Peter Travers

A kickass documentary.

A peak-form Mads Mikkelsen stars in this hilarious and heartbreaking spellbinder as a Copenhagen high-school teacher who thinks day drinking might sharpen his faculties. The Oscar for Best International Feature belongs right here.

Surprisingly timely and enduringly timeless.

McTeer and Brown make magic ina film that is wonderfully funny, touching and vital.

The burning intensity of MacKay’s face, reflecting the ferocity and futility of war, leaves an indelible mark. His fervor, coupled with the creative passion that Mendes infuses in every frame, makes 1917 impossible to shake.

How do I love the film version of the smash Broadway musical, let me count the ways, starting with the way Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande set the screen ablaze as frenemy witches and sets, costumes and songs to die for. Seeing this joyous eruption once is just not enough.

Thank Maggie Gyllenhaal, in a stunning debut as director and screenwriter, for creating one of the year’s very best movies starring the magnificent Olivia Colman as a mother haunted by her troubled past. This, you do not want to miss

Joel Coen’s triumphant film version of Shakespeare’s tragedy astounds on every level, starring Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand, two acting titans, playing an aging couple taking their last shot at murderous ambition. There is no way you can take your eyes off them.

For Swifties and newbies, here's the musical event of the movie year. And, yes, you can dance to it as the pop princess uses her all-time top-grossing concert film to show off her talent for artistic reinvention and storytelling in song. What's not to like?

All credit to O’Sullivan, Thompson and a tone-perfect cast for creating a film that moves to the rhythms of life as its lived rather than fantasized. Saint Frances retains its rough edges to that last. And that’s some kind of miracle.

The movie dissects the universal gap between the haves and the have-nots with shocking wit, stinging topicality and gut-wrenching violence. It’s explosive filmmaking on every level.

It's the no-bull performances that hold back the flood of banalities. Robbins and Freeman connect with the bruised souls of Andy and Red to create something undeniably powerful and moving.

Thanks to the clever, caring touch of director Ismail Merchant, working from a script by Caryl Phillips, this steadily engrossing film captures the book's bracing humor and humanity.

A mesmerizing film spinning from hilarity to heartbreak.

Pedro Almodovar's transfixing tragicomedy -- the best foreign movie of the year -- is also the best showcase for actresses in ages.

This week’s shocking, out-of-nowhere Oscar nomination for British actress Andrea Riseborough as an alcoholic single mother from West Texas who squanders her $190,000 lottery win on booze turns an indie movie no one ever heard of into an absolute must-see. Prepare to be wowed!

What the film does so movingly as a portrait is show the isolation that comes with creative success.

Kingsley creates an unforgettable monster. Acting rarely gets this hypnotically explosive.

Mamet -- crafts tangy, well-seasoned dialogue that a good cast can feast on. And this cast is prime.

For all its fancy pedigree, the spellbinding Dancer in the Dark aims right for the heart and aces its target.

Forget Oscar, Ocean's Eleven is the coolest damned thing around.

A marvel of delicacy and humor.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire is enthralling on every level. In her hypnotic and haunting film, alive with humor, heartbreak and swooning sensuality, Sciamma has created nothing less than a timeless work of art.

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

Wilson is flat-out hilarious, playing this cowboy like a surfer dude zapped back in time.

Not only the coolest Spider-Man epic ever, it’s one of the best movies of the year.

The filmmaker brings everything he has as an artist to this raw, resonant thriller. The screen damn near explodes as his genre caper suddenly encompasses a whole social strata (race, class, politics, gender). You’re in for a hell of a ride.

Ignited by career-best performances from Farrell and Gleason, this new classic from son of Ireland Martin McDonagh brims over with dark comic magic and jolts of bloody scary hell. Fasten your seatbelts for a spellbinder that stands high with the best movies of the year.

Creative artistry radiates from every frame of this groundbreaking film from director RaMell Ross who joins with camera wiz Jomo Fray to take us inside the eyes of two young Black men (Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson) to expose the abuses in a Florida reform school

The film is alive with delicacy and feeling...It's a beauty.

What’s never in doubt, however, is the compassion the movie shows to its protagonist, partly based on the women in the filmmaker’s own family and embodied by a great actress at her intuitive, indelible best. In capturing what Jones calls “the rhythm of living” even in the face of death, he has turned this character study into a shattering portrait of resilience — and an essential work of art.

