Peter Travers

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

Even Hugh Jackman's indisputable star power can't light up the pretentious, pseudo-poetic, sci-fi murk of this thundering misfire, which will only make you remember other, better movie mindbenders. ‘Blade Runner’ anyone?

This by-the-numbers Aretha Franklin biopic is all about Jennifer Hudson doing Aretha proud. And does she ever. As the legendary Queen of Soul, Hudson does not, will not, cannot hit a wrong note, creating a respectful tribute to both their radiant talents.

Ryan Reynolds piles on the charm as a bland bank teller who discovers he’s just a pixelated extra in a violent video game. The comedy could have been sharper, spikier and riskier—like ‘The Truman Show’— but this summer funfest goes down easy, even for non-gamers.

In a summer of junk, cinema visionary David Lowery delivers a modern movie masterpiece about a wannabe knight (a sensational, Oscar worthy Dev Patel) who must fight monsters he can and cannot see. It’s a unique and unforgettable film that ranks with the year's best.

The gloriously unhinged filmmaker James Gunn keeps Margot Robbie, John Cena and a top cast of crazies firing on all cylinders and turns a botch job original that was the worst movie of 2016 into the dazzling, down-and-dirty whirlwind it was always meant to be.

As a blunt-force Oklahoma oil rigger trying to save his daughter jailed in France for murder, Matt Damon gives an indelible, implosive performance in a deeply personal human drama disguised as a crime thriller.

The Rock and Emily Blunt knock themselves out to entertain in this dopey, derivative, theme-park ride of a movie. But, hey, the kids will love it and in the words of the Metallica thrasher that bizarrely found its way onto the soundtrack, “nothing else matters.

Shot with a poet's eye and a tin ear for dialogue, this tricked-up thriller about the horror of getting old too fast brings out the best and worst in M. Knight Shyamalan by throwing a wet beach blanket on a Covid-resonant premise about sudden death and the collapse of time.

Critics will pick on this overstuffed sequel to the 1996 animated-live-action hoops hit. It’s what we do when an alleged creative enterprise turns into a corporate ad campaign. Expect no grumbles from the under-13 crowd eager to eyeball LeBron James jamming in cyberspace with cartoon royalty.

Even when bloated Marvel action robs the film of intimacy, Johansson digs deep into how her Russian assassin once felt outside the Avengers bubble. And Pugh deserves Oscar love as her pretend sister in this fab and fitting salute to female empowerment.

Set in 1954 Detroit, Soderbergh’s terrific, twisty, film-noir throwback keeps a lot of racial, political and sexual tension simmering under the surface, providing a field day for actors who interact with clockwork precision and off-the-wall laughs.

There's nothing ‘tomorrow’ about a recycled sci-fi jumble that places all its bets on yesterday.

You’ll want to stand up and cheer for this eye-opening true story of three Black sisters from Brooklyn who emerged from a homeless shelter with their single mother to make it in the field of competitive track with the odds stacked against them.

As usual the plot is stupid beyond saving, but the vehicular action is insanely entertaining. That’s a fair tradeoff for the adrenaline junkie in all of us who only wants Vroom cranked up to 11. Consider it done.

Edgy comic Kevin Hart smooths out his rough edges to play a widower trying to raise his daughter alone. Hart can act, but he can’t act his way out of a sappy script that too often mistakes manipulative laughs and tears for genuine emotion.

It’s not in the same league as such Pixar classics as ‘WALL-E’ and the ‘Toy Story’ quartet, but there’s no denying the pure enchantment of the visual, comic and subtextual dazzle in this tale of two sea monsters trying to pass for human boys in 1960’s Italy.

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tony-winning musical is a surefire Oscar contender that lights up the screen with the immigrant experience of the American Dream. Anthony Ramos fires up an estupendo cast to give the summer’s best party a heart that sings and a spirit that soars.

The third and weakest chapter in the hit "Conjuring" series messes with the facts about a real-life case of demonic possession as a legal defense, but Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson as married demonologists know how to rally nerve-rattling chills to scare us senseless.

