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.

With everything going for this dystopian thriller about humans being replaced by replicants, including two hottie Irish Oscar nominees in Saorise Ronan and Paul Mescal as young marrieds in crisis, this stifling sci-fi misfire hits theaters as an epic botch job.

Wild Bill Friedkin’s original 1973 take on demonic possession was thrillingly too much. This safe and sorry sequel from David Gordon Green is boringly too little. Believe this: If you let the marketing devils lure you into this one, you’re in for an unholy mess.

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

Technically amazing but conceptually old-hat, this sci-fi epic from Gareth Edwards makes a case for artificial intelligence through a bond between a protective human (John David Washington) and a dangerous human simulant packaged as an insanely adorable six-year-old girl. Discuss

Blending the hilarious and heartfelt, the tough and the tender, John Carney’s sweerheart of an Irish musical is something you’ll want to hold close.

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.

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.

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.

Audience goodwill is really the only thing this third chapter of Greek family bonding has going for it as writer-director star-Nia Vardalos keeps pushing the same brand of ethnic humor. And I mean, really pushing, another reason this followup falls so painfully flat.

Hilary Swank looks like she’d rather be anywhere else than starring as a journalist and grief-stricken mother in this overblown, undercooked drug drama about America’s opioid crisis that makes its scant running time of 89 minutes feel like a torturous eternity.

Ignore the many problems in this violent revenge thriller and focus on the power and charisma of Denzel Washington who ends the third and final chapter in his Equalizer trilogy on a euphoric high. He’s a star, baby, and him you don’t want to miss.

It's basically a pricey home movie in which Adam Sandler spotlights his wife and two daughters. It's also an unexpectedly sweet and sassy surprise. Comic dynamo Sunny Sandler, his youngest, gives nepotism a good name as a Jewish girl on the cusp of womanhood.

The thrills in the first Latino superhero epic from DC Comics are mostly generic but the personal relationships between protagonist Jaime Reyes (a charming Xolo Maridueña) and his irresistibly rowdy and resilient relatives make all the difference. Viva la familia!

There’s nothing new about this queer romance between a president’s son and a prince of England except the way it skips the sorrow to favor the joy. Wishful thinking? Maybe. But for audiences eager to connect instead of divide at the movies, it's about time.

I didn’t have much hope for this umpteenth take on the 1980s comic-book relic about humanoid teen sewer rats, but Seth Rogen and his team of merry pranksters have turned this animated version into a giddy, goofball delight. Cowabunga, baby!

Barbie fever is everywhere, but this botch job about the Beanie Bables—another doll craze from last century—is no collector’s item as it runs off the rails and wastes a terrific cast led by Zach Galifianakis, Elizabeth Banks, Geraldine Viswanathan and Sarah Snook.

It could have been worse, but that’s no excuse for turning an exciting nine-minute theme-park ride into an overlong, star-stuffed 122 minute feature that is only fitfully funny and scary and soon wears out its welcome.

Even when Greta Gerwig trips up on her ambition to make this pretty-in-pink fantasia more than the fun party of summer, you cheer her refusal to play it safe as she turns Margot Robbie’s doubt-plagued Barbie and Ryan Gosling’s clueless Ken into a match made in movie heaven.

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.

So what if the plot is the usual tangle to set up stunts. Tom Cruise does the impossible and nobody does it better.

All your friends will be talking about this femcentric raunchfest and its fabulous Asian-American actors who are ready to lace every laugh with human complication.

The fifth and final chapter for our whip-cracking archaeologist suffers from the absence of Steven Spielberg and a workable script, but Harrison Ford—80 and still working deep and true—makes sure that Indy goes out in blaze of glory. One word: Respect.

This R-rated sex farce only plays at being dirty. Behind the carnal jokes lurks a Hallmark heart. But a never-friskier or funnier Lawrence, as a 30-ish Uber driver hired to seduce a college-bound kid (terrific newcomer Feldman) is well worth the price of admission. The rest gets a hard pass.

Mad trippy or catastrophic? This DC superhero epic is actually a mix of both, dragged down by exhausting multiverse hopping but flashy fun on the wings of captivating star Ezra Miller and the grumpy comic perfection of Michael Keaton as a Batman on the ropes.

Polarizing? Sure. But Wes Anderson is a film artist like no other. In defiance of realism, he builds dazzling, minimalist, all-star jewel boxes that are easy to spoof but impossible to equal. This Atomic-age fable about teen space nerds and their parents tinges laughs with genuine feeling.

Wait a hot minute here. Can a new Transformers movie actually be bearable? Let’s not get carried away, but a diverse cast and the absence of ham-handed former director Michael Bay qualify as a step in the right direction.

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).

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.

Never snap judge a Nicole Holofcener film as a sitcom. Just watch how she steers Julia Louis-Dreyfus and a pitch-perfect cast to dig out the raw feelings colliding under the laughs to reveal a generosity toward human foibles, even when comic darts draw blood.

While it can’t match the effortless charm of the 1989 animated classic, this faint but overstuffed live-action echo fills the title role with shining new star Halle Bailey who gives this musical fable just the oomph it needs—a heart that sings and a spirit that soars.

With its pokey pace broken by bursts of violence and racial tension, the end of Paul Schrader’s man-in-a-room trilogy falls short of the master’s peak. But this mesmerizer is the work of a true film artist continually striving to connect his tortured soul to ours.

