Roger Moore

Beautifully cast, touchingly played and handsomely mounted, Belle is as close to perfect as any costumed romance has a right to be.

Daniel Day Lewis, Hugh O’Conor and director Jim Sheridan made damned sure that whatever Hollywood thought, whatever “rewarding a stunt performance ” rationale might enter in filmdom’s collective mind about this bit of work, their combined efforts would be never less than a wholly realized human being.

Every action in this Cannes award-winner is motivated if not wholly rational. Every consequence grimly believable and shorn of artifice and melodrama.

The script and Simmons, known for TV’s “The Closer” and as tantrum-tossing editor J. Jonah Jameson in “Spider-Man,” make Fletcher a monster, and then look for ways of explaining him.

The Guard soars along on a script, like those by the other McDonagh (Martin wrote and directed "In Bruges" and the Oscar winning short "Six Shooter," both starring Gleeson) built out of verbal flourishes and Irish curses.

The Rider is a docudrama as elegy, a slice of rodeo realism that both romanticizes and demythologizes the Cowboy Way in a corner of America where that still means something.

The performances, direction and writing of one of the best pictures of 2010 make this Social Network every bit as addictive, and a little chilling as well.

Breathtaking and definitive, Apollo 11 avoids voice-over narration or overly-explaining anything about America’s date with destiny in July of 1969. If we aren’t old enough to remember it, we’re supposed to know it. It’s in our DNA.

It’ll be on PBS at some point, but don’t wait. Seeing it in a cinema has a hint of religious experience about it.

This unblinking look at America's Red State Crystal Meth Belt is an instant Southern Gothic classic.

A great movie like Dark Waters reminds us of what happened, of just what the “system” failed to do to safeguard us. And it reminds us of what a legal crusade looks like — a years-long grind of discovery, depositions, evidence and trials, and to be thankful for dogged, dull pluggers like Robert Bilott who stopped a mass murder in progress, armed with only a degree from “a no name law school.”

Duvall, an American Lear not going gently into that good night, reminds us that it will be a sad day indeed for movie fans when it's about time for him to Get Low.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is a biographical essay in sweetness and light.

Gorgeous and almost shockingly moving.

It’s a powerful, disturbing crisis of faith drama that takes on the raiments of a thriller, and a tour de force for the understated acting of Ethan Hawke.

The heart, action and sophistication of the artwork make this folk tale the best animated film of the year.

It stands with the greatest racing movies ever, and it’s certainly the most entertaining. But there is no doubt about one last superlative. Ford v Ferrari is one of the best pictures of the year.

In a year when much of the world has been stuck at home, day drinking, Another Round is a welcome shot of bitters with a warm cognac chaser, and a bracing/revealing renewal of a grand Danish partnership, Vinterberg and Mads his muse.

Great directors make great movies. And with Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan has made his second masterpiece, thrilling history retold, remembered and relished.

A riveting saga of pain, grit and the brute moral relativism of revenge, the first law of all, and the only one that mattered back then. The Revenant is one of the best pictures of the year.

That rare film in which every performer in it leaves the viewer in awe.

Artful, epic, operatic even, this thriller set in the world of ballet challenges the viewer with its intelligence and depth and wit.

A moving, hilarious and stunningly-animated adventure epic.

J.J. Abrams, with Steven Spielberg producing, has made one of those jaw-dropping out-of-body summer entertainments that kids old enough to swear and see PG-13 films will remember on into adulthood.

Brooks is the one who makes the message work, the one who should have been credited and the supporting player who makes “Sullivan’s Travels” worth the journey. He’s the difference between a good film of the Depression Era, and a classic.

Engrossing and moving story of a alternately warm and combative relationship.

If history’s tide runs against the Globe, at least those who worked there have the satisfaction of exposing a global wrong, and helping to end it. And they have McCarthy’s film, one of the best pictures of 2015, as a permanent record, a tribute in cinematic form, to their art and craft in its finest hour.

It is the most American movie of 2019, wearing its optimism in every gilded, rain-speckled, sun-flecked frame.

