Richard Roeper

While this period-piece, existential fantasy adventure doesn’t rank with the absolute finest entries in Miyazaki’s iconic canon, it’s still one of the most inventive and creative films, animated or otherwise, of the year.

It’s a period piece with a wink. It’s also funny as hell and a true big-screen treat.

Even with the occasional stumble and that self-indulgent running time, this is a unique and at times brilliant piece of work.

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.

The gifted director Kelly Reichardt (“Old Joy,” “Wendy and Lucy,” “Meeks Cutoff”) adds to her impressive canon of minimalist, Oregon-set treasures with an immersive and deceptively simple and uniquely original frontier morality play set in the unforgiving Pacific Northwest of the 1820s.

It’s all perfectly, wonderfully, fantastically crazy. Amidst all those ingenious, power-packed road warrior sequences, Fury Road contains a surprising amount of depth and character development.

Part psychological thriller, part moody thought piece, part romance, “All of Us Strangers” feels like a feature-length update of a classic “Twilight Zone” episode, and we mean that as a high compliment.

Anderson shoots and paces Phantom Thread almost like a 1950s mystery, and there ARE some dark elements of intrigue in the story — but this is not a Hitchcockian tale of lust and betrayal and murder. It’s a fascinating examination of an obsessive-compulsive, maddeningly self-centered, magnificently talented man .

Much of The Souvenir: Part II is about the collaborative process of creating a movie, and how filmmakers can use their art to tell their stories — not as the stories happened, but how they wished or imagined they could have happened.

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

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.

What a remarkable performance by Laura Dern. It’s a beautifully nuanced portrayal of a smart, accomplished, independent woman who finds the courage and strength to confront the past — and to understand that the demons poking at her subconscious all this time were not of her own making.

Paterson is a fable, brimming with symbolism and inside literary references and nods to playwrights and authors from decades and centuries gone by — but it’s also authentic and plausible, in its own weird way.

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.

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.

The editing is brilliant, as we jump back in forth in time, seeing these three as kids and then as young men, marveling at their skateboard moves and smiling at their rebellious spirit, and wondering if there’s any hope for any of them given all they’ve been through in their young lives.

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.

Writer-director Chung and the production team have delivered a sepia-toned memory piece that never sugarcoats the culture clashes in and out of the Yi household and yet remains hopeful in tone throughout, reminding us of the power of family and of the Great American Dream.

This is a viewing experience to be treasured. It is one of the very best films of 2019.

De Niro infuses Costello with a kind of avuncular charm, while Genovese has the fiery temper and paranoid fury to match Jake La Motta in “Raging Bull.” It’s a privilege to witness one of the best actors of all time, still at the top of his game.

With Campion’s native New Zealand standing in magnificently for early 20th century Big Sky Country, The Power of the Dog is a study in contrasts between the almost surreal beauty of the mountains and the sky and the vast land, and the nasty, petty and often unspeakably harsh manner in which people will treat one another — even their own kin.

It’s a brilliant slice of life.

As a record of a kind of everyday Parisian life, the film is superb. We think of the cafes of Paris as hotbeds of fiery philosophical debate, but more often, I imagine, they are just like this: people talking, flirting, posing, drinking, smoking, telling the truth and lying, while waiting to see if real life will ever begin.

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.

From start to finish, director/co-writer Armando Iannucci (creator of HBO’s brilliant “Veep”) delivers an audacious and insightful and ridiculous and hilarious send-up that reminded me of the classic Monty Python films of the 1970s and 1980s.

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.

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.

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.