Peter Travers

Lee offers no reassurance, no uplift, no call for all races to join hands and spout liberal platitudes. What he does offer is a devastating portrait of black America pushed to the limit, with the outcome still to be written. There’s only one way to do the wrong thing about Do the Right Thing: that would be to ignore it.

Director Richard Eyre has struck gold. Twice. Dench and Winslet are a riveting matchup.

Bring out the Oscars for the year’s best movie, a personal best from Steven Spielberg about his own coming of age as a teen torn between his love for movies and family (Michelle Williams is incandescent as his troubled mom). You won’t forget this hilarious and heartfelt classic in the making.

Want to know what it's like to be in on the discovery of a new American classic. Check out Boyhood. Richard Linklater's coming-of-age tale is the best movie of the year, a four-star game-changer that earns its place in the cultural time capsule.

You leave WALL-E with a feeling of the rarest kind: that you've just enjoyed a close encounter with an enduring classic.

Part of the miracle of Robert Altman's triumphantly fierce, funny, moving and innovative Short Cuts is that you can't get this movie out of your head. You keep playing it back to savor its formula-smashing audacity, its peerless performances and its cleareyed view of blasted lives.

Moonlight, which announces Jenkins as a major filmmaker, gets you good. It stays raw from first scene to last.

Ang Lee, a world-class director working at the top of his elegant form, has done something thrilling. For all the leaping action, it's the film's spirit that soars.

It's a mesmerizing spectacle.

That the performances are uniformly outstanding is a tribute to Rob Reiner, who directs with masterly assurance, fusing suspense and character to create a movie that literally vibrates with energy.

Chloe Zhao’s new film landmark blows the dust off history to bring a raw, present-tense immediacy to a tale of love and grievous loss. In what Shakespeare once termed “a mad blood stirring,” Jessie Buckley is guttural, defiant, and untamable in the performance of the year.

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

The hypnotic and haunting Foxcatcher can prove its worth as one of the year's very best films. Steve Carell, Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo give the performances of their lives.

A ravishing, romantic lark brimming over with style, intelligence and flashing wit.

Pure movie bliss.

Mikey Madison, Oscar’s new Cinderella, leads a cast of crazies as a Brooklyn sex worker who finds her prince charming in the son of a dangerous Russian oligarch. No list of the year’s best films would be complete without Sean Baker’s whirlwind blast of fun and social provocation.

Scorches the screen with a badass bravado all its own. Smart, sexy, funny and dangerous this high-wire act is a movie and a half.

It's taut, tense and terrific.

There may be bigger, costlier, weighter films this year. There's none lovelier.

Heads up, Oscar. First-time director Celine Song crafts the best movie of the year so far by using her own life to explore the meaning of destiny as a South Korean playwright (the glorious Greta Lee) is torn between a past love (Teo Yoo) and her American husband (John Magaro).

Clooney brings raw intensity to his role; his scenes with McElhone are rooted in a fierce romantic yearning.

Beach and Adams give remarkable performances that grow in feeling and intensity.

Writer and first-time director Anthony Minghella lays on the whimsy a bit thick at times, but his wryly funny and heartfelt observations on sorrow go down much easier than the Hollywood brand of lump-in-the-throat histrionics.

A new American crime classic from the legendary Martin Scorsese, whose talent shines here on its highest beams.

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

Start engraving the name Cate Blanchett on the Oscar for Best Actress. Her virtuoso performance as a classical music conductor blindsided by cancel culture is an absolute stunner in a Todd Field spellbinder that belongs on every list of the best movies of 2022.

There's no way you won't be captivated by Wallis, chosen ahead of 3,500 candidates to play the tiny folk hero who narrates the story. Her performance in this deceptively small film is a towering achievement.

This emotional climax of the film, with its warring glints of despair and hope, typifies the stunning achievement of The Ice Storm and confirms Lee as a director of the first rank.

The acting could not be better in this new film landmark spiked with laughs that can suddenly—or maybe not for hours or even days later—leave you choking with tears.

The superbly crafted suspense thriller…slams you like a sudden blast of bone-chilling, pulse-pounding terror.

