Roger Moore

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

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.

Not just rewarding and quite moving, but important oral and visual history, a movie worth watching even if you think you’ve read or seen all there is to know about this seminal figure in American history.

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.

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.

Roma is arty and beautiful, but also a bit like sitting on a sofa while Cuarón flips through family photo albums, never narrating or over-explaining any single moment or image.

Questlove, billed as Ahmir-Khalib Thompson here, has made one of the most entertaining concert films in years, a piece of Baby Boomer nostalgia that is thrilling and moving, jaw-dropping (those Pips get me, every time) and toe-tapping, and a history lesson, all rolled into one.

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.

What Lonergan has created here is one of the cinema’s defining statements on the kind of grief that leaves you gutted, of wounds that will never heal. He’s got the guts to make us uncomfortable in scene after scene, and the courage to deny us “The Hollywood Ending.”

Bullock and Clooney make their peril our peril in this absolutely gorgeous, moving and sometimes exultant reminder that the real terrors of space are scary enough, without invented bug-eyed monsters thrown in.

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

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.

It’s still a lovely character study in a lovely setting, even if the romance rarely achieves the urgency or heat to truly animate this “portrait.”

Best of all is the man who stands front and center, thinking, smoking and expounding, off-the-cuff, about a subject he spent his career and life mulling over, fuming over and struggling to understand in depth.

Aftersun is unnecessarily obscure and overdoes the whole “understated/unstated” thing.

There’s deja vu in watching Tolontan deal with Romanian TV, which eagerly follows his team’s reporting each night, but which cannot resist from shooting at the messenger when he appears on their talk shows, losing the thread and forgetting the real victims here.

Haynes never lifts Carol above over-dressed melodrama. And with every perfect bar where every perfect martini is served, every perfect dive of a motel on the “Lolita” roadtrip that the “just friends” abruptly take together, Carol betrays its true priorities.

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

And as long as it is, it would be a pity to cut one moment of Spall’s immersive, utterly convincing portrait of this common man with an uncommon gift.

Does this stylistically unstylish picture stand with the lurid glories of “Casino,” the pulse-pounding narrative drive and cinema semiotics of “The Departed,” or the charismatic cynicism of “Goodfellas?” Give me a freaking break.

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.

It’s not the most consequential of films, but from first stop to almost the last, it’s a trippy, traveling delight.

Call Me by Your Name isn’t so much a bad movie as a dull, bloated one, a tale of teen sexual intensity drawn out beyond the point of holding our interest, footnoted with all these spoken (repeatedly, by one and all) provisos — “This is OK because…” That’s all well and good, but I found it lacking as drama (no parental conflict), romance and period piece, a turgid potboiler overheated under the Tuscan sun.

Marriage Story is almost funny enough and touching just often enough to endorse. It’s good, but it’s no “Scenes from a Marriage” or “Husbands and Wives” or hell, “Company,” for that matter. It’s just Netflixable.

Writer-director Damien Chazelle (“Whiplash”) reaches for the stars, and cast the picture beautifully. But this throwback musical (songs by Justin Hurwitz) lurches along on show business cliches in between dreamy flights of fancy.

It’s a slight film, but as befits something as introspective and spooky as this, it’s not delicate or dainty.

It’s the genius of this genial, formulaic coming-of-age comedy that Lady Bird never seems too broadly drawn. We’ve known this kid, gone to school with her, watched her reinventions continue straight on into college.

Shoplifters, winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, is a film acted with great sensitivity, a rough story delicately told.