Scorsese builds Hugo in the Méliès manner, creating a complete, ravishing Parisian world on a soundstage in England and reveling in the sheer transporting joy of it. Hugo will take your breath away.

Oldman gives a performance that is flawless in every detail.

Taking full measure of Phantom Thread may require more than one viewing – a challenge any genuine movie lover will be eager to accept. Our advice for now: just sit back and behold.

Woody Allen's best movie in years means to trip us up: Sexual sizzle. London instead of Manhattan. Brit actors. Dark humor with a sting that leaves welts. You bet it's a change. And it looks good on the Woodman.

If Jackman and Stewart are serious about this being their mutual X-Men swan song, they could not have crafted a more heartfelt valedictory.

A rich blend of humor and heartbreak.

In these troubled times, it's a good feeling to see a funny, touching and vital doc that is both timely and timeless.

No one with a genuine belief in the possibilities and mysteries of cinema would think of missing Silence. It's essential filmmaking from the church of Scorsese, a modern master who lives and breathes in the images he puts on screen.

The actors give it their all, especially Knightley, whose jaw- jutting, heavily accented and unfairly criticized portrayal gives the film its fighting spirit.

Altman, showing the ardor and assurance of a master, pulls us into his film with seductive power. You won't want to miss a thing.

Laugh you will, loud and often. In the Loop deserves to be a sleeper hit. The whole cast is stellar. And it proves that smart and funny can exist in the same movie, even in summer.

What Cars teaches is how to blend brash comedy with technical astonishments so that each enhances the other. I can't imagine who wouldn't want to test-drive this one. Like the promos say, "It's got that new-movie smell."

Despite over-ripe narration and an understandable urge to cram too much in, Ghosts of the Abyss is a thrilling documentary.

The result is a movie miracle; it soars.

The butt of the hilarious and heartfelt screenplay by Paul Rudnick (Jeffrey) is homophobia, and his sting is wickedly on target.

All the acting is first-rate -- Dukakis gives major dimensions to a supporting role. And Christie, a Sixties screen goddess in "Darling" and "Doctor Zhivago," shows that her spirit and grace are eternal. She's a beauty. So is the movie.

It's Corbijn, shooting with a poet's eye in a harshly stunning black-and-white, who cuts to the soul of Ian's life and music. You don't watch this movie, you live it.

Garland need make no apologies for Annihilation. It's a bracing brainteaser with the courage of its own ambiguity. You work out the answers in your own head, in your own time, in your own dreams, where the best sc-fi puzzles leave things. Get ready to be rocked.

The twice Oscar-nominated actor appears onscreen only briefly. Hawke knows where the spotlight belongs. Believe me, the 81 minutes spent in Bernstein's funny, touching and vital presence is something you don't want to miss.

Reeves achieves visual wonders even in the stillness before all hell breaks loose. It's what makes War for the Planet of the Apes such a unique and unforgettable experience – that, and Serkis's career-high performance. Hail Caesar, indeed.

Both Sawyers and Sumpter are terrific, world-class charmers who suggest the powerhouses they're playing without undue mimickry.

The best surfing documentary ever made. And that includes 1966's "The Endless Summer" and its terrific 1994 sequel -- both from Bruce Brown, Dana's father.

This is Soderbergh's show, and a haunting and hypnotic show it is.

This haunting film never pushes itself on you. It trusts you to suss out the horror that lies beneath the veneer of innocence. You'll be knocked for a loop.

In Washington's haunted eyes, in the stunning cinematography of Roger Deakins (Fargo) that plunges into the mad flare of combat, in the plot that deftly turns a whodunit into a meditation on character and in Zwick's persistent questioning of authority, Courage Under Fire honors its subject and its audience.

Lee uses 3D with the delicacy and lyricism of a poet. You don't just watch this movie, you live it.

Hits hardest when it bypasses sentiment to ponder the inextricable mix of love and pain that comes with the ties that bind.

Winter's Bone is unforgettable. It means to shake you, and does.