A sharply observant and witty film that plumbs unexpected depths of feeling.

The performances are uncommonly fine...Lone Star isn't built to ride trends. It's built to last.

Timothee Chalamet ping pongs to greatness in Josh Safdie’s whooshing wonder of a film about winning at all costs. And in case you’re wondering: This is the wildest damn thing Chalamet has ever put on screen.

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.

Brother's Keeper has the texture, emotion and raw urgency of a Woody Guthrie anthem -- it keeps coming back to haunt you.

13th, available in theaters and on Netflix, is one for the cinema time capsule, a record of shame so powerful that it just might change things. Godspeed.

Savor their technique and the sizzling performances of Frances McDormand as an adulterous wife, Dan Hedaya as her vengeful husband and M. Emmet Walsh as a private detective from hell.

Unique and unforgettable.

Fellowship is the real deal, a movie epic that pops your eyes out, piles on thrills and fun, and yet stays intimately attuned to character.

The film leaps off the screen with a thrilling immediacy.

Up is a breathtaking ride into the realm of pure imagination.

You'll thrill to the action, savor the tasty dialogue and laugh like bloody hell.

Keep your eyes on Garfield - he's shatteringly good, the soul of a film that might otherwise be without one. The Social Network is the movie of the year. But Fincher and Sorkin triumph by taking it further. Lacing their scathing wit with an aching sadness, they define the dark irony of the past decade.

Paradis sizzles in a star-making role that gleams like one of Gabor's blades. She's a spellbinder.

Rea and Davidson are incomparably good in an exceptional film that is by turns darkly funny and deeply affecting. Though Jordan's control sometimes falters, it's a small price to pay for his daring.

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

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.

In the year's richest, most complex and ultimately most heartbreaking film, Inarritu invites us to get past the babble of modern civilization and start listening to each other.

What can I tell you? It works. Private Parts is a comic firecracker with a surprising human touch.

It's a swooning new classic and one of the very best films of the year.

Bo Burnham’s story about a 14-year-old misfit is one of the funniest, saddest and most heartfelt teen movies ever.

With Apocalypse Now Redux — one for the ages when it comes to the moral battles of war — Coppola has reached the finish line at last. It smells like victory.

What makes La La Land such a hot miracle is how the passion for cinema and its possibilities radiates from every frame.

With it's dynamite performances, strafing wit and dramatic provocation, The Insider offers Mann at his best -- blood up, unsanitized and unbowed.

If a thing of beauty is a joy forever, as John Keats famously said, then the surpassing loveliness and bracing brilliance of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma will never pass into nothingness.

Christopher Nolan deserves every superlative for his brilliant take on J. Robert Oppenheimer (a flawless Cillian Murphy), the dark knight of the atomic age. This terrifying, transfixing three-hour epic emerges as a monumental achievement on the march into screen history.

A rapturous masterwork.

You know how some costume epics can be such a bloody bore? Not The Favourite. It’s a bawdy, brilliant triumph, directed by Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos with all the artistic reach and renegade deviltry he brought to Dogtooth (2009), The Lobster (2015) and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017).

As ever, Freeman delivers miracles; he's as good as it gets.

This volcanically funny and seriously scary look at America's obsession with guns is meant to shake us up good. And it does.

The pleasure of this unique film comes in watching superb actors dine on Mamet's pungent language like the feast it is.

Gosford Park abounds in scenes to savor. It's a feast, and one of Altman's best.

But Stone has found in Cruise the ideal actor to anchor the movie with simplicity and strength. Together they do more than show what happened to Kovic. Their fervent, consistently gripping film shows why it still urgently matters.

Besides the in jokes, the animation and the Alan Menken score supply enough glorious entertainment to hold even brats and cynics in thrall.

Volver is Almodovar's passionate tribute to the community of women -- living and dead -- who nurtured him. Through the transformative power of his art -- carried on the wings of Alberto Iglesias' exhilarating score -- we feel their presence. You do not want to miss this one.

Recoing gives a performance that won't soon be forgotten. Neither will Time Out. It's a great movie.

Here is the jaw-dropping, eye-popping, heart-stopping movie epic we've been waiting for all year.

