Roger Moore

A chilling detective tale, a horrific sexual abuse drama and an overlong, emotional, tie-up-every-loose-end melodrama that is sure to be half an hour shorter when Hollywood remakes it without the Swedish dialogue and probably without the cool Swedish edge.

Michael B. Jordan (“Red Tails”) is never less than riveting as Oscar, and he has to be.

For all the resilience Baldwin and Jenkins show us here, it is the poet Langston Hughes’ line about “a dream deferred” that comes most easily to mind.

What a fascinating, layered character Return to Seoul is built around.

Doueiri has brilliantly and simply put a compassionate human face on a part of the world where ethnicity still trumps education, class and achievement, where even the successful face, at best, second-class citizenship in their own country.

Rodeo is so good it’s almost sure to inspire a Hollywood remake. Catch it in the original French grit, because while we know Zazie Beetz can ride, who knows if they’ll meet her quote?

Mission: Impossible — Fallout, is everything a summer action pic should be — a delirious procession of stunning stunts, epic brawls, state-of-the-art car chases and ticking clock countdowns.

It's an unblinking look into the lives of soldiers doing the most thankless job of all.

Almost every shot is a postcard-perfect African vista, and every animal shown in majestic close-up.

A most deserving Oscar winner and a film that could provoke discussion anywhere it is shown, anywhere people of any age are being bullied.

Long Promised Road, taking its title from a lesser-known tune by the band, is a celebration of the glorious third act of a performer whose struggles became legend, whose victimhood became notorious and whose “genius” no longer requires quotation marks.

Colman’s performance is the film’s marvel. But Gyllenhaal’s brilliant, subtle manipulations make hers one of the most auspicious directing debuts in years, a veteran, intimidating cinematic “bad girl” who turns her withering gaze on us and strings us along, wondering what became of The Lost Daughter.

The charms of The Wild Robot sneak up on you.

This delightful and inspiring drama succeeds the way Hawking has, even as he fails to deliver that “one theory” that explains “everything.” It’s reaching beyond your grasp, in life, in science and in film biographies, that achieves greatness.

Cedar has given Gere his own “House of Cards” to move into, where the game analogies spin out as chess and, most tellingly, dominoes. Norman needs them to fall just so, and if they do, he will be a man to be reckoned with.

There have been a lot of documentaries about Donald Trump and Donald Trump’s America, and more will show up between now and election day 2020. But the only one on that subject that strikes me as “essential viewing” is Red, White & Wasted, an eye-opening peek into the psyche, intellect, folkways and values of “the Trump base” we hear so much about these days.

Adam makes you realize we’re a long way from “Chasing Amy.” Or maybe not.

[Renner] and Sheridan and some terrific, under-used supporting players...give Wind River a somber, grim grace and the relentless forward motion of a thriller.

Moore makes this solo moment touching, bittersweet and triumphant.

As Chukwu keeps her camera on Mamie, she turns a blow against racism into a history lesson with human faces — good, poisonous, and so mutilated that we have to be forced to see it to understand our culture’s ugliest truth.

In this Golden Age of biographical musical documentaries, the filmmaker who is now working on an Ed Sullivan doc has taken a subject we thought we knew all we needed to know about, and all but re-introduced him to a new age. Well done

Polsky takes us on quite the sleigh ride, from the sunny silliness of gambling on Russian hockey, and then marketing it, to the grim reality that sets in — threats, intimidation and even murders.

I found the entire enterprise a touching, rough-hewn delight, never sparing us the explicit sex and violence of Daniel’s life “before,” moist-eyed in seeing how his “outside the collar” thinking is a tonic for a tortured town that needs to move on.

We Are Little Zombies is the most entertaining thing to come out of Japan since sushi, “Iron Chef” and the Miata.

The rawboned Hawkes manages both charm and menace in the same look, and Dancy gives his character a testy, fearful edge that doesn't make him scary, but rather someone we fear for.

A true indie film roller-coaster ride, from moon-eyed romance to aching heartbreak, cerebral puzzle to incredibly moving, emotional resolution to that puzzle. In a season of the year where sci-fi is dumbed down and then dumbed some more for mass consumption, here’s a piece of speculative fiction that will stick with you long after the last Transformer’s battery has died.

