Peter Travers

Listening to the kids talk is a treat in itself, but watching them strut their stuff in the final competition is enough to make you stand up and cheer.

This movie and Hardy's electrifying performance will knock you for a loop.

From him (Fincher), we get – what? – a faithful adaptation that brings the dazzle but shortchanges on the daring.

The Outpost gets it crucially right by bringing home the meaning of heroism as a collective action. The you-are-there ferocity of this sequence, brilliantly abetted by the prowling, handheld camerawork of Lorenzo Senatore, ranks with the best interpretations of combat on film. Your nerves will be shattered, guaranteed.

Elle Fanning does the monster mash and brings audiences back to theaters in droves by lacing the action with laughs

The Hidden World is the best Dragon yet — an animated action phenom with moonstruck passion in its heart and a spirit that soars.

With the help of cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt, composers Isobel Waller-Bridge and David Schweitzer, and Alexandra Byrne’s spectacular costumes, the film captures the whirl of a predatory society that can no longer hide behind surface prettiness. That sounds a lot like right now.

Richardson is extraordinary; it’s a brave, award-caliber performance...The fiercely erotic and deeply moving Damage casts a hypnotic spell and without moralizing.

If you haven't seen Marion Cotillard play Lady Macbeth, you really haven't seen the role inhabited with the glorious fire and ice it needs to haunt your dreams.

Warrior aspires to myth. It's Cain and Abel battling it out in the face of a decidedly ungodly father before humanity goes down for the count. Strong stuff.

Vinterberg may rush the final act, but he gets pitch-perfect performances from Schoenaerts, Sheen and Sturridge and brings out the wild side in Mulligan, who can hold a close-up like nobody's business. She's a live wire in a movie that knows how to stir up a classic for the here and now.

No one interested in the power and magic of movies should miss it.

Watson and Everett, both superb, bring ferocity and feeling to their roles. But the one you won't forget is Wilkinson (In the Bedroom) in a towering performance of grace and grit that deserves to put him on Oscar's shortlist. Good show.

Jonze has filmed a fantasy as if it were absolutely real, allowing us to see the world as Max sees it, full of beauty and terror. The brilliant songs, by Karen O (of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs) and the Kids, enhance the film's power.

It's impossible to quantify what it takes to be a quality director – but damn, you know it when you see it. And you'll see it clear and strong in Paint It Black, a staggeringly impressive feature directing debut for actress Amber Tamblyn.

A pitch-black comedy that dances around its central theme without ever facing it head on. But oh, the demented, delicious mischief it kicks up.

It's a mesmerizing spectacle.

No crime film in years boasts a cooler vibe than Michael Mann's dazzling Collateral.

Before it runs off course into excess, this brilliantly acted film version of the 1999 novel by Andre Dubus III moves with a stabbing urgency.

What I can't figure is why anyone would want to release this tripe in theaters just when Fanning has nearly lived it down. They ain't no friends of mine, or any other moviegoer.

Allenphiles will have a field day mining the film for inside dope. Are the clips from Shanghai and Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity — movies in which men are set up for a fall by dangerous women — a sly dig at Farrow? Better to see Manhattan Murder Mystery for what it is: Annie Hall replayed in a minor key by a filmmaker who sees the comedy, tragedy and transience of love and can’t stop playing the game. Allen’s readiness to step on a laugh in favor of feeling may cost him at the box office. But in this time of private hell and public scorn, it will help him endure.

What makes this so memorably nerve-frying is the way Alvarez and cinematographer Pedro Luque use night-vision and every trick in the book and ones not invented yet to trap us in their vise. Claustrophobics, you've been warned.

If you don't see where this is going, you've never seen a movie. Sorry it had to be this one.

Molly's Game bristles with fun zingers, electric energy and Sorkin's brand of verbal fireworks – all of which help enormously when the movie falters in fleshing out its characters.

But this is Washington's show, his Scarface, if you will, and his smiling, seductive monster is a thrilling creation that gives Training Day all the bite it needs.

It's basically a pricey home movie in which Adam Sandler spotlights his wife and two daughters. It's also an unexpectedly sweet and sassy surprise. Comic dynamo Sunny Sandler, his youngest, gives nepotism a good name as a Jewish girl on the cusp of womanhood.

Sure it’s cornball, but Chadha revels in it. You will, too, as the movie becomes an irresistible blast of pure feeling.

Baker makes the strongest impression not just with photography on the surf and underneath it – kudos to "water cinematographer" Rick Rifici – but through understanding how surfing allows these boys to aspire as well as dare.

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

Jeremy Piven tap dances for Hitler and turns playwright Arthur Miller’s cautionary short story about art’s accommodation to power into a well-meaning family project (his sister directed) that stumbles when it most needs to soar

Just for starters, no movie about the Dutch Resistance during World War II has any right to be this wildly entertaining, not to mention this provocative and potently erotic.

Whenever the drama drifts into soap opera, the actors restore the balance.

So, you're probably asking, what kind of a movie is this? A damn fine and funny one, thanks to the way the estimable director Stephen Frears (Dangerous Liaisons, The Grifters, The Queen) conducts the piece.

In his final film, James Van der Beek raises the bar on a standard-issue thriller through the sheer force of his talent and magnetism.