The idea has been tried — remember TV's "Herman's Head"? — but never with the artful brilliance of filmmaker Pete Docter (Up; Monsters, Inc.).

You don’t need to know a thing about Jean Luc Godard’s 'Breathless' and the New Wave to accept Richard Linklater’s invitation to participate in the sweet agony and ecstasy of their creation. No true movie lover would dream of missing it.

Chicago, based on Bob Fosse's Broadway smash, kills.

The House of Mirth is not one of those teacup and doily movies; it's harsh and disturbing. Davies does superlatively right by Wharton. There's blood on the walls.

Undeniably thrilling and troubling...Dazzling, era-defining.

It’s the closest thing to witnessing a miracle — just some cameras, a crowd and a voice touched by God.

The actors are outstanding, illuminating four different views of loneliness. But it's Camara's tour-de-force performance that anchors the film, that shocks and unnerves us.

Joel and Ethan Coen's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel is an indisputably great movie, at this point the year's very best.

Anderson orchestrates a comic romance like no other. The effect is intoxicating. Sandler and the movie will knock you for a loop.

It is also Nicholson at his bravest and riskiest. By banking his fires and staying alert to the smallest details, he delivers a monumental performance that blasts your expectations and batters your heart.

Broken Arrow delivers the hippest action fun around. Travolta's "Dr. Strangelove" exit will blow you away. Ditto the movie.

Allen has never crafted anything as fiercely funny as this comedy of coming apart; it’s a groundbreaking film, full of sublime performances alert to the violence done in the name of love.

A triumph of acting, writing and directing that defies glib description...the kind of artful defiance that Hollywood is usually too timid to deliver: a jolting comedy that makes you laugh till it hurts.

Sandra Bullock, in the performance of a lifetime, spends most of this wondrous wallop of a movie lost in space, alone where no one can hear her scream.

A hot-wired crime thriller that captures Thompson's flair for hard action, malicious wit and fevered eroticism.

Logue hits every note of humor and heart in his breakthrough role. Don't miss him. He's that good.

You’ve never seen anything in your life like Jacques Audiard’s Spanish musical about violent passions starring Zoë Saldaña, Selena Gomez and trans actress Karla Sofia Gascón in career-defining performances that take a piece out of you. This you don’t want to miss.

Dunkirk is a landmark with the resonant force of an enduring screen classic.

The last days of guilt-free glitz had consequences for more than two white chicks and their boyfriends, and Stillman shows how with delicious malice and unexpected compassion.

The best high-wire director of his generation wakes up the sleeping giant of American cinema by turning this radical blast of action, fun and fervor into the movie of the year.

Writer and director Carl Franklin ("One False Move") scores a triumph in using the brooding atmosphere and racial tension of the sun-kissed, seedy City of Angels to reveal character and reclaim a neglected past that ace cinematographer Tak Fujimoto brings to vivid life.

Here’s your chance to catch up with the best movie you never heard of, a flat-out masterpiece from Japan that’s a frontrunner to win the international Oscar and maybe pull a Parasite and compete for Best Picture. Why not? It’s enthralling from first scene to last.

You may want to revisit this profanely hilarious Hollywood satire. . .just to catch the zingers the audience often drowns out with laughter. Hollywood corrupts absolutely, and Mamet turns the toxic process into the year's best and smartest comedy.

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.

A movie of prodigious power and feeling that is also high-spirited, hilarious and scorchingly erotic.

What makes the film distinctive, devastating and unforget-table is the way De Palma lets the actions of the characters speak volumes. There is no conflict between what De Palma and Rabe are trying to say. But their methods are different. De Palma shows; Rabe tells...This is a portrait of hell so harrowing it’s impossible to shake.

It's a total triumph, brimming with humor, heart, sexual heat, political provocation and a crying need to stir things up, just like Harvey did. If there's a better movie around this year, with more bristling purpose, I sure as hell haven't seen it.

An absolute stunner of a movie.

Comedy and tragedy cohere in this extraordinary film of Alan Bennett's play.

