Film
Hamnet
Agata Grzybowska/Focus Features
Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s acclaimed 2020 novel based on the lives of William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and his wife (Jessie Buckley, astonishing) is as gorgeous as it is shattering. Early scenes paint their blissful family life in sumptuous, earthy tones, and later ones bring it crashing down around them. That the film is about the transcendent, healing power of art is brought home in a knockout climax, the most staggering cinematic catharsis in years. — Bob Mondello
Film
One Battle After Another
Warner Bros. Pictures
Paul Thomas Anderson does a lot of hot-button pushing — immigration politics, leftist fanatics, reactionary extremists, racism, a militarized state — in an action thriller he has made so propulsive it’s hard to keep your wits about you. Leonardo DiCaprio plays a perpetually stoned former revolutionary who’s trying to be a good dad in a tale that’s thrilling, hilarious, moving, politically scary as hell and Anderson’s best film yet. — Bob Mondello
Film
It Was Just an Accident
NEON
Jafar Panahi’s thriller speaks to this moment with searing intensity yet manages to morph at times into a comic brawl. It concerns former political prisoners who think they’ve captured the man who tortured them in prison but aren’t sure, because they were blindfolded. A furious indictment of the reign of authoritarian terror that grips Iran, it’s surprisingly generous in spirit and in its assumptions about what retribution by people of goodwill looks like. — Bob Mondello
Film
Sentimental Value
Kasper Tuxen/Mubi
Joachim Trier’s eloquent domestic drama centers Nora (Renate Reinsve, star of Trier’s The Worst Person in the World), one of two neglected daughters of a self-involved film director (Stellan Skarsgård). Trier anchors the film in the ornate Victorian home that has been in the family for generations, and keeps the dynamics fraught, the performances wrenching and the plot riveting as it keeps you guessing to the final moments of the final scene. — Bob Mondello
Film
Train Dreams
Netflix
Clint Bentley’s staggeringly beautiful drama is a portrait, in stately Terrence Malick mode, of early 20th-century laborers in the Pacific Northwest in an age of steam locomotives and westward expansion. Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) is a taciturn logger in a story crammed with incident — a Chinese co-worker tossed off a bridge, a felled tree killing three loggers, a comet streaking in the night sky, a forest fire laying waste to dreams, memories made and lost. It’s breathtaking. — Bob Mondello
Film
The Voice of Hind Rajab
Willa
This wrenching single-location drama is set in a Red Crescent call center in the West Bank, where operators field calls from people in Gaza who need help. One discovers that Hind, a terrified preschooler, is trapped in a car with the dead bodies of her family, amid tanks and constant strafing. The film’s power stems from a simple fact: Hind’s voice is real — recorded on Jan. 29, 2024, when she was trapped in the car. On-screen actors react in real time with the harrowing recordings; the effect is profound. — Bob Mondello
Film
The Secret Agent
NEON
Director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s bizarro Brazilian thriller about a dissident on the run takes place during Carnival and involves hit men, a 1970s movie palace showing Jaws to a shark-obsessed public, a supernatural “hairy leg” and an offbeat resistance movement. It’s a suspenseful, hilarious and ultimately unnerving tale of battling oppression during a dictatorship. Mendonça Filho’s stylistic choices suggest Hitchcock and Tarantino, but what he has concocted is strikingly original. — Bob Mondello
Film
Architecton
A24
