Peter Travers

The Daniels and their wow of a star Michelle Yeoh turn this visionary absurdist comedy into a volcano of creative ideas in full eruption. It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen

Irresistibly deranged.

Director Ben Affleck slam dunks a movie about a basketball sneaker—the Air Jordan, no less— and it’s the first all-star Oscar contender of 2023, an outrageously entertaining classic in the making with Affleck, Matt Damon, Viola Davis and a cast of MVPs at the top of their game.

A new Paul Schrader movie is always an event and this spellbinding meditation on sin and salvation—seen through the eyes of a gambler (a superb Oscar Isaac) who counts cards to both escape and confront his torturous past—is one of his best.

A uniquely hypnotic and haunting love story sparked by Nicolas Cage and Elisabeth Shue at their career best.

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.

Another game-changer from Jordan Peele, who pushes the limits of fun, fright and movie love to take horror to the next level. What do UFOs have to do with the violence eating at America? Say yes to Nope—it’ll mess with your head and pin you to your seat.

Latvia’s dark-horse entry in the Oscar sweeps for best animation doesn’t need dialogue (it has none) or A-list voice talent (also absent) to qualify as a thing of beauty as a cat and four fellow creatures carve out a future after a cataclysmic flood wipes out humanity.

Cord Jefferson’s slashingly funny satire of Black literary stereotyping is one of the best and boldest American comedies in years with a dynamite performance by Jeffrey Wright that should put him up front in the Oscar sweeps. You won't look at race on screen in the same way again.

A maliciously funny and keenly observant movie -- director-writer Patrick Stettner makes a potent feature debut -- that serves its humor dark and without artificial sweeteners.

So what if the showoff climax deserts depth for dazzle. As the first Asian hero in Marvel history, former stuntman Simu Liu is action poetry in motion and his epic starring debut kicks off the fall film season on a rousing high note.

In the most purely pleasurable movie so far this year, Ryan Gosling has a blast as a science guy who rockets into space to save all our asses with jolts, jokes and smarts that won’t quit.

Instead of the easy attitudinizing that is the default position for teen comedies, Gimme the Loot fills each frame with raw talent and exuberance.

Nightcrawler curves and hisses its way into your head with demonic skill. When the laughs come, they stick in your throat. This is a deliciously twisted piece of work. And Gyllenhaal, coiled and ready to spring, is scarily brilliant. He truly is a monster for our time.

The film belongs to Jolie. She won an Oscar for 1999's "Girl, Interrupted," but this is by far her best performance.

It's the work of a major talent. Apatow scores by crafting the film equivalent of a stand-up routine that encompasses the joy, pain, anger, loneliness and aching doubt that go into making an audience laugh.

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

The fierce and funny film version has been directed by Texan Richard Linklater (Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise) with rare grace and compassion.

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.

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

Jamie Foxx gets so far inside the man and his music that he and Ray Charles seem to breathe as one.

Shot with a surrealist's eye for madness and destruction by the great cinematographer Matthew Libatique, Mother! always seems on the verge of exploding. Your head will feel the same way. And I mean that as a compliment.

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

Shrek 2 may be computer-generated, but its innate heart and glorious sense of mischief make it one of the best and most humane movies of the summer.

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.

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

Brimming with humor and heartbreak, Slumdog Millionaire meets at the border of art and commerce and lets one flow into the other as if that were the natural order of things.

It’s murder behind stained-glass windows as “Knives Out” detective Daniel Craig and a cast of all-star sinners find the fiendish fun in a crime story about the wages of wickedness. Don’t worry, it’s not a musical

As ever with Park Chan-wook, there are tasty bits of bright and bleak to noodle on in this stinging satire of AI and capitalism, but with a rigorous fix on the growing dehumanization infecting our world. One of the year’s best.

Powered by a transfixing Portman, Larrain's film – one of the year's best – is appropriately hard to pin down and impossible to forget.

Paul Giamatti is absolute perfection as a Grinchy teacher who learns a hard lesson in empathy over a winter school break. All the actors shine in this exuberant movie gift from director Alexander Payne that has all the makings of a new holiday classic.

Now this is what I call a summer movie. Baby Driver has it all: thrills, laughs, sex, nonstop action, a killer soundtrack, a star-making performance from Ansel Elgort and a director – Edgar Wright – who can knock the wind out of you.

Immensely entertaining and provocative.

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.

Tone-deaf but thunderously exciting.

Kudrow's Michele is a deadpan delight as she joins fellow misfit Romy (a deliciously funny Mira Sorvino).

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.

McNaughton has made a film of clutching terror that's meant to heighten our awareness instead of dulling it. At the end, Henry is still out there among us. And he's no B-movie monster in a hockey mask. He could be the guy next door. This film gives off a dark chill that follows you all the way home.

Here’s a powerhouse of a documentary that makes you feel mad as hell and unwilling to take it anymore.

You can wait around and hope, but it’s difficult to believe that this rediscovered Sondheim classic with Grof, Mendez and Radcliffe will ever have a more feeling and vital performance than this one. And hey Harry Potter, you can really sing.

Viggo Mortensen scores a standout directing debut, showing the artful sensitivity and offbeat humor that define him as an actor with this heart-piercing drama in which he stars as a gay son coping with the dementia of his racist father (a career-best Lance Henriksen).

Don't miss it. Though Life Itself is a warts-and-all portrait Ebert didn't live to review, my guess is his thumbs would be shooting upward. Mine sure are.

A dynamite film that ranks with the year's best.

Appaloosa is gripping entertainment that keeps springing surprises.

Cyrus, the summer's best, most original and crazily inventive comedy, is potently funny and painfully real.

