No one interested in the power and magic of movies should miss it.

Lee offers no reassurance, no uplift, no call for all races to join hands and spout liberal platitudes. What he does offer is a devastating portrait of black America pushed to the limit, with the outcome still to be written. There’s only one way to do the wrong thing about Do the Right Thing: that would be to ignore it.

Director Richard Eyre has struck gold. Twice. Dench and Winslet are a riveting matchup.

It announces right from the start that you are not just watching a movie. You’re experiencing an immersive portrait of a life and a landscape intertwined, and entering what feels like a feature-length sense memory.

Want to know what it's like to be in on the discovery of a new American classic. Check out Boyhood. Richard Linklater's coming-of-age tale is the best movie of the year, a four-star game-changer that earns its place in the cultural time capsule.

Every one of the performances is, to say the least, an example of what talented actors can bring to a piece of character-driven tragedy; there’s not a single weak link in this chain, while the collective chemistry suggests an instant history of affection, conflict, and shared cringing.

It’s not just that they don’t make movies like this anymore — of course they don’t! — so much as no one bothers to tell these types of sprawling narratives with this level of storytelling, chops, nerve and verve.

To call it the best animated film of the last few years is to undervalue it. Berger’s take on this graphic novel is both a high point of the medium and a reminder of why we go to the movies in the first place. It’s a film lover’s dream come true.

You leave WALL-E with a feeling of the rarest kind: that you've just enjoyed a close encounter with an enduring classic.

Part of the miracle of Robert Altman's triumphantly fierce, funny, moving and innovative Short Cuts is that you can't get this movie out of your head. You keep playing it back to savor its formula-smashing audacity, its peerless performances and its cleareyed view of blasted lives.

Moonlight, which announces Jenkins as a major filmmaker, gets you good. It stays raw from first scene to last.

Ang Lee, a world-class director working at the top of his elegant form, has done something thrilling. For all the leaping action, it's the film's spirit that soars.

It's a mesmerizing spectacle.

Do Not Expect builds on his previous film’s fractured style and broadens the range of his crosshairs, but the puckishness and past-the-boiling-point sense of wrath feels even sharper this time around.

That the performances are uniformly outstanding is a tribute to Rob Reiner, who directs with masterly assurance, fusing suspense and character to create a movie that literally vibrates with energy.

There's something elemental about The Exorcist, even with the new hopeful ending that betrays the bleak original. [2000 re-release]

The hypnotic and haunting Foxcatcher can prove its worth as one of the year's very best films. Steve Carell, Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo give the performances of their lives.

No one needed further proof that he’s a master. This meditation on grief and growing up does solidify the position, however, that Miyazaki remains the greatest living animator today, period.

A ravishing, romantic lark brimming over with style, intelligence and flashing wit.

Pure movie bliss.

Scorches the screen with a badass bravado all its own. Smart, sexy, funny and dangerous this high-wire act is a movie and a half.

In the hands of director Kelly Fremon Craig (The Edge of Seventeen), Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret isn’t just about adolescence — it’s about the state of womanhood in general, with all of the accompanying sacrifices and vexations and humiliations that come with it.

It's taut, tense and terrific.

There is no single category that you can slot Rankin’s mix of a wink, a nudge and an embrace into, so we guess “lo-fi masterpiece” will have to do until a better option comes along.

There may be bigger, costlier, weighter films this year. There's none lovelier.

Clooney brings raw intensity to his role; his scenes with McElhone are rooted in a fierce romantic yearning.

Beach and Adams give remarkable performances that grow in feeling and intensity.

Writer and first-time director Anthony Minghella lays on the whimsy a bit thick at times, but his wryly funny and heartfelt observations on sorrow go down much easier than the Hollywood brand of lump-in-the-throat histrionics.

Even though it retains the basic theatrical conceit of a lone character having a one-sided conversation, it is pure cinema, because how could Almodóvar and Swinton do anything but turn this into pure cinema?

The greatest surfing picture of all time, this unassuming piece of counterculture anthropology is so likable that it had kids around the world buying boards and heading to the California coast in search of the perfect barrel.

A new American crime classic from the legendary Martin Scorsese, whose talent shines here on its highest beams.

Screenwriting this smart, inventive, passionate and rip-roaringly funny is a rare species. It's magic.

There's no way you won't be captivated by Wallis, chosen ahead of 3,500 candidates to play the tiny folk hero who narrates the story. Her performance in this deceptively small film is a towering achievement.

This emotional climax of the film, with its warring glints of despair and hope, typifies the stunning achievement of The Ice Storm and confirms Lee as a director of the first rank.