The Theory of Everything, referring to Hawking's dream of finding an equation to explain all existence, is riveting science, emotional provocation and one-of-a-kind love story all rolled into one triumphant film.

Prepare to be scared senseless, and then, when you think you have it figured, your certainty will be shaken by scenes built to scare you even more.

Goldthwait's movie, shot on video that makes it look dragged through puppy poop, is an unholy mess. But it also possesses a quick wit and an endearing tenderness toward Amy as honesty wrecks her life. It's sweet, doggone it.

When Boseman shows us Brown doing his thing onstage, the movie comes alive.

Set against the German bombing of London, Steve McQueen stirring WW2 epic misses greatness by failing to fully engage with the starker, deeper implications of seeing war through the eyes of a mixed-race child facing an evil that’s scarily close to home

This breezy, funny entry keeps things light with a hilarious and heartfelt package of nonstop kid-friendly kick-ass.

The subplot involving a tragic romance between a soldier and one of the living statues (the lovely Kelly Reilly) is hell on the humor and on a movie that stays content to do the trite thing.

It's the scenes of the boys on horseback, riding this moonbeam of a movie to a fairy-tale ending, that provide the essential ingredient: a sense of wonder.

Spain’s legendary director Pedro Almodóvar freights his first full-length feature in English with tangled subplots, but nothing can dim the artistry of Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore who make this death-fixated tale of old friends in crisis feel thrillingly alive.

Schrader is out there again, testing the limits of audience tolerance. Good for him. Buoyed by his questing spirit and Dafoe's mesmerizing performance, Light Sleeper might just keep you up nights.

Francis Coppola's revision of his 1983 film of S.E. Hinton's best seller The Outsiders is funny, touching and revelatory, with twenty-two minutes of added footage and a new soundtrack featuring Elvis Presley. [Review of re-release]

Some will write off Prisoners as shameless exploitation. But like Clint Eastwood's "Mystic River," to which it's been compared, Prisoners is so artfully shaped and forcefully developed that objections fade.

The buildup is steadily engrossing. That's because Nolan keeps the emphasis on character, not gadgets. Gotham looks lived in, not art-directed.

Logue hits every note of humor and heart in his breakthrough role. Don't miss him. He's that good.

Director Gillian Armstrong turns Sebastian Faulks' pungent novel about World War II into a soporific.

Thou wilt be dazzled.

A savage comedy of sexual extremes; the barbed laughs draw blood.

Only some bumpy, arid passages in the script keep The Others out of the master class occupied by the likes of "The Sixth Sense" and, my favorite, 1961's "The Innocents."

Dawson digs deep and nails every nuance, making the dizzying suspense resonate with raw emotion. She is, in a word, electrifying. Even when the wheels come off the too-busy plot, so is the movie.

What raises the movie above the herd and rocks our settled ideas of pop entertainment is the way Hader and Wiig resist the script's pull to tidy things up.

The movie goes soft in its final stages, but Rudd and Segel keep it real. "Sweet, sweet hangin'," says Peter of knowing Sydney. The same goes for the movie.

Tyrnauer’s flashes of compassion for this self-hating Jew and homosexual — taught from childhood to feel ashamed of what he was and who he was — remind us that his subject’s toxic, insidious amorality did not go to the grave with him. It’s all around us, among opportunists still looking for their own Roy Cohn — just one of several reasons why Tyrnauer’s doc hits you like a punch in the gut.

Ignore the tell and focus on the show, spectacular in every sense.

It's a feast of smart, sexy, glorious talk. The Oscar for best foreign film belongs right here.

The script by William Goldman (Misery) is based on fact, and when the movie sticks to fact (in an unprecedented bout of man-eating, the lions took just a few months to slaughter 130 bridge builders), the result is a hypnotic spectacle. The natives fear that the lions are unkillable demons. The hunters — Douglas and Kilmer spar splendidly in their roles — aim to prove them wrong. Hopkins, unfortunately, won’t leave well enough alone.

First-time director Drew Hancock kicks off the young movie year with an out-of-nowhere surprise, a fiendishly funny romcom scarefest that hits the entertainment bullseye and makes a star out of Sophie Thatcher as a hot date (for Jack Quaid) who doesn’t know her own power.

Forget the thin membrane of a soap opera plot— Timothée Chalamet acts and sings the young Bob Dylan to showstopping perfection, catching the famously withholding troubadour in the exhilarating act of inventing himself as multitudes, always creating and always in the wind.

You don’t expect director Ron Howard and producer Brian Grazer — partners on such benign jokefests as Splash! and Parenthood — to catch the mad-dog anarchy of the newsroom. But they nail it...What’s missing is the bite.

Thornton gets inside the coach's skin. It's a subtle, soulful performance in a movie that otherwise goes for the jugular.

A shockingly funny sendup of our money-trumps-morals culture starring a dynamite Rosamund Pike who outdoes her ‘Gone Girl’ evil by partnering in crime with the great Peter Dinklage for the most delicious, decadent treat of the new movie year.

The cool factor is off the charts as director Jeff Nichols and a trio of sizzling stars—Austin Butler, Jodie Comer and Tom Hardy—turns a landmark 1968 photobook about a 1968 Chicago motorcycle club into a vibrant vibe of a movie that vrooms to life on the big screen.