A nearly wordless meditation on the building blocks of civilization — stone and concrete — Victor Kossakovsky’s sensory overload of a documentary offers a dazzling, epically cinematic argument that humankind’s use and abuse of the Earth is unsustainable. The filmmaker makes his points not with words but with majestic images, from slow-motion shots of stone cascading downhill in a waterfall-like torrent, to soaring drone shots of ancient Roman ruins. — Bob Mondello
Film
Frankenstein
Ken Woroner/Netflix
Guillermo del Toro has made plenty of creature features, but this sumptuously sensual take on Mary Shelley’s tale of a modern Prometheus (Oscar Isaac) who crafted a Creature out of stitched-together body parts is his most achingly romantic. It centers Jacob Elordi’s wrenching, highly physical turn as a Creature at once innocent and earthy and surrounds him with richly detailed gothic splendor, a lush score and no end of swooningly oversaturated color. — Bob Mondello
Film
A House of Dynamite
Eros Hoagland/Netflix
Kathryn Bigelow’s adrenaline-fueled thriller about a nuclear missile headed toward a major U.S. city captures officialdom’s response in a breathless rush — three breathless rushes, actually — from the White House Situation Room, a military tracking station in Alaska and the president’s motorcade. Military personnel react in real time as they realize there’s a real threat that they have mere minutes to counter. The action is intense, the effect harrowing. — Bob Mondello
Film
Marty Supreme
A24
Timothée Chalamet is all id as an arrogant, self-promoting table tennis hustler loosely based on real-life 1950s phenom Marty Reisman. Directed by Josh Safdie as a stressful but exhilarating thrill ride, this sports saga follows Marty as he scams and sacrifices everyone he knows in his quest for a world championship title. He’s a monster, but an oddly endearing one, and Chalamet rides that contradiction for all it’s worth. — Bob Mondello
Film
Come See Me in the Good Light
Apple TV
How to make this documentary sound as upbeat, rousing and hilarious as it is? Poet and spoken-word star Andrea Gibson and their partner invited filmmaker Ryan White into their home in 2021. His crew got full access to the couple’s every thought as they dealt with turtledove love, mailbox madness and — here’s the part where you say, “No, this does not sound like fun” — Gibson’s Stage 4 ovarian cancer journey. Gibson’s vibrant outlook brooks few tears, and the film’s radiance raises goose bumps. — Bob Mondello
Film
Sinners
Warner Bros. Pictures
With this swing-for-the-rafters achievement, Ryan Coogler reset the bar for himself even higher than he did with Black Panther. An original blockbuster set in the Jim Crow South, with Michael B. Jordan pulling double duty as twin hustlers and — oh, of course — culture-vulture vampires?! It’s a musical! It’s an action-horror film! It’s sexy! It’s rich with historical specificity! It’s gorgeous (in any ratio or format)! But most importantly: It all just works. — Aisha Harris
Film
Hedda
Amazon MGM Studios
Sometimes you just want to watch someone be bad — like, really bad — as they don beautiful gowns and throw a lavish party in an old mansion. Tessa Thompson’s scrumptiously diabolical take on the classic Henrik Ibsen antiheroine is mesmerizing, and filmmaker Nia DaCosta gives her all the room to play and make it her own. Meanwhile, a ferocious Nina Hoss almost runs away with it all, in a multilayered performance that gives the original text another juicy layer of dimension. — Aisha Harris
Film
Zodiac Killer Project
Music Box Films
Talk about juicing lemonade from lemons: Charlie Shackleton tried making a documentary about a former law enforcement officer who claimed to know the Zodiac Killer’s identity, but couldn’t secure the rights from the officer’s family. So Shackleton turned his would-be film into something much more interesting — a keen deconstruction of today’s true-crime media conveyor belt that questions the ethical and artistic merits of the entire genre. It’s as riveting as any crime doc you’d find on Netflix. — Aisha Harris
Film
Lurker
Mubi
