This expertly-done B movie plunges breakout star Meghann Fahy into one of the scariest situations ever—a first date. The dude (Brandon Sklenar) is a charmer, yet her phone keeps buzzing with text messages to kill him. Hang on for a nerve-jangling ride.

The comic pairing of Jack Black and Jason Momoa makes this video game-turned-PG-movie pablum seem better than the cash grab it is. But not by much. Still, there’s no shame in being strictly kids’ stuff that knows how to serve and entertain its audience.

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.

Charm magnets Jenna Ortega and Paul Rudd do their best to lift this horror comedy out of the quicksand of cliches that surround it but it’s a losing proposition.

Even a double dose of the great Robert De Niro taking on the grandpa roles of feuding mob bosses Vito Genovese and Frank Costello, can’t lift this gimmicky, grating, draggy attempt to join the pantheon of classic gangster cinema. It’s a losing battle.

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.

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.

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).

How do you cram a cast of A-listers, led by Bill Murray, Jennifer Coolidge and Pete Davidson, into a crime caper so laugh deprived that calling it a comedy qualifies as false advertising? Here’s your answer. And it’s a crying shame.

Theo James plays twin brothers on the run from a toy monkey with blood-splattering murder on its mind. Director Oz Perkins doesn’t disappoint with his ferociously funny take on Stephen King’s short story even if he never reaches the horror heights.

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

For all its imperfections and borrowed horror inspirations, this cheeky romcom scarefest is still one movie Valentine that delivers the goods for shudders and cuddles.

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.

Jeremy Piven tap dances for Hitler and turns playwright Arthur Miller’s cautionary short story about art’s accommodation to power into a well-meaning family project (his sister directed) that stumbles when it most needs to soar

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

Director Leigh Whannell knocked it out of the park with his riveting 2020 reboot of Invisible Man, but his take on Wolf Man is a limp, lazy excuse for thought-provoking horror. Worse, this long night’s journey into day is no fun at all

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

Amy Adams excels as a stay-at-home mom going so crazy in confinement that she turns into a feral dog in protest. It’s a daring idea until the script chickens out as a ferocious feminist fable and sinks into cotton-candy quicksand. Bummer

Angelina Jolie fires up the best actress Oscar race as opera legend Maria Callas, but director Pablo Larraín's muffled cinematic take on the prima donna’s last days commits the cardinal sin that Callas never did as an artist by leaving us on the outside looking in.

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.

We all need a little Christmas now, but not this cynical cash grab faking it as holiday fun. The mind boggles that it cost $250 million to produce a big, bloated fiasco about Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans trying to save kidnapped Santa (J.K. Simmons). Bah, humbug

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

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.

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.

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

Family audiences rejoice! The Oscar for Best Animated Film belongs right here in this enchanting tale of a robot, voiced by the amazing Lupita Nyong'o, who finds herself playing mother to a baby goose. The result is spectacular in every sense of the word.

Mikey Madison, Oscar’s new Cinderella, leads a cast of crazies as a Brooklyn sex worker who finds her prince charming in the son of a dangerous Russian oligarch. No list of the year’s best films would be complete without Sean Baker’s whirlwind blast of fun and social provocation.

Way better than you may have heard, this mesmerizing look at young Donald Trump (a sensational Sebastian Stan) and his legal dark prince Roy Cohn (a dynamite Jeremy Strong) provides funny and scary insights into the ego Trump developed to rule the world.

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.

Here’s a sequel we did not need, trapping stars Joaquin Phoenix and the glorious Lady Gaga in a joyless musical retread of moldy ideas. Talk about sucking the life out of a party. Says she to Joker during a fantasy scene, "Come on, baby, let's give the people what they want." I'm still waiting.

With so little to show for its staggering ambition to synthesize modern New York with the fall of the Roman Empire, Francis Ford Coppola's all-star, self-financed passion project is a mess, but the lion who made it is still roaring, even in winter.

Jason Reitman energetically tracks the lead-up to the first episode of SNL in 1975, but the result is only fitfully funny, leaving the cast struggling to register. Best in show are Dylan O'Brien as Dan Aykroyd, Cory Michael Smith as Chevy Chase and Nicholas Braun in a surprise dual role.

The jokes are repetitive and the action is strictly formula, but the old-school star power of George Clooney and Brad Pitt having a laugh as lone wolf fixers stuck working the same job in New York gets by on the pleasure of their company.

