Richard Roeper

Writer-director Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade is a sweet and intelligent and sometimes absolutely heartbreaking slice of modern-day, eighth-grade life, which, in some ways (hello social media), is radically different from the eighth-grade experience of 1998 or 1978 or 1958, but in many ways is absolutely relatable to audiences of any age or gender.

My thoughts turn to the Giant CGI Anacondas in “Snake Eyes” and what their lives are like in between meals — and if that sounds ridiculous and outlandish and weird, welcome to this bombastic, slick, convoluted and unnecessary second-tier action franchise reboot.

In this world, it seems as if every moment of happiness, every glimpse of a better future, is fraught with dangerous consequences.... But redemption and hope eventually shine through here and there, and when that happens, it’s a beautiful thing.

This is a very personal project for Rebecca Hall, whose grandfather was Black but passed for white, and she has delivered an exquisitely crafted gem.

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.

I’m not going to pretend I always knew exactly what everyone was talking about as we plunged ever deeper into the weeds of double-crossing and triple-crossing among a batch of mostly iniquitous secret agents, but it’s a zippy and darkly funny ride every step of the way. The dialogue jumps off the page, and the performances are universally brilliant.

Typical Spielberg. Pulling on multiple heartstrings at the same time, to great effect.

Based on a true story, this is a tribute to the strength of a matriarch who doesn’t have time to grieve or feel sorry for herself. She has children to love and protect.

It’s a beautifully filmed, wonderfully challenging, multi-layered tale of trickery upon trickery, short con upon long con, deception upon deception.

Thanks in large part to Elliott (and Offerman and Prepon and Ritter, among others), The Hero survives some bumpy, well-worn clichés.

While it took all these decades for “Are You There, God?” to finally gets its day in theaters, it was worth the wait, as writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig (“The Edge of Seventeen”) has delivered a near-perfect adaptation of Blume’s novel that wisely retains its 1970 setting yet no doubt will be as relevant as ever to audiences of all ages.

In certain elements of tone and structure, Once Upon a Time In Hollywood has echoes of "Pulp Fiction" and "Jackie Brown," but it is alive and electric with a beat all its own.

In virtually every scenario, director Wilde and the team of screenwriters serve up the material in a fresh and original manner.

Tati is actually a silent comedian; his films are made with an amusing mixture of languages, but no one says anything very important and he doesn’t use subtitles because then we might read them and miss a sight gag.

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

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.

It would be a cliché to call In the Heights the Feel-Good Movie of the Year, but it would also be accurate. Perhaps for these times we might call it the Feeling-Better Movie of the year.

Joaquin Phoenix has never been shy about going big if the role called for it — and maybe even if the role didn’t necessarily call for it — but his performance here ranks as one of his best because of what happens between the outbursts.

Roughly 60 percent of A Ghost Story is disturbingly beautiful and spiritually challenging and stuck to me like a memory magnet. About 40 percent of A Ghost Story is maddeningly still and achingly self-conscious and just a little too pleased with itself.

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.

For every moment of inspiration and hope in the teen-political documentary Boys State, when you find yourself thinking, By gosh, the kids are all right, there are at least two jaw-dropping instances of 16- and 17-year-olds compromising their values with such cynicism you weep for our future.

What makes the movie so memorable, so good, so strong, is the unvarnished, warts-and-all perspective.

Adult Beginners has a casual, comfortable, low-budget authenticity, though it loses some of its edge near the end with some overly predictable and familiar resolutions.

It’s a memorably stark and authentic work that is at times so gut-wrenching it’s almost unbearable — but Park deftly weaves in moments of warmth and humor and hope as well. This is a special film.

The cameras simply follow Weiner’s every move, which includes disastrous public appearances, embarrassing press conferences, and media interviews that don’t exactly go Weiner’s way.

This is a film in which characters make questionable and sometimes troubling choices right up until the final scene, and yet we understand why they do the things they do, and we root fiercely for things to work between them.

This is a movie swirling in a cauldron of raw and frayed emotions, yet never coming across as treacly or overly sentimental.

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.

It’s impressive how well director Malcolm D. Lee (working from a script by Kenya Barris and Tracy Oliver) balances the serious material with the bawdy, freewheeling comedy pieces.

Here is a strikingly beautiful, bold, funny, heart-tugging otherworldly journey almost dizzying in its multi-leveled complexity, and yet containing the simplest and most enduring Capra-esque messages about how we don’t know what we’ve got until it’s gone, and how we should embrace every waking moment because it can all vanish in the blink of an eye.

To our great benefit, the material is handled beautifully, even tenderly, without becoming maudlin.

There’s no denying the talents of director Domee Shi (Oscar winner for the 2018 animated short “Bao”) and the infectious, energetic performances of the voice cast, particularly Rosalie Chiang as Meilin. The problems are mostly with the script, which often requires Meilin to be almost irritatingly obnoxious.

