Peter Travers

This eyepopper from Russian director-writer-cinematographer-editor Victor Kossakovsky (¡Vivan Las Antípodas!) is like nothing you’ve ever seen. His free-form documentary on water opens by scaring us to death.

Can a brainwashed boy in Hitler Youth learn to stop worrying and love being a Nazi hater? Beautifully directed by Turkish-German filmmaker Fatih Akin, this unexpectedly tender mesmerizer has an answer you won’t see coming

An explosive piece of entertainment that also means to make a difference. Listen up.

Bob Odenkirk aces his first role as an action star in this wild, twisty ride. He’s such a canny, captivating actor that even when the plot gets silly you're willing to follow him anywhere.

The ending leans to soap opera, but Van Sant, revisiting the closet-genius theme of "Good Will Hunting" is too keen an observer of character to let this funny and touching film go soft.

What a kick to watch whip-smart director Rian Johnson shake the cobwebs off the whodunit genre and make it snap to stylish, wickedly entertaining life for a new generation. That’s what happens in Knives Out, a mystery that takes the piss out of Agatha Christie clichés.

In the hands of first-time feature director Shannon Murphy — who crushed it in both of the Season Three Killing Eve episodes she helmed — and screenwriter Rita Kalnejais, who adapted her own play, Babyteeth rips past the hackneyed tropes of illness drama to dig out what’s fresh in the familiar.

Clermont-Tonnerre comes from a place of defiance, and her fearless instincts surge through every frame. Each time you think you have this movie pegged, it’ll knock you for a loop.

Ed Harris, who plays Pollock and makes his debut as a director - doing both jobs superbly, by the way - is angst incarnate.

Cheers, too, for the tangy bite Sam Rockwell brings to Jewell’s Libertarian attorney Watson Bryant, a rebel whose methods rile the status quo and sometimes his own client.

This is the firebrand Colette that Knightley plays with every fiber of her being. She’s something to see.

Theron has already showed her talent for bringing a deeper dimension to action as Furiosa in "Mad Max: Fury Road." Here, the actor reveals the toll that living forever is taking on Andy, who took a year off to heal emotional scars before her reluctant return to battle.

Aaron Schimberg’s head-twisting, heart-piercing psychological thriller stars a never-better Sebastian Stan as a facially disfigured actor who has an operation to remove his scars and finds he can't hide the gloomy, self-loathing introvert that lingers in his DNA.

Maud and Roland's search for an unknowable past makes for a haunting literary detective story, but LaBute pulls off a neater trick in Possession: He makes language sexy.

When a hedge fund promotes a she (Phoebe Dynevor) over a he (Alden Ehrenreich)—they’re engaged— gender politics becomes a powerhouse erotic thriller which newbie filmmaker Chloe Domont wants couples to leave arguing like hell. No worries. They wil

Mixing comedy and corn with surprising savvy, Dave is the first political fable of the Clinton era. It’s a winner.

Lit with a poet’s eye by Deschanel and given dramatic heft by von Donnersmarck, Never Look Away lunges at the primitive forces that define our lives. Even when it trips up, it’s never less than exhilarating.

Searching is a technical marvel with a beating heart at its core, which makes all the difference.

It's rare that a a movie leaves you pinned to your seat, wanting to see it again -- right now, this minute -- to work out the pieces of the puzzle. Unbreakable is one of those movies.

At two-and-a-half hours, Monrovia, Indiana often feels static and low-key to a fault. As always, Wiseman is working hard at being fair, refusing to condemn or even condescend to what his camera sees.

A fun ride, spiked with touching gravity, is not a shabby way to end the movie summer. Thanks to Jillian Bell, a comic force of nature with real dramatic chops, that’s what you get in Brittany Runs a Marathon.

In this funny, touching and haunting film, Patel cuts through stereotypes to show the hard truths of straddling two cultures.

It's a real charmer from a director who feels that a knockabout romantic farce doesn't have to be mindless -- take that, "America's Sweethearts."

Springs surprises that entertain and provoke.

A sequel always loses the advantage of surprise, but Krasinski eases us out of Covid lockdown by crafting the perfect thriller to get summer audiences back into movie theaters where everything is dark and everyone can hear you scream.

In this painfully funny and touching look at the vanities and insecurities that a mother (Brenda Blethyn) can pass on to her daughters in the name of love, writer-director Nicole Holofcener ("Walking and Talking") does a chick flick right.

Sure it’s cornball, but Chadha revels in it. You will, too, as the movie becomes an irresistible blast of pure feeling.

The list goes on with moments historic and hilarious from the likes of Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, Arlene Dahl, Ann Miller, Jimmy Durante and even Elvis. That’s more than entertainment, that’s pure gold.

In a beautifully nuanced directing debut, actor Paul Dano mines the smallest details in Richard Ford’s acclaimed 1990 novel — he and his partner Zoe Kazan wrote the emotionally-attuned script — to create a portrait of a woman who can’t quite catch up with the frustration and feminist stirrings she feels inside.

