Andrew O'Hehir

It's entirely sincere and genuinely not terrible. Burns knows the milieu of his suburbanized New York Irish-American characters at a bone-deep level (enough to induce powerful flashbacks in someone of my background), and the tone of regretful, tragicomic, low-key melodrama he strikes is just right.

It's a tight, taut, expertly crafted thriller from a director to watch.

This is a deliberately chilly and nerve-wracking experience, and one of the bleakest portraits of American society seen on-screen in the last several decades.

One of the year's best films precisely because it can't be boiled down to a message or synopsis. It's an exercise in style that risks trashiness in search of transcendence, and it's a sizzling celebration of the power of music, the power of images, and the electric, destructive power of the human body.

I felt like I'd been invited to a seven-course dinner, and all seven turned out to be cake – and then the host insisted on delivering a lecture about how cake would bring me closer to God.

One of the most intriguing tangents in Mea Maxima Culpa involves the Rev. Gerald Fitzgerald, founder of the Servants of the Paraclete, a Catholic congregation established to help priests who were struggling with celibacy, alcoholism and other personal issues.

Great cinema? Hell, I don't know. But one of the most satisfying movies of the holiday season, that much is for sure.

Does this crazy idea work? Maybe 70 percent of the time, but when it does it's both daring and brilliant.

Whatever moment of inspiration caused Spielberg to cast her (Sally Field) as Mary Todd Lincoln, it was sheer genius, because this is a role that demands bigness.

Skyfall is a push-pull between the past and the present, an effort to drag a symbol of maleness as iconic as the Union Jack bulldog on M's desk into a world of approximate gender equality and approximate acceptance of sexual difference. I'm not sure how sustainable that is over the long term; this is a smashing entertainment, but also one that feels over-engineered and constrained by its origins.

Is it, on some level, '70s-style horror schlock dressed up with contemporary gimmicks? Sure, but don't act like that's a bad thing! It's schlock with honor, schlock with a conscience, schlock that speaks to the way we live now.

Slowly but surely, Flight degenerates from a tale of moral paradox and wounded romance into a mid-1990s after-school special about addiction and recovery.

Its too-muchness is also the source of its power; I was absolutely never bored, and felt surprised when the movie ended. It's an amazing, baffling, thrilling and (for many, it would appear) irritating experience, and for my money the most beautiful and distinctive big-screen vision of the year.

Sleep Tight, first of all, is a nifty new Euro-horror film, with several wicked-cold Hitchcockian twists, that shows off the range and craft of terrific Spanish director Jaume Balagueró, co-founder of the "[Rec]" franchise (still the gold standard in found-footage horror).

One of the great things about Scott Thurman's film - a low-budget but thoroughly watchable documentary, largely funded on Kickstarter – is that it helped me see the world from McLeroy's point of view, which I might previously have considered impossible.

The Sessions should be taken for what it is, a sweet but minor fictional parable about the strange possibilities of love. You may find it significant, moving and even profound, but it has a limited connection to the real world and the real life of Mark O'Brien.

Whatever sense you make (or don't) of the spectacular, hallucinatory Holy Motors, it's the coolest and strangest movie of the year, and once it gets its druglike hooks in your brain, you'll never get them out again.

It honestly makes no difference if you don't even know the rules of chess and have never visited New York; this is a story about human potential and the lingering possibilities of the American dream.

This is an elegant, powerfully emotional and courageous film, worth seeing entirely on its own artistic terms, and also for what it conveys about the complexity of African-American life and the resurgence of African-American cultural expression.

To Ben Affleck's credit, he's made a terrific, pulse-elevating thriller that will leave the audience cheering.

The film has moments of real brilliance and pathos; flawed as it is, Seven Psychopaths isn't like anything else you'll see this year, or any other.

This may test your patience, it's not for everyone, it's a stretch to call this "entertainment" and so on. As far as Heathcliff being black – well, deal with it. Arnold's simply right about that one, and it's Laurence Olivier and Ralph Fiennes and all those costume-drama versions of the story that are wrong.

Luc Besson and Liam Neeson and the rest of the furriners who made the inept and offensive Taken 2 don't seem to have gotten the memo from Jason Bourne: Americans don't think our spooks are good guys anymore.

