Blending the hilarious and heartfelt, the tough and the tender, John Carney’s sweerheart of an Irish musical is something you’ll want to hold close.

Kristen Stewart is so good as Princes Diana—it’s the performance of her life—that the Academy should start engraving her name on the Best Actress Oscar.

Set in 1954 Detroit, Soderbergh’s terrific, twisty, film-noir throwback keeps a lot of racial, political and sexual tension simmering under the surface, providing a field day for actors who interact with clockwork precision and off-the-wall laughs.

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.

As the hard-driving daddy of Venus and Serena Williams, Will Smith gives the performance of his life in an unapologetic crowd-pleaser. You just may want to stand up and cheer.

A fierce and feeling Viola Davis headlines this historical epic about women warriors in 1823 West Africa and reminds us how indelible and truly inspiring it is to see these brave sisters doing it for themselves.

Polarizing? Sure. But Wes Anderson is a film artist like no other. In defiance of realism, he builds dazzling, minimalist, all-star jewel boxes that are easy to spoof but impossible to equal. This Atomic-age fable about teen space nerds and their parents tinges laughs with genuine feeling.

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).

The endlessly inventive Wes Anderson and a cast of all-stars use all the tools of cinema to give a big, fat, loving smooch to, of all things, print journalism and the gifted eccentrics who practice it. Too fussy? Maybe. But what an exuberant gift of a memory piece.

No wonder Kenneth Branagh’s funny, touching and vital look at his own coming of age in Northern Ireland’s turbulent capital city is the Oscar frontrunner for Best Picture. No movie this year cuts a clearer, truer path of the heart. It’s his personal best.

In a hotly divisive, post Jan. 6 election year, cinema virtuoso Alex Garland embeds us with journalists, led by a killer Kirsten Dunst, covering a speculative second war between the states. The bloody result is the most original,and propulsively exciting movie of the year so far.

How do you make a movie about an intellectual argument? By putting a human face on it, which is what filmmaker Ava DuVernay and acting force Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor do in this stunning provocation about race and class. The result is something rare: a movie that matters.

The sisters are doing it for themselves and one of them is a dragon in a wild, animated wonder ride from Disney that radiates female empowerment and comes at you in a whoosh of creative ideas in full eruption.

A love story about two pretty young cannibals won’t strike everyone as an appetizing dish. But you won’t be able to take your eyes off Timothée Chalamet and Taylor Russell as they try to reconcile romance with killer impulses on a road trip through hell.

Denis Villeneuve’s take on Frank Herbert’s dauntingly complex novel can sputter and flirt with incoherence, but the director and his actors, led by an all-in Timothée Chalamet, find the pow and the poetry in this cornucopia of visual astonishments.

I didn’t have much hope for this umpteenth take on the 1980s comic-book relic about humanoid teen sewer rats, but Seth Rogen and his team of merry pranksters have turned this animated version into a giddy, goofball delight. Cowabunga, baby!

All your friends will be talking about this femcentric raunchfest and its fabulous Asian-American actors who are ready to lace every laugh with human complication.

The creator of ‘Hamilton,’ Lin Manuel Miranda, offers a stirring tribute to the creator of ‘Rent,’ Jonathan Larson, whose too short life—as acted and sung by the sensational Andrew Garfield—becomes a love letter to his soaring spirit.

Despite some pokey pacing, the fierce human drama of how two female reporters, superbly acted by Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan, persuaded women to go on the record about being sexually harassed by producer Harvey Weinstein is the year's most gripping detective story.

Thanks to a master class in comic and dramatic nuance from Bill Murray and Rashida Jones as a father and daughter dealing with cross-generational infidelity, director Sofia Coppola turns a wispy premise into something funny, touching and vital.

When a hedge fund promotes a she (Phoebe Dynevor) over a he (Alden Ehrenreich)—they’re engaged— gender politics becomes a powerhouse erotic thriller which newbie filmmaker Chloe Domont wants couples to leave arguing like hell. No worries. They wil

Why is the sequel never the equal? Mostly because the surprise goes poof, along with the kick of originality. This followup to the animated Oscar-winning 2015 original can't do much about that, except deliver charm in sweet abundance. So why resist?

A peak-form Ryan Gosling—he and Emily Blunt are romcom hotties to die for— knocks it out of the park in this insanely entertaining love letter to Hollywood’s unsung action heroes—stunt performers. Listen up, academy: an Oscar category for stunts is way overdue.

Michael B. Jordan returns as star and now director to play Adonis Creed, the boxing champ who comes out of retirement to take on a fierce new contender (a dynamite Jonathan Majors). Even when the overcrowded plot stumbles, this clash of the titans is worth cheering.

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.

