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.

A new Paul Schrader movie is always an event and this spellbinding meditation on sin and salvation—seen through the eyes of a gambler (a superb Oscar Isaac) who counts cards to both escape and confront his torturous past—is one of his best.

Another game-changer from Jordan Peele, who pushes the limits of fun, fright and movie love to take horror to the next level. What do UFOs have to do with the violence eating at America? Say yes to Nope—it’ll mess with your head and pin you to your seat.

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.

Cord Jefferson’s slashingly funny satire of Black literary stereotyping is one of the best and boldest American comedies in years with a dynamite performance by Jeffrey Wright that should put him up front in the Oscar sweeps. You won't look at race on screen in the same way again.

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.

Paul Giamatti is absolute perfection as a Grinchy teacher who learns a hard lesson in empathy over a winter school break. All the actors shine in this exuberant movie gift from director Alexander Payne that has all the makings of a new holiday classic.

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.

Viggo Mortensen scores a standout directing debut, showing the artful sensitivity and offbeat humor that define him as an actor with this heart-piercing drama in which he stars as a gay son coping with the dementia of his racist father (a career-best Lance Henriksen).

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.

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.

Is it sacrilege for Spielberg to re-imagine the Oscar-winning 1961 musical classic? Not when it’s this thrilling. Not when two new stars—Rachel Zegler and Ariana DeBose— get to share the screen with the legendary Rita Moreno. Then Spielberg sets the screen ablaze.

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.

Don’t miss this nail-biting thriller in which director İlker Çatak and sensational star Leonie Benesch turn a tale of petty theft at a German middle school into a battle between freedom of expression and institutional control all too easy to recognize as our own.

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.

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

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.

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

So what if the plot is the usual tangle to set up stunts. Tom Cruise does the impossible and nobody does it better.

Oscar shortlisted for best animated film, this ravishing new gem from anime master Mamoru Hosoda is a knockout fantasia that cuts to the core of Gen Z lives that revolve around digi-tech and yet speaks an intimate universal language of love and loss.

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.

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.

The fall awards season roars in with this cinema powder keg. Expect Oscar to sprinkle gold dust on writer-director Aaron Sorkin and a gangbusters cast for making this recreation of a notorious 1969 trial burn with a timely relevance that singes the screen.

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.

The Japanese reboot of the kaju king snagged a surprise Oscar nomination for visual effects. It deserves the win, whether you see it in color or glorious black-and-white. For once, the 70-year-old series finds a human depth to match its dazzle. A star is reborn.

Pixar tackles the topic of female puberty in this animated funhouse ride about a 13-year girl from Toronto’s Chinatown who turns into a giant red panda in this wise and wonderful metaphor for the roller coaster of messy adolescence.

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.

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.