Richard Roeper's reviews for 2024's best picture Oscars nominees

On Sunday, one film will receive the Oscars’ highest honor: best picture.

Sun-Times film columnist Richard Roeper predicts “Oppenheimer” will walk away with the award at the end of the night, but the category had other standouts worth a watch.

Here are the eight best picture nominees Roeper reviewed, and their ratings.

‘Oppenheimer’

4 stars

“Christopher Nolan’s three-hour historical biopic ‘Oppenheimer’ is a gorgeously photographed, brilliantly acted, masterfully edited and thoroughly engrossing epic that instantly takes its place among the finest films of this decade — an old-fashioned yet cutting-edge work that should resonate with film scholars and popcorn-toting mainstream movie lovers for years and decades to come,” Roeper writes.

Read Roeper’s full “Oppenheimer” review.

‘Killers of the Flower Moon’

4 stars

“Martin Scorsese’s true-crime American period piece ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ is a big, sweeping, glorious, heartbreaking, insightful, powerful and unforgettable epic that serves notice the 80-year-old Scorsese remains at the forefront of innovative and provocative filmmaking,” Roeper writes.

Read Roeper’s full “Killers of the Flower Moon” review.

‘Barbie’

3.5 stars

“Thanks to the creative efforts of director Gerwig (who co-wrote the screenplay with her partner Noah Baumbach), the absolutely pitch-perfect casting starting with the gorgeous and talented humans Margot Robbie as Barbie and Ryan Gosling as Ken, and a candy-colored, screen-popping production design that transports us to Barbieland and beyond, this is a truly original work — one of the smartest, funniest, sweetest, most insightful and just plain flat-out entertaining movies of the year,” Roeper writes.

Read Roeper’s full “Barbie” review.

‘Poor Things’

3.5 stars

“With Emma Stone delivering the very definition of an all-in performance and a brilliant supporting cast led by Willem Dafoe and Mark Ruffalo, this is an aggressively weird (sometimes too much so) black comedy and social satire — the kind of movie that will surely make many a ‘Best of the Year’ list but might also have some theatergoers heading for the exits by the halfway point,” Roeper writes.

Read Roeper’s full “Poor Things” review.

‘The Zone of Interest’

3.5 stars

"[Christian] Friedel and [Sandra] Hüller turn in remarkable performances, never shading their respective characters with empathy and yet making them all too real and thus loathsome in a skin-crawling way. [Director Jonathan] Glazer’s deliberately passive camera work serves the story well,” Roeper writes.

Read Roeper’s full “The Zone of Interest” review.

‘Maestro’

3.5 stars

"[Bradley] Cooper’s work is nuanced, but he doesn’t shy away from the BIG moments, including a triumphant reenactment of Bernstein conducting Mahler’s “Resurrection” symphony at Ely Cathedral, which ends on just the right note — Lenny embracing his long-suffering wife, whom he truly did love,” Roeper writes.

Read Roeper’s full “Maestro” review.

‘American Fiction’

3 stars

“In writer-director Cord Jefferson’s timely and sharp and subversively funny ‘American Fiction,’ [Jeffrey] Wright is accorded the relatively rare opportunity to take the lead, and he delivers a richly layered performance that reminds us he’s one of the best actors of his generation. It’s a joy to watch,” Roeper writes.

Read Roeper’s full “American Fiction” review.