Director Ben Affleck slam dunks a movie about a basketball sneaker—the Air Jordan, no less— and it’s the first all-star Oscar contender of 2023, an outrageously entertaining classic in the making with Affleck, Matt Damon, Viola Davis and a cast of MVPs at the top of their game.

You’ve seen ‘Being the Ricardos,” but you’ll never understand the successful partnership and failed marriage of sitcom icons Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz until you see Amy Poehler’s emotional roadmap of a documentary. Between the laughs, you’ll blink back tears.

It's Fincher's deliciously depraved conceit that his perfectionist process is not unlike the killer's. In this director’s hands, and a mesmerizing title turn from Fassbinder, what could have been a compendium of hitman cliches becomes a tangle of loose ends hauntingly left untied.

The great Michael Mann directs a powerfully nuanced Adam Driver as Enzo Ferrari, the ex-racer-turned-entrepreneur. The domestic scenes with his wife (Penelope Cruz) and mistress (Shailene Woodley) slow the pacing but the vroom of tires on the road is thrilling to the max.

Tom Hanks saddles up for his first western and teams with a firebrand costar in 10-year-old Helena Zengel, but despite the film's visual grit and grace, it could have risked more and cut deeper.

You'll laugh, you'll cry and all steps in between at this vital family entertainment with a title that stands for Children of Deaf Adults. Oscar winner Marlee Matlin and newcomer Emilia Jones turn this emotional powerhouse into one of the year's best movies

Here’s the blast of wicked fun we need right now, using song and dance to enhance Dahl’s timeless tale of naughty children vs uncaring adults distilled in the war between bookish Matilda (Alisha Weir is a one-girl talent explosion) and Emma Thompson’s headmistress from hell.

Yes, it’s about paleontology, but hold the yawns. Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan hit new acting peaks in Francis Lee’s deliberately-paced portrait of two ladies on fire in Victorian England.

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.

In filmmaker Emerald Fennell’s diabolically funny takedown of toxic masculinity, Carey Mulligan gives a dynamite performance that should make her a frontrunner in the Oscar race for Best Actress.

You’ll want to stand up and cheer for this eye-opening true story of three Black sisters from Brooklyn who emerged from a homeless shelter with their single mother to make it in the field of competitive track with the odds stacked against them.

Move over Chucky, here’s the killer robot doll thriller we’ve been waiting for. This jolt of fun and fright stars a sensational Allison Wllliams as the inventor of a babysitting robot who takes her job to the homicidal hilt. The first banger hit of 2023 is right here.

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

Soderbergh’s mostly improvised jaunt on the Queen Mary 2 with three acting legends, shouldn’t work. But it does, gloriously, thanks to the irresistible teamwork of Streep, Wiest and Bergen. They’re pure gold.

Dakota Johnson is aces as a late bloomer coming out in her 30s. The touchingly personal script by Lauren Pomerantz is funny as hell, but it’s her delicacy of feeling that sneaks up and floors you. Something special is going on here. Treasure it.

Is that really Saoirse Ronan playing a blackout drunk with a violent temper? It is and against all odds she transforms this often dreary addiction drama on the strength of an emotional powerhouse of a performance that should rank her high in the Oscar race for Best Actress.

This uneven musical take on Alice Walker’s seminal novel can trip on its own too muchness, but the star film debuts of Fantasia Barrino and Danielle Brooks are worth shouting about in a tribute to Black sisterhood that’s blessed with a heart that sings and a spirit that soars.

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.

The scares are off the charts, but only as a means to confront the film’s thoughtful messaging about racial injustice. Dynamite star Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and director Nia DaCosta make you think hard about everything you see. Welcome to a new horror classic.

Video games make lousy movies, right? Not this time. Thanks to Chris Pine and a cast of merry pranksters, especially Hugh Grant and a chubwub dragon, the big-screen D&D cuts through the confusion and chaos to create a goofball fantasy even a non-gamer can love.

Are fascist dictators really vampires? That’s the shockingly funny premise behind director Pablo Lorrain’s look at Augusto Pinochet and his reign of terror over Larrain’s native Chile. Flaws and all, this spellbinder speaks scarily to the undying nature of tyranny. You’ll laugh till it hurts.

The gloriously unhinged filmmaker James Gunn keeps Margot Robbie, John Cena and a top cast of crazies firing on all cylinders and turns a botch job original that was the worst movie of 2016 into the dazzling, down-and-dirty whirlwind it was always meant to be.

Director Matt Reeves and star Robert Pattinson see the Caped Crusader as more film-noir detective than comic-book hero in their mesmerizing mindbender that aims high even when it misses the mark. It’s a grenade of pure cinema ready to blow.

So what if the showoff climax deserts depth for dazzle. As the first Asian hero in Marvel history, former stuntman Simu Liu is action poetry in motion and his epic starring debut kicks off the fall film season on a rousing high note.

