kaguya," Takahata has built Only Yesterday to go gently and to last. Mission accomplished.

Rea and Davidson are incomparably good in an exceptional film that is by turns darkly funny and deeply affecting. Though Jordan's control sometimes falters, it's a small price to pay for his daring.

The heart of the movie is really in Jasira's moments with her father, a mass of contradictions that Macdissi plays with comic ferocity and genuine feeling.

Mad Max: Fury Road kicked my ass hard. It'll kick yours. So get prepped for a new action classic. You won't know what hit you.

Winter's Bone is unforgettable. It means to shake you, and does.

One of the best and liveliest movies of the year - funny and touching in ways you can't predict.

Andrew Haigh’s enthralling ghost story concerns a screenwriter (a flawless Andrew Scott) coming to terms with a new love (Paul Mescal) and the parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) who died in his childhood. Watch out for Haigh and his four superlative actors. They’ll get you good.

Anderson orchestrates a comic romance like no other. The effect is intoxicating. Sandler and the movie will knock you for a loop.

Blue Is the Warmest Color sweeps you up on waves of humor, heartbreak and ravishing romance.

Not your typical biopic. But it is one of the best times you'll have at the movies this year.

Taking full measure of Phantom Thread may require more than one viewing – a challenge any genuine movie lover will be eager to accept. Our advice for now: just sit back and behold.

Gosford Park abounds in scenes to savor. It's a feast, and one of Altman's best.

Leave it to a g-rated cartoon to give the live-action epics a lesson in action, fun and bracing originality.

One thing is for sure about this century-spanning story about the dangers faced by young women trying to negotiate a safe space in a world of men—you’ll never forget it.

The year's most beguilling and touching surprise. Bravo.

Kicking off Steve McQueen’s “Small Axe” anthology of five stand-alone films, Mangrove is an incendiary and indispensable look at U.K. protesters in 1968 who decided to raise hell on the streets and in court about police brutality to communities of color. Essential viewing.

The crazy-ass imagination at work in Being John Malkovich hits you like a blast of pure oxygen...this movie of constant astonishments will make you laugh hard and long.

Bird has crafted a film -- one of the year's best -- that doesn't ring cartoonish, it rings true.

A new crime classic.

If you haven't already sold your soul to rock & roll, Almost Famous should seal the deal.

Christopher Nolan deserves every superlative for his brilliant take on J. Robert Oppenheimer (a flawless Cillian Murphy), the dark knight of the atomic age. This terrifying, transfixing three-hour epic emerges as a monumental achievement on the march into screen history.

The writer-director based the couple on his own parents, who bear the same names as his characters. It’s not their story, he’s said — what he’s given us instead is a love story that’s as sexy as it is savage, as tough as it is tender. It’s a spellbinder with a fever that won’t quit.

It's a magical, beguiling wonder.

Adam Driver gives one of the loveliest and least likely to be rewarded performances of the year in Paterson. Why least likely, you ask? Because Driver's indelibly moving portrayal is so lived-in and lyrical you hardly recognize it as acting.

The Fits is more than a transporting film experience. It's cinema poetry in motion.

A fiercely poetic study of violence. Stunningly shot in black-and-white. [14 Dec 1989, p.23]

Far from being exploitive, the effect is inspiring: This is the best of us.

It's a modern horror story that gets you where you live.

For some, the silver linings in Russell’s movies represent a failure to embrace darkness. I see them as a humanist’s act of resistance. That’s why American Hustle ranks with the year’s best movies. It gets under your skin.

The script, co-written by Antonioni and Peter Wollen, focuses on a TV journalist (a superb Jack Nicholson).

Day-Lewis is smashing as the man caught between his emotions and the social ethic. Not since Olivier in "Wuthering Heights" has an actor matched piercing intelligence with such imposing good looks and physical grace.

Chases so many ideas that it threatens to spin out of control. But with our multiplexes stuffed with toxic Hollywood formula, it's a gift to find a ballsy movie that thinks it can do anything, and damn near does.

The acting is electric. By the end of this haunting, hypnotic film, you feel you have watched lives being lived, not just imagined.

Beat the drums for a Simmons Oscar, and add a cymbal crash for Whiplash. It's electrifying.

Von Donnersmarck has crafted the best kind of movie: one you can't get out of your head.

Forget "Hero" -- that cult hit was just Zhang Yimou's warm-up for this martial-arts fireball that throws in a lyrical love story, head-spinning fights and dazzling surprises.