This solo ordeal won’t be to every taste, but All Is Lost is a grand vehicle for the actor and for that viewer ready to consider his or her own mortality, the problems, conflicts, strengths and shortcomings you’re sure you leave behind when you just sail away.

“The Vote” was on PBS’s “American Experience,” the gloriously acrid “Mrs. America” on Hulu and the sweet Helen Reddy biopic “I Am Woman” came to theaters and streaming. The Glorias rides the crest of that wave, the best project of the lot, and quite possibly the film of the year.

Make no mistake, “Soundtrack” is a real work of art, an historic film painted with extant footage, a fresh interview or two, sound from many sources and thoughts, facts and opinions from a wide range of people with a stake in not just events back then, but the urgent need to have those facts preserved and honestly served up to those of us trapped in the present.

The performances anchoring American Woman are some of the finest screen acting we’ll see this year.

Schrader lets her players do the heavy lifting, and to a one, they don’t let her down. The women of this scandal and this movie about reporting it make She Said a thoroughly engrossing account of how one of the touchstone stories of our time came to light, one door knocked-on, one tearful recollection at a time.

20,000 Species of Bees grabs you on several levels, starting with the arresting Basque Country locations. We pick up the rituals of beekeepers, but also explore how one of the fruits of the hive — beeswax — is vital in casting bronze sculptures.

Bullock and Clooney make their peril our peril in this absolutely gorgeous, moving and sometimes exultant reminder that the real terrors of space are scary enough, without invented bug-eyed monsters thrown in.

The best animated film Netflix has ever made, and the best animated film of 2022.

Writer-director Valentyn Vasyanovych (“Atlantis,” “Black Level”) uses irony, horror and a sober-minded, unspoken acceptance of “this is the way our lives are now” to tell a quiet, harrowing story of one extended family’s experiences of the war.

Heretic leans on horror and serial killer thriller conventions for its plot and rising suspense. The foreshadowing is obvious, but the ways it is deployed always surprise and chill.

The Man in the Hat is a gloriously simple unalloyed delight.

It’s everything a screen drama and indie film should be — a novel story, characters we rarely see and care about and immersion in a world we know nothing about.

The funniest kids’ cartoon of the summer.

It does a poor job of showing the tragedy of Turing’s hidden life but a better job at making a bigger case — unconventional people make unconventional thinkers.

It’s a pretty conventional “Lifetime Original Movie” sort of story. But co-writer/director Thomas Vinterberg (“Dear Wendy”) makes it work by building a sense of frustrating unease into it all.

This is horror with grandeur, a movie that pays homage to history and feels so of-the-moment as to seem fresh out of the lab...Candyman, the glossiest horror movie in ages, isn’t just horror. It’s horror that reaches for the Latin in that MGM (which produced the original film and gets co-credit here) logo we see in the opening credits — “Ars gratia artis,” “art for art’s sake.”

The lost art of slapstick — physical comedy — is so rarely practiced that when true masters of it show up on screen it’s like a surprise smack right on your funnybone.

It’s a somber film with flashes of wit, with funereal pacing and long, poignant close-ups that let the players — especially Ashkenazi and Adler — let us see there’s more than what we see on the surface, just with a look.

The directing debut of co-writer and star Dina Amer is a vivid portrait of the French underclass and one of the best movies to ever make us walk a mile in the shoes of someone we might not be able to identify with — someone radicalized — but who seems more relatable and understandable, the more time we spend with her.

What Lonergan has created here is one of the cinema’s defining statements on the kind of grief that leaves you gutted, of wounds that will never heal. He’s got the guts to make us uncomfortable in scene after scene, and the courage to deny us “The Hollywood Ending.”

Whatever its length and melodramatic third-act touches, Interstellar is a space opera truly deserving of that label, overreaching and thought-provoking, heart-tugging and pulse-pounding. It’s the sort of film that should send every other sci-fi filmmaker back to the drawing board, the way Stanley Kubrick did, a long time ago in a millennium far away.

The lighter touches in Human Nature, which lists Dan Rather as a producer, come from scientists who are all “Big Bang Theory” extras at heart — referencing sci fi books and movies to make their points. Will we accept a positive vision of how this hurtle towards the future turns out (“Star Trek”) or a dystopic one (“Blade Runner”)?