It’s not in the same league as such Pixar classics as ‘WALL-E’ and the ‘Toy Story’ quartet, but there’s no denying the pure enchantment of the visual, comic and subtextual dazzle in this tale of two sea monsters trying to pass for human boys in 1960’s Italy.

Foodie culture gets hilariously torched as a celebrity chef, acted to pretentious perfection by Ralph Fiennes, holds his customers, except for a deliciously defiant Anya Taylor-Joy, to the fire at his restaurant from hell. It’s all delectably unhinged.

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.

Tom Holland is better than ever in his surprise-packed, third solo outing as a teen hero in a onesie who’s out to save the world and a faltering pandemic box office. But this time the generic thrills are tempered with genuine emotion. Good one, Spidey.

Fueled by performances worth treasuring from Chastain and Sarsgaard, this impossible love story between a woman who can't forget and man who can't remember slowly works its way into your mind and heart. Filmmaker Michel Franco makes sure you’ll be moved to tears.

A sequel always loses the advantage of surprise, but Krasinski eases us out of Covid lockdown by crafting the perfect thriller to get summer audiences back into movie theaters where everything is dark and everyone can hear you scream.

It's basically a pricey home movie in which Adam Sandler spotlights his wife and two daughters. It's also an unexpectedly sweet and sassy surprise. Comic dynamo Sunny Sandler, his youngest, gives nepotism a good name as a Jewish girl on the cusp of womanhood.

Set against the German bombing of London, Steve McQueen stirring WW2 epic misses greatness by failing to fully engage with the starker, deeper implications of seeing war through the eyes of a mixed-race child facing an evil that’s scarily close to home

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.

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.

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.

The cool factor is off the charts as director Jeff Nichols and a trio of sizzling stars—Austin Butler, Jodie Comer and Tom Hardy—turns a landmark 1968 photobook about a 1968 Chicago motorcycle club into a vibrant vibe of a movie that vrooms to life on the big screen.

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.

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.

Longing for a sweet little surprise that transports you to a place of pure movie enchantment? Then check out the glorious Lesley Manville as a struggling London maid who travels to Paris to fulfill her middle-aged Cinderella fantasy of owning a Dior gown.

The carny scenes of freaks and geeks are undeniably creepy, but director Guillermo del Toro’s hallucinatory brilliance only comes in flashes as Bradley Cooper and a dynamite cast struggle to build a mesmerizing misfire into the classic it might have been.

With a dynamite cast led by a never-better Jim Parsons, what could have been a dated retelling of a 1968 play about gay men in crisis emerges instead as a funny, fierce and scarily relevant wakeup call to a resurgent threat to marginalized minorities.

As an undocumented Filipina trying to make it as a country singer in Texas, breakout star Eva Noblezada punches through the film's familiar contours to find its beating heart as a timely portrait of the immigrant experience.

Neither a filmed play nor an actual movie, the muddled screen version of August Wilson’s great drama about systemic wrongs against Black America is a mixed bag but also a stirring promise from producer Denzel Washington and his family to preserve the work of a theatrical master.

Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Phillips turn this same-sex romcom for the holidays into a gift package that feels quietly and mischievously revolutionary.

Cooper Raiff, who created this Sundance prizewinner, can't hide his feelings for people with disabilities and the challenges that come to those who love them. And I can't hide my feelings for this exuberant gift of a movie starring Raiff and a never better Dakota Johnson.

Want a blast of fun to ease your pandemic blues? No worries. Borat is back in a sequel that can't recapture the cathartic shock of the first but still shows Sacha Baron Cohen as a razor-sharp satirist who knows how to make us laugh till it hurts.

Actor David Oyelowo makes a heartfelt directing debut in a PG adventure about a boy (Lonnie Chavez) in search of a mythic creature who might save his dying mother. Even when the pace drags, the film remains a rare gift for family audiences.

Oh no—not another doomsday thriller! Yes, but hold on and see how director Sam Esmail and producers Barack and Michelle Obama, powered by an exceptional all-star cast (Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, Mahershala Ali, Kevin Bacon), make you care while frying your nerves to a frazzle.

It’s always a slam dunk when Adam Sandler drops his doofus routine and really acts. And here, as a basketball scout who yearns to coach, he infuses every frame of this formulaic crowd-pleaser with a real-deal love of the game. Hot damn! We have a winner.

Sure it’s hokey, but this fact-based crowdpleaser starring a terrific Toni Collette as a struggling Welsh villager who risks everything on a racehorse she breeds and raises is an underdog story that works like a charm.

Playing the kid sister of Henry Cavill’s Sherlock Holmes, Millie Bobby Brown, just 16, shines her talent on its highest beams and creates a totally irresistible family entertainment.

