Peter Travers

Even when the film goes too far over the top to be saved, McConaughey mesmerizes.

James Ponsoldt's funny and touching coming-of-age tale covers old ground with disarming freshness.

A hack would have turned Frank and Sam into overnight sensations. Instead, the writer-director recognizes the compromises that reality forces on dreams – and this soft breeze of a movie emerges as a scrappy surprise that's hard to shrug off.

Exciting and then some, Face/Off blends the director's supercharged images of balletic brutality and spiritual catharsis with an off-the-wall humor that allows John Travolta and Nicolas Cage to really let it rip.

Stick your neck out for this Swedish horror show. It's a winner, full of mirth and malice, plus a young romance you'll never see on the Disney Channel.

The new Mummy is, how can I put it? Just freakin' awful.

Zendaya shines like a true movie star, and she and costars Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist will blow you away as tennis pros in Luca Guadagnino’s swoony, sexy romantic triangle that finds hilarious and hardcore erotic mischief off the court and on.

If you're going to interpret on film the searching mind of an indisputable genius, it helps not to make too many dumbass moves. On that basis, score a triumph for Steve Jobs, written, directed and acted to perfection, and so fresh and startling in conception and execution that it leaves you awed.

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.

Within its small, darkly funny range, Trust is an exceptional film that stays alert to the mysteries of love.

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.

Powered by Simon's brilliance, Under African Skies is a cultural lightning bolt that soars on its music and an unshakable belief in the transcendence of art.

This is a lobbed grenade. But it’s also personal filmmaking at its prodding, profound best. This is a Spike Lee joint and a Spike Lee history lesson. Prepare to be schooled.

No true movie junkie is going to want to miss Side by Side.

Bouchareb's film helped shame the French government into raising pensions for more than 80,000 of these veterans. Here's that rare movie that really did change things. I'll be damned.

As for the animation, it's spectacular in every sense of the word and lifted by a superb Alexandre Desplat score, featuring taiko drums, that marks a new career peak for the Oscar-winning composer of "The Shape of Water."

Kelly Reichardt makes films that unfold at the speed of life, not Hollywood. She's a poet of the space between words, and the hypnotic and haunting Certain Women presents the writer-director at her artfully attentive best.

Drugstore Cowboy improves. Not much, but in provocative ways.

The lovely animation is next level in this touching tale of a Belgian girl living in Japan who finds understanding in a clash of cultures.

Love Is Strange is, above all, a triumph for Lithgow and Molina, two consummate actors who bring decades of experience to artful performances that are as emotionally expressive in silence as they are in words. Acting doesn’t get better than this. Want to know what love is? Watch Lithgow and Molina and learn.

Linklater is a sly and formidable talent, bringing an anthropologist's eye to this spectacularly funny celebration of the rites of stupidity. His shitfaced "American Graffiti" is the ultimate party movie -- loud, crude, socially irresponsible and totally irresistible.

It might have all been another Hollywood-formula flick with American might taking on the alien other. But Greengrass gives Phillips and Muse the time, aboard a covered lifeboat, to discover shared beliefs and fears.

When it comes to rousing action, whip-smart laughs and moral uplift that doesn't pump sunshine up your ass, Three Kings rules.

Like his characters, Guiraudie is walking a tightrope, finding the point where sex and death exude a similar allure. You won't be able to look away.

A kickass documentary.

In Spanish, "sicario" means "hitman." In film terms, Sicario is sensational, the most gripping and tension-packed spin through America's covert War on Drugs since Steven Soderbergh's Traffic 15 years ago.

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.

Green has created a work of startling originality that will haunt you for a good, long time.