Only glints of the old whiplash magic remain in chapter 10 as thrills give way to thudding formula and paycheck acting—not you Jason Momoa—that slow down the action to forge the limping runt of the F&F litter.

A fantastic cast led by Jay Baruchel and Glenn Howerton tells the sad but true story of the flame-out of the world’s first smartphone and the manchildren who created it. This raucous workplace comedy (think The Office) puts an unexpected lump in your throat.

Jennifer Lopez and all the mothers out there deserve better than this gross, cringey gorefest about a military-trained assassin (JLo) who makes up to the pre-teen daughter she gave up at birth by instructing her in the fine art of killing bad guys. Happy Mother’s Day, indeed.

For all its backsliding into bleak—what’s with torturing Bradley Cooper’s talking raccoon—this spirited summer kickoff delivers the requisite thrill ride and ends the GOTG trilogy with the sweet sorrow of saying goodbye to Star Lord and his wacky space dorks. It’s been a trip.

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.

This lively computer-animated take on the video game just opened and it’s already the biggest box-office smash of 2023. Despite lapses into dull and disposable, it’s also a gift for parents seeking family entertainment for the 5-year-old in all of us. Game on.

You’ll either love it or hate it as director Ari Aster tasks Joaquin Phoenix with his most challenging role yet: a total loser just trying to get home to his mama (Patti LuPone). It’s not for everyone, except audiences starved for originality in copycat Hollywood.

Before this frightfest chokes on its own relentlessly repetitive blood-splatter, Nicolas Cage proves fiercely funny as a modern-age Dracula whose malignant narcissism sends his errand boy Renfield (a soulful Nicholas Hoult) into therapy for co-dependency.

Director Ben Affleck slam dunks a movie about a basketball sneaker—the Air Jordan, no less— and it’s the first all-star Oscar contender of 2023, an outrageously entertaining classic in the making with Affleck, Matt Damon, Viola Davis and a cast of MVPs at the top of their game.

Ever since Knives Out snapped the whodunit back to wicked life, it’s harder to accept a lazy, dim-witted mystery that wastes the starshine of Sandler and Aniston on 89 minutes of sequel piffle. One of those new AI bots could have coughed up a script with more personality.

Video games make lousy movies, right? Not this time. Thanks to Chris Pine and a cast of merry pranksters, especially Hugh Grant and a chubwub dragon, the big-screen D&D cuts through the confusion and chaos to create a goofball fantasy even a non-gamer can love.

Wick-haters find only monotony in this carnival of carnage, but the rest of us will revel in the fourth chapter’s state-of-the-art action fireworks led by a hypnotically-Zen Keanu Reeves as the hitman who treats kung fu fighting like a dance tableau. Unmissable? Hell, yeah!

It’s frustrating that this immense, immersive true-crime story has been squeezed into a two-hour movie instead of a miniseries about the two women reporters—superbly played by Keira Knightley and Carrie Coon—who broke a notorious case the police could not.

The tossed-off charm of the original suffers from bloated sequelitis. Still, star Zachary Levi’s comic-book invitation to shake your sillies out will be hard to resist for underserved family audiences.

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.

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.

A bear does cocaine and kills people. That’s it. Director Elizabeth Banks revels in deliciously cheap thrills, but then treats her overqualified actors (Keri Russell, the late Ray Liotta) like bear chewtoys while the overcrowded script drifts into hibernation.

The impossibly magnetic Idris Elba brings his iconic series TV character, London copper John Luther, to thunderous life on the big screen and suddenly all is right with the world. So what if the serial-killer plot can’t get a grip, Elba is pure pow.

Even though the ending fizzles out, the star power of Julianne Moore and Sebastian Stan turns this tale of con artists on the hustle among Manhattan one-percenters into a sleek, sexy sophisticated thriller with twists that won’t quit.

The once playful runt of the Marvel litter has come down with a case of bloated excess and despite the ever-likable Paul Rudd as Ant-Man and a pow villain in Jonathan Majors, the third time is not the charm for a sequel that ignores its own cardinal rule -- less is more.

Despite the lusty efforts of Channing Tatum and Salma Hayek Pinault, stripper Mike’s final whirl is a pale, generic copy of the wow that was. The new focus on female empowerment is admirable, but gender politics are no substitute for naked, guiltless bliss.

M. Night Shyamalan can be too fuzzy, earnest and full of himself. But this doomsday thriller starring a never-better Dave Bautista as a modern horseman of the apocalypse confirms that the Sixth Sense maestro knows how to fill the screen with tension and squeeze.

This week’s shocking, out-of-nowhere Oscar nomination for British actress Andrea Riseborough as an alcoholic single mother from West Texas who squanders her $190,000 lottery win on booze turns an indie movie no one ever heard of into an absolute must-see. Prepare to be wowed!

Director Kenya Barris disastrously trades cutting social satire for romcom pablum when a Jewish podcaster (Jonah Hill) and his a Black fiancé (Lauren London) find their love imploding after her dad (Eddie Murphy) and his mom (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) plan a wedding across racial battle lines

A riveting Anna Kendrick brings her own experience with a psychologically abusive relationship to this tale of a young woman who learns to stand her non-violent ground against a male predator through female friendship. The result is quietly devastating.