One of the finest films of the ’80s, a high point for Caine, Walters and Gilbert and a movie I think about all the time because it literally changed my life.

Hoffman is merely the first among equals in a stellar cast.

Skyfall is far and away the best, and the most British of the Daniel Craig-James Bond movies.

Tina is a summarization and a celebration.

It's a bleak yet optimistic film, and Ferrell perfectly underplays his Carver anti-hero and delivers a rich, layered and subtle performance. And a funny one.

The disco decadence, the seedy era before Times Square became a theme park, the lowered expectations of an endless recession, everything that was then and is now makes up American Hustle. And that’s what makes this the best movie of this holiday season.

For the Love of Spock is everything you’d hope for in a biography of one of the most universally beloved characters and character actors of all time.

It’s visually lovely, and the performances are subtle, sunny and sympathetic. Camara lends a playful touch to Antonio’s Beatle-mania.

It’s a first rate thriller, more cerebral than Tom-Cruise-does-his-own-stunts, and all the more engaging for it.

Audacious, violent and disquieting, Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a summer sequel that's better than it has any right to be.

But marrying this “Grapes of Wrath” saga to a “journey of self-discovery” narrative in this blend of restlessness and dogged, “no whining” desperation makes Nomadland an instant indie classic and one of the best films of 2020.

Cassel's performance...the best reason to see this, one of the best French (In French with English subtitles) crime thrillers of the new millennium.

It’s a reminder of when civility, fair play and principles mattered, of when decent people of influence like Sullivan didn’t think twice about standing up to myopic bigots like Georgia Gov. Herman Talmadge.

It takes nothing away from The End of the Tour in labeling this Jason Segel/Jesse Eisenberg dramedy a “bromance.”

Moselle’s second film to focus on a fringe-dwelling “pack” but first to be a narrative, fictional feature, has an intimacy that the novelty of a free-range family of raised-by-themselves boys did not.

Nickel Boys is American history, Southern history and Florida history uncovered and exposed, and a cautionary lesson to a culture backsliding into the comfort of more and more lies and delusions, all served up in one of the most artful films of 2024.

The film is both touching and infuriating as Boyle shows us as direct a cause-and-effect in an addiction case as any documentary ever.

You’d be hard-pressed to think of a motion picture parable that more perfectly fits its moment and the mood of the country and the world it premiered into. Corbet has tapped into the zeitgeist as well as The American Myth and made a movie that makes you wince because he, like László Tóth, refused to sentimentalize it or avert his eyes from the ugliness.

Bye Bye Germany makes for a sly, smart, funny and still touching peek into that horrid past, a dramedy with pathos and a reminder that “L’chaim, to life” is the best way to remember it — with a toast to life. In the end, that’s the best revenge of all.

Storm Over Brooklyn is a tense, tight and timely film that reminds us that America itself has been doing the same — trying its best to ignore something that’s been there, for those willing or forced to see it, all along.

Romer covers a lot of ground in this sometimes touching and even inspiring documentary. About all she misses is Japan’s invitation to participate in the Little League World Series, and its early dominance and ongoing success there.

Sorogoyen tells this story of steady, tense escalation with great patience.

It’s a somewhat sprawling and almost ungainly film, years in the making, very revealing and yet notably incomplete.

Questlove, billed as Ahmir-Khalib Thompson here, has made one of the most entertaining concert films in years, a piece of Baby Boomer nostalgia that is thrilling and moving, jaw-dropping (those Pips get me, every time) and toe-tapping, and a history lesson, all rolled into one.

Yes, this is a lightly-fictionalized account of the birth of one of the seminal technologies of our time, fuzzied up just enough to keep the lawyers at bay. But if it’s not how it literally went down, it certainly makes for a colorful yarn to pass around the campfire on those cold nights in the Great White North.

Gibney uses interviews, fresh and archival, and a court deposition and reporters’ memories of long-exposure to Jobs for his evidence. And it’s damning, from the financial cheating to the lack of philanthropy to the arrogance that let him think he knew better than modern medicine how to treat his cancer.

An adorable, uplifting ache of a movie, writer-director Janis Pugh’s modest marvel floats by on the glories of a well-crafted pop song and summons up “An Officer and a Gentleman” for its finale.