Melissa McCarthy is a lock for a Best Actress Oscar nomination for Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Sure it’s hokey, but this fact-based crowdpleaser starring a terrific Toni Collette as a struggling Welsh villager who risks everything on a racehorse she breeds and raises is an underdog story that works like a charm.

A funny and touching date movie that dares to celebrate decency.

Get out your handkerchiefs. Directed by her son Edoardo Ponti, Sophia Loren, 86, returns to the screen after a decade to play a Holocaust survivor who raises the children of prostitutes. There is not a single false note in Loren’s magnificent performance. Just sit back and behold.

The film’s low-key charm and quirky humor grow on you and create a rooting interest in what happens next. It doesn’t take the Supreme Intelligence of the universe (who we always figured would resembled Annette Bening) to know it’s wise to play the long game. Captain Marvel is not just another wonder woman. She plans to build an army.

Cage and Caruso strike sparks in this riveting piece of pulp fiction, but it’s that first Kiss you’ll remember.

Oakland-based rapper Boots Riley scores a knockout debut as a director with Sorry to Bother You, a no-mercy satire that gets up in your face, breaks all the rules – and then invents new rules so it can break them too.

Recalling the best movies about actors, from "All About Eve" to "Birdman," Clouds of Sils Maria is a bonbon spiked with wit and malice. It's also a penetrating look into the female psyche, a specialty of critic-turned-filmmaker Olivier Assayas, who wrote Juliette Binoche her first starring role, as a young actress in 1985's "Rendez-vous."

Her Smell is a berserker infused a mad poetry. In her third film with Perry, following "Listen Up," "Phillip and Queen of the Earth," Moss takes a character who makes Courtney Love look like Mother Teresa and exposes the shards of humanity that once vitalized and defined her music. The effect is shattering.

Kristen Stewart is so good as Princes Diana—it’s the performance of her life—that the Academy should start engraving her name on the Best Actress Oscar.

The women's characters are as well drawn as the men's in a splendidly acted film that captures the confusion of love in ways that are ardent, affecting and wonderfully funny.

Thou wilt be dazzled.

Westfeldt and Juergensen are smart, sexy knockouts, finding just the right mix of fun and tenderness in their writing and performances.

This classically trained Irish singer and actress was a runner-up on a BBC singing competition and won roles in film (Beast) and TV (War and Peace, HBO’s Chernobyl). She’s a skyrocketing talent — and the full range of her gifts are on display here.

Any flaws in execution pale against those moments when the film brings history to vital life.

The pickings are slim for scares this Halloween season (Ghost Ship, Below), so The Ring wins first prize by default.

Gray’s filmmaking is tremendously exciting.

Blue Story is a 91-minute assault of sound and image that leaves no doubt about the vicious cycle of gang violence it presents. Prepare to be wowed.

In a twist ending, Stewart leaves us wondering if gaming the system is preferable to changing it. Can a political satire that dances on the border between silly and profound really make us take off the blinders, even for a few hours?

McTeer and the transporting music hold you in thrall.

This breezy, funny entry keeps things light with a hilarious and heartfelt package of nonstop kid-friendly kick-ass.

At times director Lasse Hallstrom lets the film slip into an upscale version of Brett Butler’s Grace Under Fire sitcom. Even when melodrama threatens, Roberts’ steadying, sharply observed performance keeps things touchingly real. Khouri’s script has the buoyant wit to deal with Grace’s anger without turning her into a lethal avenger.

There's more suspense in watching Brando, who has trouble with physical exertion, get on and off a bar stool than the robbery itself. Still, Brando -- his eyes alive with mischief --is the life of the movie.

Here’s the blast of wicked fun we need right now, using song and dance to enhance Dahl’s timeless tale of naughty children vs uncaring adults distilled in the war between bookish Matilda (Alisha Weir is a one-girl talent explosion) and Emma Thompson’s headmistress from hell.

The film is a distinct pleasure.

An inner-city western featuring Black cowboys in a real-life setting deserves celebrating and the dynamite teamwork of Idris Elba and young Caleb McLaughlin heads off the father-son cliches in the script to keep you riveted.

Harris offers an adrenalin rush of energy and talent. Her artfully stylized, explosively funny film also manages to be deeply moving without jerking easy tears.

Director Matt Reeves and star Robert Pattinson see the Caped Crusader as more film-noir detective than comic-book hero in their mesmerizing mindbender that aims high even when it misses the mark. It’s a grenade of pure cinema ready to blow.

Want to see a master class in acting? Watch Jonathan Pryce and Anthony Hopkins show how it’s done in The Two Popes, a fiercely moving and surprisingly funny provocation that pivots on speculative conversations between the German John Ratzinger, a.k.a. Pope Benedict XVI (Hopkins), and Argentine Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio (Pryce), the future Pope Francis.

Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles makes itself essential viewing by chronicling the turbulent genesis of a global sensation. But its real miracle is demonstrating why it continues to entertain and illuminate, from Tokyo to a Brooklyn middle school where an African-American girl now plays the role of Tevye’s wife, Golde, and back to Broadway.

Part thriller, part meditation on life and art, part portrait of a man on a tightrope, The White Crow may be juggling more themes than it can handle. But Fiennes makes the result a thing of bruising beauty and an exhilarating gift.

The sorrow inherent in this tale would be unbearable without the film’s flashes of humor and performances by a cast of nonprofessionals that are moving beyond measure. Capernaum suffers from being overly long and chaotic in structure, but there’s no mistaking its cumulative effect as an emotional powerhouse.

The Lovebirds knows how to send out a laugh with a sting in its tail. That’s what they call inspired lunacy.

Fort Worth native Channing Godfrey Peoples, making a striking feature debut as director and screenwriter, knows this place in her bones. She’s crafted a keenly observant and emotionally resonant debut film that feels authentically lived in.

The Big Lebowski is the best movie ever set mostly in a bowling alley.

Instead of following biopic blueprints, Hawke directs Blaze like a Foley song: artful, all over the place and possessed of enough blunt truth and aching tenderness to pull you up short.

Pulls off thrilling stunts that will leave you a sweaty-palmed mess. It's top-tier movie escapism.

The Gift delivers the lurid goods as a scary, sexy, twist-a-minute whodunit.

Ari Aster is a bold new voice in psychological horror, the kind that messes ruthlessly with your head. He proved that last year with "Hereditary," featuring Toni Colette in one of cinema’s most memorable meltdowns. And now, with the hypnotic and haunting Midsommar, he ventures into fresh territory without losing his grasp of what nightmares are made of.

Close plays this ignored, pushed-aside woman like a gathering storm, drawing us into the mind and heart of a heroine who’s not going to take it any more. The actress has received six acting nominations without ever winning an Oscar. The Wife, a funny and fierce showcase for her prodigious talents, might just end the drought. You can’t take your eyes off her.

A strong, stinging film, alive with conflicts that defy glib resolutions.

Watching Haneke's film is, aptly enough, a challenge and a punishment. But watching Huppert, a great actress tearing into a landmark role, is riveting.

Michael Douglas digs deep and delivers one of his best performances in Wonder Boys -- a comic dazzler of roguish wit and touching gravity that is driven by characters, not jokes.

Luckily, Mangold fuels his true-life plot with enough flesh-and-blood action to leave you dizzy.

A rip-roaring action adventure.

Even in the face of grievous misfortune, the characters created by Schults exude a tenderness that allows this achingly intimate drama to move past sorrow and hit you like a shot in the heart.

With Denis there’s always more than meets the prism of snap judgements. Let the movie mess with your head.

You’ll want to stand up and cheer for this eye-opening true story of three Black sisters from Brooklyn who emerged from a homeless shelter with their single mother to make it in the field of competitive track with the odds stacked against them.

The film owes its success less to shock value than to sheer cinematic inventiveness and Egerton’s total immersion in the role.

Soderbergh’s mostly improvised jaunt on the Queen Mary 2 with three acting legends, shouldn’t work. But it does, gloriously, thanks to the irresistible teamwork of Streep, Wiest and Bergen. They’re pure gold.

Altman orchestrates Dr. T's odyssey with the precision, heart and lively wit of a virtuoso.

A ragtag charmer. You will laugh.

DeMented is Waters the way we like him--spiked with laughs and served with a twist.

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

A fierce and feeling Viola Davis headlines this historical epic about women warriors in 1823 West Africa and reminds us how indelible and truly inspiring it is to see these brave sisters doing it for themselves.

In a summer of clones, Harvard Man is something rare and riveting: a wild ride that relies on more than special effects.

Passes muster as an old-style biopic with its heart in the right place. There won't be a dry eye in the house.

The Invisible Man is a chilling mind-bender that strikes at our deepest fears — the ones we can’t see.

Winds up being faster and funnier than the first time. Chan's acrobatic high jinks play strikingly off of Tucker's wiseass humor.

It takes a while for this oddball film -- a mosaic of stories in the style of "Magnolia" -- to take hold, but when it does, it grabs you hard.

The movie hits you like a shot in the heart.

First-time director Peter Care crafts something darkly funny and touching from a coming-of-age fable that might have drifted into formula without deeply felt performances from Culkin and Hirsch and dazzling animation from Todd McFarlane (Spawn) that brings the boys' comic fantasies to jolting life.

Israeli filmmaker Navid Lapid is taking the risk that audiences will embrace a tragically real situation about his country’s military culture presented as an absurdist comedy. Say yes

With the help of cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt, composers Isobel Waller-Bridge and David Schweitzer, and Alexandra Byrne’s spectacular costumes, the film captures the whirl of a predatory society that can no longer hide behind surface prettiness. That sounds a lot like right now.