It's Sagnier, a young Bardot, who lifts the movie, and Rampling, 58, who gives it nuance, not to mention a nude scene that shows off a body Demi Moore would envy. These two make it seductive fun to be fooled.

A no-bull throwback to 1970s action films. It zips along with B-movie verve while adding the rich details and go-for-broke acting that heralds something special.

Though Hollywood hyperbolizes the Gregory Poirier script -- Mann is a fictional character -- John Singleton ("Boyz N the Hood") directs the film with riveting urgency.

Woody Allen's sexiest movie ever.

Public Enemies comes at you like Dillinger did: all of a sudden. It's movie dynamite.

Based on a play by Athol Fugard, Tsotsi is South Africa's entry in this year's Oscar race for Best Foreign-Language Film. This remarkable movie means to shake you, and boy does it ever.

In Final Portrait, art achieves a permanence that trumps an evanescent feast. What holds us through all the exasperating starts and stops is Rush, a live-wire actor of such effortless charisma that we’re drawn to his every utterance and gesture. Hammer, as a stand-in for the audience, can only stare in wonder as we do.

Her Smell is a berserker infused a mad poetry. In her third film with Perry, following "Listen Up," "Phillip and Queen of the Earth," Moss takes a character who makes Courtney Love look like Mother Teresa and exposes the shards of humanity that once vitalized and defined her music. The effect is shattering.

There are even times when Black seems to be letting Crowe and Gosling make the whole thing up as they go along. Not a bad thing.

Robbins’s debut as a director is exceptionally accomplished. He shrewdly balances his sense of purpose with a flair for mischief.

What Button shows is that Ben is ultimately not the hero of his own life or his own movie. He gets inside our head, that's for sure, but, frustratingly, we never get inside his.

A sharply observant and witty film that plumbs unexpected depths of feeling.

A strong, stinging film, alive with conflicts that defy glib resolutions.

Even when her movie spins and lurches, the sensational Tessa Thompson blows the dust off a classic Ibsen play to find its queer defiant heart

Keaton has crafted something rare: a screwball comedy that cuts to the heart.

Naomi Watts and Bill Murray are funny, touching and vital as the most recent guardians of a 150-pound Great Dane named Apollo, but the scene-stealing pup scampers off with this slight but irresistible character study and wins a special place in your heart.

Damned if this wildly witty and surprisingly touching swing at movie madness and gender politics isn't on to something deep.

The butt of the hilarious and heartfelt screenplay by Paul Rudnick (Jeffrey) is homophobia, and his sting is wickedly on target.

Funny, touching and acutely observed film.

Even when the sequel loses momentum, and it does like to repeat itself, Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci are comic virtuosos not to be resisted. That’s all.

You’ve never seen anything in your life like Jacques Audiard’s Spanish musical about violent passions starring Zoë Saldaña, Selena Gomez and trans actress Karla Sofia Gascón in career-defining performances that take a piece out of you. This you don’t want to miss.

Comedian Patton Oswalt triumphantly nails every comic and dramatic nuance as Paul Aufiero, a New York Giants obsessive who has long ago moved from fan to fanatic.

The thrill of the film is watching Ant-Man and the Wasp team up and raise hell together. Rudd is a winning combination of sass and sincerity. And it's a kick to watch Lilly break out and let her star shine.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier is every rousing, whup-ass thing you want in an escapist adventure.

Brace yourself for Thirteen -- it'll cause a commotion.

Credible? Not really. But Cage and Rockwell play off each other with devilish finesse. And Lohman (White Oleander) is on fire -- she's a comer.

It's hard to pinpoint exactly when this random, scattershot, overreaching movie stops spinning its wheels and starts flying on a cumulative power that floors you. But when it happens – kapow! By the end we’re looking at Elvis, America and ourselves with new eyes and wondering, once again, if the truth really can set us free.

A riveting and indispensable record of the war in Iraq because it comes from the men who lived it.

Even when the film's frigid elegance, perfectly captured by cinematographer José Luis Alcaine, becomes off-puttingly clinical, Almodóvar's passion burns through. The skin he lives in is alive to challenge no matter what warped form it takes.

The final effect is stunning, but also sadly impersonal.

This shamelessly silly crowd-pleaser has an extra 'Nick' and a double comic dose of Vince Vaughn and a knack for springing surprises that you don’t see coming.

Fusing animation and live action with a series of outrageous props, Gondry veers dangerously close to being precious. But make no mistake: Gondry's hallucinatory brilliance holds you in thrall.

To those who see no purpose to this film, I say the purpose is learning not to turn a blind eye. The unique and unforgettable Elephant keeps its eyes wide open.

Longing for a sweet little surprise that transports you to a place of pure movie enchantment? Then check out the glorious Lesley Manville as a struggling London maid who travels to Paris to fulfill her middle-aged Cinderella fantasy of owning a Dior gown.

You may have doubts about which side to choose, but there's no doubt about this mind-bender. It'll pin you to your seat.

In this roaringly comic and powerfully affecting road movie, Terence Stamp gives one of the year's best performances.

The carny scenes of freaks and geeks are undeniably creepy, but director Guillermo del Toro’s hallucinatory brilliance only comes in flashes as Bradley Cooper and a dynamite cast struggle to build a mesmerizing misfire into the classic it might have been.

