In one of the most wrenching performances I have seen on the screen in some time, it’s thrilling to watch a young actor with passion and charisma explore so many avenues of damage control with so much depth, allowing the viewer to grapple with an unsettling variety of personal emotions.

If you cherish the rare opportunity to watch magnificent actors as perfect as Blythe Danner and John Lithgow giving it all they’ve got, in a film about grown-ups, then the line starts here.

Written with wit and nuance and sensitively directed by Maya Forbes, who makes a formidable feature-film debut, this is a movie that informs and entertains, with a centerpiece performance by the great, often underrated and always surprising Mark Ruffalo.

This is a deeply personal film, which may feel unexpected in a Pixar movie. But the pains of growing up and feeling stuck between youthful adventure and the tradition of your family are resonant for any viewer, regardless of their own experience with puberty.

The end result of this stoned-cold picnic is both haphazardly successful and somewhat disappointing, but it’s worth seeing, thanks enormously to the tremendous charisma of Sam Rockwell.

The movie is wrenchingly slow — you know from the start that nothing is ever going to happen — but Nebraska has a charm that grows on you like a lichen, a wicked sense of humor that makes you laugh in spite of yourself, a concealed heart soft as a Hostess Twinkie, and a generous, welcome respect for the basic decency of the human race, more valuable than any lottery ticket.

The ability of Kammerer and his young castmates to convey the bone-deep dread of artillery bombardments and tanks rolling overhead is matched only by Berger’s complete command of the machinery of war and propulsion of narrative.

Few films this year have been as soulful or as quietly defiant.

Companion offers a relatively surface-level thriller that asks far bigger questions than its easygoing vibe might suggest.

Waves is a demanding and absorbing family drama that unfolds in two parts without lines of division, yet both parts are distinctively and stylistically different. The film is too long, but I was impressed and riveted throughout.

Simien has created a thoughtful movie experience that feels diverse, funny and visually interesting. Those expecting an exact recreation of the ride won’t find it here, which may be for the best. Despite a few cartoon-y scenes, Simien and his cast elevate Haunted Mansion to a thoroughly entertaining and oddly emotional good time.

It’s equal parts compelling, ridiculous and uproariously pleasurable, often to the point where you can almost hear director Ridley Scott shouting, “Are you not entertained?”

I think everything about the movie is too subtle and real to appeal to the "Batman" demographic, but for mature audiences who have forgotten how to smile, it takes up where "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel' left off.

The intimacy and honesty of the family rapport, the razor sharp dialogue and—most unexpectedly—its deeply grounded humor keep the film and its slight and compassionate story utterly engaging.

The real stars are his screenwriters. By borrowing from their real life, Gordon and Nanjiani have crafted the rare romance that sparkles with real life emotion.

This is a subtle, elegant and altogether triumphant film about a subject I thought I was tired of, told with an artistry and freshness that is positively thrilling.

The saga of the guy who was the Tom Cruise of the 1950s now forms the shadow and substance of a funny, sad, meticulously researched and painstakingly detailed documentary, Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed.

This is the rare sequel that packs constant surprises while still delivering on expectations.

Flawed but different, well-crafted and consistently powerful, At Any Price is the best film about impoverished farmers in the economic agricultural crisis since Jean Renoir’s "The Southerner."

It’s one terrific, offbeat and heart-pounding thriller set in the frozen wilderness of a Wyoming Indian reservation that never ceases to surprise, enthrall and pump the adrenaline with an energy that stuns.

Written by comedian Joel Kim Booster, who also stars, the movie reframes the traditional rom-com by putting gay men into the leading roles and inviting viewers to experience drama and relationships that don’t often get the Hollywood spotlight.

Enhanced by superb writing and direction and nuanced performances by an ensemble of great actors, and enough take-home food for thought to keep the mind and senses totally focused from start to finish, The Company Men is pretty damn close to as good as it gets in a disappointing year at the movies.

If Juror #2 does turn out to be Clint Eastwood’s final film, he’s gone out with fireworks.

As much CODA is a film about a hearing person’s relationship to deafness and Deaf culture, it’s just as much about deaf characters’ relationships to a hearing world, whose norms most hearing people take for granted, and whose obstacles can impact everything from labor to self-worth.

