Naomi Watts and Bill Murray are funny, touching and vital as the most recent guardians of a 150-pound Great Dane named Apollo, but the scene-stealing pup scampers off with this slight but irresistible character study and wins a special place in your heart.

OK, Steven Soderbergh’s sleek, sexy spy thriller is sometimes too cool for school. But oh the twisted, erotic mischief dished out by dynamos Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbinder as married spies, still hot for each other but wondering if the other is a mole for the wrong side.

Repeating his historic Oscar wins for Parasite is off the table for Bong Joon-ho. It's not happening. But together with his up-for-anything star Robert Pattinson in multiple roles, Bong turns this scattershot sci-fi space opera into a buoyant social satire that really stings

Forget the silly title. There’s a world of hurt behind the laughs in this emotional powerhouse as therapist Morgan Freemen treats a PTSD soldier (a very fine Sonequa Martin-Green), home from Afghanistan but still talking to the scrappy ghost of her army bestie (Natalie Morales).

Latvia’s dark-horse entry in the Oscar sweeps for best animation doesn’t need dialogue (it has none) or A-list voice talent (also absent) to qualify as a thing of beauty as a cat and four fellow creatures carve out a future after a cataclysmic flood wipes out humanity.

Though the third screen go-round can't top the magic of the first two Paddington gems, it’s still an exuberant gift of family fun that takes our bear home to Peru for new adventures and a tangle with a sinister singing nun played to the hilarious hilt by Olivia Colman

First-time director Drew Hancock kicks off the young movie year with an out-of-nowhere surprise, a fiendishly funny romcom scarefest that hits the entertainment bullseye and makes a star out of Sophie Thatcher as a hot date (for Jack Quaid) who doesn’t know her own power.

In this shivery ghost story, director-editor-DP Steven Soderbergh proves a rich imagination can work wonders on a low budget and turn the familiar into something fresh and frightening.

Fact-based family dramas don’t come more intense or indelible than Walter Salles’s emotional powerhouse starring Golden Globe best actress winner Fernanda Torres as a Brazilian wife and mother who fights a military dictatorship to save her flesh and blood

In her first fiction feature, documentarian Payal Kapadia brings a poetic profundity to this cinematic spellbinder about female sisterhood in a big city (Mumbai) full of societal, economic and political pressures that can force out intimacy and kill the yearning to dream.

In a world of humans, bad boy British pop rocker Robbie Williams casts himself as a computer=generated monkey. Too much? Maybe. But damn, this banger-infused biopic works like gangbusters under the visual magic of director Michael Gracey

Spain’s legendary director Pedro Almodóvar freights his first full-length feature in English with tangled subplots, but nothing can dim the artistry of Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore who make this death-fixated tale of old friends in crisis feel thrillingly alive.

Gia Coppola’s film has no more than a sketch of a plot, but soars on the quietly devastating performance of former Baywatch babe Pamela Anderson as an aging Vegas showgirl who learns her hopelessly outdated dance revue has been given the hook after 30 years.

Here’s your holiday counter-programming ticket to fear and trembling. It’s a passion project for Robert Eggers who creates an atmosphere of creeping dread in which Bill Skarsgård and Lily-Rose Depp are to die for as a vampire Count and his loveliest-trickiest victim

Forget the thin membrane of a soap opera plot— Timothée Chalamet acts and sings the young Bob Dylan to showstopping perfection, catching the famously withholding troubadour in the exhilarating act of inventing himself as multitudes, always creating and always in the wind.

Nicole Kidman burns up the screen in Helena Reijn’s erotic spellbinder about why a married-with-children titan of industry would risk career suicide to find her true self by losing control with a hottie young intern (Harris Dickinson) who bends her to his cruel will. Not as transgressive as it wants to be, but damn close

Brady Corbet’s engulfing masterpiece about an immigrant architect (an Oscarbound Adrien Brody) is the best movie of the year, but it’s also way more than that— an unsentimental; uncompromising thunderbolt of pure cinema that Corbet has built to last.

This flawed but fascinating gay love story from director Luca Guadagnino is lifted to the heights by Daniel Craig who captures his character’s sexual heat and yearning heart in a performance he seems to tear from his insides. Is an Oscar nomination next? That’s the idea.

Creative artistry radiates from every frame of this groundbreaking film from director RaMell Ross who joins with camera wiz Jomo Fray to take us inside the eyes of two young Black men (Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson) to expose the abuses in a Florida reform school

In Mike Leigh’s lacerating new film, Marianne Jean-Baptiste delivers a hall-of-fame acting triumph as a London housewife and mother who’s mad at the world and ready to give us all a tongue-lashing. She’s an emotional powderkeg ready to blow. Better duck

The massacre of the Israel team at the 1972 Munich Olympics becomes an absolutely riveting docudrama on journalistic ethics as seen entirely through the control room of ABC Sports doing live coverage. Peter Sarsgaard, John Magaro and Leonie Benesch will pin you to your seat.

How do I love the film version of the smash Broadway musical, let me count the ways, starting with the way Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande set the screen ablaze as frenemy witches and sets, costumes and songs to die for. Seeing this joyous eruption once is just not enough.

A qualified thumbs up for this sequel that can’t match the Oscar-winning best picture that spawned it, but the crowd will roar nonetheless thanks to expert razzle-dazzle from director Ridley Scott and a sensational, scene-stealing Denzel Washington as a villain worth cheering.

Hugh Grant uses his charm for evil in this surprisingly provocative cat-and-mouse game about the meaning, if any, of religion in a godless modern world. The dreamy romantic Grant of yore has been replaced by a diabolical presence eager to send us all to hell. What fun.

In what may be his final film, director Clint Eastwood, 94, overcomes a contrived script to build a tense, terrific legal thriller that indicts our broken justice system. Toni Collette and Nicholas Hoult help the master explore the gray area between heroism and villainy to stunning effect.

You’ve never seen anything in your life like Jacques Audiard’s Spanish musical about violent passions starring Zoë Saldaña, Selena Gomez and trans actress Karla Sofia Gascón in career-defining performances that take a piece out of you. This you don’t want to miss.

Take in the pleasure of real teamwork as the gifted writer-director-actor Jesse Eisenberg joins an Oscar worthy Kieran Culkin for a deeply felt dramedy about two New York cousins on a tour of Poland where their late grandma survived a Nazi death camp? You’ll laugh till it hurts.

Ralph Fiennes delivers a master class in acting in this juicy, jolting mystery thriller in which director Edward Berger uses the fictional election of a new pope in Rome to mirror America’s own dirty politics. What fun! And the drama of It will pin you to your seat