Panahi creates a raw, riveting film.

As an undocumented Filipina trying to make it as a country singer in Texas, breakout star Eva Noblezada punches through the film's familiar contours to find its beating heart as a timely portrait of the immigrant experience.

It’s riveting from start to finish.

Taymor's visual and visceral flair makes Titus a grabber.

Booksmart changes the game and opens the genre up to greater possibilities. Directed by the actor Olivia Wilde in a smashing feature debut, this femcentric spin on Freaks and Geeks is high on girl power.

Writer-director Raymond De Felitta creates something wonderfully funny and touching.

As the film moves toward its painfully inevitable climax, Queen and Slim fulfills the promise made by Waithe and Matzoukas to create a new form of protest art. Their film isn’t meant to lionize these two everyday people-turned-folk heroes, but to celebrate their strength and pride.

A black-comedy gem.

Count this rehab a success.

Are fascist dictators really vampires? That’s the shockingly funny premise behind director Pablo Lorrain’s look at Augusto Pinochet and his reign of terror over Larrain’s native Chile. Flaws and all, this spellbinder speaks scarily to the undying nature of tyranny. You’ll laugh till it hurts.

This teeming film sometimes bursts at the seams, but it’s abound with an exuberant energy that honors Dickens without embalming him in the literary past. It’s irresistible.

In the end, the audience is rewarded with a steadily riveting provocation that jabs at the culture of money that makes us all complicit.

Green Book is a movie about class as well as race, and Farrelly rightly refuses to paint a pretty picture.

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.

With a dynamite cast led by a never-better Jim Parsons, what could have been a dated retelling of a 1968 play about gay men in crisis emerges instead as a funny, fierce and scarily relevant wakeup call to a resurgent threat to marginalized minorities.

Sometimes a shamelessly retro wartime romance is all the escape you need and Colin Firth and Matthew Macfadyen add class and wicked humor to this fact-based WW2 spy thriller about how British intelligence used a corpse to put one over on Hitler.

Michael B. Jordan returns as star and now director to play Adonis Creed, the boxing champ who comes out of retirement to take on a fierce new contender (a dynamite Jonathan Majors). Even when the overcrowded plot stumbles, this clash of the titans is worth cheering.

In Morgan Neville’s intimate and insightful musical doc, Paul McCartney finds his musical wings without the Beatles but with wife Linda riding shotgun and teaching him about hard to reach places in the heart.

A well-researched and richly observant documentary from Alexis Bloom about the climate of lies and systemic abuse that nurtured Ailes and allowed his behavior to flourish.

The creator of ‘Hamilton,’ Lin Manuel Miranda, offers a stirring tribute to the creator of ‘Rent,’ Jonathan Larson, whose too short life—as acted and sung by the sensational Andrew Garfield—becomes a love letter to his soaring spirit.

Follow Shyamalan's Signs. It will take a piece out of you.

Panic Room is Fincher's high-style testament to the cool things movies can do to make us jump out of our seats in the dark.

Kudos to Coogan and Reilly, not just for their gifts of impersonation, but for detailing the bedrock connection at work and play between the two men.

It’s Norton’s own performance that brings emotional connection to Motherless Brooklyn. Always a consummate actor, with Oscar nominations for "Primal Fear," "American History X" and "Birdman" — he deserved another for "Fight Club" — Norton is at his very best as Lionel, seeing beyond the tics to the things that make him human.

The movie pulls you in through the sheer immersive force of its filmmaking. In Long Day’s Journey, the search is everything with meaning as elusive and haunting as a dream.

Despite its fluid sexuality, The Half of It turns out to be less of a love story than a funny, touching and vital look into the nature of friendship.

It's funny as hell, and like all comedy that stings, sorrowful at its core.

Tenet sweeps you away on waves of pure, ravishing cinema.

Audiard recently won the Silver Lion as Best Director at the Venice Film Festival. Watch The Sisters Brothers and you’ll have no trouble understanding why.

At first glance, you might mistake What They Had for one of those well-meaning family dramas about what to do when your mom is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. But that would discount the exceptional accomplishment achieved by debuting director Elizabeth Chomko, enlivening her scrappy script with a cast of actors who truly are as good as it gets. You laugh as much as you cry, which means you believe in the movie’s truth.

A film of startling humor and feeling. For that, director Steven Shainberg, who co-wrote the script with Erin Cressida Wilson, owes much to two remarkable performances.

Whatever you call this one-of-a-kind bonbon spiked with wit and malice, it's classic oo-la-la.

Ritchie's got something all his own: a go-for-broke energy that cuts through the cliches of the crime genre.

These melancholy Danes create something sweetly sexy, funny and touching.