This stuff is golden. Directors Brett Morgan and Nanette Burstein make sure the movie goes down like potato chips. It's great fun and compulsively watchable. And don't leave before Dustin Hoffman makes a hilarious appearance as the credits roll.

Sheer perfection – that's the phrase that springs to mind when describing the humanist miracle that is Faces Places, the year's best and most beguiling documentary.

From the first sight of German soldiers goose-stepping past the Arc de Triomphe to a postscript that spells out the fate of characters whose moral confusion is all too real, Army of Shadows is a movie of its time -- and ours.

Whatever a modern love story is, Before Midnight takes it to the next level. It's damn near perfect.

A hugely entertaining blend of music, fun and eye-popping thrills, though it doesn't lack for heart.

Say this about Black Panther, which raises movie escapism very near the level of art: You've never seen anything like it in your life.

An ugly masterpiece.

In a summer of junk, cinema visionary David Lowery delivers a modern movie masterpiece about a wannabe knight (a sensational, Oscar worthy Dev Patel) who must fight monsters he can and cannot see. It’s a unique and unforgettable film that ranks with the year's best.

To Die For, sparked by a volcanically sexy and richly comic performance by Kidman that deserves to make her an Oscar favorite, is prime social satire and outrageous fun.

If you haven't already sold your soul to rock & roll, Almost Famous should seal the deal.

Some movies are too good to miss. Judy Berlin is one of them...It works like magic.

Starting with the outrageous and building from there, he ignites a slight love-on-the-run novel, creating a bonfire of a movie that confirms his reputation as the most exciting and innovative filmmaker of his generation.

Throughout his life, Brown refused to give in to public convention or his own despair; he wouldn't play the victim. Brown labored to express all of his feelings, not just the acceptable ones. Day Lewis works the same way. My Left Foot, a keen match of actor and subject, stands as an eloquent tribute to the talents of both.

Pulls you in, challenges your prejudices, rocks your world and leaves you laughing in the face of an abyss. It's alive, all right. It's also an uncompromising American classic.

A fiercely poetic study of violence. Stunningly shot in black-and-white. [14 Dec 1989, p.23]

This landmark film takes a clear-eyed look at the digital future and honors the one constant that journalism needs to stay alive and relevant: a fighting spirit.

Miyazaki is the Pied Piper -- see Spirited Away and you'll follow him anywhere.

A brilliant piece of nasty business that races on a B-movie track until it switches to the dizzying fuel of undiluted creativity. Damn, it's good. You can get buzzed just from the fumes coming off this wild thing.

DiCaprio's swaggering, swinging-dick performance is the wildest damn thing he's ever put onscreen.

Jackson’s visionary triumph, heightened by the blazing performances of Lynskey and Winslet and by Alun Bollinger’s whirling camera, is in capturing the delirium as the girls whip themselves into an erotic frenzy with Mario Lanza records, semi-naked dances in the woods and revenge fantasies.

Joachim Trier’s scintillating Oscar contender from Norway, led by a captivating new star in Renate Reinsve, sets a new gold standard for romantic comedy just before it sneaks up and hits you like a shot in the heart.

Eastwood's direction here is a thing of beauty, blending the ferocity of the classic films of Akira Kurosawa (Seven Samurai) with the delicacy and unblinking gaze of Yasujiro Ozu (Tokyo Story).

No film this year has moved me more with its humor, heart and humanity.

Stupendously exciting and emotionally engulfing... With probing intelligence and passionate feeling, Cameron has raised the adventure film very close to the level of art.

Duvall is a blazing wonder in a film that ranks with the year's best.

Brady Corbet’s engulfing masterpiece about an immigrant architect (an Oscarbound Adrien Brody) is the best movie of the year, but it’s also way more than that— an unsentimental; uncompromising thunderbolt of pure cinema that Corbet has built to last.

Other films this year will have to sweat bullets to match the explosive power and subversive wit of David Cronenberg's A History of Violence. It slams you like a body punch and then starts messing with your head.

Michael Gerbosi's script might have reduced Crane to a clueless cliche were it not for the bruised humanity that Greg Kinnear brings to the role. Kinnear is dynamite.

A new crime classic.