Liu creates an unforgettable film experience that will knock the wind out of you.

A riveting screen adventure.

From the theme of global downsizing, the filmmakers wring humor, heartbreak, suspense and stirring social drama. Cotillard, a consummate actress, fits like a natural into the workaday world of the Dardennes (Rosetta, The Son, The Kid With a Bike).

Out of a dark chapter of history about U.S. mistreatment of Native Americans, director Martin Scorsese crafts a new movie classic with stupendous acting from DiCaprio, DeNiro and newcomer Lily Gladstone. It's a great movie from our greatest filmmaker. See it now!

Gorden teases out some affecting scenes, but not enough to carry a film that promises more than it delivers.

Cuaron's hot-blooded, haunting and wildly erotic film revels in the pleasures of the flesh without losing touch with thought and feeling.

Huppert, an fearless actress (see The Piano Teacher), gives a performance that's a riveting mix of carnal and chilly – you can't take your eyes off her.

Begins like an episode of "I Love Lucy" and ends with the impact of "Easy Rider."

You won't know what outrageous fun is until you see Borat. High-five!

Everybody’s talking about this unassuming, but also unmissable and unforgettable slice of Korean-American life and for good reason: Lee Isaac Chung’s heartfelt tale of his own childhood is the best movie you’ll find anywhere about what it means to be a family.

The twice Oscar-nominated actor appears onscreen only briefly. Hawke knows where the spotlight belongs. Believe me, the 81 minutes spent in Bernstein's funny, touching and vital presence is something you don't want to miss.

In The Farewell, Wang builds a funny, touching and vital film about what makes a family in any culture. It’s simply stunning.

Timothee Chalamet ping pongs to greatness in Josh Safdie’s whooshing wonder of a film about winning at all costs. And in case you’re wondering: This is the wildest damn thing Chalamet has ever put on screen.

Even a double dose of the great Robert De Niro taking on the grandpa roles of feuding mob bosses Vito Genovese and Frank Costello, can’t lift this gimmicky, grating, draggy attempt to join the pantheon of classic gangster cinema. It’s a losing battle.

Comedy and tragedy cohere in this extraordinary film of Alan Bennett's play.

Can Jane Campion’s Montana western about toxic masculinity and repressed sexuality win Netflix its first Best Picture Oscar? With a never-better Benedict Cumberbatch leading a dynamite cast, let’s just say that no list of the year’s best movies will be complete without this cinematic powder keg.

Delicate business is being transacted in Columbus, a whisper-soft debut from Kogonada that nonetheless results in something unique and unforgettable. It's pure cinema.

The Artist encapsulates everything we go to movies for: action, laughs, tears and a chance to get lost in another world. It just might leave you speechless. How can Oscar resist?

Director Brad Anderson tightens the screws of suspense, but it's Bale's gripping, beyond-the-call-of-duty performance that holds you in thrall.

Nothing and everything happen in the movie. Director James Ponsoldt (The Spectacular Now), working from a fluid script by playwright Donald Margulies, does justice to the book without compromising his film.

Eastwood's direction here is a thing of beauty, blending the ferocity of the classic films of Akira Kurosawa (Seven Samurai) with the delicacy and unblinking gaze of Yasujiro Ozu (Tokyo Story).

Filtered through Kaufman's searching mind and soulful brilliance, the result is a masterpiece.

Relentless suspense allows The Girl Who Played With Fire to hold you in a viselike grip. But it's the performances of Nyqvist and especially Rapace that keep you coming back for more.

The movie pulls you in through the sheer immersive force of its filmmaking. In Long Day’s Journey, the search is everything with meaning as elusive and haunting as a dream.

A hugely entertaining blend of music, fun and eye-popping thrills, though it doesn't lack for heart.

It's warped and wonderfully effervescent. Ditto the songs by Danny Elfman, who sings the role of Bonejangles, the frontman for a skeleton jazz band at a swinging underworld club. Best of all is the love story.

This seriously funny movie, artfully photographed by the great Roger Deakins, is spiritual in nature, barbed in tone, and, oh, yeah, it stings like hell.

Capote is a movie that doesn't pull its punches. It's a knockout.