The superbly crafted suspense thriller…slams you like a sudden blast of bone-chilling, pulse-pounding terror.

It entered the festival circuit as a politically charged take on the standard there-goeth-the-great-artist story and exited it as a peerless act of personal reclamation. I can’t shake the feeling of being shook by it.

A sharply observant and witty film that plumbs unexpected depths of feeling.

The performances are uncommonly fine...Lone Star isn't built to ride trends. It's built to last.

Oppenheimer is one of those shoot-for-the-moon projects that feels thrilling and wonky, brilliant and overstuffed, too much and yet not enough. It’s also a movie that brings to mind the difficult era-spanning epics of yesteryear, from Reds to The Right Stuff, and is a movie made by adults for adults yet done with the sweep and majesty we now associate with movies made for kids and teens.

Amid the clamor from outraged purists and Shakespeare spinning in his Stratford-on-Avon, England, grave, you should notice that Luhrmann and his two bright angels have shaken up a 400-year-old play without losing its touching, poetic innocence.

Brother's Keeper has the texture, emotion and raw urgency of a Woody Guthrie anthem -- it keeps coming back to haunt you.

13th, available in theaters and on Netflix, is one for the cinema time capsule, a record of shame so powerful that it just might change things. Godspeed.

The performance footage alone makes this worthy of study by musicologists and historians. There are too many great scenes to mention.

Savor their technique and the sizzling performances of Frances McDormand as an adulterous wife, Dan Hedaya as her vengeful husband and M. Emmet Walsh as a private detective from hell.

Unique and unforgettable.

Fellowship is the real deal, a movie epic that pops your eyes out, piles on thrills and fun, and yet stays intimately attuned to character.

Moore and Portman inject the movie with wattage, dramatic heft, and a push-pull dynamic associated with immovable objects and irresistible forces. Melton gives May December its slow-burn tragedy.

The film leaps off the screen with a thrilling immediacy.

You leave feeling like you’ve just seen a truly extraordinary late work produced by one of the era’s greatest working auteurs, quickly followed by the sense of experiencing a sucker punch when you remember that the man driving away from the scene of the crime onscreen isn’t able to go anywhere once that screen fades to black.

Up is a breathtaking ride into the realm of pure imagination.

Frankly, Cruz’s turn alone is worth the price of admission.

You'll thrill to the action, savor the tasty dialogue and laugh like bloody hell.

Sorry, Baby is a movie with a trauma at its center, but it’s not a trauma drama. It’s about living with such things and still going on with your life. And the manner in which Victor presents this narrative, with such verve and confidence and tenderness and pitch-black humor, defies easy description. It’s simply an amazing display of someone knowing how to get their voice and vision across.

For all its playfulness, it’s the real, stinging, joyful, inconvenient reality of life that Dick Johnson Is Dead gives us. It’s a committed act of preservation: a looping, reeling, repeatable act of love.

Keep your eyes on Garfield - he's shatteringly good, the soul of a film that might otherwise be without one. The Social Network is the movie of the year. But Fincher and Sorkin triumph by taking it further. Lacing their scathing wit with an aching sadness, they define the dark irony of the past decade.

Paradis sizzles in a star-making role that gleams like one of Gabor's blades. She's a spellbinder.

Rea and Davidson are incomparably good in an exceptional film that is by turns darkly funny and deeply affecting. Though Jordan's control sometimes falters, it's a small price to pay for his daring.

Far from being exploitive, the effect is inspiring: This is the best of us.

Exciting and then some, Face/Off blends the director's supercharged images of balletic brutality and spiritual catharsis with an off-the-wall humor that allows John Travolta and Nicolas Cage to really let it rip.

In the year's richest, most complex and ultimately most heartbreaking film, Inarritu invites us to get past the babble of modern civilization and start listening to each other.

What can I tell you? It works. Private Parts is a comic firecracker with a surprising human touch.

It's a swooning new classic and one of the very best films of the year.

Martin Scorsese scores again with his gritty, kinetic adaptation of Nicolas Pileggi's best-selling "Wiseguy."

Bo Burnham’s story about a 14-year-old misfit is one of the funniest, saddest and most heartfelt teen movies ever.

With Apocalypse Now Redux — one for the ages when it comes to the moral battles of war — Coppola has reached the finish line at last. It smells like victory.

What makes La La Land such a hot miracle is how the passion for cinema and its possibilities radiates from every frame.

With it's dynamite performances, strafing wit and dramatic provocation, The Insider offers Mann at his best -- blood up, unsanitized and unbowed.