It's a wild, whacked-out wonder. Coenheads rejoice.

The exquisitely wrought tale of four British women of different backgrounds who rent a villa in Portofino, Italy, is delivered with a witty feminist twist by director Mike Newell (Dance With a Stranger) and an outstanding cast.

A landmark musical tribute.

Alive with beauty, spirit and wit, Roan Inish is pure magic.

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.

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.

Nothing in Joe Wright's screen version of Ian McEwan's dense, internalized 2001 novel of secrets and lies should really work, but damn near everything does. It's some kind of miracle. Written, directed and acted to perfection, Atonement sweeps you up on waves of humor, heartbreak and ravishing romance.

In Jafar Panahi’s latest masterpiece, one of the very best movies of the year, five Iranian dissidents debate killing their former torturer.

A riveting screen adventure.

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tony-winning musical is a surefire Oscar contender that lights up the screen with the immigrant experience of the American Dream. Anthony Ramos fires up an estupendo cast to give the summer’s best party a heart that sings and a spirit that soars.

Gilliam, along with the gifted cinematographer Roger Pratt and production designer Jeffrey Beecroft, fashions a disturbing and dazzling lost world.

In terms of excitement, imagination and rule-busting experimentation, it's a gusher.

This dizzyingly intricate film reveals new facets each time you see it. We leave Vertigo unsettled, like Scottie, who ends up on the edge of a precipice. Hitchcock is daring us to leap. He has prepared the ultimate fix for a cinema junkie: a movie to get lost in.

Ang Lee's unmissable and unforgettable Brokeback Mountain hits you like a shot in the heart. It's a landmark film and a triumph for Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal.

Stimulating entertainment, as rigorously challenging and painfully funny as anything the Coens have done. But it's necessary to meet the Coens halfway. If you don't, Barton Fink is an empty exercise that will bore you breathless. If you do, it's a comic nightmare that will stir your imagination like no film in years.

Most movies stress the agony of art (think of Kirk Douglas' Van Gogh in "Lust for Life"). Schnabel's exceptional film honors his friend by showing the act of creation as a natural high.

Haynes' commitment to outcasts, then and now, makes Carol a romantic spellbinder that cuts deep. It's one of the year's very best films.

Ephron homes in on what's been missing in movies and in life: ardor, longing and smart talk about the screwed-up notions that pass for love.

Del Toro never coddles the audience. He means us to leave Pan's Labyrinth shaken to our souls. He succeeds.

You won't know what outrageous fun is until you see Borat. High-five!

Purposely out of step with the feel-good-movie era, he offers caustic wit instead of gags, blunt questions instead of glib answers and challenges instead of reassurances. Bless him.

It’s an indisputable classic.

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.

Unforgiven is the most provocative western of Eastwood's career, and with Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman and Richard Harris along for the ride, it's also the most potently acted.

It's a renegade masterpiece that will get you good.

Clint Eastwood pours everything he knows about directing into Mystic River. His film sneaks up, messes with your head and then floors you. You can't shake it. It's that haunting, that hypnotic.

Has the juice to get its hooks into you, knock you off balance and keep you that way for two hours. It's a triumph for director Sam Mendes. The passion and precision of his Road work is staggering.

Sensational, sicko fun -- you won't believe your eyes -- and just the thing to shake up the creeping conservatism that is draining the vulgar life out of pop culture.

You just don't expect Hollywood to produce a masterwork so early in the new year. And it hasn't. This slice of celluloid dynamite comes from Romania, and what you see will floor you.

Written, directed, acted, shot, edited and scored with a bracing vibrancy that restores your faith in film as an art form, The Master is nirvana for movie lovers. Anderson mixes sounds and images into a dark, dazzling music that is all his own.

One terrific movie... Pacino and Depp are a match made in acting heaven, riffing off each other with astonishing subtlety and wit.

Payne's low-key approach only deepens the film's intimate power. Want a movie you can really connect with? The Descendants is damn near perfect.

In this risky, riveting film, our most prolific and provocative moviemaker uses his wit to touch a nerve. Crimes and Misdemeansors is so funny it hurts.