I can’t say this is head and shoulders above any other “Emma.” to come along. But de Wilde, her leading lady and her production team have made the matchmaker in need of her own match fresh and modern in a period piece detailed — right down to the acapella folk tunes and hymns sung on the soundtrack.

Longer, more thorough and tweaked to play to modern audiences better, Apocalypse Now Redux packs every bit the wallop it did when it was new. After Gallipoli and Full Metal Jacket, after even Platoon, it remains the definitive anti-war war movie.

I Was a Strranger is the first great film of 2026. It’s cleverly written, carefully crafted and beautifully-acted with characters who humanize many facets of the “migration” and “illegal immigration” debate.

The dazzling thing in Magician is how Workman breezily covers the various periods in Welles’ career, periods worthy of entire books, from his childhood as “The Boy Wonder,” to his post-“Kane” “Gypsy” years, when Hollywood was sure it had plenty of reasons not to hire him as a director, on up to today, as Richard “Boyhood” Linklater dubs him “the patron saint of indie filmmakers.”

If you love movies you should love the ones with great writing. And if you’re looking for that yardstick against which to better judge any movie that comes along, you can’t do better than immerse yourself in Chinatown.

Dallas Buyers Club is one of the best pictures of the year.

What Smith and Gardiner have adapted is a rare and precious thing, a movie whose narrative momentum is carried by the simplest of longings — hope.

Not to gush or go too far overboard, but the warmth of a movie like “Mrs. Harris” is downright restorative in the viewing, two escapist hours that remind us that everyone is entitled to courtesy, a fair shake and a little beauty and luxury, and most of all, the hope that life can get better.

A masterpiece. A work of grand visual wit, clever songs, funny gags and genuine pathos, it is perhaps the greatest stop-motion animated film ever, a painstaking style of model animation that computers have all but completely done away with.

The performances are subdued and sublime, highlighting each character’s efforts to reject or embrace his fate, or both.

A gripping story of idealism battered by bruising reality, high-handed authority and arrogant, misguided students who organize themselves to achieve maximum chaos, “Lounge” is a cautionary slice of education in an “Every parent’s an expert” era.

It's a story about storytelling, with differing versions of events in which people die by the sword. Filled with Yimou's characteristic symbolism and zest for striking colors, it's a fictional account of the unification of China.

Serious and silly, self-aware and ironic, it’s the movie that questions stardom, fame and celebrity, built around a role Michael Keaton had to become a has-been to play.

Yes, it’s a thriller with a murder mystery at the heart of it. But “whodunnit” is immaterial to the film’s thrills, and the one thing I seem to forget every time I watch it anew.

Iannucci’s cleverest touch may be that casting, giving a wonderful cross-section of British acting the chance to say those wonderful words, reclaim Dickens from the “Masterpiece Theater” swells.

In focusing on the tunes and the lyrics, Mangold makes us reconsider the head-snapping surprise of that Nobel Prize in Literature.

In the month since this documentary went into limited release, it’s proven prophetic about events as crimes are alleged or revealed in Washington. Where’s My Roy Cohn? even seems to predict how the tidal wave of high crimes and misdemeanors might play out.

Few movies about getting sober are as brilliant at conveying the allure of drowning, wallowing in alcohol, the emotional and physical liberation it seems to offer, as The Outrun. And rare is the story told within this most personal of experiences that exults in its trials, the gut check of “one day at a time” and the exultant release from the trap of addiction.

56 Up feels like the most hopeful film of them all - amusing, entertaining, and touching.

All music documentaries are subjective in that they’re the most engrossing to those the most into the music. But for the right fan, Roher’s lovely leafing through musical history will be touching and at times thrilling.

It’s one of the best pictures of the year.

John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection is quite simply the greatest tennis film ever made and one of the finest documentaries to honor any sport.

McQueen and his stellar cast take us on a difficult journey, an odyssey that will make you want to avert your eyes. It is to their great credit that we don’t.

Blaze is really something, a riveting and challenging experience and an extraordinary film not to be missed.

