Peter Travers

Haynes' commitment to outcasts, then and now, makes Carol a romantic spellbinder that cuts deep. It's one of the year's very best films.

Whatever a modern love story is, Before Midnight takes it to the next level. It's damn near perfect.

It’s the closest thing to witnessing a miracle — just some cameras, a crowd and a voice touched by God.

Dunkirk is a landmark with the resonant force of an enduring screen classic.

A mesmerizer that will creep into your dreams whether you let it or not.

A marvel of delicacy and humor.

Leigh embraces the contradictions in Turner. And in tandem with cinematographer Dick Pope, a master of light, he shows us the world as Turner sees it. The effect is harsh and ravishing. Leigh's beauty of a movie touches the heart not by sentimental gush but by the amplitude of its art.​

With The Irishman, America’s greatest living director creates his late-career masterpiece, a deeply felt addition that vibrantly sums up every landmark in his crime-cinema arsenal, from 1973’s "Mean Streets" through "Goodfellas," "Casino," "Gangs of New York," and the Oscar-
winning "The Departed."

Ang Lee, a world-class director working at the top of his elegant form, has done something thrilling. For all the leaping action, it's the film's spirit that soars.

The team of producer Ismail Merchant, director James Ivory and writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala drops the ball with this droopy, snail-paced prigs-in-wigs movie.

The idea has been tried — remember TV's "Herman's Head"? — but never with the artful brilliance of filmmaker Pete Docter (Up; Monsters, Inc.).

Pure movie bliss.

Sheer perfection – that's the phrase that springs to mind when describing the humanist miracle that is Faces Places, the year's best and most beguiling documentary.

Heads up, Oscar. First-time director Celine Song crafts the best movie of the year so far by using her own life to explore the meaning of destiny as a South Korean playwright (the glorious Greta Lee) is torn between a past love (Teo Yoo) and her American husband (John Magaro).

This is a film in which ideas resonate as well as action. Gandalf’s words to Pippin about death have a muscular poetry.

It's a swooning new classic and one of the very best films of the year.

The movie crawls hypnotically into the skin of this global assassin and astonishes you with its brazenly violent and sexual audacity.

How does a small tale of love found and lost emerge as a major triumph and one of the very best movies of the year? Marriage Story is more than just a career high for writer-director Noah Baumbach (The Meyerowitz Stories, The Squid and the Whale); it’s a peerless showcase for its stars, Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson, who turn this tale of a contentious divorce into a "Kramer vs. Kramer" for the 21st century.

What makes La La Land such a hot miracle is how the passion for cinema and its possibilities radiates from every frame.

Just when you think there's nothing original or exciting left to mine from a coming-of-age story, along comes the totally irresistible Lady Bird – a reminder that no genre is played out when there's a new artist around to see it with fresh eyes.

What makes it such a mesmerizing, wickedly witty entertainment is the revealing portrait it paints of an era in which everyone is presumed guilty where greed is concerned... It's an often chilly movie, but the chill cuts to the bone.

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.

It’s impossible to experience the deep-seated compassion of this film and not be moved to tears.

If you're looking for the best and most beguiling foreign-language film of the year, you'll find it in Maren Ade's Toni Erdmann, a German father-daughter story that will leave you laughing and choking back tears, often simultaneously.

Oscar voters pretend not to see that Sandler’s a clown who can, almost by an act of will, stand toe-to-toe with the best we’ve got.

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.

Just isn't enough.

Start engraving the name Cate Blanchett on the Oscar for Best Actress. Her virtuoso performance as a classical music conductor blindsided by cancel culture is an absolute stunner in a Todd Field spellbinder that belongs on every list of the best movies of 2022.