Director Steve McQueen, adding to his ‘Small Axe’ anthology, deserves a mountain of superlatives for this rapturous immersion into a 1980 London house party where black revelers, denied access to white clubs, cut loose to reggae beats you won’t be able to resist. It’s pure pleasure.

Danielle Deadwyler gives the breakout performance of the year as an activist mother who used the 1955 lynching of her son Emmett Till (Jalyn Hall) to galvanize the civil-rights movement. Director Chinonye Chukwu crafts this emotional powerhouse into essential viewing.

Kicking off Steve McQueen’s “Small Axe” anthology of five stand-alone films, Mangrove is an incendiary and indispensable look at U.K. protesters in 1968 who decided to raise hell on the streets and in court about police brutality to communities of color. Essential viewing.

Can Jane Campion’s Montana western about toxic masculinity and repressed sexuality win Netflix its first Best Picture Oscar? With a never-better Benedict Cumberbatch leading a dynamite cast, let’s just say that no list of the year’s best movies will be complete without this cinematic powder keg.

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.

Chloe Zhao, the Chinese-born director of this wondrous work of art (Oscar, please), joins with a never-better Frances McDormand and a cast of real-life nomads to capture what inspires the human urge to roam. It’s a new American classic.

Everybody’s talking about this unassuming, but also unmissable and unforgettable slice of Korean-American life and for good reason: Lee Isaac Chung’s heartfelt tale of his own childhood is the best movie you’ll find anywhere about what it means to be a family.

Hard to watch, but impossible to forget, this masterwork from director Jonathan Glazer concerns a Nazi family impervious to the genocide happening just over the wall at Auschwitz. It’s a wake-up call issued from the bowels of hell. We ignore it at our peril.

Fierce, funny and finally devastating, Tanovic's superb film offers a timely look at the roots of civil war and acts of terrorism on both sides that can be exploited by political and media hypocrites alike.

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

Saddle up for a rowdy, rip-snorting, hilarity-and-hellfire western full of riding, fighting, hanging, shooting, gold prospecting and bloody massacres — plus silly songs, a limbless poet, cowboy love rituals and philosophical musings about the inevitability of dying. Yes, it’s all in one movie. Who does things like that? Try Joel and Ethan Coen.

Mirai casts a spell that works on children and adults alike, but in different ways. Its creator’s artistry and empathy are the connecting links. It may be the animator’s smallest film, but it stands tall. You’ll be enchanted.

Wick 3, starring Keanu Reeves in the role he was born to play, hits you so hard in the thrill zone that instead of feeling exhausted when director Chad Stahelski calls a halt at 130 minutes, you’re panting for Chapter 4.

If you want to see what great acting is, watch Alfre Woodard deliver a master class in Clemency.

How does a small tale of love found and lost emerge as a major triumph and one of the very best movies of the year? Marriage Story is more than just a career high for writer-director Noah Baumbach (The Meyerowitz Stories, The Squid and the Whale); it’s a peerless showcase for its stars, Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson, who turn this tale of a contentious divorce into a "Kramer vs. Kramer" for the 21st century.

Like the best filmmakers at Sundance 2001, Nolan leaps into the wild blue and dares us to leap with him. Go for it.

Quentin Tarantino puts his two “Kill Bill” epics together to make one uncut, unrated radically untamed film with extras and Uma unleashed that great godalmighty feels free at last.

A thunderous spectacle.

Inspired funny business that allows Martin to hilariously torpedo Hollywood's corrupt heart.

The Hidden World is the best Dragon yet — an animated action phenom with moonstruck passion in its heart and a spirit that soars.

It’s part tour diary, part trickster handbook and totally mesmerizing. Rockumentary-wise, you’ve never seen or heard anything like it.

Glorious, a colossus of rousing action and ferocious fun.

Wait till you get a load of this babe from hell in scenes that are sure to put the gorgeously lurid Romeo Is Bleeding on the Moral Majority’s shit list. The rest of us – those who believe it’s children and not adults who need protection from movie mayhem – will be too busy relishing the riveting fireworks display from Olin and Oldman in this scorcher of a thriller. Director Peter Medak (The Krays, The Ruling Class) keeps the action stylish, sexy and fiendishly funny. The film rarely makes a lick of sense, but it’s compulsively watchable.

