Roger Moore

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.