Richard Roeper

News of the World works at the highest levels as a story of two lost souls who find one another, and as a crackling good, blood-spattered Western.

One of the pure joys of this job is experiencing a breakout performance or discovering a new director destined for great things. Saint Frances gives us both.

With Cillian Murphy’s quiet, almost small and yet grand performance carrying the story every step of the way, “Small Things Like These” is quite possibly the best movie I’ve seen so far this year.

IT...carried me along from the opening frame, rarely missing a beat.

Chazelle’s script is hopeful and sweet and clever and rich. His direction is innovative and captivating.

It just might be the most impressive piece of filmmaking I’ve seen in 2015, and it features a great lead performance by a rising star, a memorable supporting role by a familiar veteran — and one of the most amazing acting jobs by a child I’ve ever seen.

This is one of my favorite movies of 2018.

You feel a hurricane of emotions watching Barbara Kopple’s brilliant and searing documentary Desert One.

What a beautiful and epic film is Interstellar, filled with great performances, tingling our senses with masterful special effects, daring to be openly sentimental, asking gigantic questions about the meaning of life and leaving us drained and grateful for the experience.

The fourth entry is a worthy addition to the Toy Story library, bringing back some of the most beloved characters in the history of animated film and introducing us to a fantastically entertaining new bunch of toys — some of them adorable and huggable, some of them more reminiscent of a certain type of creepy, old-school doll usually seen in R-rated horror films.

BlacKkKlansman is one of Spike Lee’s most accomplished films in recent memory, and one of the best films of 2018.

Thanks to Affleck’s sure-handed, period-piece-perfect direction, a crackling good screenplay by Alex Convery and the lively, funny, warm, passionate performances from the A-list cast, Air is as entertaining and fast-paced as an NBA Finals game that is destined for overtime.

There’s hardly a moment in this film that doesn’t feature at least one great actor in top form.

Hillbilly Elegy is a beautifully constructed, unforgiving, heart-tugging family epic about three generations of the Vance family.

The Infiltrator is a great-looking, well-paced, wickedly funny and seriously tense thriller, bolstered by an ensemble cast as good as I’ve seen in any film this year.

Rush ranks among the best movies about auto racing ever made, featuring two great performances from the leads, who capture not only the physical look of the racing legends they’re playing, but the vastly different character traits that made their rivalry, well, made for the movies.

What a beautiful, thrilling, joyous, surprising and heart-thumping adventure this is.

It’s an expertly paced thriller that never misses a note.

This is one of the best movies of the year, featuring one of the most perfect endings of any movie in recent memory.

The music, the cinematography, the acting choices, the daring plot leaps — not a single element is timid or safe...The Place Beyond the Pines earns every second of its 140-minute running time.

Linklater introduces us to an abundance of characters, but it’s a tribute to his writing (and the performances) that each of the baseball players has a distinct personality and story thread.

This is one of the best movies of 2017.

One of the many wonderful surprises in A Star is Born is how director/co-writer/leading man Cooper strikes the perfect balance between a showbiz fable with emotional histrionics and performance numbers and a finely honed, intimate story with universal truths and experiences hardly unique to the entertainment world.

As always, Steve McQueen is an original and bold storyteller, delivering the goods with dazzling creativity. Even when “Widows” delves into pulpy, blood-soaked material, everything is filtered through the lens of a true artist. This is one of the best movies of the year.

The end result is a brilliant and brave and beautifully honest film.

Timothée Chalamet gives an Oscar-worthy performance in one of the best films of 2024.

Mangrove is an invaluable work enlightening us on an important chapter in Black history across the pond.

In the flat-out hilarious 1970s period piece “Dolemite Is My Name,” Murphy is the funniest he’s been since we last saw Sherman Klump and family in the early 2000s — but he’s equally effective in the handful of relatively low-key, dramatic moments. It’s a fully realized performance.

This is a strange and beautiful and unique film, one of the best movies of the year.