Gere gives 'em the old razzle-dazzle with his roguish charm and sharp comic timing. The surprise is the unexpected feeling he brings to this challenging role.

Whether you regard Stella's getting her groove back as a feminist battle cry or as a silly wish-fulfillment fantasy, the movie delivers guilt-free escapism about pretty people having wicked-hot fun in pretty places.

You won't see more explosive acting this year.

Look, it's fun to watch Shepherd hate on bratty children, classical music and liberal pieties. Smith's acid tongue makes any line sound better. But the subplot about a blackmailer (Jim Broadbent) who terrorizes Shepherd in the dead of night adds nothing, least of all a purpose.

Yup, it could have been a bucket of bleak. But the electric talent of Harrelson and Moverman is too exciting to be anything but exhilarating.

Our Idiot Brother comes off as a blueprint for a smart script no one really made. Now that's what I call dumb.

LaBute achieves a bracing originality by observing human folly as a means to understand rather than condemn. Love or hate his films, LaBute is one of the most challenging filmmakers to emerge in years.

As Tourette’s activist John Davidson, Robert Aramayo gives an astonishing performance that hits you like a shot in the heart.

Thompson, Kaling and up-for-anything director Nisha Ganatra spin comic gold.

With a dynamite cast led by a never-better Jim Parsons, what could have been a dated retelling of a 1968 play about gay men in crisis emerges instead as a funny, fierce and scarily relevant wakeup call to a resurgent threat to marginalized minorities.

With the male need to control women hitting a new flashpoint, Alex Garland’s provocation is fired by urgency as the extraordinary Jessie Buckley stars as a widow threatened on all sides by toxic masculinity. Garland is stingy with answers, but his implications are incendiary.

Theron has already showed her talent for bringing a deeper dimension to action as Furiosa in "Mad Max: Fury Road." Here, the actor reveals the toll that living forever is taking on Andy, who took a year off to heal emotional scars before her reluctant return to battle.

The film is most riveting in its early scenes, when Soderbergh's digital cameras locate germs everywhere – don't touch those peanuts!

Director Andrew Currie is better at laughs than scares, but he can’t sustain either as Fido runs out of steam in the final stretch. Till then, it’s fiendish fun.

Holmes nails every laugh without missing the dramatic nuances. She makes April and her movie well worth knowing.

It's the classic American tale of the family man triumphant, and Howard makes sure that it hits you right in the heart.

If you've had it with all that feel-good holiday sludge, hook up with the combustibly nasty Bad Santa. It could become a Christmas perennial for Scrooges of all ages.

Does this sound like rock heaven? It is.

As an undocumented Filipina trying to make it as a country singer in Texas, breakout star Eva Noblezada punches through the film's familiar contours to find its beating heart as a timely portrait of the immigrant experience.

Is this vulnerable Madonna the real thing or a ploy to ingratiate herself with film audiences who’ve found her chilly and strident? You be the judge. But there’s no denying that Truth or Dare is at its raunchy best when Madonna is kicking ass instead of kissing it.

Cedar Rapids had me smiling at hello.

Joel and Ethan Coen's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel is an indisputably great movie, at this point the year's very best.

Gangs of New York is something better than perfect: It's thrillingly alive.

Pucci is an actor to watch: He rides this spellbinder without softening the truths that plague the thumbsucker in all of us.

For anyone professing true movie love, there's no resisting it.

Dragon errs by trafficking too much in what made Bruce Lee sell instead of what made him tick.

The melancholy attached to the impermanence of life and love suffuses this film, making it memorably haunting and hypnotic.

In the year's richest, most complex and ultimately most heartbreaking film, Inarritu invites us to get past the babble of modern civilization and start listening to each other.

Any resemblance between this Bad Lieutenant and the 1992 Abel Ferrara landmark is purely in the head of the dude who thought up the title.

a bang-up ride that means to wring you out. Mission accomplished.

A rousing, gorgeously animated good time.

DiCaprio is in peak form, bringing layers of buried emotion to a defeated man. And the glorious Winslet defines what makes an actress great, blazing commitment to a character and the range to make every nuance felt.

Gets the action job done and you better believe that Bruce is still the man.

The film version of Carnage hasn't just lost God from its title, it's lost the laughs from the play that brought it life.

A hypnotic movie of harsh truth and healing compassion. It sticks with you.

The young star, maturing nicely past the boyish enthusiasm he showed in "Slumdog Millionaire" and "Marigold Hotel" films, enters a new phase of his career with fierce commitment. Lion is one from the heart.

A subversively entertaining documentary.

What a shame that this well-meaning look at the absurdity of gay conversion camps — it won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance this year — lacks the teeth to make its points stick.

The film owes its success less to shock value than to sheer cinematic inventiveness and Egerton’s total immersion in the role.

Wayne Kramer, who co-wrote the scrappy script with Frank Hannah, makes a potent directing debut and strikes gold with the cast.

Duncan zips through five decades and dozens of characters without reducing the participants to cliches or slogans. A remarkable cast helps him to keep focused on the core of the piece.

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.

Dazzling, sometimes hilarious and surprisingly emotional documentary.