Be Natural, from the moment of release, becomes one of the seminal documentaries on early film history and must-see movie watching for any serious cinephile.

Rarely has a movie gone as deep into the magical resiliency and adaptability of childhood.

Yes, “schmaltzy” and “corny” fit in any description of this 1940 film. The soundstages don’t do justice to Holland or London or the North Atlantic. But what plays over 80 years later is the wit, the Ben Hecht (“The Front Page”) and Benchley-written exchanges between the posh Brit and the American trying to work his way into the political inner circles where Europe was about to take a stand against fascism.

It is the colors, the life contained in those vivid those tableux, the theaters, street scenes of this or that army marching by, the shadows and fog of “reality” intruding on the rigidly constrained theatrical performances that stick in the memory from this masterpiece.

An organized riot of images and sounds, Moonage Daydream is perhaps the only way a documentary biographer could approach the story of David Bowie. Brett Morgen (“Crossfire Hurricane”) has made his true masterpiece, the perfect film to celebrate a multifaceted life of aesthetic excess.

The suspense Hitchcock mastered in his films of the ’30s becomes excruciating here as we watch the various threads unravel into a deadly finale.

Honey Boy just tells us one story, with judgement and compassion, with an honesty that surprises and moves us. And it leaves it to us to decide if it was all worth it, if indeed the end justifies the means. You will never look at a child’s performance in a film or TV show the same way after this.

It's stunning work, movingly narrated by actors from Josh Lucas to Robert Duvall, all telling the stories of those who fought and bled and lived to tell the tale. [23 Mar 2007, p.21]

It's a delightful cartoon that truly feels African in the way it carries the wisdom of the ages. It feels like a great fable, preserved for generations because of the wise lessons it imparts. [04 Aug 2000, p.19]

Waterman is a grand feel-good remembrance of an epic life, a documentary that could make even non-surfers and “haoles” (non-Hawaiians) swell with tearful pride that the human race ever produced this “bronze god” who walked among us and changed the world.

And Dern, a great character actor who made his mark opposite everyone from Redford and John Wayne to Jane Fonda, embraces the roll of a lifetime.

With Parasite [Bong] transcends genre even as he sharpens his social satire skills, delivering a movie that will resonate from Seoul to Syracuse, Helsinki to Hong Kong, one of the great films of 2019.

Paltrow and McGrath’s interpretation of the character and recreation of the mores of the time are spot-on. This is an “Emma” of her era — young, privileged, cosseted and a busybody who sticks her nose in others’ business without noting that her own happiness and chief means of providing happiness to others are being neglected.

Richard Linklater’s Boyhood is an amazing achievement in telling an unremarkably remarkable life story.

A stop any literary-minded movie-goer will want to make.

Playground is so vividly-detailed that it could be triggering to anyone whose childhood wasn’t ideal. And even if you don’t get ugly flashbacks from it, you will marvel how any of us get through this hazing rite of passage without permanent scars or long-term psychotherapy.

Zhao, bouncing back from the Marvel “Eternals” paycheck picture/debacle, serves up a touching romance between a distracted young man of letters and a woman so attuned to nature she hunts with a pet hawk, knows the uses of every herb and tree and the incantations that go with their preparation and is thus labeled the “daughter of a witch.”

She made her glittering life seem tragic, even as she denied her own right to feel sorry for herself thanks to everything her gift and her “destiny” gave her.

Conclave is a deliciously immersive experience, a narrative that commands our attention and expects our speculation even if it maintains a distance that allows it all to seem out-of-step, fusty and even darkly humorous at its most extreme.

Pre Fab! is an amusing, informative and bittersweet documentary.

There’s never been much more than a fringe audience for anime in the U.S., which suggests that Hollywood might not be long in taking a live-action shot at this story. But whatever the budget, whoever the stars, they’ll have to go some ways to top the magic managed by artists and their brushes spelling out Your name.

There have been better documentaries this year, but none of them are the roller-coaster ride that Three Identical Strangers turns out to be.