The Scottish writer-director Charlotte Wells’ minimalist masterpiece Aftersun draws us into the lives of a father and daughter on a summer vacation in such a natural and gradual way that we feel like we truly know them as the days and nights go by, and we care deeply about them. And yet it still comes as something of a jolt when the final moments of this movie hit us SO hard, like a sledgehammer to the heart.

In writer-director Steven Knight’s mesmerizing jewel of film titled Locke, Tom Hardy is so brilliant we readily watch him drive a car and talk on the hands-free phone for virtually the entirety of the film — and it’s one of the more effortlessly intense and fascinating performances I’ve seen any actor give in recent memory.

I was stirred by the lush and pristine sounds of the band, including of course Eddie Vedder’s oft-imitated but never really duplicated guttural growl of a voice, and I was greatly impressed by the gorgeous visuals in the concert sequences. This is one of the most vibrant-looking rock performance films of recent years.

This movie soars on the strength of the screenplay. Monahan gives Hedlund and in particular Isaac dozens upon dozens of rich, intricate lines, and they’re both up to the task and then some. Isaac is an actor who is not afraid to go big or go home, but in Mojave, his finest moments are relatively quiet and sublime. Every inch of his performance is pure excellence.

It is smart without being smug, insightful without being condescending, funny without being mean-spirited and genuinely moving. It’s unique and original and fresh and wonderful, and can you tell I loved it?

It all works. All of it. The music, the performances, the twists and turns in the plot, the sheer energy and life force of the movie.

With first-rate production values and a gloriously memory-drenched 35mm cinematography, Licorice Pizza is a visual feast brimming with razor-sharp dialogue, hilarious comedic vignettes, brilliant performances from Cooper Hoffman and Alana Haim as well as the veteran, star-studded supporting cast, and some genuine heart. This is one of the very best movies of 2021.

Gifted isn’t the best or most sophisticated or most original film of the year so far — but it just might be my favorite.

Weird. Brilliant. Stunning. Under the Skin is by far the most memorable movie of the first few months of 2014.

The Revenant is a visceral sensation, filled with unforgettable visuals and memorable set pieces.

The result is one of the smartest, funniest and most visually captivating movies of the year.

This is an inclusive, diverse, multi-level, multi-layered, funny, warm, cool, richly detailed, lovingly rendered, friendly neighborhood instant classic.

Edward Zwick’s Pawn Sacrifice is an enthralling piece of mainstream entertainment that captures the essence of Fischer’s mad genius, perfectly re-creates the tenor of the times AND works as a legit sports movie about the great game of chess.

In “Banshees,” Gleeson and Farrell once again are pure movie magic together, with Gleeson’s gruff and rugged and imposing persona the perfect counterpart to Farrell’s handsome and wide-eyed transparency, which at times borders on the, well, the not-too-bright. Earnest, but not too bright.

Following the path of “Three Billboards” is a little like driving down an unfamiliar road in beautiful but forbidding country late at night, and alternately marveling at the scenery and gripping the steering wheel tightly when yet another steep drop or sudden change of direction presents itself.

Through Gerwig’s wonderfully creative prism, it’s as if we’re meeting the March sisters for the very first time, and we’re immediately swept away in a gorgeously filmed, wickedly funny, deeply moving and, yes, empowering story with themes still relevant some 150 years after the time period of these events.

Every character in To Leslie feels “lived-in.” Every scene rings true, sometimes in surprising ways.

Uncut Gems is part psychological thriller, part black comedy, part thriller and part dysfunctional extended family drama — and it clicks on all those cylinders.

With brilliant, innovative, claustrophobically effective directing choices by Mendes, Oscar-worthy cinematography from the living legend Roger Deakins and strong, raw performances from the two young leads, 1917 is a unique viewing experience you won’t soon shake off.

Take a moment to absorb and interpret and appreciate the vibrant and gorgeous and sometimes brutal and mind-bending and occasionally incomprehensible hallucinatory epic that is Blade Runner 2049, which stands with the likes of “The Godfather Part II” and “Terminator 2” and “Aliens” as a sequel worthy of the original classic.

