Richard Roeper

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.