Richard Roeper

That’s when It Comes at Night is most effective — when we’re trying to figure out these characters and what exactly is creating those weird noises and jolting thumps beyond the locked doors.

Somewhere inside the utterly unnecessary, bloated running time for John Wick IV, there’s a brilliant, stripped-down, 100-minute classic of a drive-in action film, where the admittedly breathtaking action sequences don’t grind on for so long that they actually become borderline tedious.

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.

As you’d expect from this cast, the performances are uniformly excellent, with the standout being Jayne Houdyshell, the only holdover from the Broadway production, who reprises her Tony-winning role and is mesmerizing as an ordinary woman with an extraordinary capacity to get through the night, the week, the year, the life, she’s been given.

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.

Directed by David Tedeschi and produced by a team including Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and Martin Scorsese, “Beatles ’64” could have been subtitled, “Everything Old Is New Again.”

Bujalski’s script is smarter and much weirder (in a good way) than the standard romantic comedy. His characters are funny without ever trying to be funny.

This is the type of adventure that transports you to a world so exotic and lush and mysterious and dangerous, it feels as if we’re on a different planet.

I’m not prepared to instantly label Avengers: Endgame as the best of the 23 Marvel Universe movies to date, but it’s a serious contender for the crown and it’s the undisputed champion when it comes to emotional punch.

This is a well-photographed and rousing tale, with the “Stranger Things” star doing fine work as the fiercely determined heroine, and a deep and talented group of familiar faces in key supporting roles.

The People’s Joker pushes boundaries and questions the status quo, but it also works as a sincerely told origins story for Joker the Harlequin.

If you’re going to go all-in with the gorgeous and chilling and sometimes ludicrous Ex Machina, if you’re going to buy into the lofty debates and the wiggy humor and the borderline misogynistic notion of the perfect woman, you’ll have to check your logic at the ticket counter.

Zootopia is brimming with silly, slapstick humor and terrific one-liners — and yes, some simple yet valuable lessons about tolerance and prejudice and learning to embrace our differences. There’s nothing wrong with a lesson or two when those lessons are packaged within such a great and memorable film.

The cinematography, the set design, the all-important soundtrack, the editing: all first-rate. This is one smart chiller.

With Rolling Thunder Revue, Scorsese remains at the top of his game, and is the perfect filmmaker to tell the story of a unique chapter in the life and career of a fellow creative legend.

Director Garret Price (“Woodstock 99"), who is clearly a fan of the music, nimbly weaves in current-time interviews with Christopher Cross, Kenny Loggins and various session greats and producers with archival footage.

It’s funny as hell in a drive-in splatter movie kind of way, smart and insightful and respectful in its depiction of modern-day teens, brimming with sly and satiric social commentary — and legitimately profound.

Catherine Hardwicke’s sharply drawn, slow-simmer domestic drama Prisoner’s Daughter has the cool vibe of an indie film from a generation ago, from the lived-in look of the Vegas sets to the authentic performances of the terrific cast.

This movie is bat-bleep crazy even as it makes solid and thought-provoking arguments. It veers all over the place, at times scoring major laughs, on occasion working quite well as a social satire and a screwball romance. But it also falters with some running jokes that stumble and collapse, and a few cringe-inducing scenes that aim for provocation but seem forced.

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.

The satire becomes almost numbingly obvious over the far too long running time of 140 minutes, and with all due appreciation for the strong work by the leads, the horrifically impressive VFX and prosthetics, and a few moments of pitch-black humor, we exit the film feeling more pummeled than enlightened.

Logan Lucky is great fun and one of the most purely entertaining movies of the year.

All well and fine, but it’s a dark thrill to see the return of the fantastically gnarly, nasty, disgusting, humorless and utterly post-human vampire — the O.G. Dracula — in the gothic horror feast that is Robert Eggers’ “Nosferatu.”

The climbing sequences, the storms, the drama of broken equipment and nearly broken men — all great stuff, made even more compelling because the film does a wonderful job of letting us get to know and like each of the three adventurers.

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.

In Erica Tremblay’s lean and quietly powerful “Fancy Dance,” a 13-year-old girl named Roki can scarcely contain her excitement about an upcoming dance, but the circumstances in this story couldn’t be more different than those old-school high school fairy tales.

Highly entertaining high camp.

In Till, we see how Emmett had music in his heart and a bounce in his step and was just beginning his life’s path when monsters came calling in the middle of the night — and we’re once again filled with admiration for Mamie Till-Mobley, who made sure we never forgot.