Williams gives a performance that is riveting in its recessiveness and, as a consequence, truly, deeply scary.

Playing the kid sister of Henry Cavill’s Sherlock Holmes, Millie Bobby Brown, just 16, shines her talent on its highest beams and creates a totally irresistible family entertainment.

Oscar weekend is the perfect time to catch up with Edward Berger’s anti-war epic about young German soldiers dying in the trenches during WW1. The German-language film earned a wowza nine nominations, including Best Picture, and tragically its message never gets old.

Outrageously, even shamelessly, entertaining.

Paul Dano excels in this fact-based tale of how little-guy investors actually took down billionaire Wall Street fat cats. What’s not to like about this slapstick tragedy with a windfall of laughs.

The famous Assayas light touch keeps his film above the fray of didacticism. So dig in as an expert cast puts a scintillating spin on every verbal volley. Non-Fiction is a bonbon spiked with delicious wit and malice.

It isn't the sex that shocks here, it's the chilling core of loneliness. Intimacy dares to cut deep, and its daring gets to you.

Redford plays the game of filmmaking to reveal what he holds sacred: story, character, feeling, thoughtful pacing, and an alertness of nuances of honor and shame that most movies skip in the rush to the rush.

In Cry-Baby, Waters has created a crackpot jamboree that captures the Fifties, then parodies and transcends the period; any resemblance to Nineties greed, prejudice and repression is intentional. At forty-three, Waters remains unrepentantly juvenile. It’s his saving grace. What he can’t fight, he ridicules. The mirror Waters holds up to the world is distorted, turning everyone into a grotesque. But we can still see ourselves in it And laugh.

These kickass Barbies bring heart to a machine tooled genre.

Ruben Brandt, Collector is always a feast for the eyes, but it’s the intellectual curiosity on display that raises the bar.

Longing for a sweet little surprise that transports you to a place of pure movie enchantment? Then check out the glorious Lesley Manville as a struggling London maid who travels to Paris to fulfill her middle-aged Cinderella fantasy of owning a Dior gown.

Some of the footage, shot by crew members, radiates hold-your-breath suspense, especially when the Maiden pushes through the ice floes of the Southern Ocean, near Antarctica. You’ll have your heart in your mouth as the yacht enters the final stretch.

A mesmerizing deconstruction of the brute nature of love.

A hilarious hodgepodge, in which De Niro gives his best comic performance to date.

Nunez is a major filmmaker who thrives working in a minor key. He makes Ruby a romantic fable with a tough core of intelligence and wit. It’s a real beauty.

The fighting spirit of this female quartet blazes through every frame of this galvanizing film. “We did this without knowing shit,” says Vilela. That’s just a beginning. Way before the movie ends, you’ll feel their fire.

Scores a solid hit.

Allenphiles will have a field day mining the film for inside dope. Are the clips from Shanghai and Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity — movies in which men are set up for a fall by dangerous women — a sly dig at Farrow? Better to see Manhattan Murder Mystery for what it is: Annie Hall replayed in a minor key by a filmmaker who sees the comedy, tragedy and transience of love and can’t stop playing the game. Allen’s readiness to step on a laugh in favor of feeling may cost him at the box office. But in this time of private hell and public scorn, it will help him endure.

Director Kenneth Branagh again stars as Agatha Christie’s preening detective Hercule Poirot, moving Dame Agatha’s mystery from London to Venice and into the land of the supernatural. This all-star (yay Tina Fey!), wickedly entertaining shakeup does them both proud.

A shockingly intimate and deeply affecting film about the roots of sexual role playing.

Hollywood retreads of foreign films are rarely a good idea (did you see Miss Bala?), but Gloria Bell is a playful, pleasure-giving exception.

Egoyan is an acquired taste, but once in, you’re hooked. Exotica is Egoyan’s most accomplished and seductive film to date — even tackling acute psychic distress, Egoyan’s deadpan comic eye never flinches.

Anora Oscar winner Sean Baker produced, edited and cowrote Shih-Ching Tsou’s captivating tale of three generations of women building a life in Taipei. One personal note: As a leftie myself, I strenuously object to the idea that being left-handed is the mark of the devil.

The antique charms of the story can still seduce us when done well, and director Jean-Paul Rappeneau, who freely adapted the play with Jean-Claude Carrière, knows how to fashion a sumptuously beautiful, hugely entertaining spectacle that also stays alert to the cadences of the heart.

In crafting a fierce, fragmented, downbeat film about a character who makes the wrong decision as a man by being right as a cop, Penn flies in the face of what sells in Hollywood. Godspeed.

Australian writer-director Jennifer Kent creates a woman’s revenge tale fueled by a righteous anger at the evil men do. There’s not a whit of audience coddling. You’ve been warned.

Disney delivers an uneven but sensationally entertaining sequel to the Oscar winner that pulls out all the stops.

This comedy is packed with p---- jokes, the cruder the better.

