Roger Moore

Gay coming-of-age stories are common enough these days, but Moonlight finds a new perspective, a new setting and a compelling new filmmaking voice to tell that story. It’s one of the best pictures of the year.

It may be generic and inspiring TV movie subject matter, but Green immerses us in this world and punches up the limited horizons that face these characters.

Is The Lodge the most disturbing thriller of the year? Judas Priest, I hope so. Dark and despairing, grim and gripping, it’s not necessarily shocking. It doesn’t live or die on its “big twists.” But it gets in your head and messes around there. Just as it was designed to do. I can’t remember a horror movie that left me as gutted as this one.

Hudlin’s embracing film reminds us that there was a lot of history that unfolded around this one man, and a lot of change came about thanks to this one extraordinary life of achievement and humility, grace and principled defiance.

It’s a bracing, damning indictment of a world where women have no bodily autonomy wrapped in a visceral, on-the-lam chase thriller in which every man our heroine meets is not just an existential threat, but a real one.

Grim, gruesome and glorious.

“Battle” is is by turns serio-comic and chilling to the point of depressing.

Using archival footage, inventive animated recreations of incidents and chilling aerial smart-bomb views of air strikes as they happen, Moreh creates a simple yet elegantly damning film.

The film’s major revelations are not how hilarious, anarchic and charismatic the Muppets were and are. That’s been covered elsewhere. What’s fascinating here is remembering the lesser known figures who shaped the show that was to come.

There are scenes that will make your jaw drop, and moments that make your heart stop.

You want great action? Eschew the comic book movies and read a few subtitles. Escape from Mogadishu is in a league of its own this summer.

The shocked inability to focus on what one must do despite the pull of pretending, saying and repeating “it’ll all be over soon” is vividly recreated in this small-scale version of a larger scale tragedy to come.

The set-up may be "Burning Bed” melodramatic, but Foumbi never lets the film tumble into predictability. We see things almost wholly from Marie’s point of view, but get a sense of the human being inside her captor. The plot has its obvious contrivances, but they never take us out of the story and never dictate any predictable “Hollywood” turn.

Long, patient and chilling, it vividly captures a time in America and the feel of divided Berlin in the muted blues and greys that color our memories of that “duck and cover” age.

This performance reminds us that Bridges is that rare actor who has never had to make that apology. Crazy Heart lets him be every bit as grand as we’d hope him to be.

Compared to the gravitas of “The 49th Parallel” and “One of Our Aircraft is Missing,” and the strained metaphors of “A Canterbury Tale,” “I Know Where I’m Going” is downright fluffy, feather light, despite a harrowing peril-at-sea sequence that is as polished as anything from the filming tank/rear projection era in black and white film.

American Animals is a tense, taut sober and occasionally silly thriller that reminds us that the Caribbean Island at the end of the Hollywood heist is always a mirage.

In the best picture of 2015, Carey Mulligan is the stoic, long-suffering sweatshop worker radicalized into action.

Pike is magnificent in this part, giving us layers to the hard-drinking live-for-today chain-smoker who could be moved to tears, repeatedly, by the suffering she saw.

Amanda Knox may not change anybody’s mind. But it should.

As he types away, constantly interrupted, taking too little care of his health, exasperated by a dying Lexus or his sons’ addiction to “screens,” we marvel at the compulsion of the artist to make art, to leave a legacy not just to all of us, but to those living under his roof.

Chemistry is king. It's one reason the rom-com has long seemed like the toughest code for Hollywood to crack. But never underestimate the power of snappy, rapid-fire banter, the paving stones of the Hollywood road to romance.

Start to finish, it’s a delight.

It is Dafoe’s compact, internalized turn as the artist, letting us feel his pain rather than bellowing about it (see “Lust for Life” for that) that pulls us in and gets us as close to the artist as any film ever has. It’s glorious work, and a grand capstone to a fabulous career, with or without Oscar recognition.

This winning film wins you over without manipulation, without guile and without ulterior motives. If you can’t feel good about humanity after this one, you can’t feel good.

This is “The Florida Project” set in Pennsylvania, a memoir both brilliantly specific and depressingly universal.

I love the light, intensely likable lilt Whishaw (“Q” in the latest James Bond films) gives Paddington’s line-readings. You forget the bear is animated and that bears can’t talk, and your children won’t even need that much encouragement to suspend disbelief.

The Big Short becomes not just amusing and explanatory, a real tour de force for its fast-talking cast.