Peter Travers

McTeer and the transporting music hold you in thrall.

There's a difference between exposing misogyny and crassly exploiting it.

Inherent Vice is packed with shitfaced hilarity, soulful reveries, stylistic ingenuity and smashing performances that keep playing back in your head. It may not demand repeat viewings, but it sure as hell rewards them. It's the work of a major talent.

Cord Jefferson’s slashingly funny satire of Black literary stereotyping is one of the best and boldest American comedies in years with a dynamite performance by Jeffrey Wright that should put him up front in the Oscar sweeps. You won't look at race on screen in the same way again.

While you're remembering new high-impact names, add Arnold. In only her second film, after 2006's "Red Road," she keeps the screen filled to bursting with the beauty and raw terror of life.

No grabs you hard, no mercy, and keeps you riveted.

Best Worst Thing brims over with moments of humor and heartbreak that reflect the feeling of knowing "we're what's new." This movie is more than good, pal. It's indispensable.

As always, Tom Hanks is in there pitching, but this time it’s mostly softballs. The cliched plot about a reformed grumpy old man is so obvious you can see it from outer space.

It's a blast.

Wake up, people. Tarantino lives to cross the line. Is Django Unchained too much? Damn straight. It wouldn't be Tarantino otherwise.

What pulls us over the rough spots is the mind meld between del Toro the artist and the child inside him. They both want to astonish us. Geeks everywhere, salute.

They say it’s all in the timing, especially when it comes to funny business. But in The Hustle everyone’s inner comedic clock is calamitously off. The setups are flat, the jokes don’t land and the actors don’t — or won’t — connect.

There are times when the film grips us with such hallucinatory terror that you may think it’s another of Adelaide’s PTSD-induced nightmares. Maybe it is. Or maybe it’s a ghastly reflection of the way we live now.

A hell of a hilarious time at the movies if you're up for laughs that stick in your throat.

Sound plays as crucial a role as visuals in replicating an authentic culture to drive the storytelling.

You wind up caring deeply about the affair that began in the 1950s between American teenager Don Bachardy and three-decades-older Christopher Isherwood, the noted British author whose "Berlin Stories" inspired "Cabaret."

With the Bard’s words, Henry roused his soldiers to action: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.” With this mediocrity, it’s more a case of how the war was wan.

The climax, in which all the characters link arms in a dance and sing, could serve as a textbook illustration of forced gaiety. Much Ado is much askew.

Instead of the easy attitudinizing that is the default position for teen comedies, Gimme the Loot fills each frame with raw talent and exuberance.

OK, it’s no Fury Road, but visionary action poet George Miller scores a solid base hit by replacing the irreplaceable Charlize Theron with livewire Anya Taylor-Joy as the younger Furiosa in the exhilarating act of inventing herself. You’ll be dazzled, guaranteed.

This is Bond like you've never seen him, almost Freudian in his vulnerability. And a dynamite Daniel Craig, never better in the role, nails Bond's ferocity and feeling.

A Fantastic Woman catches a human being in the challenging and exhilarating process of inventing herself. The result is unique and unforgettable.

Von Trier draws us inexorably into the web of these characters. He loses us in a dream of his own devising. That's filmmaking. Now if he'd only learn to shut up at press conferences.

With the cast getting looser and the mind games kinkier, it's hard to resist.

Fiercely provocative, Paprika shames Hollywood’s use of animation as a kiddie pacifier.

It is impossible to over-praise Stenberg’s incandescent performance, a gathering storm that grows in ferocity and feeling with each scene.

It's hard to resist the film's exuberance.