Keeps the pulse pounding without sacrificing laughs or logic.

The talented Mr. Minghella has made an imperfect movie but not an impersonal one. His morality tale means to get under the skin, and does.

First-time director Drew Hancock kicks off the young movie year with an out-of-nowhere surprise, a fiendishly funny romcom scarefest that hits the entertainment bullseye and makes a star out of Sophie Thatcher as a hot date (for Jack Quaid) who doesn’t know her own power.

You leave this movie with questions about this odd-duck of a humanist, who eased children through the thorny feelings that come with fear, bullying, divorce, and trauma. You also leave grateful for how Hanks and Heller respect the privacy and complexity of a man who knew life was never as simple as it looks. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is a movie that speaks from the heart. Let it in.

Guided by the fierce, fully committed performances of Driver and Bening,The Report is a bristling reminder that truth still matters. Naïve? Maybe. But, damn, do we need it now.

Green’s slow-burn style might not spell box-office windfall in a cinema era of short attention spans, but her artistry is indisputable.

The cool factor is off the charts as director Jeff Nichols and a trio of sizzling stars—Austin Butler, Jodie Comer and Tom Hardy—turns a landmark 1968 photobook about a 1968 Chicago motorcycle club into a vibrant vibe of a movie that vrooms to life on the big screen.

Think "Sex and the City" with men, only in Italian and with lots more hollering and hand gestures.

As the director puts it: “This movie is an accumulation of scenes based on Van Gogh’s letters, common agreement about events in his life that parade as facts, hearsay and scenes that are just plain invented. This is not a forensic biography about the painter. It is about what it is to be an artist.”

The Outpost gets it crucially right by bringing home the meaning of heroism as a collective action. The you-are-there ferocity of this sequence, brilliantly abetted by the prowling, handheld camerawork of Lorenzo Senatore, ranks with the best interpretations of combat on film. Your nerves will be shattered, guaranteed.

Minahan wants us to see ourselves in the dark mirror of this outrageously funny satire. He's built the laughs wisely so they stick in our throats.

George Clooney is a movie star and Adam Sandler is his manager in a deceptively lighthearted Noah Baumbach comedy that hides a world of Hollywood hurt.

Schindler's List, despite blatant compromises, is a rending historical document. But the film's near-certain victory is based less on merit than on the marketing of its ambitious intentions. The academy doesn't judge movies, it weighs them by subject matter. On that basis, Spielberg's epic tips the scales.

Even when bloated Marvel action robs the film of intimacy, Johansson digs deep into how her Russian assassin once felt outside the Avengers bubble. And Pugh deserves Oscar love as her pretend sister in this fab and fitting salute to female empowerment.

A delicate gem.

It's the new year's first happy surprise.

Josh O’Connor adds another triumph to his growing list of exceptional performances as a Colorado father broken by divorce and a raging wildfire. Bring handkerchiefs

Bruckheimer and director Tony Scott have wisely set their course by Will Smith, who is sensational in a dramatic role that leans on him to carry a movie without the help of aliens or Big Willie-style jokes for every occasion.

Sigourney Weaver deserves awards attention for turning what could have been a cliched dramedy about a real-estate agent, who’s also a functioning alcoholic, into something funny, touching and vital. And cheers to Kevin Kline as the dazed dude who loves her.

[Keaton] delivers a chilling performance, imbuing what could have been a one-note nut case with unexpected reserves of feeling. The acting and direction don’t fill in all the credibility gaps, but they do make for classy, crackling suspense.

Lacks the cumulative impact of "Boyz," since Singleton allows repetition and sermonizing to dull his theme about the infantilization of black males. But Baby Boy leaves you shaken.

Way better than you may have heard, this mesmerizing look at young Donald Trump (a sensational Sebastian Stan) and his legal dark prince Roy Cohn (a dynamite Jeremy Strong) provides funny and scary insights into the ego Trump developed to rule the world.

What elevates The Rental is the dynamite acting from the four leads.

Timely and smartly entertaining.

Writer-director Gerard Stembridge keeps the amoral laughs bubbling.

It’s the actors who make this real-life legal procedural come alive.

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.

Lumet has a reputation for speed, and when a film doesn’t engage him, as in Family Business, the result seems rushed, sloppy. But in Q&A, with all the actors perfectly cast and on his wavelength, he works wonders. Nolte is electrifying.

Weigh the flimsy story against the eye-popping, jaw-dropping, shoot-the-works visuals that fill the screen to bursting and the choice is clear: James Cameron’s 3-D sequel to his biggest hit is the ultimate in-theater thrill ride. You’ve never seen anything like it in your life.

Starring the great Jessica Lange as a Broadway legend gobsmacked by a diagnosis of dementia, this is a snappy, stirring tribute to theater as a lifeline. Ignore the occasional drift into soap opera in favor of Lange’s transfixing master class in acting Just sit back and behold.

