Peter Travers

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.