I'm not sure V/H/S is brilliant cinema or anything – indeed, I'm not sure it's appropriate to call it cinema at all – but it sure is an ingenious hybrid: part Godardian art film, part abstract video experiment, part sleazy shocker, and all self-castigating interrogation of what film-theory types call the "male gaze."

It's simultaneously terrifying and hilarious, a full-on shotgun blast to the face of rediscovered 1970s weirdness, something like finding out that there's a classic Peckinpah film you've never seen, or that Wes Craven and Bernardo Bertolucci got drunk in Sydney one weekend and decided to make a movie together.

While the portrayal of Southern race relations in the '60s is less central here than in "The Help," it's also less labored and earnest, and one could argue that it's subtler, more intimate and more honest.

The Waiting Room is a source of both inspiration and hope. The system may be broken, but the people are not.

I'm not ready to proclaim Looper a sci-fi masterpiece just yet; let's let it sit awhile. But it's a lean, mean, smart, violent picture with a bit of Stanley Kubrick edge, fueled by the terrific Gordon-Levitt.

So teachers' unions don't care about kids. Oh, and luck is a foxy lady. This is what I took away from the inept and bizarre Won't Back Down, a set of right-wing anti-union talking points disguised (with very limited success) as a mainstream motion-picture-type product.

Mythic, thrilling and brilliantly made motion picture.

If at first I tried to resist these hapless Pennsylvania teens who'd never even heard of David Bowie, for Christ's sake, I was won over completely by the time Patrick and Sam are ready to graduate and Charlie has faced down his demons one more time.

Immediately leaps near the top of the list of greatest baseball documentaries.

The Master is often spectacular and never less than handsome, and it has numerous moments of disturbing and almost electrical power. I can't say, after one viewing, that I found it moving or satisfying as a whole, but I'm also not sure it's supposed to be. This is an almost apocalyptic tale of thwarted emotion - love cut short - set in a pitiless land of delusions.

I'm going to suggest, somewhat tentatively, that Bachelorette is most unlike "Bridesmaids" because it fundamentally isn't a comedy at all, but something closer to a dense, dark character drama tarted up in high heels and a short skirt and dosed with pills and coke.

Not only does this film gloriously fulfill the potential that Ira Sachs has tantalized movie-lovers with for years, it also help explains what took him so long. Out of lost love comes a terrific work of art; it's the oldest story in the world, but it always feels new when it's done right.

If it's too subtle (and too similar to several other low-key indie romcoms) to make a big splash, it's got lovely performances and really builds strength as it goes along.

One could and perhaps should use scare quotes around "intellectual" when it comes to someone who would crank out a piece of campaign-season partisan hackwork this crude and sloppy. (By this standard, James Carville looks like Immanuel Kant.)

Moody and a little slow, with muted colors and a half-empty, alien-feeling suburban setting, Danish director Ole Bornedal's The Possession is a nifty end-of-summer gift for horror buffs.

Lawless offers a compelling, gruesome and instructive time-travel exercise.

It demands to be experienced on its own terms or not at all, which creates a significant level of resistance in the contemporary media marketplace – but may also be a source of counterintuitive appeal.

Much of the argument Navarro assembles in Death by China is unassailable as to its basic facts, even if the tone and manner of presentation leave much to be desired.

It almost continuously gets darker, funnier and edgier as it goes along.

Robot & Frank is such a sly, dry, modest-seeming picture – part science fiction, part social satire, part geriatric comedy – that you don't realize how well it works until it's over.

Hope Springs is an oddly ambitious blend of bland humor and startling insight into the realities of married life. It's something like Ingmar Bergman's "Scenes From a Marriage," as translated into the universe of the Lifetime Network.

A lean, clean killing machine that supplies some dark, late-summer thrills and chills and breathes new life into a seemingly extinct franchise.

Unlike most issue-oriented documentaries about the abundant idiocy of the human species and the imminent demise of our planet, Mark S. Hall's Sushi: The Global Catch offers foodies and sushi buffs a refreshing palate-cleanser before the parade of experts and the dire news reports.

It's easy to hate movies that are abundantly terrible or immoral or stupid, but I almost feel like a jerk telling you that Fernando Meirelles' globetrotting drama 360 is a mistake from beginning to end.

Total Recall is a doggone good time, with a bunch of nifty technical and visual flourishes, competently managed plot twists and elegant, Wachowski-esque action choreography that eventually becomes deadening because there's just too much of it and it's dialed up too high.

