Roger Moore

The cast and filmmakers have made a very good movie about a very tough subject. and somehow have managed to never cop out once by showing us easy answers.

It is the funniest film you’ll see this year.

It’s fair to say that this “Charlie Brown Christmas” length film is pretty much an instant classic.

“Raise Hell” is a movie of laughs, because nobody ever popped the balloons of political pretense like the hard-drinking, chain-smoking six-foot permanent “outsider” Molly Ivins.

Great filmmakers remember that cinema is a visual medium, that you never say something with dialogue when you can show it with an image. That’s how Clio Barnard tells the story of Dark River, a quiet, tense and beautiful tale of brothers and sisters and abuse set in Yorkshire sheep country.

Young Onata Aprile makes Maisie a passive wonder, a sweetly poker-faced, nonjudgmental and hopeful child, even as she’s being ditched at bars, forgotten at school or passed back and forth like a prize, or a bad penny.

It’s a subtle and subtly-acted story told at a slow simmer, adding twists even as it takes an inevitable turn towards tragic. Many a transgender tale is cast in operatically-tragic terms. But here, anything less would feel like a cheat.

[A] sturdy, gripping film.

The situations are documentary-real, the acting barely feels like “acting” at all as we invest in the story, feel its pain and fear its outcome.

Witty, warm and wistful and in just the right proportions, Spectacular is the best-acted film of the summer.

Filmmakers Lowell and Mortimer were there to document every excruciating inch, with stunning Yosemite scenery as their backdrop for almost every striking frame. The film they got out of it is, like the experience they were documenting, one of a kind.

Thanks to Oldman’s unerring portrayal of a deeply flawed man rising to face a crisis, and inspiring a nation to rise with him, it’s an equally worthy reminder that there have been bad times before today’s, and that people, great and small, saw them through.

It’s a terrific film, much more reflective than the tributes CNN whipped together right after Bourdain’s death

This is what filmed spectacle used to look like — a trip to a place or time most of us could never see.

The sweet, the comic and the tragic blend together most agreeably in the winsome French romance The Hedgehog.

BlackKklansman is the funniest Spike Lee movie in decades, a film of such wit, tension, passion and relevance that it is his most important work since “Malcolm X.”

For a fan, Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice is a lot more than a quick trip through her career and her life, even if it offers few deep insights into her psyche and to others might seem just an exercise in Boomer musical nostalgia.

To fans who know the tunes by heart, hearing their history is never less than thrilling. And if you’ve heard that line about “Swampers” and never new who they were, you should. They have been known to pick a song or two.

In these, America’s darkest days since the Vietnam War, Crip Camp is an inspiring, upbeat shaft of light and a sobering reminder that whatever conservatives want to say about the ’60s, every now and then, hippies changed America, and helped America change the world.

Sossai hasn’t made a movie that sentimentalizes alcoholism, but he has managed to suggest the mistakes, busted dreams, dashed hopes and futility of getting ahead or getting by in a barely-functioning democracy and permanently-rigged “market economy” that makes the bottle such an appealing escape.

Through Short’s American Songbook jazz, I knew about the place long before I ever visited New York. And Miele’s documentary lets us know it even better, even if we can’t afford the cheapest rooms (not head-spinningly expensive). That would be, of course, the “Harrison Ford Suite.”

Artistically, Get on Up rivals “Walk the Line,” with a lead performance on a par with the career-making turns of Angela Bassett (“What’s Love Got to Do With It?”) and Jamie Foxx (“Ray”). With this wonder of the summer, Boseman and Taylor deliver a piece of American cultural history every bit as important as the Jackie Robinson story, a story told with heart, humor, funk and soul.

The story takes a surprising turn midway through, a change in direction that deepens the experience for the viewer, making us culpable in at least part of the misery these two face.

Comical, colorful, wonderfully cast and beautifully animated.

The true story of a Korean diplomat kidnapped in civil war-torn Lebanon in the ’80s becomes the most exciting, most entertaining buddy picture in years —“Ransomed” — the best action pic of the summer.