The result is a brutal and haunting meditation on violence and power in the music industry — and whose careers have been derailed in the aftermath.

Among the most gripping, well-paced, acted and directed, and generally thrilling of anything that I've seen (yet) this year.

Considering the subject, ripe with titillating possibilities, it's surprisingly about as sexy as a week-old meat loaf. Tastefully directed by Tanya Wexler, it is a total joy from start to finish.

This is an intimate story, sometimes uncomfortably so, but it’s also an expansive one, about whether our societies allow people to live outside prescribed boxes and whether it accepts them when they do.

This is their story. It is true. It is history. As a film, it is riveting, suspenseful, harrowing and exciting, and somehow, it also manages to be something rare among war pictures—a big-scale entertainment.

It’s rare to see a war film you can truthfully label poignant, but The Last Full Measure combines the heart-pounding excitement of "1917" with the urgent, deeply moving emotional honesty of "Saving Private Ryan" to tell a heroic but somehow overlooked story of courage under fire that now emerges as one of the most valuable chapters to emerge from the debacle of Vietnam.

This is the sort of riotous good time you want to watch in a crowd with shared laughs and gasps.

It’s not a guilty pleasure; it’s actual pleasure. If there was ever a time to run into Downton Abbey’s welcoming embrace it’s now.

The Safdies’ film is a cinematically expressive tightrope walk that seems designed to leave your blood pressure permanently spiked. It can be relentless and hard to take, but it is brimming with surprise and a vivacity that radiates off the screen.

An equally dreamlike and urgent act of radical archiving, Sierra Pettengill’s Riotsville, USA traces the origin of America’s militarized dismantling of social justice movements to a specific time and place.

In small ways, Hansen-Løve allows One Fine Morning to break the viewer’s heart, but overall the film is unexpectedly hopeful. Anyone who has guided a parent through a debilitating disease will find the story especially heartbreaking, particularly as Sandra begins to crack under the weight of her father’s suffering. But One Fine Morning is also about starting again and finding joy in the midst of sadness.

As it unfolds, The Man in the Basement is as provocative, intelligent and suspenseful as anything you are likely to see this year.

Exploring the suffocating complexities of domestic life in the social isolation of quarantine, this volatile couple explores the shifting values of their relationship, from sex to politics (including the possibility of — God forbid — marriage!), with an insight that is never less than a candid talisman to learn from and live by in troubled times.

For repeated breathless sequences involving hand-to-hand combat, assassination attempts, and a wicked climactic car chase, shout out to Director Leitch.

What makes this one different is the dedication, commitment and sincerity the star brings to every aspect of the role. This is a pugilist with a heart.

More than anything, Daughters—along with Greg Kwedar’s remarkable current release Sing Sing—speaks to the absolute societal and spiritual imperative of investing in rehabilitation, within prisons and outside their walls.

It’s a feel-good film with an infectious sense of fun and inspiration that brings out the best in people instead of catering to their lowest instincts.

What results is a messy, ambitious, deeply emotional film that sometimes falls victim to the tropes of the genres it attempts to remix but never loses its power to move us.

Fast X is an outlandish movie. Literally nothing in this movie could really happen, but isn’t that why we watch films in the first place? The imagined world of the Fast & Furious saga is exciting and that’s enough. Are there too many characters now? Yes. Do you always know what’s going on? No. But you’ll laugh, you’ll cheer and you’ll feel, for a few hours, like part of a family.

What is truly amazing, especially in this age of Ponzi schemes and the misappropriation of people’s life savings, is the fact that Herb and Dorothy have never sold a single piece in their collection.

While Marvel metastasizes as a movie brand, the irreverent Guardians of the Galaxy franchise has become a healthy off-shoot. There’s something loose-limbed and unexpected about this series.

Will Tracy’s screenplay adapts the basic premise and parameters of Jang’s original, but director Yorgos Lanthimos puts his unique tonal spin on the material, turning in one of the most sardonic Hollywood comedy-dramas in recent memory.

The film, which is like Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None told through an Instagram filter, is hilariously and cleverly of the moment, embracing the digital age and the types of people it has generated, although it may alienate an older audience. But to those it does speak to, it’s a genuinely fun watch that plays on our expectations of the murder mystery genre.

