Richard Roeper

We’ve seen this movie before, or at least versions of this story — but thanks to Hall’s well-crafted script and sure-handed direction, and the heartbreakingly effective performances from Teller and the supporting players, this is a powerful and valuable addition to the coming-home war movie canon.

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

David Fincher’s The Killer is a meticulously crafted and masterfully rendered film about a meticulous and masterful assassin, and with Michael Fassbender in the lead role, you just couldn’t have a better triangle of material, director and actor.

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

The filmed version of the Broadway sensation makes for immersive, exhilarating, magnificent cinema, almost sure to thrill first-time viewers as well as diehard fanatics who have seen the stage production once or twice or a dozen times.

With spectacularly haunting original songs by Robert Levon Been of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club accompanying the journey, Schrader expertly captures the equal parts exciting and depressing worlds of casinos, where the slots are always jangling and the bar is always open.

Director Sheridan and his co-writers Charles Leavitt and Michael Koryta (whose novel is the source material) have fashioned a thoroughly engrossing tale filled with memorable characters, dryly funny dialogue and show-stopping, often brutal confrontations in which the weapon of choice varies from semi-automatic firearms to a deer rifle to a fire extinguisher to handguns to an axe to bare fists, depending on the circumstances.

This is the best movie of the year so far and one of the best films of the decade.

As the film takes deeper and darker turns, it also becomes something special, something unflinchingly honest, something that will punch you in the gut AND touch your heart.

This is an unforgettable dance with the devil.

Christopher Nolan’s three-hour historical biopic Oppenheimer is a gorgeously photographed, brilliantly acted, masterfully edited and thoroughly engrossing epic that instantly takes its place among the finest films of this decade — an old-fashioned yet cutting-edge work that should resonate with film scholars and popcorn-toting mainstream movie lovers for years and decades to come.

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.

Working from a script by Paul Webb and aided by stark, beautiful, sometimes startlingly realistic cinematography by Bradford Young, DuVernay has delivered a powerful and moving portrait of Martin Luther King Jr.

This is a great documentary about a great man.

American Hustle is the best time I’ve had at the movies all year, a movie so perfectly executed, such wall-to-wall fun, so filled with the joy of expert filmmaking on every level I can’t imagine anyone who loves movies not loving THIS movie.

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

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

Boseman is in utter command of his character. It is a beautiful, sad, wonderful, bittersweet thing to behold.

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.

Shot in beautiful tones of black and white (and silver and gray), Nebraska is steeped in nostalgia, regret and bittersweet moments. Yet it’s also a pitch-perfect cinematic poem about the times we live in.

Son of Saul is lasting work of art — difficult to watch, impossible to forget.

Unflinchingly directed by Steve McQueen, led by Ejiofor’s magnificent work, 12 Years a Slave is what we talk about when we talk about greatness in film.

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.

Nolan has crafted a tight, gripping, deeply involving and unforgettable film that ranks about the best war movies of the decade.

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.

What beauty. What brutality. What madness.

Martin Scorsese’s true-crime American period piece Killers of the Flower Moon is a big, sweeping, glorious, heartbreaking, insightful, powerful and unforgettable epic that serves notice the 80-year-old Scorsese remains at the forefront of innovative and provocative filmmaking.

Even though it is a highly stylized, stop-motion animation film featuring puppet-like human characters, it is a pinpoint-accurate encapsulation of some of the most banal AND some of the most exhilarating moments virtually all of us have experienced at some point in our lives.