This unassuming animated gem about a shell (indelibly voiced by co-writer Jenny Slate) trying to find his family shames the bloat of big-studio cartoons by proving good things really do come in small packages. The result is unique and unforgettable.

Polarizing? Sure. But Wes Anderson is a film artist like no other. In defiance of realism, he builds dazzling, minimalist, all-star jewel boxes that are easy to spoof but impossible to equal. This Atomic-age fable about teen space nerds and their parents tinges laughs with genuine feeling.

Elegantly witty and haunting . . . McKellen gives the performance of his career . . . and Brendan Fraser excels.

Ali is a bruiser, unwieldy in length and ambition. But Mann and Smith deliver this powerhouse with the urgency of a champ's left hook.

Delivers frisky fun for bruised romantics regardless of age, sex or nationality.

Watching De Niro take Paul through his first panic attack ("I'm crying like a woman") is an unalloyed joy.

A riveting and surprisingly romantic ride.

Forget who wins or loses, Boys State is about that promise of change in the air. And it’s exhilarating.

Steadily engrossing and devilishly funny, and, o brother, does it look sharp.

Technology has allowed Jackson to erase the barriers of time and speak to a new generation about what war does to youth. His humane and heartbreaking film is a profound achievement.

With Oscar buzz surging for Riz Ahmed, the time is now to check out his virtuoso performance as a rock drummer facing deafness in a riveting, resonant film whose thrashing power and emotional gravity exert a grip that won’t let go.

In her first fiction feature, documentarian Payal Kapadia brings a poetic profundity to this cinematic spellbinder about female sisterhood in a big city (Mumbai) full of societal, economic and political pressures that can force out intimacy and kill the yearning to dream.

Japanese manga master Hayao Miyazaki, 83, came out of retirement for this hand-drawn beauty about his own life growing up in wartime. The Oscar for best animated feature belongs right here since Miyazaki’s unparalleled artistry shines out of every frame.

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 friendship at the heart of this film, as indelibly portrayed by two brilliant young actresses — Flanigan is a wonder to behold, while Ryder nails just the right notes of supportive and warmly sympathetic — is a thing of beauty. Hittman’s urgent film is an emotional wipeout. It’s hard to watch. It’s also impossible to forget.

A movie heart-breaker of oddball wit and startling grace.

A personal best for producer Jerry Bruckheimer, a triumph for Scott and a war film of prodigious power. You will be shaken.

It's a role of fierce demands, and Rampling meets them all. In a summer of crass, Rampling is a true class act.

If, like me, you enjoy challenges that are emotionally rewarding to puzzle out, then I'm Thinking of Ending Things ranks with the year's best movies.

Watching Carville and Stephanopoulos manipulate the media by playing both footsie and hardball makes for a wickedly funny and irreverent lesson in ’90s power politics.

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

The challenge is exhilarating. You can discover a lot about yourself by getting lost in Mulholland Drive. It grips you like a dream that won't let go.

Prepare to be wowed by one of the best movies of the year, starring a sensational Sandra Hüller (heads up, Oscar) in Justine Triet’s spellbinding murder mystery that is really a forensic anatomy of a marriage told through the gripping story of a wife on trial for killing her husband.

As heartfelt as it is hilarious.

You won't forget this film -- it's devastating.

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

The first commandment of Dogma: Thou shalt not stop laughing.

Sean Astin is a winner as Rudy Ruettiger, who earns the grades, a place on the scout team and, in 1975, a chance to play... There’s little Rocky-like rah-rah. It’s Ruettiger’s persistence that his teammates and the film celebrate. For that, Rudy earns a rousing cheer.

A movie that advances the career of a demonstrably gifted filmmaker, a fearlessly funny movie whose laughs draw blood, a bracingly provocative movie that won't apologize for its bad temper.

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

A bright burst of action and comedy with a cast that makes for rousing good company.

Tadpole may be small, but it's something special -- a cheeky comedy knockout.

Shaka King’s powerhouse about the 1969 murder of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton (an Oscar-worthy Daniel Kaluuya) by the Chicago police with the help of an FBI informer (Lakeith Stanfield) is a new movie classic that speaks to the toxic racism of its time and ours.

The acting is top-notch, and LaPaglia, who makes the cop's torment palpable, gives the performance of his career.