Given the assault of devilishly clever plot twists that buzz-bomb your brain like a two-hour binge of quad-shot lattes, Duplicity goes down as too smart for its own good.

The Painted Veil has the power and intimacy of a timeless love story. By all means, let it sweep you away.

It works enough of the time to deliver on the promise of bad dreams.

The movie steps lively with buoyant humor and palpable sexual tension, but keep an eye out for the dark places.

You'll laugh till it hurts at Cold Souls.

It’s funny — as is a lot of this eager-to-please, all-over-the-place movie — thanks to the dry snap of Moran’s dialogue and Feldstein’s exhilarating performance.

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

A meditation on the racial and class conflicts at the heart of the American character.

The actors make it unique and unforgettable.

But fantasy elements aside, this Disney movie has the one essential that makes a nature documentary fly: a thrilling sense of wonder.

Don't get me wrong – the movie lays on the raunch, and there are more gut-busting laughs than you can count. But no one gets objectified or patronized.

Green Book is a movie about class as well as race, and Farrelly rightly refuses to paint a pretty picture.

What links the two films in fun and ferocity is the big game, a ripsnorter that is irresistibly entertaining.

The reason that Boy Erased hits you like a shot in the heart can be found in Jared’s relationship with his parents. Kidman brings stirring compassion and a growing strength to a woman who learns about herself the more she learns about her son. And Crowe is magnificent as a believer who can’t quite storm the barricades his faith erects around a true reconciliation with his son.

The Avengers has it all. And then some. Six superheroes for the price of one ticket... It's also the blockbuster I saw in my head when I imagined a movie that brought together the idols of the Marvel world in one, shiny, stupendously exciting package. It's "Transformers" with a brain, a heart and working sense of humor. Suck on that, Michael Bay. [10 May 2012, p.74]

All your friends will be talking about this femcentric raunchfest and its fabulous Asian-American actors who are ready to lace every laugh with human complication.

Stimulating entertainment, as rigorously challenging and painfully funny as anything the Coens have done. But it's necessary to meet the Coens halfway. If you don't, Barton Fink is an empty exercise that will bore you breathless. If you do, it's a comic nightmare that will stir your imagination like no film in years.

Anderson packs the film with atmosphere spiked with intrigue. And Hamm gives his role a James Bond-meets-Don Draper appeal, tossing off one-liners with a weary insouciance. His scenes with Pike give the movie a resonant power it wouldn't otherwise have.

As ever, Freeman delivers miracles; he's as good as it gets.

Messed up as it is, you can't tear your eyes away from this explosion of brutal sounds and images.

Sensational, sicko fun -- you won't believe your eyes -- and just the thing to shake up the creeping conservatism that is draining the vulgar life out of pop culture.

Neither a filmed play nor an actual movie, the muddled screen version of August Wilson’s great drama about systemic wrongs against Black America is a mixed bag but also a stirring promise from producer Denzel Washington and his family to preserve the work of a theatrical master.

Junkies for dark humor should prep for going cold turkey, despite the efforts of director Andrew Adamson to spice things up with combat and a rivalry between Caspian and Peter (good on Moseley for showing some backbone) that Lewis never imagined.

Like Kathryn Bigelow's "Detroit," set half a century ago, Chon's Gook uses the past to speak to a tumultuous present. Chon has created a hardass yet hypnotically beautiful film that snarls and sparks to incite, not a fever in the blood, but an urgent conversation about what makes us human. Godspeed.

Blue Story is a 91-minute assault of sound and image that leaves no doubt about the vicious cycle of gang violence it presents. Prepare to be wowed.

The movie brims over with action -- check out Alex's run through traffic on the Paris beltway -- but Canet scores a triumph by plumbing the violence of the mind.

First-time director Peter Care crafts something darkly funny and touching from a coming-of-age fable that might have drifted into formula without deeply felt performances from Culkin and Hirsch and dazzling animation from Todd McFarlane (Spawn) that brings the boys' comic fantasies to jolting life.

Despite a gimmicky premise, Chronicle fuels its action with characters you can laugh with, understand and even take to heart.

Yes, the sets and costumes elicit swoons, but it's the peerless Sondheim score, however truncated, that makes this Woods a prime destination.

At first glance, you might mistake What They Had for one of those well-meaning family dramas about what to do when your mom is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. But that would discount the exceptional accomplishment achieved by debuting director Elizabeth Chomko, enlivening her scrappy script with a cast of actors who truly are as good as it gets. You laugh as much as you cry, which means you believe in the movie’s truth.

Two people talking in a car. Hardly the stuff of white-knuckle drama, right? It is when you hitch two phenomenal actors, Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys, to a suspenseful script and tightly coiled direction by Babak Anvari, and then stand back and let them rip.

To try and wrap your head around the plot of Predestination can only lead to madness. Don't get me wrong: The movie itself is a trip. Just jump off the cliff and go with the Spierig brothers, Peter and Michael, as they whoosh into the labyrinth of their own fervid imaginations.

Tenet sweeps you away on waves of pure, ravishing cinema.

Eyes sees what it wants to see, but it's a riveting glimpse.

The funny and touching result is worth cheering for.

You can feel the heat that ignites this gripping tale, and the humor and humanity that root it in feeling. Sayles knows how to use his social conscience: He lets it rip.