They may not name the illness after him. But when the “tough son of a bitch” underwrites the research that ends it, you can be damned sure his name’ll be on the cure.

A Mexican-accented kids’ cartoon so colorful and unconventionally dazzling it almost reinvents the art form. As pretty as a just-punctured pinata, endlessly inventive, warm and traditional, it serves up Mexican culture in a riot of Mexican colors and mariachi-flavored music.

This magazine of a movie is something to be savored, a rarefied delight that’s intellectually aspirational, as the great magazines used to be. It rewards the well-read, the art observer, the film lover, the Francophile and the Wes Anderson fanatic.

Yalda: A Night of Forgiveness is a riveting and thoroughly engrossing satire of Iranian culture and the work-arounds built into a theocracy, ways of ignoring calls for reform and the shedding of “tradition.”

I was shocked at how emotional the film, covering familiar ground with a lot of familiar footage, could be.

Of all the gonzo-goofy comic book adaptations that embrace video gaming sensibilities, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is the gonzo-goofiest.

As he did with “The Dallas Buyers’ Club,” director Jean-Marc Vallée covers this inner and outer journey with a minimum of fuss. The flashbacks and their revelations, filling in the puzzle, are sparingly doled out. The stunning scenery Cheryl hikes through is barely noticed.

A swift and streamlined tragedy by the greatest playwright in the English language becomes a lean, quick and brutally brisk film in Coen’s hands.

Efira’s ability to play manipulative and nurturing, cunning and hurt, selfishly deceitful and vulnerable is impressive, and utterly necessary for the twists this script (by Barraud and Héléna Klotz) serves up.

The Drop is a simmering thriller from the writer who gave us “Mystic River” and “Gone, Baby Gone,” a tale heavy with the weight of violence we know is coming.

Bissell has made a film where the casting isn’t the only thing that’s “on-the-nose.” The message, where the film’s sympathies lie and its emphasis on the character with the bigger journey to make could earn it some “Green Book” styled blowback.

It all swirls together in a riot of color, action, deadpan gags and musical and martial arts mayhem, a kids’ movie that rushes by you so fast you won’t want to take a concession stand break.

Polley has taken a pointed, of-its-moment novel and turned it into an indictment and a plea for civil discourse in a call-to-arms moment.

Portman lets us feel the way her loss utterly empties life of meaning and purpose. But Chilean director Pablo Larrain (“The Club”) lets little John Jr. (Aiden and Brody Weinberg) provide the heart-wrenching release, just as he did back at that state funeral in 1963.

When you see the brutish incuriosity, the cowardly pack-mentality cruelty and utter disregard for “selflessness” and “compassion,” it’s hard not to see its North American analogs among the most self-serving, system-rigging raised-to-be-authoritarians among us. And pray that they devour each other rather than us.

Gay coming-of-age stories are common enough these days, but Moonlight finds a new perspective, a new setting and a compelling new filmmaking voice to tell that story. It’s one of the best pictures of the year.

It may be generic and inspiring TV movie subject matter, but Green immerses us in this world and punches up the limited horizons that face these characters.

Is The Lodge the most disturbing thriller of the year? Judas Priest, I hope so. Dark and despairing, grim and gripping, it’s not necessarily shocking. It doesn’t live or die on its “big twists.” But it gets in your head and messes around there. Just as it was designed to do. I can’t remember a horror movie that left me as gutted as this one.

Hudlin’s embracing film reminds us that there was a lot of history that unfolded around this one man, and a lot of change came about thanks to this one extraordinary life of achievement and humility, grace and principled defiance.

It’s a bracing, damning indictment of a world where women have no bodily autonomy wrapped in a visceral, on-the-lam chase thriller in which every man our heroine meets is not just an existential threat, but a real one.

Grim, gruesome and glorious.

“Battle” is is by turns serio-comic and chilling to the point of depressing.

Using archival footage, inventive animated recreations of incidents and chilling aerial smart-bomb views of air strikes as they happen, Moreh creates a simple yet elegantly damning film.