Demi Moore seizes the role of her lifetime as a movie star turned fitness guru who gets axed for committing the cardinal sin of aging. You’ve never seen anything like the body horrors in Coralie Fargeat’s gory and glorious takedown of youth obsession.

Aaron Schimberg’s head-twisting, heart-piercing psychological thriller stars a never-better Sebastian Stan as a facially disfigured actor who has an operation to remove his scars and finds he can't hide the gloomy, self-loathing introvert that lingers in his DNA.

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.

Three sublime actresses, indelibly played by Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen and an Oscar-calling Natasha Lyonne, portray sisters coping with the impending death of their father in a bruisingly funny and sad chamber piece from Azazel Jacobs that takes a piece out of you.

We’ve waited 36 years for this sequel and despite some rough plot patches, Michael Keaton returns in peak form to the funniest role of his career as the trickster demon who’s determined to let his freak flag fly. The Juice is loose, babe. Act accordingly.

Summer just saved its thrillingest thriller for last. Starring a wow Kyle Gallner and Willa Fitzgerald, this cinematic gut punch from JT Mollner brings one day in the romantic twisted love life of a serial killer to vivid life on screen. You won’t know what hit you.

Even talented people can make terrible movies. Case in point: this all-star, devil-made-me-do-it horror show from Lee Daniels with an overqualified cast, underfunded special effects, a sinkhole of a script and a nutso confidence in its own nonexistent profundity.

Beauty can be an ugly business so it’s too bad this tense, fitfully funny satire about vanity scammers only goes skin deep. But it’s all flowers for Elizabeth Banks who is sheer bonkers perfection as a cosmetics control freak losing control.

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.

The mostly improvised drama about a trans man reuniting with his family can feel clumsy and contrived, but it soars on waves of raw feeling thanks to the deeply felt, deeply moving performance of Elliot Page in a role he wears like a second skin.

The seventh chapter in the creepy-crawly franchise shamelessly feeds off the DNA of the first two sci-fi space classics. But new director Fede Alvarez dishes out serviceable funhouse horrors with the gory enthusiasm of the alien fanboy he most truly is.

Fighting their way out of the flowery tearjerking in the film version of Colleen Hoover’s mega-bestseller are a timely movie and a stellar Blake Lively performance that both take measure of domestic violence and the women who get to decide when enough is enough.

Since heist movies are a dime a dozen, don’t get your hopes up. But thanks to the easy chemistry between Matt Damon and Casey Affleck, there is the kick of an acting job well done.

Josh Hartnett does his best playing a serial killer and devoted dad living in the same body. But you don’t need a sixth sense to know that director M. Knight Shyamalan is running on empty as his patchwork thriller slips from disappointment to disaster.

This 1960s-era soap opera is less a movie than an excuse for Oscar-winners Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain to dress to thrill and try to kill each other. With stars like these, you can almost forget how quickly the plot drifts off into absurdity.

Is it a great movie? Nah. It's too slick a Marvel package for that, with surprisingly meh special effects and an energy that’s more desperation than inspiration. But stars Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman are willing to bust a gut to make you laugh. So there’s that.

It’s the same old tornado twaddle, but the destructive power of weather has never been more timely, the sparking star charisma of Glen Powell never more evident and the tenderness director Lee Isaac Chung shows for the land and its people never more appreciated.

The first indisputably great movie of 2024 is a blazing Oscar contender about a real-life prison arts program that helps caged birds, led by a simply stupendous Colman Domingo, to rediscover their humanity with a heart full to bursting and a spirit that soars.

When it comes to high-wire acting with no net, Nicolas Cage is a rock star and the serial-killing satanic devil he plays here ranks with his bizarro best even when director Oz Perkins lets his plot slide into silliness. No matter—virtuoso Cage lights the spark and then, ka-boom!

Eddie Murphy is 63 now and sometimes the jokes seem just as retirement ready, but seeing the this comic legend return to the cop role he created four decades ago—along with many of the old gang— at least squeaks by as primo fan service.

Sure it repeats everything it did the last three times, but thanks to Steve Carell’s lovable grump of a Gru and those wild and crazy Minions, the random lunacy remains hard to resist.

Costner’s real reverence for the classic western dances with disaster by passing off the first of his four-part saga as epic filmmaking instead of a trio of speechifying, clumsily linked one-hour episodes that play like a TV series with no direction home.

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.