The artful symmetry is an Almodovar hallmark, and his cinematic memento is filled with the intimate, indelible moments that made a life. You can feel his passion for cinema in every frame. Pain and Glory is not just his most personal film. It’s also one of his greatest.

Ralph Fiennes delivers a master class in acting in this juicy, jolting mystery thriller in which director Edward Berger uses the fictional election of a new pope in Rome to mirror America’s own dirty politics. What fun! And the drama of It will pin you to your seat

Written and directed by the bracingly brilliant Joanna Hogg, this delicate, dazzling memoir traces her own origin story, and there is something superheroic about her struggle to look back without hitting the brick wall of formula and weepy nostalgia.

What makes David Crosby: Remember My Name one of the best rock documentaries of all time is the no-bull immediacy of the filmmaking.

Take a look at leading man Wagner Moura. That’s a movie star, right there. An Oscar nomination for this political thriller that truly thrills is his next step. Just watch, it’ll happen.

If you're looking to have your nerves fried and your pulse pounded, this is your ticket to ride.

A savage comedy of sexual extremes; the barbed laughs draw blood.

The year’s most indelibly inventive animated adventure mixes graphic design with documentary realism and puts hallucinatory brilliance at the service of understanding the continuing psychic damage of war. You’ll never forget it.

Anderson offers no phony uplift for the Tenenbaums or for audiences. But he does know how to take a sad song and make it better. In these troubled times, that's a gift.

One of the best movies of the year--startling, innovative, hugely funny and powerfully, courageously moving.

Sadly, Howard blands out in the final third, using old-age makeup and tear-jerking to turn a tough true story into something easily digestible. Until then, you'll be riveted.

Elegant, funny and unexpectedly touching, this whodunit about a murder aboard the yacht of William Randolph Hearst represents a bracing comeback for Peter Bogdanovich.

In a hotly divisive, post Jan. 6 election year, cinema virtuoso Alex Garland embeds us with journalists, led by a killer Kirsten Dunst, covering a speculative second war between the states. The bloody result is the most original,and propulsively exciting movie of the year so far.

Gorgeous filmmaking that brims over with funhouse thrills and ravishing romance.

Fierce, funny and vividly moving.

This new animation classic, the first in a two-part sequel, is out to make history. Consider it done. In a word—wow! You’ve never seen anything like it in your life.

Starring Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga in two of the year’s best performances, this mesmerizing film about race, class and gender identity in the 1920s speaks urgently to right now and marks a brilliant directing debut from Rebecca Hall.

One of Moore’s best and most incisively funny films — right up there with "Roger & Me" (1989), "Bowling for Columbine" (2002) and "Sicko" (2007) — his latest goes way past taking potshots at the Donald, though it does that with piercing intelligence and wounding wit.

Oscar voters pretend not to see that Sandler’s a clown who can, almost by an act of will, stand toe-to-toe with the best we’ve got.

Cage, who gives a blazing, imposive performance, uses his haunted eyes to reveal the emotional scars that Frank can't heal.

For a series that began nearly 25 years ago, this classic in the making couldn’t go out on a more fitting note of tender, tear-drenched resolution.

Howard lays off the manipulation to tell the true story of the near-fatal 1970 Apollo 13 mission in painstaking and lively detail. It's easily Howard's best film.

It’s impossible to experience the deep-seated compassion of this film and not be moved to tears.

The actors make it unique and unforgettable.

An uncommonly good movie - a thriller that transcends thrills to become a heartfelt and heart-stopping personal drama.

It's a powerful and provocative achievement from a first-time filmmaker of enormous promise.

A funny and touching film that is gorgeously acted by a British cast to rival Gosford Park's.

A world-class charmer that could even seduce the Academy when it hands out the first official animation Oscar next year.

It’s the sort of cinema that feels steeped in the past, completely of the moment and timeless all at once.

You get pulled into a force field, thanks to Cooper’s behind-the-camera chops and Gaga’s sound and fury. By the time the end credits roll, you realize that, in fact, two stars have been born.

