Roger Moore

Here's a documentary so slick, novel, touching and outrageous that your first thought might be "This has to be fake."

A feather-light meringue of a romance to remind us there will always be a Paris.

Von Sydow paints a compelling and very entertaining portrait of a showbiz original who found a niche, made his mark with an act famed for its shock value, and yet dabbled in most every musical style to come along after he broke big because he could and would try anything.

This “Jungle Book” could give remakes a good name.

Emily the Criminal is the face and voice of not just the summer, but an American generation right now, looking for a break and desperate enough to cross the line if they don’t get it.

Samuel’s film is an embarassment of acting riches, laugh-out-loud funny when it wants to be and thought-provoking when it dares to be.

Hopkins, Colman, Williams, Sewell and Poots give us an eyeful and and earful of a fate awaiting far too many of us in this quietly gripping and intimate drama.

Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is a movie of its moment, a brilliant bauble of female empowerment, scathing satire and genuine wit.

The truth is far stranger. And Maloof and Siskel reveal it only gradually. They structure their documentary thusly — negatives found, fame and acclaim follow, a post-mortem triumph. And then the REAL Vivian starts to emerge.

Ronnie’s is a gloriously musical celebration of the club where everyone from Dizzy to Sonny, Chet to Miles, Sarah and Ella to Carmen and Cleo held forth.

The best “wake up” call documentary of 2020, a movie filled with warnings discussed by the very smart women sounding those warnings, the very smart women doing something about this very real threat.

This quietly riveting Cannes Golden Camera Award (Best First Feature) nominee introduces a filmmaker with a great eye and almost serene patience, and an early mastery of this genre should he choose to make it his specialty.

The first third is brisk and witty, the middle third gloomy and the finale of Part 1 not so much a cliffhanger as a grim, inspiring tease, a masterly build-up to put "I can't wait for part 2" on every Muggles' lips.

In the hands of Tom Hanks and his “Captain Phillips” director, Paul Greengrass, this adaptation of a Paulette Jiles novel becomes a parable for these “troubled times,” a story of race and unrepentant racism, men of violence who won’t give up that violence and the power of a free press to rectify that.

A disarmingly charming documentary about Green’s walk, the people he meets and oh, the things he’s seen.

White finds ways for Stiller to surprise us, and the veteran actor manages to hide his cards in scene after scene, letting us keep up with him, but never ever allowing us to guess where his emotions will take him next, and what form they’ll take.

The best faith-based film ever made, an uplifting, entertaining and wonderfully-acted account of surfer Bethany Hamilton's life before and after a shark bit her arm off in the waters off her favorite Hawaiian beach.

Arrival puts Villeneuve, who first came to attention with “Incendies,” firmly in the first rank of filmmakers, a director capable of not just entertaining, but challenging. And the wide-eyed Adams, near the top of the list of the best actresses never to win an Oscar, delivers another riveting, melancholy and life-affirming performance that threatens to change that, maybe as soon as next February.

A Great American Play becomes a Great American Film with Fences, Denzel Washington’s letter-faithful adaptation of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize winning masterpiece.

Jones tells this story with care and a lack of hurry, a pace to fit an age when people traveled no faster than two mules pulling a wagon could carry them. It’s “True Grit” and “The African Queen” with a moment of “Lawrence of Arabia,” period-perfect and a total immersion in this world.

Saoirse Ronan shines in the title role, a wily, physically-fit and lethal girl.

Ford, in a performance as affecting as any he’s ever given, lifts this romance in ways we never see coming.

If you're looking for a filmmaker to document, for all of humanity, "one of the greatest discoveries in the history of human culture," the great Werner Herzog is your guy.

Vivian makes for a fascinating account of the psychological scars of a divorce, born mainly by their reserved, internalizing mother but rippling through to the daughters.

Bennett impresses, first scene to last.

With Win Win, McCarthy has found his emotional sweet spot, a sweet and complex story to set it in and the perfect title for it.

Like the master big screen poker player than he is, Roth never ever shows his cards.

It’s the genius of this genial, formulaic coming-of-age comedy that Lady Bird never seems too broadly drawn. We’ve known this kid, gone to school with her, watched her reinventions continue straight on into college.

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl isn’t deep. But this sure-to-be-a-crowd-pleasing laugher/weeper reminds us that there’s nothing wrong with a romantic comedy that reaches for inspiring and cathartic between the laughs.

It’s damning in its depiction of a culture “willing to look the other way so long as he was making a lot of people a lot of money.”

It is Carrey, turning his patented rubber-faced, rubber-voiced shtick loose on a role with heart, substance and entertainment value, who makes this romantic farce a movie too good to sit on any studio's shelf.

A terrific heist picture.

I, Tonya flirts with mocking its characters, but Janney and especially Robbie counter that with their unblinking, “not on my watch” performances.

I like the way Moss and McBaine set us up to accept stereotypes — about teenage girls and their priorities, about conservative Emily or confident liberal Faith — and then upend those expectations.

Sicario is a conventionally unconventional drug wars thriller, a well-cast, breathlessly executed peek into the heart of a Trumpian nightmare of Mexican cartels which kill at will on either side of an embattled border.