Hugh Jackman acts his heart out as a parent unable to cope with his clinically depressed son, but even he can’t save this poor relation to The Father from descending into two hours of misery porn.

As always, Tom Hanks is in there pitching, but this time it’s mostly softballs. The cliched plot about a reformed grumpy old man is so obvious you can see it from outer space.

Christian Bale tries to solve a murder at West Point, circa 1830, with the help of young cadet Edgar Allen Poe (Harry Melling). But what should be a gothic mesmerizer ends up a dreary exercise to doom and gloom that’s an endurance test for audiences.

Move over Chucky, here’s the killer robot doll thriller we’ve been waiting for. This jolt of fun and fright stars a sensational Allison Wllliams as the inventor of a babysitting robot who takes her job to the homicidal hilt. The first banger hit of 2023 is right here.

Noah Baumbach thonors Don DeLillo’s virtuoso 1985 novel about the comic-absurdist chaos of consumerism with a too cautious respect. The result is his most constricted film which only breaks free when he allows costars Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig to fly on their own wings.

A dynamite Naomi Ackie acts and lip-synchs her heart out as the legendary songbird, but Whitney deserved a much better movie than this patchwork, cobbled-together biopic that barely skims the professional highs and personal lows that made up her tragically short life.

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.

There's about an hour of terrific movie in this love-hate look at lurid Old Hollywood. Too bad it’s trapped in three hours plus of self-indulgent bloat. Even the starshine of Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt dims as director Damien Chazelle rabidly bites the hand that feeds him.

Bill Nighy delivers a master class in acting as a stifled bureaucrat Brit who decides to seize the day before it's too late. Working in miniature to achieve major truths, this deeply human drama has the power to sneak up and knock you sideways.

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.

After the infamous slap that sidelined his career, Will Smith returns as a runaway slave in a sorry but noble misfire that offers the disgraced actor pitifully few chances to bring dimension to a real-life character the script traps in a swamp of misery-porn cliches.

Brendan Fraser is on the march to Oscar. That's how astonishing his acting is as a morbidly obese recluse in this deeply moving character study. Accusations that wearing a fatsuit diminishes his tour de force performances are nonsense. This is essential viewin

A love story about two pretty young cannibals won’t strike everyone as an appetizing dish. But you won’t be able to take your eyes off Timothée Chalamet and Taylor Russell as they try to reconcile romance with killer impulses on a road trip through hell.

So what if it’s talky. Writer-director Sarah Polley’s vital film gathers together eight women—acted with heat and heart by a miraculous cast—to debate what to do about male sexual predators. Doing nothing is not an option in this unique and unforgettable landmark in the making.

You’ve never seen a Pinocchio like this one, a funny, touching and vital masterpiece from del Toro that uses stop-motion animation to create a world of beauty and terror to get lost in. The Oscar for best animated feature belongs right here.

Let’s give thanks for this wicked, whacked-out whodunit sequel. Daniel Craig is back as southern-fried detective Benoit Blanc and all is right with the world as a cast of merry pranksters (yay Janelle Monae) turns murder most foul into comic gold.

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.

Despite some pokey pacing, the fierce human drama of how two female reporters, superbly acted by Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan, persuaded women to go on the record about being sexually harassed by producer Harvey Weinstein is the year's most gripping detective story.

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.

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.

Cheers to Scotland’s Charlotte Wells for making the best movie of the year by a first-time writer-director. And cheers to Paul Mescal and young Frankie Corio for bringing this heartfelt father-daughter story to such funny, touching and vital life.

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.

In a valiant effort to bring back the romcom, George Clooney and Julia Roberts sprinkle their stardust on a stale storyline that Rock Hudson and Doris Day might have found retro in the last century. Their hearts are in it, though, and that’s something.

Question for Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson: What happened, dude? How did your passion project playing a Black DCEU posterboy for anger management become a humorless, chaotic bummer that leaves you holding the bag for an epic failure to launch?

Ignited by career-best performances from Farrell and Gleason, this new classic from son of Ireland Martin McDonagh brims over with dark comic magic and jolts of bloody scary hell. Fasten your seatbelts for a spellbinder that stands high with the best movies of the year.

After 44 years Jamie Lee Curtis bows out of her iconic role with slashing feminist fire, but if you believe blood-lusting Michael Myers is really hanging up his mask in this divisive scam of a Halloween ending then you don’t know how greed powers Hollywood’s gift for resurrection.

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.

David O. Russell strands an A-list cast —Bale! Robbie! Washington! De Niro!— in a pokey and problematic mystery romp. You can feel Russell’s cage-rattling intensity, but only in fits and starts as the convoluted conspiracy plot goes out in a fizzle.

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.

Anything for Halloween? You bet. Lock up the children—the Sanderson Sisters are back in a bewitching sequel that returns Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker and Kathy Najimy to the roles they created in 1993 just in time to put a funny-scary spell on you.

Ana de Armas is raw and riveting as Marilyn Monroe in Andrew Dominik’s surreal journey through a star’s subconscious that leaves out the fun parts to cloak her life in abject misery. The nearly three hour result is hard to watch, but oddly impossible to forget.