Who'd have thought the demise of a kill-happy Russian dictator could leave you laughing helplessly? That's The Death of Stalin for you, a slapstick tragedy – and for the funniest, fiercest comedy of the year so far – from the fertile mind of Armando Iannucci, the British political satirist behind the HBO's Veep and the sensational, Strangelovian In the Loop (2009).

In Mike Leigh’s lacerating new film, Marianne Jean-Baptiste delivers a hall-of-fame acting triumph as a London housewife and mother who’s mad at the world and ready to give us all a tongue-lashing. She’s an emotional powderkeg ready to blow. Better duck

It's a renegade masterpiece that will get you good.

Huppert's brilliance is indisputable, her performance alternately playful and deeply moving.

His (Anderson) abiding love for a vanished past, real and imagined, is at the core of The Grand Budapest Hotel. The thrill comes in watching as this rare talent gives his movie wings.

Joel Edgerton and Felicity Jones bring flesh-and-blood immediacy to this classic in the making. about the beauty and terror of pioneering railroad days. A tough sell? Maybe. But not when a movie dares to reach for the stars like this one.

You get pulled into a force field, thanks to Cooper’s behind-the-camera chops and Gaga’s sound and fury. By the time the end credits roll, you realize that, in fact, two stars have been born.

It's a wow of a thriller with a soul that isn't computer generated. Poitras may be guilty of taking Snowden at face value, but she succeeds brilliantly in evoking a shadow villain intent on world domination. Big Brother is back, baby, and he's gone digital.

Recoing gives a performance that won't soon be forgotten. Neither will Time Out. It's a great movie.

All the acting is first-rate -- Dukakis gives major dimensions to a supporting role. And Christie, a Sixties screen goddess in "Darling" and "Doctor Zhivago," shows that her spirit and grace are eternal. She's a beauty. So is the movie.

It’s an indisputable classic.

Anthony Hopkins delivers a master class in acting as a once-brilliant man losing his mental faculties to the plague of dementia. First-time director Florian Zeller turns his modern “King Lear” of a play into essential cinema.

Foxtrot makes demands on audiences and then richly rewards them. It's a riveting, deeply resonant achievement.

Incisively witty, provocative and acted to perfection, this sublime entertainment is a career peak for producer Ismail Merchant, director James Ivory and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

The Woodman has recovered his common touch. On him, it looks good.

You don't just watch it as much as you absorb it until the film's ebb and flow become a part of you.

It may sound silly, but Lord and Park conjure up a world of visual miracles.

Two men alone create an epic landscape of feeling in one of the very best movies of the year.

Note to Oscar: Make sure a best actress nomination happens for the blazing Penelope Cruz in this emotional powerhouse from director Pedro Almodovar about a Madrid photographer coping with an unplanned pregnancy and a tangled political past.

Chris Pine proves he can act. Ben Foster, well, he always could. And Jeff Bridges shows them both how it's done. Those are just three riveting reasons to pony up for Hell or High Water.

Up is a breathtaking ride into the realm of pure imagination.

You’ll never forget the nakedly unafraid performance that Emma Stone delivers in this rowdy and rapturously beautiful blast of feminist whup-ass from director Yorgos Lanthimos. You won’t know what hit you, which is just one reason why I’m rabid to see it again.

Even when it goes off the rails, this epic take on the notorious French emperor boasts state-of-the-art battle scenes from master tactician Ridley Scott, 85, and a big acting swing from Joaquin Phoenix in a beast of a role that will keep you riveted.

Say this about Black Panther, which raises movie escapism very near the level of art: You've never seen anything like it in your life.

Brooklyn is easily the year's best and most beguiling love story. The surprise is that it also goes deeper, sadder and truer.

Spectacular in every sense of the word, even if you don' t know an Orc from a Uruk-Hai.

Renier and Francois give deeply affecting performances that help soften the film's harsh blows. But only in the compassionate eye of the Dardennes do these three children achieve a state of grace.

It’s the sort of cinema that feels steeped in the past, completely of the moment and timeless all at once.

I'm jazzed by every tasty, daring, devastating, howlingly funny, how'd-they-do-that minute in Birdman. Like all movies that soar above the toxic clouds of Hollywood formula and defy death at the box office, Alejandro G. Iñárritu's cinematic whirlwind will bring out the haters. They can all go piss off. Birdman is a volcano of creative ideas in full eruption. Buy a ticket and brace yourself.

Melissa McCarthy is a lock for a Best Actress Oscar nomination for Can You Ever Forgive Me?