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.

A joy to behold.

This unnervingly funny and quietly devastating film -- director Todd Field's first since his smash 2001 debut with "In the Bedroom" -- pulls you in like a magnetic-force field.

Down in the Valley is a wild thing that sticks with you long after it's over. You know, a real movie.

A jolt-a-minute horroshow laced with racial tension and stinging satirical wit.

Glorious entertainment.

Director Fernando Meirelles and screenwriter Jeffrey Caine put a human face on John le Carre's novel of sex, lies and dirty politics in modern Africa. Prepare for a thrilling ride.

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

It will hook you good and keep you riveted.

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

What's lucky is that no matter what language it's in, My Life as Zucchini never sacrifices what’s true for what’s trite and easier to sell. This is animation as an art form, inspiring and indelible.

The Hangover ain't art, but Phillips has shaped the hardcore hilarity into the summer party movie of all our twisted dreams.

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

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.

You watch The Wrestler (with a superb title song from Bruce Springsteen) in a state of pure exhilaration. A great actor in a great movie will do that to you.

Blue Caprice is a cinematic punch to the gut, a mind-bending meditation on how to mold a killer, and one of the most potent and provocative true-crime movies ever made.

Take in the pleasure of real teamwork as the gifted writer-director-actor Jesse Eisenberg joins an Oscar worthy Kieran Culkin for a deeply felt dramedy about two New York cousins on a tour of Poland where their late grandma survived a Nazi death camp? You’ll laugh till it hurts.

Artfully exciting and compulsively watchable even at a butt-numbing 152 minutes, the film makes good on the promise New Zealand writer-director Andrew Dominik showed with "Chopper" in 2000.

Denis Villeneuve’s take on Frank Herbert’s dauntingly complex novel can sputter and flirt with incoherence, but the director and his actors, led by an all-in Timothée Chalamet, find the pow and the poetry in this cornucopia of visual astonishments.

Lasseter is back behind the wheel, and you can feel his love for all things automotive in every frame. No humans blot this anthropomorphic romp. Cars do all the talking.

Zemeckis springs so many pow 3-D surprises you'll think Beowulf is your own private fun house.

Down in the mud with the guys, Moore finds the heart of her character and a career beyond vanity and hype. She's never looked better.

Is it sacrilege for Spielberg to re-imagine the Oscar-winning 1961 musical classic? Not when it’s this thrilling. Not when two new stars—Rachel Zegler and Ariana DeBose— get to share the screen with the legendary Rita Moreno. Then Spielberg sets the screen ablaze.

A gorgeously acted, written and directed spellbinder.

The ending -- a more devastating surprise than "The Village" could manage -- caps eighty sweat-job minutes of imaginative, jolting suspense.

Amateur is Hartley heaven, a sharp-witted thriller that takes off into dark and uncharted territory.

Miyazaki works marvels. Sit back and behold.

A slambam sci-fi thriller with a brain, a heart and an artful sense of purpose. You're in for a wild whoosh of a ride.

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

A movie handled with this kind of care is a rare gift. Refusing to hide from pain or bow to it, 50/50 makes its own rules. It'll get to you.

In this steadily gripping hothouse of a thriller, it's Cooper -- funny, fierce and bug-wild -- who gives us a look into the abyss.

This follow-up is every bit the start-to-finish sensation as the original, and you'll be happy to know that Bird's subversive spirit is alive and thriving.

Lukas Moodysson, a young Swedish director, crafts a stunner of a film out of familiar turf.

McConaughey makes sure we feel his tenacity and triumphs in the treatment of AIDS. His explosive, unerring portrayal defines what makes an actor great, blazing commitment to a character and the range to make every nuance felt.

What's fresh about Midnight in Paris is the way he (Allen) identifies with Gil's idealization of the past, of the Paris that represented art and life at their fullest.

Your only mistake would be to not see it at all, and miss out on one of the unalloyed pleasures of the fall movie season.

The specter of war haunts Cold Mountain, but you remember it for the heat of its romantic yearning and the mysteries that wrap themselves around you until you're lost in another world.

It'll slap on a smile on your face that won't quit.

What If doesn't break new ground. But it has charm to spare, and Radcliffe and Kazan are irresistible. No ifs about it.

Family audiences rejoice! The Oscar for Best Animated Film belongs right here in this enchanting tale of a robot, voiced by the amazing Lupita Nyong'o, who finds herself playing mother to a baby goose. The result is spectacular in every sense of the word.

A meandering but altogether mesmerizing film from writer-director Azazel Jacobs that finds buoyant comedy and touching gravity in the ashes of a relationship.

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.

Yes, it's in French with English subtitles. Don't worry. Nothing gets lost in translation as this coming-of-age tale brims over with humor, heartbreak and ravishing romance.

As directed by the Safdie brothers, Josh and Benny, the movie rips through 100 minutes of screen time like Wile E. Coyote with his tail on fire. It's electrifying.

Eastwood's modest approach to these momentous events shames the usual Hollywood showboating. In a rare achievement, he's made a film that truly is good for the soul.

It feels lived it, honest and painfully funny.

No list of the year's best performances should be made without her (Sally Hawkins).

Moore's fireball of a movie could change your life. It had me laughing with tears in my eyes.

You don't have to be in vogue to enjoy this stylish ride through Bergdorf's. It's a surprise package to die for. Miele and his virtuoso cinematographer, Justin Bare, show how fashion can be aspiration, a model for dreaming the impossible.

A fiercely funny human comedy with jokes that sting and leave marks.

Sound plays as crucial a role as visuals in replicating an authentic culture to drive the storytelling.

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.