In Oppenheimer, Nolan tells an epic story tacked onto an introspective, multi-faceted life, a hero in the Greek tragedy mold — brilliant and focused, but a man who knew his flaws and conflicted enough about his work that he all but accepted his fate as just deserts for all the “blood on my hands.”

One of the best pictures of the year and the best movie of the summer.

The performances and Greengrass’s way with action immerse us and make Captain Phillips a tight, taut,edge of your seat thriller even if you remember the ending.

There are people, powerful people, who don't want old cases dug up. It's a tribute to the story's construction that the mystery only deepens, the more Benjamin digs.

That makes Sarah's Key that rare Holocaust tale that punches through the cobwebs of history and its dry, inhuman statistics, and brings that terrible past to life.

Repellently violent, intimately epic and powered by a performance so absorbed, hurt, confused and just “out there” that it makes everything that’s come before it in the genre just a vamp in tights, Joker turns every previous film in this justly maligned genre into “just a cartoon.” Damn. There’s an Oscar in this.

That message, this script and these actors make Rabbit Hole one of the best films of 2010.

Dafoe, high on the list of best actors never to win an Oscar, was at his very best in this portrait of a loner who starts to take stock of “the life” at 40.

Joe is the movie that will make you remember how good Nicolas Cage once was and can be again.

Writer-director Roy shows himself to be a De Sica, Spike Lee or Cuaron of the Philippines, an artist who points his camera at his world and makes us see it the way he does.

The dialogue is hard-bitten and Mamet-sharp.

McQueen makes the viewer work towards understanding the themes and subtexts of these films. He gloriously recreates the jaw-dropping delight the bullied, racially-taunted kid experiences the first time he sees the shops and colorfully-attired street life of “his” people on moving day.

Social Dilemma is a good film, probably too little too late to play a role in saving democracy or healing a nation so divided half of it won’t do the most basic things to stop a pandemic. But there you are, and there we are.

The film, which stretches history to its breaking point in some cases and finds deeper truth in others, looks at how the expediencies of war and the nature of tit-for-tat guerilla conflicts dehumanizes even the humane.

Every scene is magical, every image a work of art in Song of the Sea.

We should all be so lucky as to live in a world designed, peopled and manipulated by Wes Anderson. His latest film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, is a dark, daft and deft triumph of design details.

Moneyball is a thinking person's baseball movie, and a baseball fan's thinking movie.

An exquisite character study in grief.

Davis and Spencer give faces and fully-fleshed out lives to women who must have been more than what they did for a living as The Help.

Belfast is a moving, tense and yet often lightly comical experience. And as one of the best pictures of 2021 ends, you remember how good a filmmaker Branagh can be, and marvel at how he was able to pack all this warmth, wit and trauma into just 100 minutes.

A terrific film, not as moving or damning as this year’s Amy Winehouse expose, but a warm piece of cinematic scholarship.

Wartime survival epics are a rich genre unto themselves, and with The 12th Man, Norway has one that ranks among the very best.

Doctor Strange doesn’t break formula, and no, they will never ever be able to surprise us with his origin story again. It’s still head, shoulders and cloak above so much of what’s being churned out the seemingly bottomless vaults of Marvel and DC Comics.

This is as thorough a take-down of a business and its practices as you’re likely to ever see.

Father Soldier Son can be compared to the controversial Vietnam era doc “Hearts and Minds,” as well as the sober WWII’s aftermath “The Best Years of Our Lives,”in its focus, its intimacy and its politics.

It’s a fascinating and utterly engrossing film, immersing us in this world, fretting over what we can see coming before the principals do, and relating it to the xenophobia and bigotry out in the open in America, just as it is in backward, rural Transylvania.

Thanks to Banderas and his Corinthian leather purr and writers who know how to use it, "Puss" is the best animated film of 2011.

Rye Lane has all the ingredients of a classic romantic comedy. All of them.

It is Sorkin’s film’s sense of “right now” that sticks with you.

The magic in the film is in the actors. Only somebody who has stripped himself emotionally bare for the camera could achieve the level of performance that Goldwyn gets from every single SAG member on this set.

Like many a first film from someone experienced in episodic TV, Babyteeth gives us a lot to chew on. But in this case, that turns it into the very best kind of emotional roller-coaster, one that wins its laughs and earns its tears. In a year without blockbusters, this Aussie indie marvel stands out — one of the best films of the summer.

Henson didn’t live long. But his restless mind and energy were devoted to sweet-natured and sometimes challenging entertainment — he never wanted to be a “children’s puppeteer” — that he produced with almost every waking second. “Idea Man” reminds us that the ideas he explored live on after him.

Ptacek, as she was in the short, makes a great foil. And the addition of Rossum and Perlman to the cast adds pathos and paranoia, guilt and menace.

Bræin Hovig and Skarsgård take us into their confidence as they make these choices, decisions, promises and compromises. The wonder of Hope is how much of that they do without dialogue, just with a look, a gesture, a silent scream of despair or teeth grinding in resignation.