If a thing of beauty is a joy forever, as John Keats famously said, then the surpassing loveliness and bracing brilliance of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma will never pass into nothingness.

A rapturous masterwork.

McDonagh also wants to give his actors a hell of a showcase, too, and it’s the two stars butting brows at the center of The Banshees of Inisherin that make this a masterpiece of men behaving very feckin’ badly.

Not since Lawrence of Arabia has there been a serious historical movie of this sweep, complexity and intelligence.

The movie feels at times like a miracle — not least for what it does not do. McQueen’s ability to render a universe of incident and emotion out of granular details, sounds and visions that feel specific and fully lived, should not surprise us at this point in the career. This is a director whose work has long displayed an ability, and a fascinating eagerness to display, the power of dramatic tangents and uncanny effects of sound and image.

You know how some costume epics can be such a bloody bore? Not The Favourite. It’s a bawdy, brilliant triumph, directed by Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos with all the artistic reach and renegade deviltry he brought to Dogtooth (2009), The Lobster (2015) and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017).

As ever, Freeman delivers miracles; he's as good as it gets.

This volcanically funny and seriously scary look at America's obsession with guns is meant to shake us up good. And it does.

A movie that liberates your tears and makes you fall in love with it. It is almost assuredly predestined to be the single best movie you see this year.

The pleasure of this unique film comes in watching superb actors dine on Mamet's pungent language like the feast it is.

Gosford Park abounds in scenes to savor. It's a feast, and one of Altman's best.

Good One is, among its infinite attributes, an ode to a style of filmmaking that appears to be humble, yet still manages to be devastating and humanistic to its very core. Mostly, it’s just a great f*cking movie, full stop.

But Stone has found in Cruise the ideal actor to anchor the movie with simplicity and strength. Together they do more than show what happened to Kovic. Their fervent, consistently gripping film shows why it still urgently matters.

Besides the in jokes, the animation and the Alan Menken score supply enough glorious entertainment to hold even brats and cynics in thrall.

Volver is Almodovar's passionate tribute to the community of women -- living and dead -- who nurtured him. Through the transformative power of his art -- carried on the wings of Alberto Iglesias' exhilarating score -- we feel their presence. You do not want to miss this one.

What the filmmaker and his collaborators have given us is something truly special: a radical work of art that channels a tsunami of radical empathy. And it couldn’t feel more necessary or vital at this moment in time.

In its sprawling attempt to partially wrap its arms around the Great-Step-Backward Age we find ourselves in, One Battle After Another shares a slight kinship with another shoot-the-moon auteur work of recent vintage: Eddington. Ari Aster’s film stared directly into the abyss and, shuddering, worried about how we could or should fight back. Anderson’s humanistic masterpiece of a movie says: You fight it with love. That’s the end game. That’s how you retain your decency and sanity. That’s the only way you protect the future, and change it. That’s how you live to battle another day.

Recoing gives a performance that won't soon be forgotten. Neither will Time Out. It's a great movie.

Here is the jaw-dropping, eye-popping, heart-stopping movie epic we've been waiting for all year.

This is what the work of a visionary filmmaker looks like. Forget the new flesh. Long live the old Cronenberg.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles is the ultimate Thanksgiving film: John Hughes understood that it's all about the buildup. No matter if your journey is filled with near-death experiences, cars going up in flames, punches to the face and other disasters – getting to enjoy Thanksgiving with family and friends make the odyssey worth it. Everything else is just turkey.

The idea has been tried — remember TV's "Herman's Head"? — but never with the artful brilliance of filmmaker Pete Docter (Up; Monsters, Inc.).

Chicago, based on Bob Fosse's Broadway smash, kills.

The House of Mirth is not one of those teacup and doily movies; it's harsh and disturbing. Davies does superlatively right by Wharton. There's blood on the walls.

Undeniably thrilling and troubling...Dazzling, era-defining.

Come to West’s celebration of the movies’ darker underbelly for the adrenaline rush of sex and violence. Exit it having witnessed something that marks the spot where baser impulses meets artistry, in more ways than one.

It’s the closest thing to witnessing a miracle — just some cameras, a crowd and a voice touched by God.

The actors are outstanding, illuminating four different views of loneliness. But it's Camara's tour-de-force performance that anchors the film, that shocks and unnerves us.

Joel and Ethan Coen's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel is an indisputably great movie, at this point the year's very best.

Anderson orchestrates a comic romance like no other. The effect is intoxicating. Sandler and the movie will knock you for a loop.

It is also Nicholson at his bravest and riskiest. By banking his fires and staying alert to the smallest details, he delivers a monumental performance that blasts your expectations and batters your heart.