Alex Russell’s feature debut is about a sociopathic striver (played by Théodore Pellerin) who latches onto a mopey, vulnerable pop star (Archie Madekwe), and it’s a seductive and uncomfortably cringey psychological thriller. Pellerin is especially captivating here, giving one of the year’s breakout performances; he completely inhabits the uncool desperation of a hanger-on and serves as an apt symbol for our always-online times. — Aisha Harris
Film
Sorry, Baby
Mia Cioffi Henry/Sundance Institute/A24
Director, writer and star Eva Victor delivers one of the best feature debuts of the year in this quiet drama about a college professor dealing with the aftermath of a traumatic on-campus experience. Victor is focused on much more than that experience, though: The film exhibits a frank, sometimes funny, and deep appreciation for the importance of close friendships and the restorative nature of receiving kindness when you need it most. — Aisha Harris
Film
Black Bag
Claudette Barius/Focus Features
Steven Soderbergh has been on a roll lately, and this sexy spy thriller written by David Koepp is a huge reason why. Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett make for an irresistible pair as George and Kathryn, married British intelligence officers whose relationship is tested by a cybersecurity leak. Can Kathryn be trusted? Who knows! Cue an expertly choreographed dinner party with all the suspected traitors, multiple layers of lies and deceit, and sleek, drool-worthy fashion and set designs. — Aisha Harris
Film
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
Chibesa Mulumba/A24
When a Zambian man dies, his large family gathers to take part in a customary dayslong act of mourning. But in life, the man did horrible things, and the elders’ ritual is too much to bear for three cousins bonded by their pain. Filmmaker Rungano Nyoni’s surrealistic drama takes sharp aim at the culture of silence around sexual abuse and is anchored by stunning performances from Susan Chardy, Elizabeth Chisela and Esther Singini. — Aisha Harris
Film
Universal Language
Metafilms
For much of Canadian filmmaker Matthew Rankin’s whimsical ensemble dramedy, you don’t quite know what he’s trying to do or where he’s trying to lead you. Hell, it’s often not even clear what time period we’re in. But it never matters: As a colorful cast of characters young, old and in between crosses paths, each with their own anxieties, experiences and aims, an absurdly charming sense of community begins to emerge. The emotional payoff is extraordinary. — Aisha Harris
Film
Jay Kelly
Peter Mountain/Netflix
Jay Kelly is Noah Baumbach’s great contribution to this year’s trend of movies about artist fathers attempting to reconcile with their estranged adult children. Playing a big-time movie star whose past comes back to haunt him, George Clooney calls upon a lifetime of personal experience living in the public eye and delivers an affecting performance that’s one of his best. Baumbach astutely captures what’s lost in a life spent prioritizing career over family and what can’t be reclaimed: time. — Aisha Harris
TV
The Traitors, Season 3
Euan Cherry/Peacock
Few things this year were as invigorating as witnessing traitor Rob Mariano, aka Boston Rob, act as the reality competition show’s main villain this season by playing down and dirty, even against his fellow traitors. And it was nothing short of hilarious watching the ever-aloof himbo Tom Sandoval bewilder his castmates. Throw in Bob the Drag Queen always being extra, residual Big Brother drama between Britney Haynes and Danielle Reyes spilling over into the castle, and much more, and a gloriously messy time was had. — Aisha Harris
TV
Dying for Sex
FX/Hulu
No surprise here: As Molly Kochan, a young woman diagnosed with terminal cancer, Michelle Williams is phenomenal. But so is everything else about this limited series, which is inspired by the late Kochan’s life. Her sex-positive quest to finally achieve her first orgasm after ending an unfulfilling marriage is as profound as it is funny and awkward. And the ensemble, including Jenny Slate, Rob Delaney and Sissy Spacek, makes it all the sweeter. Hardly an easy watch, but it will stick with you. — Aisha Harris