Here’s the main thing you need to know about The Marvels, the 33rd movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe: It’s fun. That shouldn’t be revelatory since comic book movies are supposed to be uplifting blockbuster entertainment, but it’s both a surprise and a relief that Nia DaCosta’s MCU debut is genuinely enjoyable.

In the process, Schamus creates not only a meaningful and moving snapshot of an America on the cusp of redefining itself, but also a cinematic hybrid few of us thought possible: the literary college sex comedy.

Under the careful guidance of Australian director Benedict Andrews, Kristen Stewart’s Jean is a doomed star emerging in the center ring of her own drama, distinctive and refined, with an elegant mask that fails to cover the twitching nerve beneath the surface that feels like it’s always on the verge of exploding.

It’s a movie that resonates, particularly for those who felt drawn in by Owens’ novel, although certainly there will be viewers who find it trite or melodramatic. But this is a strong, satisfying adaptation that welcomes the audience into the marsh alongside Kya.

Make no mistake, this is a musical turned into a blockbuster, as Chu treats the wide shots of the dozens of background dancers with the same eye you could see Christopher Nolan apply to Tenet, or the Russo brothers apply to Endgame.

From its gentle introduction to its jarring final scene—a lifelike anticlimax that makes sense spiritually more than logistically—My Father’s Shadow acts as both a retrospective and a soulful reconstruction, breathing life into the past while distinguishing the personal and pragmatic details that inform the complexity of a person—even one who exists entirely in memory.

I’m neither Italian nor Catholic, but I was glued to this massive achievement with unwavering fascination, finding it thoroughly and emotionally captivating.

Stephen Frears’ latest based-on-a-true story onscreen endeavor is at the same time compelling and endearing, perhaps because at its core it’s a story about the common man triumphing over naysayers.

The manner in which Mikkelsen, the former Danish gymnast and dancer we chiefly know for his suave villains in 2006’s "Casino Royale" and the NBC series "Hannibal," plays off his largely mute charge is simply extraordinary.

It is so uncannily adroit at balancing humor and pathos that the two complement rather than detract from each other.

There’s so much to look at and think about that it is sometimes difficult to concentrate on the story, but a plot does emerge in the capable hands of Maïwenn, who keeps the facts straight while keeping one of the most shocking chapters in French history alive and kicking.

The Book of Henry is a wildly imaginative film with a lot of shifting parts, and an absolutely huge heart. A film this original deserves to be seen and felt.

A triumph of sensitivity, humanity and good taste that manages to admirably transcend every tendency inherent to the usual label of “tearjerker.”

This is not simply one of the finest films to explore the unique challenges that beset women in rural parts of the country where men outnumber them two-to-one. It is also one of the only to illustrate the devastating social impact of the war against women and their reproductive rights that has been waged by statehouses across the nation.

How to Blow Up a Pipeline both fully embraces its agitprop roots while also transcending them.

World War Z towers above every other alleged summer blockbuster. It’s the real deal.

Every thing about Fincher’s film—from his resurrection of his late father Jack’s script to his exacting recreation of a Hollywood in the midst of a creative explosion that it wouldn’t experience again for another 30 years or so—is a call to arms.

Every complex member of the writer’s legacy has an agenda, with varying gains and losses, and the power of the film rests in the way it captures so many tangled lives as they cross and intersect at curious angles. The camera is literal, so the film sometimes fails to escape its roots of literary inspiration. This did not bother me. How many times do you get the chance to curl up with a good movie?

Painful for sure, but glorious too, Pain and Glory is Spanish wunderkind Pedro Almodóvar’s best and most moving film in years—a brave and wrenching self-portrait of an aging artist under the siege of age and the fear of death.

At a time when few movies display either a shred of originality or a fresh slant on an old genre, and so many are little more than cookie-cutter derivations of each other, it’s energizing to see something as keenly observed and uniquely competent as Emily the Criminal. It’s a tense and engaging thriller that looks and feels distinctively different.

As scripted, documentary-style fact-based dramas go, it doesn’t get much better than this.

Even when it occasionally falters, it is polished, heartbreaking, and worthy of attention.

The surprising results are unlike anything I’ve seen lately, and the best surprise of all is a funny, inspired and career-enhancing star performance by Ben Stiller that left me touched, applauding and laughing out loud.