It's a wild, whacked-out wonder. Coenheads rejoice.

Douglas never makes a false move, delivering a tour de force in human weakness.

Dull title for a juicy, fact-based caper movie that's full of surprises I have no intention of spoiling.

Sometimes a movie comedy just clicks. Welcome to one of those times.

This hilarious, high-kicking nonsense cost two cents and looks it -- hell, it was shot in 19 days, but you'll laugh helplessly anyway.

A movie of potent provocation and surging humanity that ranks with the year's best.

Luckily, Trumbo has a powerhouse Bryan Cranston to light a fire under the moldier clichés in John McNamara's script.

There’s no contrived digital sleight-of-hand in Spider-Man: Far From Home that can match what Holland does: He makes the MCU feel new again.

A mesmerizing erotic odyssey.

One thing's for sure about this raw provocation from the Coens: Like the music, the pain runs deep and true. You'll laugh till it hurts.

Berg's unquestioning faith in law and order could have used, well, a little questioning. But there's no doubt about the worth of the movie as a well-earned tribute to the heroes and victims of a tragic event that may have just made Boston stronger.

In a multiplex filled with empty New Year vessels (take that, Kangaroo Jack), this holdover grabs you hard.

Green made the wise choice to be funny in telling his sad story.

Are we always still in high school in our heads? 21 Jump Street thinks so. And Hill and Tatum are just the crazy-ass comedy team to prove it.

Mamet is on his game, and that is a sight to see. No con.

Spends too much time covering ground well known from the headlines. But the scenes of the couple at home with their children and friends are uniquely fascinating, if not, in Wilson's words, "very 007-ish."

Mellencamp has made an admirably unfussy movie that sneaks into your heart with the hypnotic power of a song.

In Guncrazy, Davis delivers pow entertainment with a twist: It matters.

Driver's tough core of honesty and wit is bewitching. So's the movie.

Though The Drop covers familiar ground, it simmers with charged emotion. The image that lingers belongs to Gandolfini.

Wells is a wonder with actors - Cooper and Jones earn top honors - and a filmmaker with an instinct for the emotions that bleed between the lines. This haunting movie hits you hard and right where you live.

In Kill Bill, Tarantino brings delicious sin back to movies -- the thrill you get from something down, dirty and dangerous.

Scott Pilgrim is a breathless rush of a movie that jumps off the screen, spins your head around and then stealthily works its way into your heart.

Director-writer Martin Hynes shapes his first movie into something emotionally truthful, painfully funny and vibrantly alive. It's a near-perfect road movie, since you don't want the ride to end.

This gut punch of a documentary will knock you for a loop. File it under "no good deed goes unpunished."

One of Moore’s best and most incisively funny films — right up there with "Roger & Me" (1989), "Bowling for Columbine" (2002) and "Sicko" (2007) — his latest goes way past taking potshots at the Donald, though it does that with piercing intelligence and wounding wit.

Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Phillips turn this same-sex romcom for the holidays into a gift package that feels quietly and mischievously revolutionary.

Cooper Raiff, who created this Sundance prizewinner, can't hide his feelings for people with disabilities and the challenges that come to those who love them. And I can't hide my feelings for this exuberant gift of a movie starring Raiff and a never better Dakota Johnson.

For those who don't believe that truth trumps fiction for whacked-out depravity, mark this shockingly fierce and funny spellbinder as Exhibit A.

Jolly good show.

There’s no doubting its power. This film will take a piece out of you.

It isn't the sex that shocks here, it's the chilling core of loneliness. Intimacy dares to cut deep, and its daring gets to you.

What these guys do for revenge during one hellish day in the Big Apple makes the panic room look like Barney's toy box. The film itself goes off the deep end way before the end credits.

Searching is a technical marvel with a beating heart at its core, which makes all the difference.

Craig Zobel's potent and provocative Compliance is torture to sit through. It's also indispensable filmmaking. How is that possible? Check it out.

Veering between sentimentality and exploitation with a few misguided stops at raunchy sex farce, Reign Over Me never finds a tone to suit its purpose.

The film's most pleasing surprise is the beautifully nuanced portrait of Capote's confidante, "To Kill a Mockingbird" author Harper Lee, by Sandra Bullock. You heard me. Bullock gives the film what it otherwise lacks: the ring of truth.

Despite the futuristic tilt in the title, Star Trek Beyond works best when it boldly goes retro.

Any similarities between Josey and Lois Jenson, the real woman who made Eveleth Mines pay for their sins in a landmark 1988 class-action suit, are purely coincidental. Instead, we get a TV-movie fantasy of female empowerment glazed with soap-opera theatrics.

Jones is a marvel. Sundance couldn't get enough of her. You won't, either. Her performance grabs hold and won't let go.

To the credit of this scrappy, admirably femcentric film, crisply directed by Meera Menon from a tightly wound script by Amy Fox (with Reiner and Thomas also doing double-duty as producers), Equity refuses to paint a rosy picture of women at the top.

My advice is to keep your eyes on Lawrence, who turns the movie into a victory by presenting a heroine propelled by principle instead of hooking up with the cutest boy.

Subversive and diabolically funny.

Rey deserves credit for comic observations that sting.