Two Oscar-winning Emmas—Stone and Thompson—are dressed to wow and deliver much to enjoy in this beautifully crafted fluffball, but the end result is a decorative distraction that never runs the risks it promises.

A sequel always loses the advantage of surprise, but Krasinski eases us out of Covid lockdown by crafting the perfect thriller to get summer audiences back into movie theaters where everything is dark and everyone can hear you scream.

It’s a juicy premise: Eddie Izzard’s British spy vs. a school for daughters of the Nazi high command run by the great Judi Dench. But the crackerjack espionage thriller that might have been, the one filled with ideas and purpose, is defeated by flat execution.

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.

Angelina Jolie, back in action mode as a haunted smokejumper seeking redemption, gets the job done if you’re looking for action escapism, but those who wish for something deeper and more resonant are plum out of luck.

Amy Adams leads an overqualified and underserved cast as an agoraphobic child psychologist who thinks she sees a murder in this ‘Rear Window’ ripoff that just lies there, static and dreary, awaiting an animating spark that never comes.

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.

A dementia subplot torpedoes the laughs, leaving Tiffany Haddish and writer-director-star Billy Crystal adrift in a comedy fizzle that forgets to be funny.

No knock on serving up an action-jacked Michael B. Jordan in an R-rated, red-meat, military thriller. But this clumsy update of Clancy’s 1993 bestseller should have been way better than a generic, one-note, cash grab.

You know a ghost story is a hot mess when it strands a stellar Amanda Seyfried and a top cast in a remote, country house haunted by toxic masculinity, dangling plot threads and nothing worth hearing or seeing.

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.

It’s a form of actor abuse to see the legendary Morgan Freeman trapped in this relentlessly violent and vapid mess that does offer one lesson to students of cinema in how to do everything calamitously wrong.

Sebastian Stan, the Winter Soldier himself, shows he can turn up the heat with costar Denise Gough for a romcom romp in Greece that starts on a sexy, swooshing high before draining out the fun for dramatic insights that never come. Bummer.

Despite an intriguing premise that suggests a ‘Lord of the Flies’ in space, Neil Burger’s fun-free thriller about young hotties playing astronauts quickly devolves into is a dud that never makes sense of its borrowed convictions or any sense at all.

This comedy misfire starring McCarthy and Spencer as unlikely superheroes is hardly a crime against cinema. It just a bumpy road to blah in which the actors look to be having a way better time than you will. That’s messed up.

An inner-city western featuring Black cowboys in a real-life setting deserves celebrating and the dynamite teamwork of Idris Elba and young Caleb McLaughlin heads off the father-son cliches in the script to keep you riveted.

Forgive the exposition dump in the convoluted plot and go for a clash of the titans that is spectacular in every sense of the word.

Bob Odenkirk aces his first role as an action star in this wild, twisty ride. He’s such a canny, captivating actor that even when the plot gets silly you're willing to follow him anywhere.

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.

A hot mess that throws a wet blanket of dystopian drivel over fresh young stars Daisy Ridley and Tom Holland. Chaos Limping is more like it.

Tom Holland, of Spider-man fame, breathes dramatic fire as a PTSD-afflicted Army medic in Iraq who returns home as a bank robber to feed his opiod and heroin habit, but his glossy, overlong film is failed Oscar bait that drowns him in addiction cliches.

The sisters are doing it for themselves and one of them is a dragon in a wild, animated wonder ride from Disney that radiates female empowerment and comes at you in a whoosh of creative ideas in full eruption.

It’s good to see Eddie Murphy again as Zumundan royalty, but the laughs in this tame, PG-13 sequel to the raucous, R-rated 1988 original feel predictable and played out as they strain to slide by on nostalgia. Your call.

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.

