Roger Moore

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.

Gladstone carries the picture as a reactor — to the stories she hears from this waitress, that grandfatherly distant relative, the bride-to-be. But even those reactions are subdued.

A Quiet Place makes for an entertaining, nerve-rattling essay on what might save us, the power of connection and the symphony our environment provides when we give it the silence it begs for and so seldom gets.

For its first 90 minutes, Bodied dazzles, ducks and dishes through a corner of hip hop most of us only experience through documentaries or Youtube clips. Here’s a movie that takes the form seriously, and gives us a taste of how hilarious it can be — for those not on the receiving end of these epic couplets of insult.

The eccentric, serene, almost poetic documentary about Kelly, his business, his protege guitar builder/decorator, the former art student Cindy Hulej.

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.

Frances Ha turns melancholy and almost painful to watch in its last act as she and we see the dead end dead ahead. And the film doesn’t seem to earn the finale the two of them cooked up for us.

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

What we have here is a gripping story rather dryly told, a somewhat frustrating essay on Scandinavian passivity without the pathos of the similarly themed Oscar winning Danish film “In a Better World.” It’s the helplessness that gets to you.

The riffing, the one-upsmanship, the off-the-cuff zingers and the singing (ABBA, a great favorite of Coogan's most famous creation, the dizzy talk show host Alan Partridge) make The Trip an easy-going trek down a road well-traveled by these two.

A proper whodunit, as twist-turny as you might expect, and as amusingly edgy and cutting as its title suggests.

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

Haley’s movies have an old-fashioned comfort food quality, and this sits happily on the menu with his earlier works.

Krieps makes her journey into this open wound not just intriguing, but heartbreaking.

Watching unhappy, uncertain children grow in confidence as they learn, bond and then run loving, yipping, straining sled dogs is incredibly touching.

This quick, short Sundance Film Festival award winner leaves out a lot more about Brinkley than in it includes. But save your trip to the library (or Wikipedia) for after the film. The surprises, comic and tragic, are worth waiting for.

The tennis, with augmented sound, shotmaking, balls-eye-view camera work and the like, dazzles. And whatever the strengths of the leads, the sexual dynamics of this relationship are every bit as of America at this “moment” as the beautiful biracial player’s “color” that the script takes pains to point out.

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.

Sorry We Missed You is Loach’s intimate, scathing take on life in the “gig economy,” a family not getting ahead or even holding its own, but swimming as frantically as it can even as they spiral down the drain. It’s his best film in years, and with a resume that includes “My Name is Joe” and “The Angel’s Share,” that’s saying something.

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.

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

Whatever leftovers The Holdovers serve up, Payne and his once-and-future-muse Giamatti make this cinematic comfort food perfectly palatable.

Although the arc of the story is quite conventional in terms of Ruben’s “stages of death and dying” journey, the script and Ahmed’s affecting, sympathetic performance make us cling to the same hopes that Ruben does, that he can recover some of his hearing, maybe enough to get some of his life back.

Fuji’s performance is the highlight here, a man of science and obsessive Ham radio buff struggling to communicate what he’s going through but failing to soften his personality as his memory, and the self-control it might contain, fail.

What we’re left with is a stark reminder that, “BlackKklansman” aside, it’s possible to agree with most everything Spike Lee says in his movies these days while lamenting the decline in his storytelling skills and his unwillingness to edit them into sharper focus.

Operatic in tone, a love poem that’s “Howl” raw in scope and despair, The Last Black Man in San Francisco is a deadpan elegy to a city, its ever-shifting populace, family lore and the weight of the past.

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

A rough and rough around the edges tale of children growing up on the mean streets of the wrong side of Brooklyn. It’s a coming of age story of a self-absorbed, downtrodden punk with a dream who learns about the love that comes with responsibility.