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.