Singer Andra Day’s breakout star performance as jazz legend Billie Holiday raises this chaotic film above its faults by showing how Holiday used her voice as a starting gun for the civil-rights movement despite a relentless FBI campaign to destroy her.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

It would have been nice if filmmaker Sam Levinson had provided a real script instead of a thin outline, but John David Washington and an incandescent Zendaya are thrilling to watch as lovers at war in a millennial ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.’

In a shameless weeper that plays it strictly by the cliché book, compensation comes from the rugged sincerity of Justin Timberlake as an ex-con who becomes a surrogate dad to a gender-nonconformist seven-year-old boy, wonderfully acted by Ryder Allen.

Despite widening gaps of logic in its slow-burn mystery plot, this twisty, killer-on-the-loose, dark-night-of-the-soul thriller features top turns from Denzel Washington and Rami Malek as L.A. cops chasing a psycho, played by a scary and diabolically funny Jared Leto.

Priyanka Chopra-Jonas lends her beauty and star power to Ramin Bahrani’s unwieldy but enthralling screen adaptation of Aravind Adiga's bestselling novel about the haves and have-nots in modern India.

In filmmaker Emerald Fennell’s diabolically funny takedown of toxic masculinity, Carey Mulligan gives a dynamite performance that should make her a frontrunner in the Oscar race for Best Actress.

Debuting director Regina King ignites sparks by casting four dynamite actors as 1964 civil-rights icons—Kingsley Ben-Adir as Malcolm X, Eli Goree as Cassius Clay, Aldis Hodge as Jim Brown, and an Oscar worthy Leslie Odom Jr. as Sam Cooke—and letting them rip about being Black in America.

Doug Liman’s gimmicky dud about a London diamond heist set during the pandemic falsely assumes that quarantined audiences are panting to see films about the hell of living in quarantine. Despite a starry cast led by Anne Hathaway, Locked Down is a major letdown.

In this emotional powerhouse about an expectant mother who experiences her worst nightmare, the brilliant Vanessa Kirby delivers a tour de force that will leave you shattered.

Get our your handkerchiefs for this live-action take from Italy on the Disney animated classic, starring Oscar winner Roberto Benigni as Geppetto, the woodcutter who builds a puppet to replace the son he never had.

You'd have to be a real Grinch to hate on a blockbuster sequelthat's so puppy-eager to please. But despite the fem power of star Gal Gadot and director Patty Jenkins, all the CGI huffing and puffing over 2 1/2 hours can deflate momentum and audience endurance..

Pixar’s first feature with a predominantly Black cast and a Black lead actor (the superb Jamie Foxx) contemplates the origins of jazz and the meaning of life and death. Don't fret the metaphysics, kids, It's the year's peak achievement in animation.

Tom Hanks saddles up for his first western and teams with a firebrand costar in 10-year-old Helena Zengel, but despite the film's visual grit and grace, it could have risked more and cut deeper.

Soderbergh’s mostly improvised jaunt on the Queen Mary 2 with three acting legends, shouldn’t work. But it does, gloriously, thanks to the irresistible teamwork of Streep, Wiest and Bergen. They’re pure gold.

All the actors excel at helping director-star Clooney turn this apocalyptic thriller into something more thoughtful than sci-fi flashy, especially the grace note of hope that speaks with heartfelt relevance to these pandemic times.

Are you ready to party? Here's the musical blast we need right now to cure our pandemic blues. Corny? You bet. But an all-star cast, led by Streep, Kidman and Corden, wears its unruly heart on its sleeve as Ryan’s Murphy’s plea for tolerance sings, dances and laughs our troubles away.

Director Steve McQueen, adding to his ‘Small Axe’ anthology, deserves a mountain of superlatives for this rapturous immersion into a 1980 London house party where black revelers, denied access to white clubs, cut loose to reggae beats you won’t be able to resist. It’s pure pleasure.

Inside this manic jumble about a family of prehistoric ‘Flintstones’ knockoffs lies a brightly animated bauble that speaks to the power of staying connected even when forced apart. Pretty good for a cartoon, especially during a pandemic.