Arriving in theaters almost exactly 50 years since the Detroit riots of late July 1967, Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit is a searing, pulse-pounding, shocking and deeply effective dramatic interpretation of events in and around the Algiers Motel.

Keith Maitland’s Tower is a stunningly powerful and gripping documentary.

Wells is a talent as a storyteller and as a director with a nice visual touch, and as a screen presence. Emily is wonderful. We like spending time with them. (Noel and Emily, I mean.)

It’s a sweet and knowing and lovely and funny story, but occasionally the spell of warm nostalgia is broken by painful moments of family heartbreak and cruel bullying.

We learn all kinds of illuminating factoids.

The sweat-drenched and emotionally bruising “Challengers” from director Luca Guadagnino (“Call Me by Your Name”) joins the likes of “King Richard,” “Wimbledon,” “Final Set” and “Battle of the Sexes” as one of the best tennis movies ever.

Catching Fire makes only the occasional misstep.

It’s smart and different and sometimes deliberately odd and really funny — rarely in a laugh-out-loud way, more in a smile-and-nod-I-get-the-joke kind of way.

Armando Iannucci (creator of HBO’s “Veep”) transforms Charles Dickens’ masterful but often dour and cumbersome 624-page Victorian novel into a brilliant piece of entertainment that often plays like “Alice in Wonderland” as interpreted by Monty Python.

Thanks to the razor-sharp screenplay by James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick and the stylish and Wes Craven-influenced direction by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett and the ease with which Campbell, Cox and Arquette return to their roles, the new “Scream” stabs and jabs at our memories of the original and creates some bloody fresh twists of its own.

It’s a shattering, thunderous wake-up alarm, a call to lay down arms, a gutsy social satire and a highly stylized work of fiction that sometimes feels as accurate and sobering as the crime reporting you see on the front page of this newspaper.

As the documentary makes clear, Bourdain, who battled heroin addiction in his younger days, was a thrill-seeker, an obsessive personality, who always seemed to be in search of the next amazing experience, the next high, the next unforgettable adventure.

Stillman has done a marvelous job of adapting Austen’s novella Lady Susan and capturing the author’s tart and rapier-sharp sense of humor.

The abrupt tonal shifts may throw some viewers for a loop, but when the confrontations segue from tense verbal exchanges to sudden bursts of violence, it feels authentic and organic to the foundation laid down in the first half of the film.

It’s a blazingly vibrant, emotionally resonant and exhilarating movie musical that does justice to Alice Walker’s iconic 1982 novel and the subsequent stage and movie versions while forging new creative paths and standing on its own as a bold and original work.

It’s entertaining as hell.

Sudeikis and Brie make for one of the most endearing pairings of the year, and Headland has delivered one of my favorite romantic comedies in recent memory.

Though stylized and eccentric and non-linear in its narrative path, and filled with dazzling non-sequiturs and oddly cryptic storylines, Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth is indeed set on this Earth, and these characters are very much alive.

This is a lurid, cynical, nasty, rough piece of work, and I mean that in the best possible way.

With Pugh and Garfield delivering authentic, genuine movie-star performances, “We Live in Time” is an old-fashioned weeper, done with heart and originality. It’s a Movie We Think You’ll Like.

As for Witherspoon, there’s not a shred of her America’s Sweetheart persona in this work. She strips naked, literally and otherwise, in a raw, brave performance.

Elisabeth Moss delivers the best performance of her film career, carrying the story every step of the way.

Unlike so many of the cookie-cutter, wisecracking-assassin movies in recent memory, Bullet Train acknowledges its outlandishness from the beginning and yet also manages to connect so many dots in creative, gotcha fashion.

Like the great Douglas Sirk melodramas of that time period, Sylvie’s Love is unabashedly sentimental and just gorgeous to behold — but the difference here is the terrific ensemble cast is primarily Black and Latinx.