It's a revamped Cinderella story with power as the aphrodisiac, and Douglas and Bening play it to the classy hilt. The courtship scenes in the film's lighter, more deft first half have the bounce of a moonstruck fable.

It's soft-core pap for horny boys and their hornier dads.

What makes Crazy Stupid Love a cut above is actors who let pain seep into the laughs. Here's a comedy you really can take to heart.

Berg does a tremendous job of throwing us into the action with the help of dizzying handheld camerawork from Enrique Chediak.

Limbo is vital personal filmmaking from a world-class practitioner of the art.

End of Watch gives you the savage whoosh of being on a job that can get you killed. Sins of cop clichés can be forgiven when a movie pays honest tribute to police on the line.

Gibson has made a film of blunt provocation and bruising beauty.

Want a blast of fun to ease your pandemic blues? No worries. Borat is back in a sequel that can't recapture the cathartic shock of the first but still shows Sacha Baron Cohen as a razor-sharp satirist who knows how to make us laugh till it hurts.

The movie comes at you in a whoosh, like a volcano of creative ideas in full eruption.

It scared the living crap out of me. Only at the movies is that a compliment.

The Meddler belongs to Sarandon, a famously no-bull actress who digs in deep, showing us how moms aren't one thing, they're all things. How else can they make you laugh from love and cry from crazy? The Meddler knows how. Listen up.

Even a nice chianti couldn't help you wash down this lump of tear-jerking twaddle.

The Homesman lacks the scope and depth of Jones' dynamite 2005 directorial debut, "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada." But Jones and Swank, walking the tightrope between comic and tragic, ignite combustibly.

Acting doesn't get much better than the subtly brilliant display put on by Tilda Swinton in We Need to Talk About Kevin.

In this muddled but marvelous blend of documentary and concert film, director Lian Lunson takes you down to a place where it's possible to look closely at the life and art of cult troubadour Leonard Cohen.

You leave The East with a hunger to know more and a good idea of where to look. For Marling and Batmanglij that counts as mission accomplished. For audiences, it’s that rare thing these days – a movie that matters.

Burton uses the summer's most explosively entertaining movie to lead us back into the liberating darkness of dreams.

The voice work is exceptional, with a special nod to Maggie Gyllenhaal as a toxic-tongued baby sitter and Jason Lee as her raunchy-to-the-point-of-depraved boyfriend. Kenan is a talent to watch, even in a flick that doesn't know when to quit.

Ice-cold. Dead eyes. Demonic laugh. His face a mask you can't read until he's up in yours. Then run. That's Johnny Depp giving everything he's got in a riveting, rattlesnake performance as South Boston gangster James "Whitey" Bulger in Black Mass.

(Shelton) knows how to write pungent dialogue that covers a multitude of sins when the film goes off the rails.

Schumacher could have exploited those tabloid headlines about solid citizens going berserk. Instead, the timely, gripping Falling Down puts a human face on a cold statistic and then dares us to look away.

A Separation is a landmark film. No way will you be able to get it out of your head.

The surprise is how effective Wingard is at keeping the atmosphere jumpy and tense. And you can't help rooting for Erin, who could win Survivor if she went on the show. Vinson's take-charge performance is the life of this badass party. When you're ducking in your seat, it's nice to have someone to root for.

At three hours, this Western whodunit can feel like too much of a good thing. But Tarantino writes like a flamethrower. His incendiary dialogue feels like profane poetry. And the dude thinks big.

Moore shows us acting at its best, alive with ferocity and feeling and committed to truth.

There are glimmers of the perversely fascinating murder mystery of the classic 1957 Patricia Highsmith novel, but this misguided update suffers from a lack of suspense, wit and undetectable sexual chemistry between Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas. Read the book, skip the movie.

Edward Norton is at his best here, chalking up another boundary-stretching performance this year in the wake of the unfairly overlooked "Down in the Valley."

Just know that Pulse possesses the dark art to make your pulse pound and your hair stand on end -- with no cheating.

Thanks to Professor Marston and his real-life Wonder Women, something close to a death blow was dealt to the demeaning, centuries-old image of the damsel in distress. It's a hell of an origin story.

Catherine O'Hara is comic perfection as Marilyn Hack.

Explosive entertainment.

Actor David Oyelowo makes a heartfelt directing debut in a PG adventure about a boy (Lonnie Chavez) in search of a mythic creature who might save his dying mother. Even when the pace drags, the film remains a rare gift for family audiences.

Cheers, too, for the tangy bite Sam Rockwell brings to Jewell’s Libertarian attorney Watson Bryant, a rebel whose methods rile the status quo and sometimes his own client.

You keep rooting for the team, mostly because director Gavin O’Connor (the terrific Tumbleweeds) cast real athletes instead of actors, a canny decision that pays major dividends when the big game is re-created.

It’s sexy, suspenseful fun, and gorgeous-looking to boot.

Director Doug Liman -- the hip skipper of "Swingers" and "Go" -- makes all the familiar dirty business seem fun and almost human. In these dog days, Bourne earns what passes as high praise: It doesn't suck.

American Animals is a high-style caper that touches a deeper chord of youthful indiscretion and moral imbalance. You won't be able to stop talking about it.