Film
No Other Choice
NEON
Park Chan-wook’s latest film, out Dec. 25, is a nasty piece of work indeed — a satirical pitch-black comedy about the lengths to which one middle manager at a paper company (Lee Byung-hun) will go to cling to the lifestyle he and his family enjoy. The lengths in question: killing other candidates for the job he wants. And while his plans for murder are exacting and meticulous, this is a Park Chan-wook film, so things can be counted upon to go hilariously, bloodily, squelchily wrong. — Glen Weldon
Film
Peter Hujar’s Day
Janus Films
Peter Hujar’s Day is a vibe — a film made for gray Sunday afternoons. It’s December 1974 in Manhattan. Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall), a writer, records her photographer friend, Hujar (Ben Whishaw), as he recounts the events (and nonevents) of the previous day. He smokes and drinks while talking about the prosaic things artists talk about all the time (like chasing down freelance payments). It’s a quiet film that offers a glimpse into our analog past, a place where the wallpaper is textured and the hi-fis are chunky. — Glen Weldon
Film
Weapons
Warner Bros. Pictures
Writer/director Zach Cregger’s movie really gets the suburbs at night — they’re at once mysterious and beautiful, ugly and depressing. He loads the film with images that sear themselves into your brain — those running kids, sure, but also the stubborn, unignorable weirdness of Aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan), whose mere presence quickly becomes a kind of narrative black hole that bends the movie around it, drawing every character to her. And that ending? A hoot. A dang hoot is what it is. — Glen Weldon
Film
Superman
Warner Bros. Pictures
Superhero cinema has been an emo mopefest for so long that your local movie theater might as well be a Hot Topic. Enter: James Gunn’s Superman, whose hero is so bright and pure and hopeful he’s like a restorative bath of light from Earth’s yellow sun. I worried that Gunn’s instincts toward glib, nihilistic hyperviolence (see: Peacemaker) would make for a bad fit, but David Corenswet imbues the Last Son of Krypton with a charming, resolute corniness that defies cynicism. — Glen Weldon
Film
Twinless
Roadside Attractions
Writer/director James Sweeney’s film stars himself and Dylan O’Brien as two young men who meet in a support group for people grieving the loss of their twin sibling. There’s a lot more to it than that, and over the course of this darkly funny film, we learn something — a terrible secret — that we know will eventually come to light, because we’ve watched movies before. But when it does, the film’s tension doesn’t dissipate — it deepens — which is why the ending lands with such quiet grace. — Glen Weldon
TV
Murderbot
Apple TV
The best comedy of the year follows SecUnit (Alexander Skarsgård), a security android that secretly attains autonomy just before it’s assigned to protect a group of touchy-feely scientists on a dangerous planet. Every time the scientists try to involve SecUnit in their messy human lives, Skarsgård registers panic in a series of tiny but hilarious microexpressions. Masterful eyebrow-acting. The thing is: All SecUnit wants is to be left alone so it can watch TV. Relatable. — Glen Weldon
TV
Long Story Short
Netflix
Creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s previous show BoJack Horseman was both hilarious and gut-punchingly sad, sometimes within a matter of seconds. His new animated comedy, which checks in on one Jewish family at various moments in time, is also hilarious — matriarch Naomi (Lisa Edelstein), for example, is a force of comedic nature. It’s sad too, though its approach is gentler and more wistful than BoJack’s — and as a result, it’s even more rewarding. — Glen Weldon
TV
Andor, Season 2
Des Willie/Lucasfilm Ltd.