Despite a sappy ending that surprises in all the wrong ways, Daniel Craig’s fifth and final go-round as 007 cements his reputation as the gold-standard James Bond of the 21st century and lays down a challenge for anyone—he or she—who dares to follow him.

Is surgery the new sex? Body horror maestro David Cronenberg and a cast led by Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux and Kristen Stewart tackle that question and more in a futuristic sci-fi shocker that will leave you laughing, squirming and—yikes—thinking.

Nicolas Cage plays Nicolas Cage in this whacked-out meta-comedy that doesn’t always hang together as a movie but cements its gonzo star as the eighth wonder of the world when it comes to highwire acting without a net.

Even when bloated Marvel action robs the film of intimacy, Johansson digs deep into how her Russian assassin once felt outside the Avengers bubble. And Pugh deserves Oscar love as her pretend sister in this fab and fitting salute to female empowerment.

Director George C. Wolfe had a dream to put unsung civil-rights firebrand Bayard Rustin front and center in a movie. And now, with the help of executive producers Barack and Michelle Obama and a thrilling acting tour de force from the great Colman Domingo, he has.

An inner-city western featuring Black cowboys in a real-life setting deserves celebrating and the dynamite teamwork of Idris Elba and young Caleb McLaughlin heads off the father-son cliches in the script to keep you riveted.

Weigh the flimsy story against the eye-popping, jaw-dropping, shoot-the-works visuals that fill the screen to bursting and the choice is clear: James Cameron’s 3-D sequel to his biggest hit is the ultimate in-theater thrill ride. You’ve never seen anything like it in your life.

A 40-ish single mom hooks up with a 20-ish boy band star. Cue the soap suds? Not this time. Somehow sensational Anne Hathaway and swoony Nicholas Galitzine make the cliches dance, bringing humor, heat and unexpected heart to a fantasy for daydream believers.

Not every joke or jolt hits the mark. But thanks to a go-for-broke Vince Vaughn as a hulking serial killer who body swaps with a teen girl, you won’t find a better way to LOL while being scared senseless than with this ‘Freaky’ Friday the 13th.

It can’t top the original and the absence of the late Chadwick Boseman hurts real bad, but Ryan Coogler’s sequel proves to be more than cringey franchise building by putting women of color in charge (yay to Angela Bassett and Letitia Wright) and watching them fly.

This two-hour film wrap-up of the unjustly cancelled crime series may feel patchy and uneven, but it still gives Liev Schreiber’s iconic Ray—a hardcase-for-hire who can fix anything but the nightmare of his past— the send-off he and we deserve.

Sure, it’s a bit predictable, but actress Zoe Kravitz—in a promising directing debut— milks every ounce of suspense out of this #MeToo thriller set on an island paradise where pretty young things accept invites from tycoon Channing Tatum at their own peril.

This English-language horror remake can’t touch the 2022 Danish original, but it gets in its scarefest licks thanks to a smiling devil of a lead performance from James McAvoy that will creep you out big time and fry your never to a frazzle.

Get out your handkerchiefs. Directed by her son Edoardo Ponti, Sophia Loren, 86, returns to the screen after a decade to play a Holocaust survivor who raises the children of prostitutes. There is not a single false note in Loren’s magnificent performance. Just sit back and behold.

This psychological thriller about a demonic hand puppet only works in fits and starts. But watching virtuoso actors John Lithgow and Geoffrey Rush let their freak flags fly as nursing home patients in a fight to the death is a blast of fun and fright to make you squirm.

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.

Peter Dinklage sings! Pushing past the conventional elements in Joe Wright’s ravishing musical version of a unrequited love, Dinklage makes believers of us all. His Cyrano thinks his small size makes him a freak. But it's not a poetic ideal he can't live up to, it's his. That's his tragedy.

No one will ever play the bright comic exterior and dark soul of Willy Wonka like Gene Wilder did in 1971. But Timothée Chalamet takes a charming shot at it in this wispy, wobbly musical origin story that still earns a pass for offering much needed family fun for the holidays

In this emotional powerhouse about an expectant mother who experiences her worst nightmare, the brilliant Vanessa Kirby delivers a tour de force that will leave you shattered.

Noah Baumbach thonors Don DeLillo’s virtuoso 1985 novel about the comic-absurdist chaos of consumerism with a too cautious respect. The result is his most constricted film which only breaks free when he allows costars Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig to fly on their own wings.

Paul Dano excels in this fact-based tale of how little-guy investors actually took down billionaire Wall Street fat cats. What’s not to like about this slapstick tragedy with a windfall of laughs.

No. 10 in the series proves there’s still life, artful cosplay and action monkeyshines in the ape-verse that began in 1968, but a worrying case of franchise fatigue is sneaking in. Whatever happened to quitting while you're ahead?