Oscar winner Emma Stone teams up again with her Poor Things ’director Yorgos Lanthimos for a mesmerizing mindteaser, costarring a fabulous Jesse Plemons, that tells three stories that you can’t stop thinking about as they entertain and exasperate.

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?

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.

The fourth round for Will Smith and Martin Lawrence isn’t a bad movie, really, just another mediocrity trying to cash in on what came before, the kind of money grab that’s killing movies by serving leftovers as the main course. Resist, people, before it's too late.

Starring the great Jessica Lange as a Broadway legend gobsmacked by a diagnosis of dementia, this is a snappy, stirring tribute to theater as a lifeline. Ignore the occasional drift into soap opera in favor of Lange’s transfixing master class in acting Just sit back and behold.

Oooowee, this is one scorchingly sexy thriller. Powered by shining new star Glen Powell, who singes the screen with wowza costar Adria Arjona, this cheeky, somewhat true story from director Richard Linklater adds up to one of the best and most beguiling movies of the year.

Soon to be infamous for bad decisions, this despairingly off-kilter toon looks like a movie, talks like a movie, but feels like a cynical cash grab propelled by the idiocy of turning our favorite mouthy, shamelessly lazy cat into a blah action hero voiced by Chris Pratt.

OK, it’s no Fury Road, but visionary action poet George Miller scores a solid base hit by replacing the irreplaceable Charlize Theron with livewire Anya Taylor-Joy as the younger Furiosa in the exhilarating act of inventing herself. You’ll be dazzled, guaranteed.

While this sanitized and superficial Amy Winehouse biopic flounders around in search of focus, new star Marisa Abela gives her blazing all to capturing the late singer’s short, turbulent life and lasting art with stunning ferocity and feeling.

Jane Schoenbrun's off-handedly revolutionary mindbender about two teens bonding over a sci-fi TV series isn't always easy to get your head and heart around. But hold on for its incendiary daring, its willingness to go for broke. Schoenbrun is a trans game-changer. They make us believe.

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?

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.

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.

Zendaya shines like a true movie star, and she and costars Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist will blow you away as tennis pros in Luca Guadagnino’s swoony, sexy romantic triangle that finds hilarious and hardcore erotic mischief off the court and on.

This French bonbon, Woody Allen’s best reviewed film in years, is no career landmark. But its blend of humor and homicide shows Allen, 88, still moving forward, creating the kind of film he made his name on, the kind that makes you laugh till it hurts. And that's a stroke of luck indeed

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.

Bertrand Bonello’s exhilarating cinematic challenge stars a never-better Lea Seydoux and George MacKay as lovers across space and time who fight to embrace the beast of their dangerous emotions while artificial intelligence threatens to eradicate it.

Mean tweets 1920 version: The incomparable Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley turn a flimsy script about poison pen letters that turn friends against each other into irresistible fun. Any resemblance to today’s internet trolling is purely intentional.

Star Jake Gyllenhaal and director Doug Liman huff and puff to reimagine the bawdy B-movie punch of the 1989 original with Patrick Swayze, but despite putting a fresh coat of paint on this rickety old jalopy, there’s still nothing under the hood.

Michael Keaton’s second go as star and director stumbles but rises again on the strength of Keaton’s ability to bring his bristling intelligence as an actor to his work behind camera in this darkly comic film noir about an L.A. hitman losing a fraught battle with dementia.

Dive head first into this pulpy, erotic crime thriller starring a fireball Kristen Stewart as a gym manager in hot love with a young bodybuilder (a sensational Katy M. O'Brian), Directed in a fever by the great Rose Glass, the film is a grenade of image and sound ready to blow.

Millie Bobby Brown fights a heroic battle as a princess bride up against a digital dragon, but it’s not the damsel but the audience that will suffer distress from the nonstop, numbing repetition that turns this Netflix movie dull and dreary way too fast.

The year’s first surefire blockbuster is a sequel that outdoes Denis Villeneuve’s first epic 2021 sand opera. OK, it’s long and sad-faced solemn, but Chalamet and Zendaya are destiny-kissed lovers to die for, Austin Butler makes a hissable new villain and the spectacle is off the charts.

Japanese manga master Hayao Miyazaki, 83, came out of retirement for this hand-drawn beauty about his own life growing up in wartime. The Oscar for best animated feature belongs right here since Miyazaki’s unparalleled artistry shines out of every frame.