Shaffer has filmed a great primer on a key figure in the history of cinema and the perfect movie for anyone whose interest was piqued by “Nope” to learn “the real story,” which is colorful enough without the glorious myths surrounding it.

Honeyland is an elegiac and gloriously photogenic tragedy, an environmental parable played out in striking images and stark lessons in the high desert of northern Macedonia.

Start to finish, it’s a bloody delightful romp.

The whole enterprise is amusing, warm and embracing, so much so that English words fall short of perfectly summing up this utterly charming film. Only a Spanish word will do. “Encantada.”

It’s a near miracle that anyone could get a movie out of this. But Ozon, like Visconti before him, has. It’s not for the sentimental, the conventional or the faithful. But The Stranger, in book or its latest cinematic form, is for the intellectually curious and questioning. Just don’t go expecting it to provide many answers.

Haneke tells this tale a bit too patiently for my taste. But the metaphors are unmistakable, as is the power of the film’s message.

However much you know about these people and this subject, Sorkin shines a light in dark or unjustly-ignored corners of their epic story. And he makes obvious the strain and burden of “Being the Ricardos” into a film that’s witty and bittersweet.

The laughs in Drunk Bus may come in familiar places, but there’s a genuine effort to flip the script just enough to avoid the standard traps in such farces.

Phoenix and Hoffman really sell C’mon, C’mon, settling into “siblings” with such ease that even their phone conversations have a lived-in familiarity

Adams. From the first time we saw her on the screen, we knew what she was feeling and thinking, just from staring into those huge, hopeful and sometimes hurt eyes. Her big eyes make this Big Eyes one of the best pictures of the year.

It isn't a great film. But it is a smart and high-minded one, wonderfully cast, with understated direction. Clooney is good enough in the lead to stir talk of a political future.

Sketch-comedy whiz Jordan Peele of TV’s ”Key and Peele” and “Keanu” has cooked up the smartest horror movie in ages, an edge-of-your-seat thriller that is entertaining and creepily enlightening at the same time.

Reeves has Americanized a very good foreign film without defanging it.

I love the way the film sets us up with “types” — ambitious, narcissistic politico, “trophy” wife, loyal spouse, doting dad — and thoroughly upends them time and again.

Anniversary may be, like its “movie of the moment” forebears, another shout into the void. But everybody involved — especially Lane, whose performance is another career highlight — can take heart in trying to sum up democracy’s collapse as seen through one, generally slow-to-alarm inside-the-beltway family’s disintegration. Yeah, it happened like this.

Carell, though, is the real shock to the system here. He is quirky, queer in the old fashioned sense, and pathetically funny.

Oakley’s ability to find a hopeful spin to put on this bleak time is a history lesson for us all.

Koepp and Soderbergh make this as much about mistrust and fidelity in a marriage as it is about spies-gone-wrong. They keep their film intimate and interrogatory, giving it an old fashioned theatrical feel.

It’s a wholly original child’s-eye-view of emotions and growing up, a demanding movie for small children and a rewarding and touching one for their parents.

Lacy’s impressively thorough film forces anybody willing to watch it to reconsider her, measure her life’s work and legacy against that of her iconic father and appreciate the screen legend and cultural force she has been.

Moving, majestic and manly, Only the Brave is a nearly perfect rendition of the sort of righteous, heroic entertainment Hollywood routinely built around its best leading men.

What makes Say Anything timeless isn’t the cast so much as it is the characters, and isn’t the story as much as the way it is told. The dialogue, crisp and (relatively) clean by modern, coarse and cliched standards, is its own “grand romantic gesture,” teen angst, teen curiosity and the teen dilemma incarnate.

Alex Winter’s Zappa is perhaps the most thorough Zappa screen biography to come along, and that’s acknowledging how hopeless the job of making The Compleat Zappa bio-doc is.

Even though I couldn’t imagine the endurance contest of experiencing the show in person in real time, this documentary — which identifies via graphics the songs and their earlier-than-you-realized dates of composition — leaves you wanting more. As dazzling as this highlights sampler can be, one hopes more of it will be released in bite-sized servings.