All the drama seems to have happened off camera for director Olivia Wilde and stars Harry Styles and Florence Pugh. What's on screen is a glossy, repetitive retread of The Stepford Wives with a dash of The Truman Show and no discernible personality of its own.

There's nothing ground-breaking about this backstage murder mystery in 1953 London. Dig under the froth and you'll only find more froth. But thanks to the inspired lunacy of Rockwell and Ronan, it's a wicked fun whodunit that goes down easy.

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.

Queen Latifah and Ludacris drive right into a brick wall of action cliches.

Hi-Diddle-Dee-Dee, it didn’t work for me.

Despite the star presence of Kevin Hart and Mark Wahlberg, this laugh-starved, buddy comedy is crushingly dim-witted and disposable.

This romantic fantasy from visionary director George Miller is all over the place structurally, but odds are you won't be too bothered given the sparks ignited by Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba as a magical djinn hellbent on granting her three wishes.

Think of it as Jaws on Safari and you'll have some idea what to expect from this generic thrill machine that requires Idris Elba to look great (he does) while doing battle with a digital lion.

A slumming Jamie Foxx is cool to the max as a vampire hunter gunning down bloodsuckers in sunny LA. But you leave this goofy but mostly godawful action-comedy feeling pummeled, beaten down by an avalanche of sound and fury signifying the usual nothing.

Brad Pitt’s laidback movie star magnetism is a joy forever. Too bad that the action-heavy, incoherently-edited, Japanese choo-choo he’s riding goes too quickly off rails from exhilarating to downright exhausting.

As actor, screenwriter and dynamite debuting director, a seriously funny B.J. Novak takes aim at an America broken by disconnection. He doesn’t always hit his target, but when he does this tale of a New York liberal battling Texas gun nuts comes alive with mirth and menace.

Netflix broke the bank on this formula action epic fronted by A-listers Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans as assassins for hire. It’s good enough to rank as watchable. But even in these inflationary times, shouldn't 200 million bucks buy us more than good enough?

Another game-changer from Jordan Peele, who pushes the limits of fun, fright and movie love to take horror to the next level. What do UFOs have to do with the violence eating at America? Say yes to Nope—it’ll mess with your head and pin you to your seat.

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.

The Delia Owens bestseller about sex and murder in the Carolinas comes to the screen as an antiseptic, airbrushed, miscast misfire that takes so few risks with the publishing phenom that it feels more embalmed than a freshly imagined version of the book.

It’s barely half as funny, fierce, romantic and thrilling as 2017's incomparable Thor: Ragnarok, but director Taika Waititi and sweetly self-mocking star Chris Hemsworth get such goofball jollies sending up the usual Marvel bloat that resistance is futile.

This Minions prequel would have to go some to make it as flimsy, but Steve Carell is pricelessly funny doing the voice of a pre-teen wannabe villain wrangling an army of goggle-wearing little buggers and you could do worse in a search for animated family fun

This unassuming animated gem about a shell (indelibly voiced by co-writer Jenny Slate) trying to find his family shames the bloat of big-studio cartoons by proving good things really do come in small packages. The result is unique and unforgettable.

Baz Luhrmann’s bejeweled battering ram of a biopic is all over the place, which can be distracting, but the grit and grace of Austin Butler’s performance as The King is a thing of beauty. A star is born right here.

More trifling lark than a new Pixar landmark, this toon hits the sweet spot as the story of astronaut Buzz Lightyear before he became a toy. Chris Evans voices the Buzz bluster, but it's breakthrough star Sox the cat who steals scenes to infinity and beyond.

Cooper Raiff, who created this Sundance prizewinner, can't hide his feelings for people with disabilities and the challenges that come to those who love them. And I can't hide my feelings for this exuberant gift of a movie starring Raiff and a never better Dakota Johnson.

It’s always a slam dunk when Adam Sandler drops his doofus routine and really acts. And here, as a basketball scout who yearns to coach, he infuses every frame of this formulaic crowd-pleaser with a real-deal love of the game. Hot damn! We have a winner.

The kid in us knows that even in a pokey, predictable sequel like this one you still stick around for the scary parts with the stampeding dinosaurs. But the wonder and awe of the Spielberg original have gone pfft.

Is surgery the new sex? Body horror maestro David Cronenberg and a cast led by Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux and Kristen Stewart tackle that question and more in a futuristic sci-fi shocker that will leave you laughing, squirming and—yikes—thinking.

With the male need to control women hitting a new flashpoint, Alex Garland’s provocation is fired by urgency as the extraordinary Jessie Buckley stars as a widow threatened on all sides by toxic masculinity. Garland is stingy with answers, but his implications are incendiary.

The sequel is still unapologetically rah-rah about American imperialism, but who cares? Thirty-six years after the original, Tom Cruise is having the time of his life, the in-flight thrills are off the charts and—hot damn!—you won’t find more blazing action anywhere.

The Daniels and their wow of a star Michelle Yeoh turn this visionary absurdist comedy into a volcano of creative ideas in full eruption. It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen

The second film continuation of the Brit series knows it’s old-hat and out of touch. But it’s also comforting fan service and if you can shut out the real world in favor of a fantasy remembrance of things past, you’re in for a treat.

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.