Andor isn’t just a good Star Wars show — it’s one of the best shows of the year. That’s because it spends its time digging beneath George Lucas’ tidy black-and-white morality to tell a story about the mundane machinations of fascism and the desperate people sacrificing their ideals — and one another — to fight it. Even as we barreled toward a preconceived ending (the events of Rogue One), the series managed to carve out moments of heartbreak and triumph and, yeah, I’ll say it: hope. — Glen Weldon
TV
The Pitt
Warrick Page/Max
A harrowing season of television about a harrowing shift at a Pittsburgh emergency department, The Pitt was sad, maddening, sometimes funny and deeply compassionate toward both staff and patients. It had a lot to say about America’s broken health care system and the way it torments everyone in different ways. The show and multiple actors, including hospital-show veteran Noah Wyle, won well-deserved Emmys. Expect the second season to be one of 2026’s most talked-about shows. — Linda Holmes
TV
Pluribus
Apple TV
Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul creator Vince Gilligan reunited with Saul star Rhea Seehorn for a story calling back to his days as an X-Files writer. Seehorn plays Carol, a woman who finds herself alone when the personalities of nearly everyone else on Earth are swallowed up by a mysterious hive mind. It’s a very funny show at times but also agonizingly lonely, as Carol — who’s basically a misanthrope — abruptly comes to understand how much she misses colliding with other people’s flawed humanity. — Linda Holmes
TV
The Lowdown
Shane Brown/FX
Reservation Dogs creator Sterlin Harjo brought another Oklahoma story to life with this tale of a self-proclaimed “truthstorian” named Lee Raybon (Ethan Hawke) who does muckraking journalism from the back of a Tulsa bookstore. Hawke seems to understand this funny but tragic man perfectly, and the show is full of great supporting performances from Kyle MacLachlan, Jeanne Tripplehorn and especially Peter Dinklage, who shows up for one episode as Lee’s old friend and brings the story new depths. — Linda Holmes
TV
The Studio
Apple TV+
Seth Rogen stars in this satire about Hollywood, playing a brand-new studio executive who wants to make good movies but also wants to keep his job. More than anything, he wants to be liked, but he can’t stop infuriating real-life actors and directors who appear in cameos: Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, Sarah Polley, Anthony Mackie, Olivia Wilde and a lot more. Catherine O’Hara is great in it, Bryan Cranston is great in it, and the season builds to a heck of a conclusion. — Linda Holmes
TV
The Residence
Erin Simkin/Netflix
A whodunit set in the White House is a great idea, very well realized in this comic mystery about the murder of the building’s chief usher during a state dinner honoring Australia. Uzo Aduba plays the thoughtful, steel-trap-minded detective Cordelia Cupp, who is brilliant at solving mysteries, even though she’d rather be bird-watching. Funny and tense, it’s exactly what a story like this should be, and Aduba is perfectly suited (well, tweed-jacketed) to play a brilliant detective. — Linda Holmes
Film
Wake Up Dead Man
Netflix
Rian Johnson’s third Benoit Blanc mystery is maybe the most emotionally satisfying of the three, starring Josh O’Connor as a young priest suspected of killing the bombastic Monsignor Wicks (Josh Brolin), with whom he’d repeatedly clashed. O’Connor and Daniel Craig, playing Blanc, are marvelous together, and while the film is funny, it’s also a respectful and deeply felt story about faith and how hard it can be to maintain. And, yes, there’s another great supporting cast, including Glenn Close and Andrew Scott. — Linda Holmes
Film
Mountainhead
Fred Hayes/HBO
Succession creator Jesse Armstrong made this dark (dark) comedy about a gathering of tech titans, and it has a lot in common with work he has done with Armando Iannucci on shows like Veep. As these four rich, morally empty men sit in a luxury mountain mansion and debate what to do about what appears to be a global meltdown, it becomes more and more clear that they are both menaces and fools. And the cast, led by Steve Carell and Ramy Youssef, is up to the task of mixing comedy and misery. — Linda Holmes
Film
Blue Moon
Sabrina Lantos/Sony Pictures Classics
The night Oklahoma! opened was maybe the worst night of Lorenz Hart’s life. The lyricist, who had worked with Richard Rodgers for years to great success, saw Rodgers team up with Oscar Hammerstein, debut a hit show and, for all intents and purposes, move on. Ethan Hawke plays Hart with compassion as a man who, over the course of an evening in a bar as the show’s opening-night party begins around him, drinks and talks (and talks) to conceal his pain. — Linda Holmes