It’s the war between the bonds of family vs. the pull of wealth — a global theme across wide borders and cultures — that gives the film heft. But even when the script drifts into moralizing, it’s the emotions that hold sway.

When it comes to high-wire acting with no net, Nicolas Cage is a rock star and the serial-killing satanic devil he plays here ranks with his bizarro best even when director Oz Perkins lets his plot slide into silliness. No matter—virtuoso Cage lights the spark and then, ka-boom!

Keeps the laughs coming, and a dynamo named Steve Zahn is the cheif reason why. It's a one-joke movie, but the cast knows how to sell it.

The Woodman has recovered his common touch. On him, it looks good.

Foodie culture gets hilariously torched as a celebrity chef, acted to pretentious perfection by Ralph Fiennes, holds his customers, except for a deliciously defiant Anya Taylor-Joy, to the fire at his restaurant from hell. It’s all delectably unhinged.

The practical effects, meaning the real stuff the computer never touched, make all the difference when you’re asking audiences to see the characters as human instead pawns in a digital game.

All the pieces hang together. You can't say that about many movies.

Auteuil and Depardieu spar hilariously, and writer-director Francis Veber, following "The Dinner Game," offers another delicious treat.

Jagger the actor is someone you want to see again. Eat your heart out, Madonna.

Aims for pure joy and achieves it.

Hugh Jackman shepherds a tale of sheep crimesolvers that tickles the funnybone, touches the heart and just may end up as the summer’s sweetest surprise.

With shocking humor and surprising grace, Von Trier creates something unique and memorable.

In this shivery ghost story, director-editor-DP Steven Soderbergh proves a rich imagination can work wonders on a low budget and turn the familiar into something fresh and frightening.

Love it or loathe it—there’s no in between—Emerald Fennell’s deliciously depraved takedown of the upper classes keeps you glued to Barry Keoghan as a poorboy driven to madness and worse by a rich Adonis (Jacob Elordi) and his sweetly vampiric mom (an Oscar-ready Rosamund Pike).

Deliver it does, big time.

It’s a delicious irony that emo queen Billie Eilish and blockbuster king of the world James Cameron have teamed up to go small on the most massive screen imaginable, in 3D yet. I couldn’t have liked it more.

You can feel the heat that ignites this gripping tale, and the humor and humanity that root it in feeling. Sayles knows how to use his social conscience: He lets it rip.

Rules needs that dose of hilarity. Ellis' satire, filtered through Avary's harsh lens, is hard to stomach, harder to ignore.

Delivers more suspense than a tombful of mummies.

The film, bathed in gorgeous shadow and light by cinematographer Joe DeSalvo, gets more personal as it moves along. You can feel the romantic ache when Bruce and the missus duet on “Stones.”

As Tourette’s activist John Davidson, Robert Aramayo gives an astonishing performance that hits you like a shot in the heart.

As a blunt-force Oklahoma oil rigger trying to save his daughter jailed in France for murder, Matt Damon gives an indelible, implosive performance in a deeply personal human drama disguised as a crime thriller.

A potent thriller that grows in intensity as the audience realizes that the character it likes most is most likely a nut job.

It’s the essential conflict between mother and daughter that brings The Truth into Kore-eda territory, where life is always a delicate balance. He’s lucky to have Deneuve and Binoche tempering the verbal fireworks with a tenderness that that allows for pain, regret and the hard-won knowledge that they must both face the truth to move on.

Sorkin distills what made Lucille Ball a comedy legend and a prickly feminist pioneer into one tumultuous week of production on “I Love Lucy.” As for those who thought Kidman would be all wrong as the fiery redhead, won’t you be surprised—she’s all-stops-out fabulous.

It’s a power house.

A potently acted, buoyantly funny film that trades on emotion without making you gag on it.

All praise to Elisabeth Moss, who brilliantly plays Jackson as a volcano on the verge of eruption, and director Josephine Decker, whose experimental "Madeline’s Madeline" reveled in leaving folks in a twist.

You wanna feel all right? This is the holiday movie that will do it.

In this queer BDSM romdomcom with a core of sweetness, Alexander Sarsgård and Harry Melling bring passion and compassion to a taboo subject rare in mainstream cinema. It’s about time.

Leaves you feeling tense and terrific. It's fun to be fooled.

Restores our belief in the power of movies to transform reality, even temporarily. So what if it's not perfect? It's magic.

Nicolas Cage plays Nicolas Cage in this whacked-out meta-comedy that doesn’t always hang together as a movie but cements its gonzo star as the eighth wonder of the world when it comes to highwire acting without a net.

The result is a film of surprise and wonder, lyrically attuned to the ticking intensity of romance.

Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Phillips turn this same-sex romcom for the holidays into a gift package that feels quietly and mischievously revolutionary.