The return of Benedict Cumberbatch to the world of Strange may seem chaotic madness to the uninitiated, but it’s thrilling to see livewire director Sam Raimi breathe hilarity and juicy horror into the Marvel formula that so needed a shakeup. This is it.

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.

Enchantment still beckons in the third of J.K. Rowling’s planned five film prequel to Harry Potter, but this flagging franchise—beset with controversies among its creative team—slogs when it most needs to soar.

If long, loud and ludicrous is your kind of movie escapism, check out director Michael Bay’s latest shot of adrenalized, de-humanized filmmaking as a psycho bank robber (Jake Gyllenhaal) commandeers an ambulance as a getaway car. Entertaining? Exhausting is more like it.

Jared Leto goes the extra mile to bring a minor-league villain from Marvel Comics to the big screen, but this botched horrorfest about the so-called “living vampire” is less deserving of a sequel than a stake through its heart.

This all-over-the-place, all-silly, all-star (Bullock, Tatum, Radcliffe, Pitt) throwback to 1980’s escapism—think “Romancing the Stone”—radiates such a puppy-dog eagerness to please that you want to pet it instead of pointing out its faults.

There are glimmers of the perversely fascinating murder mystery of the classic 1957 Patricia Highsmith novel, but this misguided update suffers from a lack of suspense, wit and undetectable sexual chemistry between Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas. Read the book, skip the movie.

Ryan Reynolds leads an A-list cast in this ‘Back to the Future’ nostalgia trip that coasts down well-worn roads instead of paving new ones with fresh imagination. But there are still laughs and tears to be had this cynicism-free throwback to ‘80s family entertainment.

Pixar tackles the topic of female puberty in this animated funhouse ride about a 13-year girl from Toronto’s Chinatown who turns into a giant red panda in this wise and wonderful metaphor for the roller coaster of messy adolescence.

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.

You’ve seen ‘Being the Ricardos,” but you’ll never understand the successful partnership and failed marriage of sitcom icons Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz until you see Amy Poehler’s emotional roadmap of a documentary. Between the laughs, you’ll blink back tears.

So what if star and co-director Channing Tatum lays on the sniffles in this tale of an Army Ranger and a K9 warrior named Lulu, who steals every scene she's in. They’re both PTSD-scarred combat veterans who try to heal each other and they hit you like a shot in the heart.

Better lower your expectations about this video game turned movie. But Tom Holland, teaming up with Mark Wahlberg, proves his Spider Man success is no fluke, which makes this Indiana Jones knockoff more watchable than it has any right to be.

It’s shameless fluff wrapped in a blanket of bland. You won’t believe a word of this romcom knockoff, but JLo and Owen Wilson work real hard to convince you that love is the answer.

Even a lackluster script and dodgy computer effects can’t screw up the retro bliss doled out by director and star Kenneth Branagh as he sets sail for Egypt with an all-star cast of suspects who keep you guessing whodunit.

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.

This two-hour film wrap-up of the unjustly cancelled crime series may feel patchy and uneven, but it still gives Liev Schreiber’s iconic Ray—a hardcase-for-hire who can fix anything but the nightmare of his past— the send-off he and we deserve.

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.

Oscar shortlisted for best animated film, this ravishing new gem from anime master Mamoru Hosoda is a knockout fantasia that cuts to the core of Gen Z lives that revolve around digi-tech and yet speaks an intimate universal language of love and loss.

Way fiercer and funnier than a fourth sequel has any right to be. Here's ‘Scream’ for a new generation – so self-aware that it mocks itself for relying on borrowed inspiration (the 1996 Wes Craven original) while squeezing the golden goose for one last payoff.

There’s nothing fresh or surprising about a boy coming of age with the help of his bartender uncle (Ben Affleck reminding us what a terrific actor he can be), but director George Clooney’s affection for the characters serves up a winning blend of laughs and tears.

What a bummer to kick off 2022 at the movies with a lame, gender-flipped mission impossible. Chastain and her team of women warriors could have shown the guys how action cinema is done. Instead, director Simon Kinberg traps them in an empty, soulless mess.

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.

Peter Dinklage sings! Pushing past the conventional elements in Joe Wright’s ravishing musical version of a unrequited love, Dinklage makes believers of us all. His Cyrano thinks his small size makes him a freak. But it's not a poetic ideal he can't live up to, it's his. That's his tragedy.

Thank Maggie Gyllenhaal, in a stunning debut as director and screenwriter, for creating one of the year’s very best movies starring the magnificent Olivia Colman as a mother haunted by her troubled past. This, you do not want to miss

It’s been 18 years between ‘Matrix’ sequels, but beneath the action chaos of warring computer codes are Keanu Reeves as Neo and Carrie-Anne Moss as Trinity, proving that they’re still romantic icons of timeless cool in a movie that’s a stone-cold trip. Wowza!

The carny scenes of freaks and geeks are undeniably creepy, but director Guillermo del Toro’s hallucinatory brilliance only comes in flashes as Bradley Cooper and a dynamite cast struggle to build a mesmerizing misfire into the classic it might have been.

Tom Holland is better than ever in his surprise-packed, third solo outing as a teen hero in a onesie who’s out to save the world and a faltering pandemic box office. But this time the generic thrills are tempered with genuine emotion. Good one, Spidey.