A dynamite bundle from British writer-director Guy Ritchie. Even when the accents are as indecipherable as the plot, Ritchie keeps the action percolating and the humor on high.

Cheers to Scotland’s Charlotte Wells for making the best movie of the year by a first-time writer-director. And cheers to Paul Mescal and young Frankie Corio for bringing this heartfelt father-daughter story to such funny, touching and vital life.

You'll laugh, you'll cry and all steps in between at this vital family entertainment with a title that stands for Children of Deaf Adults. Oscar winner Marlee Matlin and newcomer Emilia Jones turn this emotional powerhouse into one of the year's best movies

Let’s give thanks for this wicked, whacked-out whodunit sequel. Daniel Craig is back as southern-fried detective Benoit Blanc and all is right with the world as a cast of merry pranksters (yay Janelle Monae) turns murder most foul into comic gold.

Nunez finds a striking lyricism in simple lives that inspires an uncommonly fine cast and ranks him as a world-class filmmaker.

You’ve never seen a Pinocchio like this one, a funny, touching and vital masterpiece from del Toro that uses stop-motion animation to create a world of beauty and terror to get lost in. The Oscar for best animated feature belongs right here.

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.

Offers something magical in the haunting and hypnotic performance of Sarah Polley...(the film) cuts deep.

A tornado of laughs based on the black experience as lived by these four insightful jokers, instead of as filtered through the Hollywood formula.

"Waves" is a spellbinder.

This hilarious and humane film nails its subject -- not just the unshaved armpits and the lack of underwear -- and marks Moodysson as a talent to watch.

What makes it one of the best (and most unclassifiable) movies of the year is the hypnotic way it keeps re-inventing itself from scene to scene.

Palm Springs suggests that repetition can kill sex drives, marriages, and even the will to live. Yet it still leaves you laughing gratefully at the resilience of love.

Unique and unforgettable.

Detractors will see the usual parade of repressed feelings in a Masterpiece Theatre setting. Those who look closer will find one of the best films of the year.

Waggish fun like this is too good to miss.

Lane is a force of nature. Her slow-burning, fiercely erotic performance charges the movie.

You’ll laugh and cry your eyes out as an emotionally bruised diver learns about life and loyalty from an eight-tentacled mollusk. This Oscar favorite and viral sensation is the year’s most unorthodox and unforgettable love story.

Concentrate on the abundant factors that make First Man unmissable and unforgettable. There have been astronaut movies before, good (Apollo 13) and better (The Right Stuff). But few have been as much a triumph of the imagination fueled, not by FX but by indelible feeling, as this one.

Setting it against the backdrop of a wanton city under siege, Schroeder crafts a film of whiplash urgency.

It's a haunting, hypnotic film that exerts an escalating grip on the heart and the conscience.

An uneven movie that nonetheless bristles with stinging wit and exerts a perverse fascination.

Mitchell gives this post-punk, neo-glam rock extravaganza everything in his loaded arsenal of talents. He gets the sound right, the look right, the fun right and - this is crucial - the pain right.

Oooowee, this is one scorchingly sexy thriller. Powered by shining new star Glen Powell, who singes the screen with wowza costar Adria Arjona, this cheeky, somewhat true story from director Richard Linklater adds up to one of the best and most beguiling movies of the year.

Let the unsettling secrets of this outrageously funny and steadily engrossing meditation on the life of two high school misfits after graduation catch you by surprise. It's that good.

In a mere 76 minutes, director Ira Sachs and his virtuoso actors, Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall, have captured a specific world in universal terms and made a film for the ages.

It's unmissable, flaws and all, because riveting suspense spiced with diabolical laughs and garnished with a sprig of kinky romance add up to the tastiest dish around.

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

Using their voices for demonstrations and protests, they helped pass 1990’s revolutionary Americans With Disabilities Act. This documentary proves that they are still changing the world.

Never snap judge a Nicole Holofcener film as a sitcom. Just watch how she steers Julia Louis-Dreyfus and a pitch-perfect cast to dig out the raw feelings colliding under the laughs to reveal a generosity toward human foibles, even when comic darts draw blood.

Before this trippy, mesmerizing movie swerves out of control, it delivers an exhilarating and challenging ride.

Get your titles straight -- this is the good one, and a roaring good time.

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.