It’s impossible not to see this character and this riveting performance by Amir-Ebrahimi and not think of the brave women protesting their treatment and status right now on the streets of Iran’s cities. Arezoo, like hundreds of thousands of her sisters, persists.

The film invites us to imagine interior lives, a narrowing of the “pursuit of happiness” to tasks at hand, modest goals, music, food and love. As our pandemic waxes and wanes, “Lunana” becomes one of the great cinematic escapes of recent years.

“Camp” is a word that’s falling into disuse in these more tolerant times. But back then, that was the whole point, and full ownership of it was reflected in the name of the pageant. This was “camp” back when camp meant something.

Corben doesn’t stop with just the “sex scandal” part of this. “God Forbid” takes us back to the blackmail-worthy “quid pro quo” of Falwell’s endorsement of the profane, obscene and hilariously Godless Donald Trump. Then journalists, academics and historians tie Falwell’s father, the dynasty-founding racist turned anti-abortion opportunist Jerry Falwell, to Trumpism and the State of the Nation today.

When it’s all over, the viewer gets to wrestle with everything everyone here does — the plight of Syria, the nature of art, “exploitation” and the nature of “freedom.” Not bad for the first Tunisian film much of the world will have ever had the chance to see.

Strip away the French and Arabic subtitles, the French-prison setting and the Muslim-messianic title, and A Prophet, opening Friday at The Enzian, would still be the grittiest prison thriller in years.

A heartbreaking, underplayed and intensely gripping Roddy Doyle story about modern homelessness.

Gospel According to André immortalizes a man of his moment, who invented himself and made his own moment. And as he winds down his career and takes a deep, sweeping, cape-bedecked parting bow, this self-flattering film biography gives us one last chance to appreciate what a trip he’s had, and what a trip he’s been.

There are bigger films and more entertaining stories coming to screens this holiday season. But there isn’t one more life and love-affirming than All of Us Strangers, a movie that reminds us that memory burnishes loved ones for a reason.

It’s clever to the edge of brilliant, and damned funny, start to finish.

Built on a quietly compelling performance by Virginie Efira (“Benedetta,” “Elle”), it may be the best depiction of how trauma changes your psyche and your life since the Peter Weir Jeff Bridges/Rosie Perez drama “Fearless.”

Panahi spins all this into a road comedy with a bittersweet aftertaste, letting us laugh out loud at the travel companion from Hell — or at least “The Ransom of Red Chief” — while wistfully reminding us of loss and leave-takings, the helpless desperation of running afoul of an authoritarian state, the very foundations of heartbreak.

Krippendorff squeezes a lot of layers of the urban teen experience into Cocoon’s slim 93 or so minutes, and gives a lot of shades to her characters, who are never simple “types” the way most Hollywood films about high schoolers are.

Skarsgard has carved out a wide niche for his varied and colorful acting career to inhabit. He’s stoic and unflinching here, a man on a mission.

That humor is a the delicious underpinning to whatever melodrama happens as these five connect and clash. And that humor is what reassures us, even at its darkest moments, that no matter how things work out for the adults, these kids are going to be all right.

It’s a beautiful film, equal parts sentimental and bluntly realistic. Like “Honeyland,” what Kotevska is capturing is a vanishing way of it.

Calvary is a compact and biting tale of a righteous man being tested by his faith, his peers and his predicament.

Pig hangs on Cage’s soulful intensity in the part, a man who used to be somebody who, as one contemptuous old acquaintance hisses “doesn’t exist” now.

It's the best heist picture since "Heat."

Not just rewarding and quite moving, but important oral and visual history, a movie worth watching even if you think you’ve read or seen all there is to know about this seminal figure in American history.

A damned clever neo-noir with a top-drawer cast, genuine suspense, dark humor and a plot that keeps you guessing for a very long time, this Steven Soderbergh thriller has everything a good heist picture needs to get over.

Oscar winner Morgan Neville (“20 Feet From Stardom”) carves in stone the case for Rogers’ as an authentic American TV saint.

An intimate piece of romantic folklore with breathtaking geographical ambition, The Tale of the King Crab comes to theaters feeling familiar, but startling in what it shows us and where it takes us.