If you cherrypick the good stuff from a sea of unfocused choices, McKay’s all-star comedy (Leo! JLaw! Meryl!) about impending doom has its playful and provocative pleasures. But the laughs don’t stick in the throat the way they must in a screwball farce that ends in utter hopelessness.

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.

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.

Is it sacrilege for Spielberg to re-imagine the Oscar-winning 1961 musical classic? Not when it’s this thrilling. Not when two new stars—Rachel Zegler and Ariana DeBose— get to share the screen with the legendary Rita Moreno. Then Spielberg sets the screen ablaze.

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.

Amid the jumble of fake Italian accents and overall too-muchness, an Oscar-ready Lady Gaga is flat-out fabulous. Is this ravishing soap opera of high fashion and higher crimes outrageous camp or “The Godfather” in designer duds? I’m calling a tossup.

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.

As the hard-driving daddy of Venus and Serena Williams, Will Smith gives the performance of his life in an unapologetic crowd-pleaser. You just may want to stand up and cheer.

No Joker in sight as the stellar and always surprising Joaquin Phoenix shows his tender side in this bracing, bittersweet family dramedy from Mike Mills, whose movie is a quiet thing, but with a delicate, soulful magic you won’t soon forget.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A Marvel epic that values personal connections over spectacle? Sorry adrenaline junkies, but that’s what Oscar-winning, indie director Chloe Zhao brings to her first superhero blockbuster. The slow-paced result is uneven, but memorably inclusive and unique.

The endlessly inventive Wes Anderson and a cast of all-stars use all the tools of cinema to give a big, fat, loving smooch to, of all things, print journalism and the gifted eccentrics who practice it. Too fussy? Maybe. But what an exuberant gift of a memory piece.

Denis Villeneuve’s take on Frank Herbert’s dauntingly complex novel can sputter and flirt with incoherence, but the director and his actors, led by an all-in Timothée Chalamet, find the pow and the poetry in this cornucopia of visual astonishments.

It gets the job done for trick-or-treat season, but this sequel falls short of expectations by sidelining its luminous star Jamie Lee Curtis and substituting rote mayhem for an inventively scary frightfest.

Harrowing to watch, but impossible to shake, this emotional powerhouse catches two sets of parents, brilliantly played by Martha Plimpton, Jason Isaacs, Reed Birney and an Oscar-worthy Ann Dowd, in the traumatic aftermath of a school shooting.

Despite a sappy ending that surprises in all the wrong ways, Daniel Craig’s fifth and final go-round as 007 cements his reputation as the gold-standard James Bond of the 21st century and lays down a challenge for anyone—he or she—who dares to follow him.

Joel Coen’s triumphant film version of Shakespeare’s tragedy astounds on every level, starring Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand, two acting titans, playing an aging couple taking their last shot at murderous ambition. There is no way you can take your eyes off them.

This big-screen prequel to ‘The Sopranos,’ with a touching Michael Gandolfini playing the teen version of the role created by his late father, is good, but not good enough to score as a great mob epic in its own right.

Firing up the Oscar race for Best Actress, a virtuoso Jessica Chastain raises up this formula biopic about televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker by redeeming her reputation as a cultural joke in clown makeup and finding the soul beneath the sparkle.

Flawed? You bet, but the film of the Broadway musical about teen suicide is not the crime against humanity some claim. Yes, Ben Platt, 27 is playing a high school kid, but he inhabits the role he created on stage with every fiber of his being and hits you like a shot in the heart.

This meandering neo-western is far from classic Eastwood. But Eastwood, at 91, is still classic in every sense of the word.

A new Paul Schrader movie is always an event and this spellbinding meditation on sin and salvation—seen through the eyes of a gambler (a superb Oscar Isaac) who counts cards to both escape and confront his torturous past—is one of his best.

So what if the showoff climax deserts depth for dazzle. As the first Asian hero in Marvel history, former stuntman Simu Liu is action poetry in motion and his epic starring debut kicks off the fall film season on a rousing high note.

Manufactured for the ‘Kissing Booth’ crowd, this gender-swapped, TikTok-friendly update of the 1999 teen hit sounds awful and it often is, but enough charm pokes through the cracks to sucker anyone who ever fell for a makeover fable.

The scares are off the charts, but only as a means to confront the film’s thoughtful messaging about racial injustice. Dynamite star Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and director Nia DaCosta make you think hard about everything you see. Welcome to a new horror classic.

You'll laugh, you'll cry and all steps in between at this vital family entertainment with a title that stands for Children of Deaf Adults. Oscar winner Marlee Matlin and newcomer Emilia Jones turn this emotional powerhouse into one of the year's best movies

Even Hugh Jackman's indisputable star power can't light up the pretentious, pseudo-poetic, sci-fi murk of this thundering misfire, which will only make you remember other, better movie mindbenders. ‘Blade Runner’ anyone?

This by-the-numbers Aretha Franklin biopic is all about Jennifer Hudson doing Aretha proud. And does she ever. As the legendary Queen of Soul, Hudson does not, will not, cannot hit a wrong note, creating a respectful tribute to both their radiant talents.

Ryan Reynolds piles on the charm as a bland bank teller who discovers he’s just a pixelated extra in a violent video game. The comedy could have been sharper, spikier and riskier—like ‘The Truman Show’— but this summer funfest goes down easy, even for non-gamers.

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.