Bell explodes onscreen in a performance that cuts to the heart without sham tearjerking. Look for Billy to blast off.

All the actors, in roles large and small, bring their A games to the film. Two hours and 40 minutes can feel long for some. I wouldn’t change a frame.

Whether or not Casino meets your expectations, it delivers the rush you only get from an audacious gamble.

August Wilson’s play about black musicians fighting racism in 1927 may reveal its stage origins on screen, but watching Viola Davis and the late Chadwick Boseman deliver the performances of their lives is a thrilling experience you do not want to miss.

One of the best movies of the year and by far the most entertaining.

That Linklater pulls off the innovative feat with hypnotic assurance is nothing short of amazing.

The writer-director based the couple on his own parents, who bear the same names as his characters. It’s not their story, he’s said — what he’s given us instead is a love story that’s as sexy as it is savage, as tough as it is tender. It’s a spellbinder with a fever that won’t quit.

Maguire and Dunst keep Spider-Man on a high with their sweet-sexy yearning, spinning a web of dazzle and delicacy that might just restore the good name of movie escapism.

The Crucible, despite some damaging cuts to the text, is a seductively exciting film that crackles with visual energy, passionate provocation and incendiary acting.

Lynch takes us on a journey of shattering understatement -- a remarkable accomplishment.

Limbo is vital personal filmmaking from a world-class practitioner of the art.

Jane Schoenbrun's off-handedly revolutionary mindbender about two teens bonding over a sci-fi TV series isn't always easy to get your head and heart around. But hold on for its incendiary daring, its willingness to go for broke. Schoenbrun is a trans game-changer. They make us believe.

No wonder Kenneth Branagh’s funny, touching and vital look at his own coming of age in Northern Ireland’s turbulent capital city is the Oscar frontrunner for Best Picture. No movie this year cuts a clearer, truer path of the heart. It’s his personal best.

Engrave an Oscar for actor-director Bradley Cooper for his heart-full-to-bursting tour de force as composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein. Alive with glorious music, the film soars on the undying love the bisexual legend feels for the wife (a never-better Carey Mulligan) who lives with his angels and demons.

Spike Lee is coming at you with his greatest and most galvanizing movie in years. BlacKkKlansman is right up there with "Do the Right Thing" and "Malcolm X" in the Spike’s Joint pantheon of game-changers.

Darkness stays on the edges of Hollywood town in Paul Thomas Anderson’s screwball comedy explosion about the serious business of first love. Newbies Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman light up the screen in one of the very best movies of the year. They’re to die for.

Andrew Haigh’s enthralling ghost story concerns a screenwriter (a flawless Andrew Scott) coming to terms with a new love (Paul Mescal) and the parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) who died in his childhood. Watch out for Haigh and his four superlative actors. They’ll get you good.

Under the astute direction of Danny DeVito, who does a sly turn as Oliver's attorney, this acid-dipped epic of revenge is killingly funny and dramatically daring.

This stunning, slow-build thriller from South Korean director Lee Chang-dong sizzles with a cumulative power that will knock the wind out of you.

You should prepare to be wowed by Natalie Portman, who delivers a take-no-prisoners performance as Celeste, a swaggering rock diva who tends to burn down everything in her path, especially when she’s crossed.

Hollywood does gloriously right by Judy Blume’s groundbreaking 1970 novel about a pre-teen girl (a stellar Abby Ryder Fortson) in a tug-of-war with puberty and religion. Costars McAdams and Bates exemplify Blume’s refreshing candor. Call it totally irresistible.

Note to Oscar: Make sure a best actress nomination happens for the blazing Penelope Cruz in this emotional powerhouse from director Pedro Almodovar about a Madrid photographer coping with an unplanned pregnancy and a tangled political past.

Like Vardalos and Corbett, who play their roles with vibrant charm, the film, directed by Joel Zwick, is heartfelt and hilarious in ways you can't fake. It's a keeper.

Ferrara’s blend of toughness and lyricism turns this visionary crime film into something stylish, seductive and haunting.

As entertainment and provocation, Joker is simply stupendous.

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