Oh no—not another doomsday thriller! Yes, but hold on and see how director Sam Esmail and producers Barack and Michelle Obama, powered by an exceptional all-star cast (Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, Mahershala Ali, Kevin Bacon), make you care while frying your nerves to a frazzle.

Popstar mixes the hilarity with a surprising amount of heart. 4Real.

Working in Spanish for the first time, the filmmaker somehow allows the interweaving threads of his plot to get tangled into a jumble even he can’t satisfactorily unravel. It’s a damn shame.

The funny and heartbreaking Off the Map, directed with a poet's eye and a keen ear for nuance by Campbell Scott, resonates with something rare in today's movies: simplicity.

It’s always a slam dunk when Adam Sandler drops his doofus routine and really acts. And here, as a basketball scout who yearns to coach, he infuses every frame of this formulaic crowd-pleaser with a real-deal love of the game. Hot damn! We have a winner.

Avengers: Infinity War leaves viewers up in the air, feeling exhilarated and cheated at the same time, aching for a closure that never comes ... at least not yet.

You can laugh with Maps to the Stars, but you can't laugh it off. Prepare to be knocked for a loop.

John Wick is the kind of fired-up, ferocious B-movie fun some of us can't get enough of. You know who you are.

Truth to Power sprawls when it most needs to focus, diluting the power punch of the original with too much bobbing and weaving. But it's hard to argue that the crusade isn't still vital.

The Way Way Back gets it wittily, thrillingly right. It turns the familiar into something bracingly fresh and funny. It makes you laugh, then breaks your heart.

Buoyed by a Latin-flavored score and Favreau's knack for improv inspiration, Chef is the perfect antidote to Hollywood junk food. Like the best meals and movies, this irresistible concoction feels good for the soul.

Why We Fight deserves high praise for making it that much tougher to wear blinders.

Sure it’s hokey, but this fact-based crowdpleaser starring a terrific Toni Collette as a struggling Welsh villager who risks everything on a racehorse she breeds and raises is an underdog story that works like a charm.

Even Dinklage and Fanning can’t give this failed experiment a heartbeat. You won’t wish for the end of world while watching I Think We’re Alone Now, just the end of the movie.

Levinson wants nothing less than to capture the hope and despair of the American dream through the saga of one family — his family. It’s a grand ambition. But the film, though exquisitely crafted, lacks the political, spiritual and sociological depth to realize it. What Avalon does offer are rich period details, abundant scenes of humor and heartbreak and outstanding performances.

That’s the power of My King. It sees that passion creates an unholy mess. Maïwenn doesn’t want to warm our heart, she wants to rip into it, and turn the concept of the Hollywood happy ending on its head.

The movie rises and, at times, even soars. This is all - and I do mean all - thanks to what human actors in league with computer technology can now achieve to bring the apes to life. No more guys squeezed into monkey suits and talking in posh accents. Performance-capture makes all the difference.

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

Smart, witty and alert to the buried resentments that poke through the shiny surface of affluence, Holofcener's film recognizes that money is the new sex.

Playing the kid sister of Henry Cavill’s Sherlock Holmes, Millie Bobby Brown, just 16, shines her talent on its highest beams and creates a totally irresistible family entertainment.

A warped wonder of a movie that takes twisted to areas few have investigated.

Chris Hemsworth leads a starry cast in a heist drama that fascinates even through a veil of familiarity. Near the end, a standout Halle Berry flashes a smile of sweet satisfaction. My guess is that you’ll feel the same way.

A summer firecracker. It's also a tribute to outcasts -- teens, gays, minorities, even Dixie Chicks. It's not without thought or feeling, except when its mind gets bent by the gods of box office. Then it's craven and empty.

Buscemi makes this pathetic and potentially lethal shutterbug a figure of surprising humor and compassion.

With a $15,000 budget too puny to empty a petty-cash drawer, the no-frills Paranormal Activity comes packed with thrills.

Despite a sappy ending that surprises in all the wrong ways, Daniel Craig’s fifth and final go-round as 007 cements his reputation as the gold-standard James Bond of the 21st century and lays down a challenge for anyone—he or she—who dares to follow him.

In relying on narration, Redford's movie is too little show and too much tell.

Is it a great movie? Nah. It's too slick a Marvel package for that, with surprisingly meh special effects and an energy that’s more desperation than inspiration. But stars Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman are willing to bust a gut to make you laugh. So there’s that.

Jarmusch is a true visionary; he knows his films can't bring order to the ravishing chaos around him, but he can't resist the fun of trying. In this compassionate comedy of missed connections, he makes us see the ordinary in fresh and pertinent ways. But the flickers of humanity in those taxis are soon dulled by barriers of time, sex, race, language and money. They are flickers in a vast emotional void.

It’s the actors who make this real-life legal procedural come alive.

It's a beast of a movie, an emotional roller coaster that threatens to go off the rails, and does. But Cianfrance, working from a scrappy script he wrote with Ben Coccio and Darius Marder, takes you on a hell of a ride.

Page One is a vital, indispensable hell-raiser.

The funny, touching and vital Beatriz at Dinner probably tackles way more than it can handle, but so what? Godspeed. You won't know what hit you.

Until the last half-hour, when Lucas actually does establish a emotional connection between the landmark he created in 1977 and the prequel investment portfolio he laid out in 1999, the movie is one spectacularly designed letdown after another.