The gloriously unhinged filmmaker James Gunn keeps Margot Robbie, John Cena and a top cast of crazies firing on all cylinders and turns a botch job original that was the worst movie of 2016 into the dazzling, down-and-dirty whirlwind it was always meant to be.

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.

The Rock and Emily Blunt knock themselves out to entertain in this dopey, derivative, theme-park ride of a movie. But, hey, the kids will love it and in the words of the Metallica thrasher that bizarrely found its way onto the soundtrack, “nothing else matters.

Shot with a poet's eye and a tin ear for dialogue, this tricked-up thriller about the horror of getting old too fast brings out the best and worst in M. Knight Shyamalan by throwing a wet beach blanket on a Covid-resonant premise about sudden death and the collapse of time.

Critics will pick on this overstuffed sequel to the 1996 animated-live-action hoops hit. It’s what we do when an alleged creative enterprise turns into a corporate ad campaign. Expect no grumbles from the under-13 crowd eager to eyeball LeBron James jamming in cyberspace with cartoon royalty.

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.

Set in 1954 Detroit, Soderbergh’s terrific, twisty, film-noir throwback keeps a lot of racial, political and sexual tension simmering under the surface, providing a field day for actors who interact with clockwork precision and off-the-wall laughs.

There's nothing ‘tomorrow’ about a recycled sci-fi jumble that places all its bets on yesterday.

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.

As usual the plot is stupid beyond saving, but the vehicular action is insanely entertaining. That’s a fair tradeoff for the adrenaline junkie in all of us who only wants Vroom cranked up to 11. Consider it done.

Edgy comic Kevin Hart smooths out his rough edges to play a widower trying to raise his daughter alone. Hart can act, but he can’t act his way out of a sappy script that too often mistakes manipulative laughs and tears for genuine emotion.

It’s not in the same league as such Pixar classics as ‘WALL-E’ and the ‘Toy Story’ quartet, but there’s no denying the pure enchantment of the visual, comic and subtextual dazzle in this tale of two sea monsters trying to pass for human boys in 1960’s Italy.

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.

The third and weakest chapter in the hit "Conjuring" series messes with the facts about a real-life case of demonic possession as a legal defense, but Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson as married demonologists know how to rally nerve-rattling chills to scare us senseless.

Two Oscar-winning Emmas—Stone and Thompson—are dressed to wow and deliver much to enjoy in this beautifully crafted fluffball, but the end result is a decorative distraction that never runs the risks it promises.

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.

It’s a juicy premise: Eddie Izzard’s British spy vs. a school for daughters of the Nazi high command run by the great Judi Dench. But the crackerjack espionage thriller that might have been, the one filled with ideas and purpose, is defeated by flat execution.

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.

Angelina Jolie, back in action mode as a haunted smokejumper seeking redemption, gets the job done if you’re looking for action escapism, but those who wish for something deeper and more resonant are plum out of luck.

Amy Adams leads an overqualified and underserved cast as an agoraphobic child psychologist who thinks she sees a murder in this ‘Rear Window’ ripoff that just lies there, static and dreary, awaiting an animating spark that never comes.

Actor David Oyelowo makes a heartfelt directing debut in a PG adventure about a boy (Lonnie Chavez) in search of a mythic creature who might save his dying mother. Even when the pace drags, the film remains a rare gift for family audiences.

A dementia subplot torpedoes the laughs, leaving Tiffany Haddish and writer-director-star Billy Crystal adrift in a comedy fizzle that forgets to be funny.

No knock on serving up an action-jacked Michael B. Jordan in an R-rated, red-meat, military thriller. But this clumsy update of Clancy’s 1993 bestseller should have been way better than a generic, one-note, cash grab.

You know a ghost story is a hot mess when it strands a stellar Amanda Seyfried and a top cast in a remote, country house haunted by toxic masculinity, dangling plot threads and nothing worth hearing or seeing.

You’ll laugh and cry your eyes out as an emotionally bruised diver learns about life and loyalty from an eight-tentacled mollusk. This Oscar favorite and viral sensation is the year’s most unorthodox and unforgettable love story.

It’s a form of actor abuse to see the legendary Morgan Freeman trapped in this relentlessly violent and vapid mess that does offer one lesson to students of cinema in how to do everything calamitously wrong.

Sebastian Stan, the Winter Soldier himself, shows he can turn up the heat with costar Denise Gough for a romcom romp in Greece that starts on a sexy, swooshing high before draining out the fun for dramatic insights that never come. Bummer.

Despite an intriguing premise that suggests a ‘Lord of the Flies’ in space, Neil Burger’s fun-free thriller about young hotties playing astronauts quickly devolves into is a dud that never makes sense of its borrowed convictions or any sense at all.

This comedy misfire starring McCarthy and Spencer as unlikely superheroes is hardly a crime against cinema. It just a bumpy road to blah in which the actors look to be having a way better time than you will. That’s messed up.

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.

Forgive the exposition dump in the convoluted plot and go for a clash of the titans that is spectacular in every sense of the word.

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.

A peak-form Mads Mikkelsen stars in this hilarious and heartbreaking spellbinder as a Copenhagen high-school teacher who thinks day drinking might sharpen his faculties. The Oscar for Best International Feature belongs right here.