Frame by frame, ’71 is one of those intense war thrillers where you know it’s fiction, you know it’s not a documentary, and yet every performance and every conflict feels true to the history and the events of the time.

This is a time capsule — an expertly crafted time capsule — of an astonishing career.

This truly IS must-see cinema — one of the most visually striking films you’ll ever see, featuring magnificent performances from the two leads.

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.

There’s not a single false, “actor-y” note in Bening’s work. It is a master class in nuanced acting, and it is deserving of an Academy Award.

Poker Face has a lean, cool look, and there are some effective dramatic moments, mostly due to the weight-of-the-old weariness in Crowe’s powerful performance. Unfortunately, Paul Tassone’s over-the-top theatrics as the main villain border on the cartoonish, as the psychological gamesmanship gives way to standard action movie stuff, and the cards and the chips have long been forgotten.

One Night in Miami is filled with profoundly impactful exchanges, and a sprinkling of edgy, comedic observations.

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

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

In Gabe Polsky’s Red Army, the Iron Curtain surrounding the Soviet dynasty is pulled back to reveal an immensely effective but dehumanizing machine in which hockey served as an important propaganda tool, resulting in some of the most impressive teams ever to take the ice.

This is a love letter to journalistic bravery and to the First Amendment, and it is the best movie about newspapers since “All the President’s Men.”

Writer-director Cooper (Crazy Heart, Out of the Furnace, Hostiles) is an enormously gifted storyteller who infuses nearly every moment of this movie with a sense of despair and hopelessness, as some genuinely goodhearted but in most cases deeply damaged souls struggle mightily to battle a mythical, flesh-eating creature from the deep woods while also dealing with real-world trauma that’s equally frightening.

More times than not, The Benefactor takes the less interesting fork in the road.

The formula has rarely been mined to such resounding success. This is one of the funniest movies of the year AND one of the most romantic movies as well.

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.

Thanks to a charismatic, natural performance from star-in-the-making Michael B. Jordan, a script from writer-director Ryan Coogler that expertly navigates paying tribute to the franchise while creating an effective stand-alone film and fine work from Stallone...Creed is a terrific addition to the “Rocky” canon.

Beyond the product placement, Marry Me is a high-concept “elevator pitch” movie that is set in present day but feels like a relic of the mid-1990s.

Toni Morrison is an absolutely beautiful wordsmith and a beautiful force on multiple fronts, and if this documentary is an unabashed love letter to her life and work, I say: Why. Not.

With Powell and Arjona sizzling as the most electric romantic pairing of the year so far, “Hit Man” is pure escapist early summer fun.

Ghostlight becomes a love letter to the power of theater, to the power of the timeless written word, to move us, to make us feel, to change us.

Serkis is brilliant and memorable and sometimes absolutely heartbreaking as Caesar. The supporting players excel, with each getting a moment or two in the sun.

It’s one of the best movies of the year and one of the truest portrayals I’ve ever seen about troubled teens and the people who dedicate their lives to trying to help them.

Mr. Henson left behind a body of work that continues to endure today, but a great deal of his legacy remains on Sesame Street, and this film tells us exactly how he and everyone else got there.

For about an hour, The Lobster is pure absurdist greatness, brimming with pitch-black shock humor and big, wild ideas. The second half of the film isn’t nearly as imaginative and startling, but I walked out of the screening with the surefire knowledge I wouldn’t soon shake off its most inspired sequences.

A Quiet Place doesn’t have the pin-you-to-your-seat originality of “Get Out,” or the psychological depth and pure scare impact of “Lights Out” or the wall-to-wall intensity of “Don’t Breathe,” but it is one of the smarter and more involving horror films of the last few years.

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.

This is one of those movies where it looks like the immensely appealing cast had as much fun making the film as we have watching it — especially because so many of these familiar faces are playing against type.

Here is the best American movie of the year so far.

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.

It’s a rustic, poetic, occasionally funny, sometimes heartbreaking and wonderfully strange and memorable character study of a man who is in such tremendous pain he had to retreat from the world.

Marjorie Prime sounds like the title of a British miniseries, but is in fact one of the strangest, most disturbing and most thought-provoking films of 2017.

As can be said of most Apple products, it’s a wonder to behold — despite a few irritating glitches.

A stunningly wrong-footed journey that begins with an attempt at bittersweet magic and ends on a series of sour and increasingly dopey notes.

Although at times overly talky, The Holdovers on balance is a charming and smart comedy/drama that is set in 1970 and actually looks like it was made in 1970, from the scratchy opening titles through the grainy-looking visuals, which were achieved through a combination of old school lenses and digital post-production magic. Hal Ashby (“Harold and Maude,” “The Last Detail”) would have been proud.

Director Lee and the team of writers have created an immersive, violent and sometimes shocking tapestry that plays out like “Deer Hunter” meets “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” with a steady undercurrent of subtle and not-so-subtle social and political commentary.

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.