The film’s major revelations are not how hilarious, anarchic and charismatic the Muppets were and are. That’s been covered elsewhere. What’s fascinating here is remembering the lesser known figures who shaped the show that was to come.

There are scenes that will make your jaw drop, and moments that make your heart stop.

You want great action? Eschew the comic book movies and read a few subtitles. Escape from Mogadishu is in a league of its own this summer.

The shocked inability to focus on what one must do despite the pull of pretending, saying and repeating “it’ll all be over soon” is vividly recreated in this small-scale version of a larger scale tragedy to come.

The set-up may be "Burning Bed” melodramatic, but Foumbi never lets the film tumble into predictability. We see things almost wholly from Marie’s point of view, but get a sense of the human being inside her captor. The plot has its obvious contrivances, but they never take us out of the story and never dictate any predictable “Hollywood” turn.

Long, patient and chilling, it vividly captures a time in America and the feel of divided Berlin in the muted blues and greys that color our memories of that “duck and cover” age.

This performance reminds us that Bridges is that rare actor who has never had to make that apology. Crazy Heart lets him be every bit as grand as we’d hope him to be.

Compared to the gravitas of “The 49th Parallel” and “One of Our Aircraft is Missing,” and the strained metaphors of “A Canterbury Tale,” “I Know Where I’m Going” is downright fluffy, feather light, despite a harrowing peril-at-sea sequence that is as polished as anything from the filming tank/rear projection era in black and white film.

American Animals is a tense, taut sober and occasionally silly thriller that reminds us that the Caribbean Island at the end of the Hollywood heist is always a mirage.

In the best picture of 2015, Carey Mulligan is the stoic, long-suffering sweatshop worker radicalized into action.

Pike is magnificent in this part, giving us layers to the hard-drinking live-for-today chain-smoker who could be moved to tears, repeatedly, by the suffering she saw.

Amanda Knox may not change anybody’s mind. But it should.

As he types away, constantly interrupted, taking too little care of his health, exasperated by a dying Lexus or his sons’ addiction to “screens,” we marvel at the compulsion of the artist to make art, to leave a legacy not just to all of us, but to those living under his roof.

Chemistry is king. It's one reason the rom-com has long seemed like the toughest code for Hollywood to crack. But never underestimate the power of snappy, rapid-fire banter, the paving stones of the Hollywood road to romance.

Start to finish, it’s a delight.

It is Dafoe’s compact, internalized turn as the artist, letting us feel his pain rather than bellowing about it (see “Lust for Life” for that) that pulls us in and gets us as close to the artist as any film ever has. It’s glorious work, and a grand capstone to a fabulous career, with or without Oscar recognition.

This winning film wins you over without manipulation, without guile and without ulterior motives. If you can’t feel good about humanity after this one, you can’t feel good.

This is “The Florida Project” set in Pennsylvania, a memoir both brilliantly specific and depressingly universal.

I love the light, intensely likable lilt Whishaw (“Q” in the latest James Bond films) gives Paddington’s line-readings. You forget the bear is animated and that bears can’t talk, and your children won’t even need that much encouragement to suspend disbelief.

The Big Short becomes not just amusing and explanatory, a real tour de force for its fast-talking cast.

Clint Bentley’s debut feature film is an elegiac tribute to the lonely, dangerous and tenuous life of a jockey. Filmed in “magic hour” glow, with almost every scene a beautifully backlit postcard, Jockey makes a fine star vehicle for one of the finest character actors working today, Clifton Collins, Jr.

Movies about assassins (“Nine Hours to Rama,” “The Gandhi Murder”) rarely get this deeply into the life and conditions that inspire a political murder. “Incitement,” which swept last year’s Israeli Academy Awards and was Israel’s entry as “Best International Feature” for Hollywood’s Oscars, manages to be both thorough, damning and fraught throughout.

It’s no surprise that the story of rock’s original female badass makes for a gritty, inspiring documentary.

Shoplifters, winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, is a film acted with great sensitivity, a rough story delicately told.