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 The dreamy romantic Grant of yore has been replaced by a diabolical presence eager to send us all to hell.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.