A hot mess that throws a wet blanket of dystopian drivel over fresh young stars Daisy Ridley and Tom Holland. Chaos Limping is more like it.

Tom Holland, of Spider-man fame, breathes dramatic fire as a PTSD-afflicted Army medic in Iraq who returns home as a bank robber to feed his opiod and heroin habit, but his glossy, overlong film is failed Oscar bait that drowns him in addiction cliches.

The sisters are doing it for themselves and one of them is a dragon in a wild, animated wonder ride from Disney that radiates female empowerment and comes at you in a whoosh of creative ideas in full eruption.

It’s good to see Eddie Murphy again as Zumundan royalty, but the laughs in this tame, PG-13 sequel to the raucous, R-rated 1988 original feel predictable and played out as they strain to slide by on nostalgia. Your call.

Anthony Hopkins delivers a master class in acting as a once-brilliant man losing his mental faculties to the plague of dementia. First-time director Florian Zeller turns his modern “King Lear” of a play into essential cinema.

Singer Andra Day’s breakout star performance as jazz legend Billie Holiday raises this chaotic film above its faults by showing how Holiday used her voice as a starting gun for the civil-rights movement despite a relentless FBI campaign to destroy her.

With Oscar buzz surging for Riz Ahmed, the time is now to check out his virtuoso performance as a rock drummer facing deafness in a riveting, resonant film whose thrashing power and emotional gravity exert a grip that won’t let go.

A shockingly funny sendup of our money-trumps-morals culture starring a dynamite Rosamund Pike who outdoes her ‘Gone Girl’ evil by partnering in crime with the great Peter Dinklage for the most delicious, decadent treat of the new movie year.

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.

Shaka King’s powerhouse about the 1969 murder of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton (an Oscar-worthy Daniel Kaluuya) by the Chicago police with the help of an FBI informer (Lakeith Stanfield) is a new movie classic that speaks to the toxic racism of its time and ours.

Viggo Mortensen scores a standout directing debut, showing the artful sensitivity and offbeat humor that define him as an actor with this heart-piercing drama in which he stars as a gay son coping with the dementia of his racist father (a career-best Lance Henriksen).

It would have been nice if filmmaker Sam Levinson had provided a real script instead of a thin outline, but John David Washington and an incandescent Zendaya are thrilling to watch as lovers at war in a millennial ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.’

In a shameless weeper that plays it strictly by the cliché book, compensation comes from the rugged sincerity of Justin Timberlake as an ex-con who becomes a surrogate dad to a gender-nonconformist seven-year-old boy, wonderfully acted by Ryder Allen.

Despite widening gaps of logic in its slow-burn mystery plot, this twisty, killer-on-the-loose, dark-night-of-the-soul thriller features top turns from Denzel Washington and Rami Malek as L.A. cops chasing a psycho, played by a scary and diabolically funny Jared Leto.

Priyanka Chopra-Jonas lends her beauty and star power to Ramin Bahrani’s unwieldy but enthralling screen adaptation of Aravind Adiga's bestselling novel about the haves and have-nots in modern India.

In filmmaker Emerald Fennell’s diabolically funny takedown of toxic masculinity, Carey Mulligan gives a dynamite performance that should make her a frontrunner in the Oscar race for Best Actress.

Debuting director Regina King ignites sparks by casting four dynamite actors as 1964 civil-rights icons—Kingsley Ben-Adir as Malcolm X, Eli Goree as Cassius Clay, Aldis Hodge as Jim Brown, and an Oscar worthy Leslie Odom Jr. as Sam Cooke—and letting them rip about being Black in America.

Doug Liman’s gimmicky dud about a London diamond heist set during the pandemic falsely assumes that quarantined audiences are panting to see films about the hell of living in quarantine. Despite a starry cast led by Anne Hathaway, Locked Down is a major letdown.

In this emotional powerhouse about an expectant mother who experiences her worst nightmare, the brilliant Vanessa Kirby delivers a tour de force that will leave you shattered.

Get our your handkerchiefs for this live-action take from Italy on the Disney animated classic, starring Oscar winner Roberto Benigni as Geppetto, the woodcutter who builds a puppet to replace the son he never had.

You'd have to be a real Grinch to hate on a blockbuster sequelthat's so puppy-eager to please. But despite the fem power of star Gal Gadot and director Patty Jenkins, all the CGI huffing and puffing over 2 1/2 hours can deflate momentum and audience endurance..

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.

Tom Hanks saddles up for his first western and teams with a firebrand costar in 10-year-old Helena Zengel, but despite the film's visual grit and grace, it could have risked more and cut deeper.

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.

All the actors excel at helping director-star Clooney turn this apocalyptic thriller into something more thoughtful than sci-fi flashy, especially the grace note of hope that speaks with heartfelt relevance to these pandemic times.

Are you ready to party? Here's the musical blast we need right now to cure our pandemic blues. Corny? You bet. But an all-star cast, led by Streep, Kidman and Corden, wears its unruly heart on its sleeve as Ryan’s Murphy’s plea for tolerance sings, dances and laughs our troubles away.

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.

Inside this manic jumble about a family of prehistoric ‘Flintstones’ knockoffs lies a brightly animated bauble that speaks to the power of staying connected even when forced apart. Pretty good for a cartoon, especially during a pandemic.