Peter Travers

How do you make a movie about an intellectual argument? By putting a human face on it, which is what filmmaker Ava DuVernay and acting force Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor do in this stunning provocation about race and class. The result is something rare: a movie that matters.

The Japanese reboot of the kaju king snagged a surprise Oscar nomination for visual effects. It deserves the win, whether you see it in color or glorious black-and-white. For once, the 70-year-old series finds a human depth to match its dazzle. A star is reborn.

Start the new year off wrong with another Kevin Hart misfire that doesn’t even try to be funny, preferring to slide by as a humdrum heist movie that steals time you'll never get back.

Don’t miss this nail-biting thriller in which director İlker Çatak and sensational star Leonie Benesch turn a tale of petty theft at a German middle school into a battle between freedom of expression and institutional control all too easy to recognize as our own.

Fueled by performances worth treasuring from Chastain and Sarsgaard, this impossible love story between a woman who can't forget and man who can't remember slowly works its way into your mind and heart. Filmmaker Michel Franco makes sure you’ll be moved to tears.

The great Michael Mann directs a powerfully nuanced Adam Driver as Enzo Ferrari, the ex-racer-turned-entrepreneur. The domestic scenes with his wife (Penelope Cruz) and mistress (Shailene Woodley) slow the pacing but the vroom of tires on the road is thrilling to the max.

A stirring true story about the triumph of an eight-man rowing crew at the 1936 Olympics fits right into director George Clooney’s old-fashioned love for underdogs, but the exciting races are muted by thinly developed personal dramas that feel pokey and predictable.

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.

This uneven musical take on Alice Walker’s seminal novel can trip on its own too muchness, but the star film debuts of Fantasia Barrino and Danielle Brooks are worth shouting about in a tribute to Black sisterhood that’s blessed with a heart that sings and a spirit that soars.

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

No one will ever play the bright comic exterior and dark soul of Willy Wonka like Gene Wilder did in 1971. But Timothée Chalamet takes a charming shot at it in this wispy, wobbly musical origin story that still earns a pass for offering much needed family fun for the holidays

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.

You’ll never forget the nakedly unafraid performance that Emma Stone delivers in this rowdy and rapturously beautiful blast of feminist whup-ass from director Yorgos Lanthimos. You won’t know what hit you, which is just one reason why I’m rabid to see it again.

Oh no—not another doomsday thriller! Yes, but hold on and see how director Sam Esmail and producers Barack and Michelle Obama, powered by an exceptional all-star cast (Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, Mahershala Ali, Kevin Bacon), make you care while frying your nerves to a frazzle.

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).

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.

Even when it goes off the rails, this epic take on the notorious French emperor boasts state-of-the-art battle scenes from master tactician Ridley Scott, 85, and a big acting swing from Joaquin Phoenix in a beast of a role that will keep you riveted.

What would make a 30-ish woman have sex with a 12-year-old boy? Expect director Todd Haynes to throw you thrillingly off balance with peak acting from Julianne Moore and Charles Melton as the lovers and Natalie Portman as the actress eager to go Hollywood with their squirmy moral tale.

It’s a risk doing a prequel to this hit film franchise without the power surge of star Jennifer Lawrence and the safe and sorry result, set 64 years before Lawrence's Katniss Everdeen ever drew breath, is seriously overlong and underwhelming.

It's Fincher's deliciously depraved conceit that his perfectionist process is not unlike the killer's. In this director’s hands, and a mesmerizing title turn from Fassbinder, what could have been a compendium of hitman cliches becomes a tangle of loose ends hauntingly left untied.

Poised between goofy and godawful and plagued by rewrites and reshoots, this 33rd entry in the Marvel cinematic universe is in serious disrepair. The MCU, once the spawner of glories, is stuck in a rut. The time for a rethink is now.

Director George C. Wolfe had a dream to put unsung civil-rights firebrand Bayard Rustin front and center in a movie. And now, with the help of executive producers Barack and Michelle Obama and a thrilling acting tour de force from the great Colman Domingo, he has.

In Sofia Coppola’s bittersweet biopic, Elvis takes a backseat to Priscilla Presley—shining new star Cailee Spaeny—who met the King (a dangerously seductive Jacob Elordi) at 14, married him at 21 and finally escaped his Graceland pumpkin shell to become her own woman. Brava!

Paul Giamatti is absolute perfection as a Grinchy teacher who learns a hard lesson in empathy over a winter school break. All the actors shine in this exuberant movie gift from director Alexander Payne that has all the makings of a new holiday classic.

It's frustrating that a movie about a woman who dares so much has a script that dares so little. But Annette Bening’s body-and-soul acting as marathon swimmer Diana Nyad and Jodie Foster’s brilliance as her dynamo of a coach will have you cheering.

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!

For Swifties and newbies, here's the musical event of the movie year. And, yes, you can dance to it as the pop princess uses her all-time top-grossing concert film to show off her talent for artistic reinvention and storytelling in song. What's not to like?

Prepare to be wowed by one of the best movies of the year, starring a sensational Sandra Hüller (heads up, Oscar) in Justine Triet’s spellbinding murder mystery that is really a forensic anatomy of a marriage told through the gripping story of a wife on trial for killing her husband.