TV
Alien: Earth
Patrick Brown/FX
Finally, a talented storyteller takes on the most obvious question left for the Alien franchise: What if a deadly Xenomorph — as well as a few other alien horrors — get loose on Earth? Because the showrunner is Noah Hawley (Fargo, Legion), we also get human minds transplanted into synthetic bodies; warring corporations feuding over deadly alien life forms that have crash-landed on Earth; a suspenseful homage to the first two Alien movies; and a quirky synthetic person played by Timothy Olyphant. Pure sci-fi heaven. — Eric Deggans
TV
Ladies & Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music
Eugene Gologursky/Getty Images
It starts with the best opening in music documentary history: an inspired video montage in which co-director Questlove melds SNL musical performances to showcase Prince playing with Rick James and Busta Rhymes rapping alongside TLC, and more. From there, the film digs into everything from the first live rap performance on national TV, Eddie Murphy nearly refusing to do the classic James Brown hot tub sketch and a much-belated appreciation of Sinéad O’Connor’s on-screen protest against the Catholic Church. — Eric Deggans
TV
Severance, Season 2
Apple TV+
The show’s mind-bending conceit — office workers whose memories are severed between work and home, creating two minds in the same body — only grew deeper, weirder and more delicious this season. As one character negotiated between his “innie” and “outie” selves to rescue his wife, the show’s send-up of dehumanizing office culture grew so bizarrely relevant that watching episodes felt like peering into a starkly lit, surprisingly lo-fi future. — Eric Deggans
TV
Adolescence
Ben Blackall/Netflix
Forget about the astounding feat of filming each of this limited series’s four episodes in one continuous shot. Consider instead the supremely relevant story of an average family torn apart by the accusation that a 13-year-old boy murdered his female classmate, egged on by social media pressure. Toss in spellbinding performances by Stephen Graham as the boy’s father and newbie Owen Cooper as the boy himself, and you have a towering TV classic. — Eric Deggans
TV
Pee-wee as Himself
Getty/HBO
Paul Reubens’ on-screen ambivalence about the docuseries — and his failed attempts to wrest editorial control from director Matt Wolf — turn this into more than a look at a man who invented one of TV’s quirkiest characters. It’s a captivating recounting of how Reubens’ reluctance to reveal himself outside Pee-wee Herman’s scripted antics ultimately helped fuel his show business downfall. — Eric Deggans
TV
Task
Peter Kramer/HBO
Yes, the way Mark Ruffalo, Tom Pelphrey and castmates nail the peculiar accent of Pennsylvania’s Delaware County (Delco) is impressive. But what really sticks is the way Ruffalo’s broken-down FBI agent seems to be a distorted mirror of Pelphrey’s damaged robber of drug houses, with both men stumbling through the wreckage of their own lives as one chases the other. It’s a poignant picture of two seemingly disparate men who often can’t help failing, despite how hard they try not to. — Eric Deggans
Film
The Perfect Neighbor
Netflix
This is the best version yet of a growing style of documentary: films cobbled together almost entirely from body camera footage from police. This time, they document repeated calls to a neighborhood where an erratic woman in her 50s keeps tangling with kids playing nearby. When the woman shoots and kills a mom of one of the boys during an argument, video of the family’s grief feels almost voyeuristic — capturing the sad culmination of an escalating situation through the unblinking eye of first responders. — Eric Deggans
TV
High Horse: The Black Cowboy
Peacock
Executive producer Jordan Peele tees up the story of a long legacy of racial oppression by asking a simple question: Why don’t we know more about Black cowboys? The answer involves everything from Manifest Destiny to the Tulsa Race Massacre and Bass Reeves, the Black U.S. marshal who likely inspired the Lone Ranger. This docuseries explores how these disparate examples show a white-dominated society bending history, laws and media to remove nonwhite people from cowboy and Western culture. — Eric Deggans
TV
Blue Lights, Season 3
Peter Marley/BritBox
It has taken three seasons for this saucy, streetwise drama about scrappy patrol officers in Belfast, Northern Ireland, to take flight. But it is now one of the best cop shows on TV, blending realistic storylines that reference lingering sectarian tensions in the city, wealthy power brokers trying to live above the law and cops still grieving the loss of a fellow officer. It’s all powered by strain between officers who feel compelled to help people and others who just want to survive the shift. — Eric Deggans