Peter Travers

The Cove plays like a thriller. It has the breathless pace of a "Bourne" movie, but none of the comfort of fiction. This is documentary filmmaking at its most exciting and purposeful.

Want your skin to crawl? This one's for you.

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.

Thompson never disappoints, nailing every nuance of a judge who lets the world in at the cost of losing her own judgment. This is acting of the highest order.

Somehow, Lucille's plight is meant to comment astutely on the civil-rights movement. Now that IS crazy.

Even when you know what's coming, Crazy Heart haunts you like a classic country song. It's a mesmerizer. So is Bad Blake. This dude also abides.

Farrell is a dynamo. And Kiefer Sutherland, whose sniper role is essentially a voice on the phone, matches Farrell subtle shift for subtle shift.

Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow, filmmakers themselves and De Palma fans to the bone, haven't gathered a bunch of talking heads to debate De Palma's significance. They just put the man himself on camera, mic him up and let him rip. The result is heaven for movie lovers.

Amid the clamor from outraged purists and Shakespeare spinning in his Stratford-on-Avon, England, grave, you should notice that Luhrmann and his two bright angels have shaken up a 400-year-old play without losing its touching, poetic innocence.

There's something elemental about The Exorcist, even with the new hopeful ending that betrays the bleak original. [2000 re-release]

Fueled by performances worth treasuring from Chastain and Sarsgaard, this impossible love story between a woman who can't forget and man who can't remember slowly works its way into your mind and heart. Filmmaker Michel Franco makes sure you’ll be moved to tears.

Three sublime actresses, indelibly played by Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen and an Oscar-calling Natasha Lyonne, portray sisters coping with the impending death of their father in a bruisingly funny and sad chamber piece from Azazel Jacobs that takes a piece out of you.

Scott Pilgrim is a breathless rush of a movie that jumps off the screen, spins your head around and then stealthily works its way into your heart.

The bloodsuckers in this thriller may not have much bite, but here's a movie that can -- it's guaranteed -- drain the life out of an audience in minutes.

Screenwriting this smart, inventive, passionate and rip-roaringly funny is a rare species. It's magic.

Fighter shapes up as one of the great documentaries of this year, or any other.

This rip-roaring Irish comedy is the freshest surprise of the season.

It's a beast of a movie, an emotional roller coaster that threatens to go off the rails, and does. But Cianfrance, working from a scrappy script he wrote with Ben Coccio and Darius Marder, takes you on a hell of a ride.

Barbershop: The Next Cut is stagey, often simplistic and it talks too damn much. But, hell, the talk has flavor and snap and a real-world sense of a community in crisis. Not bad for an escapist romp.

Until the last half-hour, when Lucas actually does establish a emotional connection between the landmark he created in 1977 and the prequel investment portfolio he laid out in 1999, the movie is one spectacularly designed letdown after another.

Far from being exploitive, the effect is inspiring: This is the best of us.

Hopkins and Mirren are acting pros in stellar form. There's no way you want to miss the pleasure of their company in a movie that offers a sparkling and unexpectedly poignant look at how to sustain a career and a marriage.

It's a big story, and in this landmark film Miyazaki is up to every demand. Sit back and behold.

An adventure in pure imagination that plays to the smart kid in all of us.

Laugh you will, loud and often. In the Loop deserves to be a sleeper hit. The whole cast is stellar. And it proves that smart and funny can exist in the same movie, even in summer.

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.

Exclusively culled from police-cam footage, this outstandingly crafted, Oscar-buzzed documentary examines a white Florida woman who murders her Black neighbor on the basis of a stand-your-ground law that indicts an entire society

The first indisputably great movie of 2024 is a blazing Oscar contender about a real-life prison arts program that helps caged birds, led by a simply stupendous Colman Domingo, to rediscover their humanity with a heart full to bursting and a spirit that soars.