A blast of comic irreverence that serves as a starring vehicle for two stoner characters who had previously been relegated to the sidelines.

Here’s your holiday counter-programming ticket to fear and trembling. It’s a passion project for Robert Eggers who creates an atmosphere of creeping dread in which Bill Skarsgård and Lily-Rose Depp are to die for as a vampire Count and his loveliest-trickiest victim

You’d have to search hard to find a movie this hypnotic and haunting.

What shakes the dust off this period piece is the vibrant acting.

A Best Actress Oscar nomination for Jennifer Lopez? You better believe it. Her see-it-to-believe-it performance in Hustlers is that dazzling, that deep, that electrifying.

Blunt honesty and rare introspection sets Howard apart from the usual cut-and-paste trips down memory lane.

Eddie Murphy is funny again. Sadly, he lacks the guts to follow through on the cathartic self-satire that gives the film its distinction.

Craig Zobel's potent and provocative Compliance is torture to sit through. It's also indispensable filmmaking. How is that possible? Check it out.

Clark is a talent to watch. He's made a transfixing film about a family that looks touchingly and unnervingly like yours and mine.

It's a blast.

Even when her film dips into melodrama, Rose Byrne grounds her portrayal of an unhoused woman living her car in a humanity that feels detailed and true.

Naomi Watts and Bill Murray are funny, touching and vital as the most recent guardians of a 150-pound Great Dane named Apollo, but the scene-stealing pup scampers off with this slight but irresistible character study and wins a special place in your heart.

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.

Steve Carell, best known as a team player on "The Daily Show," "The Office" and such movies as "Anchorman," earns top-banana status as Andy. He is flat-out hilarious.

The haunting, heart-piercing Elah isn't perfect. It's something better: essential.

What links the two films in fun and ferocity is the big game, a ripsnorter that is irresistibly entertaining.

Blending humor and heartbreak in a performance that makes a small movie a richly satisfying one, Caine truly is magic.

Killer-funny documentary.

Credible? Not really. But Cage and Rockwell play off each other with devilish finesse. And Lohman (White Oleander) is on fire -- she's a comer.

Primed to keep your pulse racing so your brain will stop thinking, "WTF!" Go with the illogic or you'll miss the fun.

It can’t top the original and the absence of the late Chadwick Boseman hurts real bad, but Ryan Coogler’s sequel proves to be more than cringey franchise building by putting women of color in charge (yay to Angela Bassett and Letitia Wright) and watching them fly.

Dawn is dynamite entertainment, especially in the rousing first hour.

Warrior aspires to myth. It's Cain and Abel battling it out in the face of a decidedly ungodly father before humanity goes down for the count. Strong stuff.

You'll laugh till it hurts at Cold Souls.

Cruise finds the core of Reacher in his eyes, with a haunted gaze that says this lone wolf is still on a mission and still a long way from home. That's the Reacher Lee Child created in his books. And Cruise does him proud.

The film is technically raw, but the sight of Van Peebles playing his father at a defining moment in movie history exerts a potent fascination.

Nonstop mayhem follows in a stampede of comic terrors ready made for Halloween. Sure it's exhausting. But Goosebumps, knowing its audience, lets it rip.

Araki gives his hypnotic film a raw intensity heightened by a surreal landscape and a jagged score from the likes of Braindead Sound Machine, KMFDM and Coil.

This is a Ferrell you've never seen before, nailing a role that calls for breakneck humor in the final race against the clock and touching gravity in the love scenes with Gyllenhaal.

At its best, De-Lovely evokes a time, a place and a sound with stylish wit and sophistication.

The best hip-hop film of all, taking on obvious targets (misogynist lyrics) and sacred cows (political rap) alike.

Malkovich weaves something delicate and devastating.

Estevez keeps his touch light, with a minimum of pedantry. The Way is really a gift from this son to his father. Sheen, gradually revealing a man painfully getting reacquainted with long buried feelings, who gives the film its bruised heart.

The actors are world-class charmers, and the magnificent Dame Maggie is the diva divine. Her wit still stings, as it does on "Downton Abbey."

You can certainly argue just how speculative this film version of Churchill is as history. But Cox's performance cannot be faulted. It's a master class in acting.

Nil By Mouth is a shockingly intimate portrait of entrapment that may leave you wincing. It’s Oldman’s Raging Bull.

It's a wet dream for anyone who's ever dreamed of getting an edge on the information highway. The worst side effect is that you won't believe a word of the damn thing in the morning. Fair exchange.

A tasty swig of holiday cheer.

It's one crazy love story, but Carrey and McGregor make it work by making us buy the romance as the real thing. There's something about these Marys that pulls you in.

Even when the drama gets overcooked, Lymelife sends off sparks.

Martin excels in the title role.

This is rock-solid entertainment. McConaughey, a cunning mesmerizer in the courtroom, steers this Lincoln into what could be a hell-raising franchise. More, please. Soon.