No wonder Kurt Cobain was a fan. But it's the way Feuerzeig walks with him on the line between creativity and madness that digs this haunting and hypnotic film into your memory.

Willem Dafoe should be on top of Oscar's Best Supporting Actor list for his stellar work in The Florida Project, a film that's as hilarious and heartbreaking as it is unclassifiable.

It's hard to resist the film's exuberance.

The actors are to die for. Bening and Moore nail every nuance of a relationship going adrift. And Ruffalo is dynamite as a man keeping himself at a distance. Kids makes its own special magic. It's irresistible

My advice is to keep your eyes on Lawrence, who turns the movie into a victory by presenting a heroine propelled by principle instead of hooking up with the cutest boy.

Ice-cold. Dead eyes. Demonic laugh. His face a mask you can't read until he's up in yours. Then run. That's Johnny Depp giving everything he's got in a riveting, rattlesnake performance as South Boston gangster James "Whitey" Bulger in Black Mass.

It's both gravely serious and a demonically funny, a blend meant to catch audiences off balance. Mission accomplished.

Love, Simon is a John Hughes movie for audiences who just got woke. And for all its attempts not to offend, it's a genuine groundbreaker.

This baby has the stuff to end the movie summer on a note of dazzle and distinction.

The sheer scope of Nolan's vision – with emotion and spectacle thundering across the screen – is staggering. The Dark Knight Rises is the King Daddy of summer movie epics.

Even when Oldroyd loses his directorial grip, Pugh is there to make things right. Not many young actress have that sort of power to command the screen as if by divine right. She dives deep into this terrifically twisted, erotic thriller and makes it matter.

In Spanish, "sicario" means "hitman." In film terms, Sicario is sensational, the most gripping and tension-packed spin through America's covert War on Drugs since Steven Soderbergh's Traffic 15 years ago.

What Hooper has crafted is a work of probing intelligence and passionate heart.

Bale, in a piercing, quietly devastating performance, holds the film's center with commanding authority. It's a film whose brute force tempered with contemplative grace. It's a potent and prodigious achievement.

The radiant Barrymore energizes Cinderella with a tough core of intelligence and wit.

Keaton has crafted something rare: a screwball comedy that cuts to the heart.

Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland plumb the violence of the mind with slashing wit and shocking gravity. Happy nightmares.

The chaotic, jumbled The Other Side of the Wind isn’t for everyone — just folks who care about the history of film and the master builder who helped make it great.

Visually, however, True History speaks volumes. In tandem with MacKay, whose incendiary performance finds method in Ned’s growing madness, Kurzel and his crew of merry, malicious pranksters blow the dust off a calcified outlaw history to bring something elemental and transgressive to the screen.

Thompson, Kaling and up-for-anything director Nisha Ganatra spin comic gold.

What makes it a Haynes film, besides the evocative camera genius of Haynes regular Ed Lachman, is something intangible and mysterious. The director’s admirers will think immediately of "Safe," the 1995 indie classic starring Julianne Moore as a wife and mother who thinks she’s being poisoned by something unidentifiable in the environment. That feeling of dread pervades throughout, and deepens the film’s scarily timely themes beyond the usual demands of docudrama.

A sinfully scrumptious bonbon.

It’s the sort of performance that feels like early Pacino or Dustin Hoffman, all twitches and vibrations and seeming like he’s in a constant state of motion even when standing still. And it fuses so well with what we, the viewer, think we know about Chalamet that it begins to blur the boundary in the best possible way.

Here’s McQueen working in one of his most exciting modes as a director: cool anger. In contrast to the passionate political thrust of of Mangrove and the heated groove of Lovers Rock, Red, White, and Blue is wrought of images that feel clinical and removed — until you mash them together into a movie. That’s when the hellmouth cracks open, and all the seeming poise at the movie’s surface is revealed for the disguise that it is. The studied symmetries, the visual confrontations marked along racial lines, all of it is expressive, and much of it works.