It strips away the myth and icon and reveals Jobs for the hustler-huckster he was, just a smooth, smiling turtleneck, trying to sell us something. In many ways, his film makes all other Jobs movies unnecessary.

Goswami’s understated performance drives this brilliant debut feature, a sometimes silent observer who can barely register shock at some of what she sees and experiences.

Gosling caps an already-distinguished career with an unfussy performance that lets us see behind the stone-faced public mask this most enigmatic American hero wore, from the moment he became a public figure to the very end of his days.

In a cinema recently overrun with combat documentaries, Marshall Curry’s Point and Shoot manages a first. Here’s a film that captures the romance of war amongst today’s young and testosterone-fueled. Want to know why young men from all over the world have flocked to fight for ISIS? Point and Shoot explains it.

It’s more an instant cult film than a picture with any prayer of reaching millions.

The intimacy of the story and the black and white cinematography keep Dear Comrades! from crossing into “epic.” Konchalovskiy is more interested in reminding people of the violence their neighbors, soldiers, police and leaders are capable of, how drab and circumscribed life was back then.

A leg up on the first “Trip,” an altogether more delightful vacation with two blokes who might wear us and each other out along the way. But then, that’s half the fun.

Most credit goes to Coogan for the success of this odd coupling.

We’re taken back to a naive era, when the boundaries of “smut” were narrower, when even the images of an unlikely “adult” star (she never did sex films or “real” porn) seem now like good, clean fun.

And the viewer is left with one inescapable conclusion. Conservatives further to the right than Buckley could ever have dreamed control Congress. And gays, like Vidal, can get married. They both won.

Lion is moving and inspiring.

Warm, intimate and brittle, Loving is the most important movie of 2016, and one of the best.

If you see just one “Hitler” film this year, make it this one.

Is it better to have loved and lost than never to have logged on at all?

Capital in the 21st Century, in documentary form, is an almost overwhelming alarm bell, a call to action and a fact, chart, animated illustration-and-quote-stuffed history of “how we got here” in the first place.

But Jones, luminous in support in such dramas as “The Theory of Everything,” carries this picture, delivers thrilling arguments thrillingly and puts a warm, human face on a legal figure who has become liberalism’s Obi Wan Kenobi, “our only hope.”

One thing that separates this film from similar movies (Paul Verhoeven’s “Black Book” and “Soldier of Orange” are two of the best) is that it takes the story past the German surrender and into the murky waters of post-Occupation collaborator-hunting.

Puce finds fear and a disheartening, misdirected fury in all this, and pathos in its resolution. And she does it in a subtle but provocative drama that may not make the Best International Feature Oscar field, but is still one of the best pictures of 2021.

As with her best films, Coppola is utterly at ease in this milieu and it shows.

It’s one of those limited-release films that few will see, with acting so compact and contained that everyone who loves great screen performances should. Weisz, Firth and Thewlis give us understated, unfussy performances that lift The Mercy, a wonderfully tragic story with a hint of magnificence about it.

Elvis works, often brilliantly and always beautifully, a musical bio-pic that’s a little bit “Ray” and “I Walk the Line,” with hints of “Get on Up” “Judy” and “Rocket Man.” It can be frustrating, like the man himself. And who’s to say if its appeal won’t be limited generationally, racially or geographically?

Dapolito gets at what Radner represented to those who followed her, and what Radner recognized in herself, that play-acting comedy let her “be prettier than I was, be people I could never be…Comedy allowed me to be in control of my situation.”

I Am Love is a cinematic orgy, a sensual Italian feast of food, sex, guilt and grief. An intimate, quiet and even slow movie, its subtle shadings veil turbulent emotions.

A scenic, poetic, striking and moving thriller about Sicily’s “problem” viewed through the lens of youth and young love. The spooky overtones make its title an honest one, even if the frights are few. This is a “Ghost Story” well worth telling, and seeing.

Swiss director and co-writer Oliver Rihs (“Ready, Steady Ommm!”) takes a serious step into the big time with this gripping saga, a story that begins escape-artist jaunty and occasionally finds its way back there even as the story turns grimmer and the color palette progressively greyer.

It’s a film that flirts with cloying, here and there — especially at the end. But it reminds us, even before that U.N. recognition becomes official, that there’ll always be an England, that English manners survive, and there’ll always be a Maggie Smith, imperious, hilarious and glorious in that wonderful third act her life and career have given her.

If it isn’t as decorous and deft as the Jane Austen romances of an earlier literary (and cinematic) age, the longing is still there in a story that feels more lived-in, brutish and realistic.

Scouts Honor: The Secret Files of the Boy Scouts of America, delivers just what its title promises, apalling accounts of decade after decade of minimizing horrific abuse by serial boy-rapists, a scandal so big it “dwarfs” the “Catholic Church and Baptist Church” scandals, as one expert testifies in the film.

If Bigelow cannot quite bring herself to gracefully end her difficult, challenging movie — which changed studios and finds itself parked in theaters on the tail end of popcorn picture season — it’s because it’s too important a subject to risk shortchanging, too pointed a message to risk letting audiences miss.