Peter Travers

Jonze has filmed a fantasy as if it were absolutely real, allowing us to see the world as Max sees it, full of beauty and terror. The brilliant songs, by Karen O (of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs) and the Kids, enhance the film's power.

I'm jazzed by every tasty, daring, devastating, howlingly funny, how'd-they-do-that minute in Birdman. Like all movies that soar above the toxic clouds of Hollywood formula and defy death at the box office, Alejandro G. Iñárritu's cinematic whirlwind will bring out the haters. They can all go piss off. Birdman is a volcano of creative ideas in full eruption. Buy a ticket and brace yourself.

Gangs of New York is something better than perfect: It's thrillingly alive.

For dynamite suspense loaded with thrills and wicked fun, you can’t beat The Fugitive — the summer’s best action blaster.

Proving himself a world-class director, McQueen basically makes slaves of us all. It hurts to watch it. You won't be able to tuck this powder keg in the corner of your mind and forget it. What we have here is a blistering, brilliant, straight-up classic.

The hard action, bracing wit and mournful grace of Peckinpah’s cowboy classic shames every new movie around. It’s a towering achievement that grows more riveting and resonant with the years.

Out of a dark chapter of history about U.S. mistreatment of Native Americans, director Martin Scorsese crafts a new movie classic with stupendous acting from DiCaprio, DeNiro and newcomer Lily Gladstone. It's a great movie from our greatest filmmaker. See it now!

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.

Nothing the Hughes brothers have done in their videos for Tone Loc, Tupac Shakur and others prepares you for the controlled intensity and maturity they bring to their stunning feature debut.

Cautionary tales aren't new. What sets Kids apart as daringly original, touching and alive is its authenticity.

In uniting to honor Arenas, Bardem and Schnabel create something extraordinary.

Like the music, the film is outspoken, roaringly funny, defiantly sexual and relentlessly in your face. I couldn't have liked it more.

Filtered through Kaufman's searching mind and soulful brilliance, the result is a masterpiece.

Oscars all around. Led by a life-of-the-party Gary Oldman as the boozehound screenwriter of ‘Citizen Kane’ and a sublime Amanda Seyfried as a tycoon’s mistress, this funny and fierce landmark from David Fincher peels away at Hollywood’s Golden Age. The result is a gorgeous piece of cinema that ranks with the year’s very best.

Hang on tight. The knockout punch of the movie season is being delivered by Zero Dark Thirty.

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

One of the year's best and most provocative films.

It's the Pixar animators who keep grown-ups as riveted as the kids with visual marvels that dazzle and delight.

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

Cuaron's hot-blooded, haunting and wildly erotic film revels in the pleasures of the flesh without losing touch with thought and feeling.

Taut, tense and enthralling, as smart and surprising as it protagonist.

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."

This blisteringly cynical satire, written by Paddy Chayefsky, is one of the darkest movies ever made, a cold-eyed lament for a society torn apart by upheavals of the Sixties.

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.

Ida is an art film in the finest sense of the term — it is austere technique counterbalanced by emotions that bleed.

The acting by Esposito and Jackson is exceptional, but it is on the remarkable face of Nelson that Yakin shows what gets lost when a child beats criminals at their own game.

Jarmusch is a true visionary; he knows his films can't bring order to the ravishing chaos around him, but he can't resist the fun of trying. In this compassionate comedy of missed connections, he makes us see the ordinary in fresh and pertinent ways. But the flickers of humanity in those taxis are soon dulled by barriers of time, sex, race, language and money. They are flickers in a vast emotional void.

Takes off with the lightning speed of a thriller, the gonzo force of frontline journalism and the emotional wallop of a drama that puts a human face on shocking statistics.