Roger Moore

Warm, intimate and brittle, Loving is the most important movie of 2016, and one of the best.

If you see just one “Hitler” film this year, make it this one.

Is it better to have loved and lost than never to have logged on at all?

Capital in the 21st Century, in documentary form, is an almost overwhelming alarm bell, a call to action and a fact, chart, animated illustration-and-quote-stuffed history of “how we got here” in the first place.

But Jones, luminous in support in such dramas as “The Theory of Everything,” carries this picture, delivers thrilling arguments thrillingly and puts a warm, human face on a legal figure who has become liberalism’s Obi Wan Kenobi, “our only hope.”

One thing that separates this film from similar movies (Paul Verhoeven’s “Black Book” and “Soldier of Orange” are two of the best) is that it takes the story past the German surrender and into the murky waters of post-Occupation collaborator-hunting.

Puce finds fear and a disheartening, misdirected fury in all this, and pathos in its resolution. And she does it in a subtle but provocative drama that may not make the Best International Feature Oscar field, but is still one of the best pictures of 2021.

As with her best films, Coppola is utterly at ease in this milieu and it shows.

It’s one of those limited-release films that few will see, with acting so compact and contained that everyone who loves great screen performances should. Weisz, Firth and Thewlis give us understated, unfussy performances that lift The Mercy, a wonderfully tragic story with a hint of magnificence about it.

Elvis works, often brilliantly and always beautifully, a musical bio-pic that’s a little bit “Ray” and “I Walk the Line,” with hints of “Get on Up” “Judy” and “Rocket Man.” It can be frustrating, like the man himself. And who’s to say if its appeal won’t be limited generationally, racially or geographically?

Dapolito gets at what Radner represented to those who followed her, and what Radner recognized in herself, that play-acting comedy let her “be prettier than I was, be people I could never be…Comedy allowed me to be in control of my situation.”

I Am Love is a cinematic orgy, a sensual Italian feast of food, sex, guilt and grief. An intimate, quiet and even slow movie, its subtle shadings veil turbulent emotions.

A scenic, poetic, striking and moving thriller about Sicily’s “problem” viewed through the lens of youth and young love. The spooky overtones make its title an honest one, even if the frights are few. This is a “Ghost Story” well worth telling, and seeing.

Swiss director and co-writer Oliver Rihs (“Ready, Steady Ommm!”) takes a serious step into the big time with this gripping saga, a story that begins escape-artist jaunty and occasionally finds its way back there even as the story turns grimmer and the color palette progressively greyer.

It’s a film that flirts with cloying, here and there — especially at the end. But it reminds us, even before that U.N. recognition becomes official, that there’ll always be an England, that English manners survive, and there’ll always be a Maggie Smith, imperious, hilarious and glorious in that wonderful third act her life and career have given her.

If it isn’t as decorous and deft as the Jane Austen romances of an earlier literary (and cinematic) age, the longing is still there in a story that feels more lived-in, brutish and realistic.

Scouts Honor: The Secret Files of the Boy Scouts of America, delivers just what its title promises, apalling accounts of decade after decade of minimizing horrific abuse by serial boy-rapists, a scandal so big it “dwarfs” the “Catholic Church and Baptist Church” scandals, as one expert testifies in the film.

If Bigelow cannot quite bring herself to gracefully end her difficult, challenging movie — which changed studios and finds itself parked in theaters on the tail end of popcorn picture season — it’s because it’s too important a subject to risk shortchanging, too pointed a message to risk letting audiences miss.

Desert One is unsparing and unflinching.

Billie is the far and away the most definitive Billie Holiday biography ever put on screen, a film that celebrates her magic and examines the demons that haunted her, chemical and human.

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.