The music is brilliant, Chazelle’s writing and directing are something to behold, Teller is really good — and Simmons delivers one of the most memorable performances of the year.

With Ilana Glazer leading an outstanding cast, False Positive is not a movie you can easily shake off in a day or two. Or three.

It’s filled with a kind of giddy energy that leaps off the screen. It’s corny, it’s dopey, it’s sincere, it’s romantic, it’s thrilling and it leaves one anticipating the next adventure of these heroic goofballs.

Disney’s Frozen works beautifully as a timeless fairy tale with a modern twist.

At times Grandma overdoes it with the stand-alone scenes in which crusty ol’ Elle causes a scene or sticks it to some jerk. It’s a little too neat. Mostly, though, Weitz’s screenplay strikes sharp note after sharp note.

It’s film that’ll make you wince at times, and you’ll most likely not want to see twice, but seeing it once is an experience you’ll not soon forget.

This is an important film presented as mainstream entertainment. It’s a great American story.

This is a smart, savvy film with sabre-sharp one-liners, a half-dozen terrific supporting turns, one of the best scores of the year, a winning romance and a heartfelt and authentic performance from Rock.

Jackman does a magnificent job of portraying a man who has been lying so long on so many fronts, even he isn’t sure of the truth any longer.

To be sure, we get a classic comic book movie storyline about a megalomaniacal madman intent on taking over the world, but there’s often a relatively light tone to the proceedings. This is a throwback piece of pure pop entertainment.

You might just find yourself applauding during certain moments of dramatic triumph in Theodore Melfi’s unabashedly sentimental and wonderfully inspirational film, and yes, some of those moments feature people working out high-level math problems.

Even as I was rolling my eyes, I was digging just about every stylized visual flourish, every big performance, every overly dramatic confrontation featuring first-rate actors letting loose with unabashed gusto and veracity, even when they were bellowing lines stating the obvious.

At first, the jigsaw puzzle seems needlessly difficult to solve, but once all the pieces are in place and we see the big picture, we’re left with admiration for director/co-writer Antonio Campos’ ability to weave a memorably brooding film from Donald Ray Pollock’s novel of the same name.

Pour a cup of cheer and toast filmmaker Dana Nachman for telling the stories of some of these elves and the families who have benefitted from the fruits of their tireless volunteer labor in Dear Santa, a sprightly feel-good documentary that comes at a time when we could use a lift — and serves as a reminder there are an awful lot of truly good people in this world.

The Order is an enormously effective thriller, and yes, a timely reminder that there has never been a time in this land when darkness and hate didn’t thrive, and in numbers.

Writer-director Nguyen cleverly unspools the story like a heist film, with Vincent wheeling and dealing every step of the way.

This movie rocks.

Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick turn in layered, nuanced performances, while the male actors playing varying degrees of scumbag are suitably and effectively nauseating and intimidating. The Royal Hotel is a little like the Hotel California in that you can check out any time you’d like, but on some level, you can never really leave.

While the subject matter is often bleak, this isn’t a depressing journey. Seeing great actors at the top of their game working with such rich material is never a downer.

In a pair of elegantly chilling sequences (the editing in this film is superb), Maya and Ryan fight for their lives against the needle-drop background of first “Nights in White Satin” by the Moody Blues and later “The Best of Times” by Styx. You’ll never think of those classic rock tunes in the same way again.

Forrest Tucker’s swan song moments in The Old Man & the Gun are well tailored for Robert Redford’s swan song as an actor. It’s a damn good performance that also serves as a fitting curtain call.

Penna and his co-writer Ryan Morrison handle this existentially challenging material with grace, and Kendrick, Collette, Kim and Anderson deliver equally impactful, intense performances.

For all its moodiness and melancholy, Logan is also a rip-roaring action film — and it’s wickedly funny at times as well.

Landline is a very funny film about people dealing with very serious situations.

It’s a carefully crafted, almost reverential character study of man and music Hawke clearly and greatly admires.