It’s a tribute to the amazing and fantastically perplexing and singularly mind-blowing Hulu film “In & of Itself” that even though a few of the feats performed by magician/actor/storyteller/performance artist Derek DelGaudio in his one man-show could be explained away by the use of special effects (which DelGaudio does NOT employ, as far as we can tell), most of it just seems ... Magical.

Directed by David Yates, who has spent most of the last two decades helming “Harry Potter” movies and prequels and might not be the best fit for this material, Pain Hustlers aims to be a fast-paced, raucous, blunt and slick work a la “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “The Big Short,” but winds up caught between the worlds of breezy satire and hard-hitting expose.

Cleaner is “Die Hard,” just with different people.

Even as Greengrass’ signature kinetic style renders us nearly seasick and emotionally spent from the action, it’s the work of Tom Hanks that makes this film unforgettable.

A Hero runs a bit long at 127 minutes and is at times frustratingly ambiguous, but Farhadi has delivered another insightful slice of life and Amir Jadidi turns in a remarkably intriguing performance as the never quite heroic Rahim.

The Northman is often insanely over the top and there are moments when it feels as if Eggers could maybe ease his foot off the pyrotechnic pedals, but still, this is one of the most strikingly original and brutally effective movies of the year so far.

Animals is a stark, brilliant, uncompromising, beautifully acted piece of work that deserves to be mentioned with “Panic in Needle Park” and “Requiem for a Dream” as a cautionary tale about drug addiction that doesn’t glamorize but also steers clear of proselytizing.

It’s an unusual mix of big-picture issues, grindhouse pulp and pure, rough entertainment, bolstered by one of the better ensemble casts of the year. This movie is not, um, fussing around.

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.

In a way (and maybe it was a conscious choice), some of Almereyda’s flourishes mirror Milgram’s flamboyance — but in both cases, when you have such a provocative foundation and such rich material to work with, pushing it to the next level isn’t necessarily the best choice.

Mass feels like a staged play brought to the cinema, with unobtrusive camerawork that gives us the feeling of eavesdropping on this intense and emotional and hopefully cathartic gathering.

Whenever Pacific Rim Uprising gives itself the chance to do something fresh or unique or original, it passes up that opportunity to embrace the cliché.

I’m not entirely convinced the ending is the perfect landing to everything that transpired before, but Arrival is not a linear adventure of the mind, and it is a film probably best seen twice.

Indeed Get a Job is an uneven, strange little movie with a hit-and-miss screenplay, some distractingly weird camera angles and a few subplots that never should have seen the light of day (or the dark of theater), but it also has an infectious charm, some genuinely funny set pieces and winning performances throughout.

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.

Coco is full of life, especially when we’re hanging out the with the dead.

Admission has some sublime moments, most of them involving Fey and Rudd dancing around their inevitable romance. The problem is in the foundation.

Spielberg has taken an important but largely forgotten and hardly action-packed slice of the Cold War and turned it into a gripping character study and thriller that feels a bit like a John Le Carre adaptation if Frank Capra were at the controls.

Foxcatcher is a disturbing and memorable film.

Sometimes you see a play and you can imagine it being a movie. Sometimes you see a small movie like this, and you can imagine it working better as an intimate stage play.

Portman’s performance carries the day.

Through a treasure trove of archival footage, interviews with former backup singers and songwriters and other associates of Tina’s, as well as a series of interviews filmed with Turner (who is now 81) at her Shangri-La-esque chateau in Zurich, Tina is must-see for longtime fans and, perhaps more important, millennials who might not grasp just how much of an influence Tina Turner has been on generations of performers — regardless of gender.

In writer-director Cord Jefferson’s timely and sharp and subversively funny “American Fiction,” Wright is accorded the relatively rare opportunity to take the lead, and he delivers a richly layered performance that reminds us he’s one of the best actors of his generation. It’s a joy to watch.

A small and warmhearted gem starring one of our finest veteran actors in a well-crafted and emotionally involving remake of a film about a widowed curmudgeon who begins to grow and change after experiencing some major life setbacks.

It is a ridiculously entertaining (and often just plain ridiculous) monster-robot movie that plays like a gigantic version of that “Rock ’Em, Sock ’Em Robots” game from the 1960s, combined with the cheesy wonderfulness (or should it be wonderful cheesiness?) of black-and-white Japanese monster movies from the 1950s.

This is an unforgettable dance with the devil.

It’s impossible to fathom how writer-director Adam McKay has turned this material into one of the funniest and yet most sobering, not to mention one of the most entertaining movies of 2015.

Even with a terminally ill teenage son character, a pill-popping absentee mother and a crotchety grandpa character, The Forger is consistently ineffective as a sentimental tearjerker — and an even bigger failure as a heist movie.

While the overall tone of Moana is uplifting, the story makes room for some pretty deep insights.

This is one of the best movies of the year, featuring two of our finest actors at the top of their game. Wright’s lead performance is worthy of major award nominations, as is O’Connor’s supporting work.