This is a feel-good comedy bordering on farce, but [Squibb] makes every scene and every line so natural that when you laugh, you’re reacting to genuine humor, not calculatedly constructed punch lines.

They have made a film absent of time that could not possibly be more of the moment.

Baby Doll doesn't go as deep as A Streetcar Named Desire or even On the Waterfront. But it's the most seamless melding of Kazan's abilities as an actor's director and a filmmaker. [12 Jun 2006]

Athena is shocking, partly because its events seem only about five minutes in our future. One could place its powder keg neighborhood in any city in any divided nation, particularly here in the United States, where another “war that pits brother against brother” seems at least as probable.

Lee Hirsch is certainly one who is making a difference. I endorse him and his brave, powerful movie and urge you to see it for yourself. You might leave Bully with rage, but you will not leave Bully with indifference.

[Adlon] has crafted a film that is at once sophisticated and aggressively sophomoric, profoundly romantic and deeply cynical, and as feminist as a barbecue at Gloria Steinem’s house and yet seemingly apolitical enough to appeal to your average Entourage fan.

The perfect actor with the perfect part at an ideal moment in his career, Domingo doesn’t simply embody Rustin, he liberates him.

This is Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut, and in her capable hands the story is purposefully hazy, unfolding in both present day and disjointed flashbacks, opening space for the audience to question the behavior of these characters and the societal pressures driving their actions.

Do not see The Taste of Things on an empty stomach. It’s a French film about gourmet French cuisine, magnificently photographed and meticulously prepared for both the camera and the palate, and raised to the status of art as only the French can.

While the film proudly remains a chamber piece very much in keeping with its roots in the theater, King opens it up in ways that show an innate knack for visual storytelling.

EO is a successful attempt by 84-year-old Polish filmmaker and sometimes actor Jerzy Skolimowski to both update and add color to the cinematic conversation about despair, purpose, and braying that Bresson started more than a half century ago.

As Robin Williams’ final film, it tolls a wonderful bell for the legacy of a distinguished career.

Too bleak and wrenching to recommend unconditionally. You need a strong constitution to watch it soberly, but it is a gripping experience that left me weak in the knees.

Filmmaker Andrew Haigh strikes gold in this moving, heart-wrenching drama about the lasting trauma of grief, isolation and the all-too-human fear of loneliness.

There’s no way to avoid the resemblances of this film to one of Keaton’s biggest past successes, Mr. Mom, but it’s consistently more intelligent and original.

The experience is simultaneously intimate and stirring; the film brings its audience to a thrillingly colorful and utterly relevant world of its own at a time when the primary purpose of other superhero movies seems to be to tease future installments and fill corporate coffers.

It’s too monstrous and mean-spirited to please everyone unconditionally, but I found it challenging and honest — and hair-raising enough to work as a modern morality tale in cowboy boots.

Laugh-out-loud funny and somewhat melancholic.

Love Lies Bleeding is an exhilarating ride from beginning to end. Whether that’s because of its status as a tense crime thriller, its brutal violence, its sultry central romance or a combination of all three, the pulpy, pulsing power of this movie cannot be denied.

Don't miss this one. A brave and inspired antidote to time-wasting mainstream movies, it is unlike anything you've seen before or will likely ever see again. In short, it is unforgettable.

It’s as cheeky as it is morbid, and the two flavors play well together.

The heart of the film derives from the fact that the more they all get to know each other, the more they all mature and their differences blend. The title comes from a lesson in Huckleberry Finn—that a lie is good if it helps others, the way Huck lied to save Jim from the slave traders.

Several aspects of this sad, grim story remain a mystery, but I am pleased to report that for the most part, Chappaquiddick catalogues the facts and eschews the sensationalism. The result is a film of integrity and disclosure, a controversial chapter in American history that substitutes clinical accuracy for Hollywood embellishment, with an impressive attention to detail and an admirable respect for suspenseful narrative.

Lovelace may be a movie about a porn star, but it’s not pornographic. At least, not sexually.

As a cautionary tale about America’s inevitable self-destruction, the relentless cynicism of its narrative is often preposterous, but as a visionary look at the horrors that lie ahead for a great country on the rocks—and what America has done to itself already—this is one of the most harrowing yet exhilarating science-fiction epics ever made.

It’s a little long and leisurely. However, fueled by Rachel and Richard’s baby mania, it never drags.