Samuel has made a movie that imagines a good-hearted sinner slouching toward salvation one desperate measure at a time. But he’s also made a mirror designed to let folks see themselves in this scenario for once.

For all the majesty and naturalistic realism of its imagery, Nomadland is nevertheless full of sublime, uncanny details that lift it somewhat above the fray.

Screenwriters Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski lay the foundations for a conventionally well-built haunted-house chiller. But Bruckner (a V/H/S anthology alumnus who also gave us 2017’s tight little wilderness horror The Ritual) and Hall herself occasionally deviate from the plan, forming something a little more strange and sculptural.

Coppola gives Suicides a haunted quality that is undeniably affecting, a feeling intensified by a wonderfully funny and touching Dunst.

A certain leap of faith is required. But for those believe that movies can get into your head and under your skin in ways that sometimes defy description, and tap into the same transcendent state that great pop music does — that sensation of temporarily floating into some other dizzying realm — this is for you. It isn’t the movie you think you’re walking into. Amen for that.

Notturno is not journalism. Yet from its very outset it raises the same questions about itself and its own making, about the film’s ability to show what it shows, because what it shows is often so immediately intimate — private to the point of making a viewer want to avert their eyes.

At it’s core, however, The Order is really a horror film, made all the more frightening because the monsters who live on these Everytown, USA, Maple Streets seem way too prevalent at the present moment.

Congratulations, Gen-Z, you’ve just been handed your new midnight-movie obsession.

Appearances by Adam Ant, the Slits and Siouxsie and the Banshees, along with U.S. trans icon Jayne County, ground it in the moment, but Jarman's suggestion that even the most vocal nihilists would sell out their ideals — if given enough encouragement, naturally — provided a glimpse of the future.

Your suspension of disbelief may get tested more than a few times as Linklater’s crime comedy shuffles to its ironic happily-ever-afters — ditto your tolerance for self-consciously jaunty scores — yet your faith in Powell as a real-deal leading man who can work miracles is never shaken.

When E.T. debuts on DVD, you can choose between the new version, which better matches E.T.'s words to his lips, and the sweetly clunky, digitally deprived version redolent of penis breath. I don't need to phone home to know which one I'm buying. [2002 re-release]

The result is both emotional and a comic knockout.

Rather than telling you how young women are affected by this, Patton and Rae show you. And to watch one of the interviewees go for being a joyous, giddy, chatty child to being a slightly older, more distant and jaded tween is heartbreaking.

Abounds in pleasures.

The choices that King and Hoover make relative to the public pressures they applied to one another only serve, in Pollard’s recounting of this bitter history, to twine these men together ever so tightly. This is all part of what gives Pollard’s film its deafening urgency, its tingling aura of imminent danger.

Sonnenfeld deftly orchestrates the intricate two-part harmony, and Smith and Jones -- a powerhouse comic pair -- make it all look easy.

Enys Men is for us. It’s a cult classic that didn’t feel the need to kill time in order to be called cult or classic.

The Shrouds is, for all of its hallucinatory imagery and airport-read twists and turns, a blatantly personal film — arguably Cronenberg’s most personal since 1986’s The Fly.

The Fall Guy is at its delirious best not when it’s ginning up sound and fury and mayhem, but when it simply lets Gosling and Blunt trade screwball banter and give every scene they share a will-they-or-won’t-they tension.

For those who only think of Robert Downey Sr. as the father of the guy from the Marvel movies, Sr. is happy to fill in some blanks from here to paternity. And for those of us who already worship of the altar of the elder Downey, this Netflix doc — it drops on the streaming service this weekend — is a chance to see a true indie-movie O.G. potentially get the credit he deserves.

The Substance won’t reset society’s fixation on youth or cure Hollywood’s sexist ills. It will, however, remind you that when you’re chasing your past by any means necessary, you are always your own worst enemy.

A mesmerizing mood piece.

It’s delicious — sweet, tart, surprisingly moving and funny as hell.

Green sometimes hits his points too hard, letting his fierce human drama drift into polemic. But there’s no denying the righteous indignation that fuels Monsters and Men, a powerhouse that couldn’t be more timely or necessary.

A spine-tingler directed with fierce finesse.

That Green’s sequel works as well as it does — it’s still a slasher movie — is due only in part to the director and his collaborators’ copycat admiration for Carpenter’s blueprint. Mostly it’s the troubled times we live in that allows this energizing, elemental horror film to touch a raw nerve for #MeToo.

The director finds poetry in the face of his lead actress, whose performance is as luminous and moving as the film itself.

Tuesday makes a strong case for death as a natural, if not the most natural part of life. It makes an even stronger case, however, for Julia Louis-Dreyfus being one of the greatest actors working today.

As you find yourself instinctively reviewing those own seemingly insignificant moments in your own life, the ones that you hold so dear, while following this cyber-compassionate movie to its conclusion, it’s almost impossible not to be moved by the long game that the film’s creator is playing.

It is a gorgeous film, and one that deserves to be seen on a giant screen as much as that other only-in-theaters release this weekend, F9. And even when I Carry You With Me becomes so lost in its aesthetic that you worry it’s losing focus, this impressionistic approach doesn’t take away from what is an intimate, extremely personal story of two men fighting to build a life with each other.

Yang turns this heartwarmer into a feat of delicate magic.

Watergate is an extraordinary dossier on what remains a major black mark on the republic. It’s also a sobering reminder that just because we were able to stop it once doesn’t mean we can relegate it to our country’s back pages. Consider this a cautionary tale.

Epstein and Meek’s nonfiction effort functions as a portrait of unconscionable bureaucratic wrongdoing as well as an attempt to restore the reputations of four men who suffered unjust fates in both life and death.

In Vice, the writer-director is tossing grenades every which way — it’s a movie that’s ferociously funny one minute, bleakly sorrowful the next.

The movie is a film-length argument against our usual, overly personified, cutesy depictions of animals. It is also, not incidentally, a plea to stop eating them.

This eyepopper from Russian director-writer-cinematographer-editor Victor Kossakovsky (¡Vivan Las Antípodas!) is like nothing you’ve ever seen. His free-form documentary on water opens by scaring us to death.

Breaking is a family affair, a film that works because every person in its cast, even those playing the “villains,” gives you a character whose flawed humanity is worth believing.

It helps that American Fiction has, at its center, someone who gives Monk a keen intelligence, a razor-sharp wit, and a spiky exterior, as well as showing you the perpetually scratched romantic beneath the battle-tested cynic.

(The verb in the title is not superfluous. If this movie resembles anything, it’s "Citizen Kane" — structure-wise, if not remotely aesthetically.)

An explosive piece of entertainment that also means to make a difference. Listen up.

The ending leans to soap opera, but Van Sant, revisiting the closet-genius theme of "Good Will Hunting" is too keen an observer of character to let this funny and touching film go soft.

What a kick to watch whip-smart director Rian Johnson shake the cobwebs off the whodunit genre and make it snap to stylish, wickedly entertaining life for a new generation. That’s what happens in Knives Out, a mystery that takes the piss out of Agatha Christie clichés.

In the hands of first-time feature director Shannon Murphy — who crushed it in both of the Season Three Killing Eve episodes she helmed — and screenwriter Rita Kalnejais, who adapted her own play, Babyteeth rips past the hackneyed tropes of illness drama to dig out what’s fresh in the familiar.

Alex is neither an excuse for Arnett to crack jokes at will nor part of a tradition of funny people bending themselves into Bikram Yoga positions to be taken seriously. It’s merely a portrait of a guy trying to find his way back, one confessional free-form monologue at a time, to who he is after being adrift in a sea of existential ennui.

Clermont-Tonnerre comes from a place of defiance, and her fearless instincts surge through every frame. Each time you think you have this movie pegged, it’ll knock you for a loop.

Ed Harris, who plays Pollock and makes his debut as a director - doing both jobs superbly, by the way - is angst incarnate.