Klayman's riveting, vérité-style film captures this burly, bigger-than-life figure over the past three years, as his activism has heightened, his art has grown increasingly confrontational and he has deliberately blurred the distinction between aesthetics and politics.

This is a love story of uncommon loveliness and simplicity.

Friedkin's still got it - the "it" being his ability to infuse every frame of the film with powerful ambiguity and doubt, and also his ability to attract terrific actors and propel them in unexpected directions.

It's mediocre and half-baked, with flashes of a potential good movie showing through here and there.

With this sober, mournful, gorgeously mounted and marvelously acted drama, Miike connects himself to the greatest traditions of Japanese film and to the period of historical self-examination that followed the debacle of World War II. And he also crafts one hell of a fable of heroism.

If The Dark Knight Rises is a fascist film, it's a great fascist film, and arguably the biggest, darkest, most thrilling and disturbing and utterly balls-out spectacle ever created for the screen. It's an unfriendly masterpiece that shows you only a little circle of daylight, way up there at the top of our collective prison shaft - but a masterpiece nonetheless.

Easy Money may well be the crime film of the year, or the decade.

Like a Theodore Dreiser novel for our time, infused with the vivid, vulgar spirit of reality TV. It often had the sold-out Eccles Center howling, but also has elements of profound tragedy and allegory.

While "Ballplayer" is certainly unsettling, must-see viewing for baseball fans - a nonfiction follow-up to Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck's outstanding 2009 feature "Sugar" - it's a vibrant tale, alive with color and texture, that's far more than a sports movie.

Savages is enjoyable in a way that's almost but not quite intentional camp; it's like eating a dinner made by a 7-year-old, with cake for every course, interspersed with Jell-O, Pepperidge Farm goldfish and chocolate sprinkles.

Pretty good summer flick!

The point of watching the film, and the only reason to see it, is the experience of watching it, which sounds tautological or something, but is just true. It's a powerful visual and sonic creation with unforgettable characters, set in a heartache-inducing imaginary vision of American community, worlds away from hyper-technologized urban existence.

In a universe of Hollywood comedies that seem determined to insult the audience and pander to the basest form of post-adolescent fantasy, Ted feels almost sophisticated.

Magic Mike is a fascinating film, one of his (Soderbergh's) best in recent years.

When Vikram Gandhi set out to become a guru, he didn't expect to really become a guru. But that's what happens in his slippery, ambiguous, tense and finally moving Kumaré, which is officially termed a documentary but could also be considered as the video corollary to a thorny work of performance art.

There's definitely some empty-calories, summer-movie fun to be found in this ludicrous genre mashup, most of it courtesy of maniacal Russian director Timur Bekmambetov, who stages hilarious, imaginative, almost free-form action sequences like nobody in the business.

Take This Waltz is frank, erotic, often very funny and sometimes startling, with an underlying tragic sensibility.

Moms and girls everywhere deserve this movie, absolutely, and I hope they have a great time. But they also deserve much more, and much better.

Rock of Ages is an effulgent celebration of fakeness. It isn't trying to be real; it's trying to be faker than any fake thing has ever been before.

I really enjoyed watching Prometheus almost the whole way through, and I'm looking forward to seeing it again. It's an enjoyable thrill ride, slicked up with a thin veneer of Asking the Big Questions. But do its so-called heroes really have to be such blithering New Age idiots?

I resisted this derivative mishmash of classic fairytale and modern epic fantasy for as long as I could, but ultimately it swept me up into its geeky but manly embrace and carried me away on a white charger.

It's a marvelously constructed personal journey, both wrenching and bittersweet, whose emotional ripple effects stay with you for days and weeks afterward.

Rapturous and hilarious.

Let me come clean right now and tell you that I enjoyed The Intouchables quite a bit. If you're looking for a lightweight summer change of pace, with just a smidgen of Continental flair, here it is.

It's kind of endearing and kind of asinine.

A breakthrough movie after its own fashion, a mysterious existential thriller that's brilliantly acted and masterfully directed, without a second of wasted screen time.

Its shameless and nonsensical combination of ingredients finally won me over, after a fashion, when I realized that its gung-ho Navy-recruitment propaganda and retrograde gender politics shouldn't be taken any more seriously than the ZZ Top, AC/DC and Billy Squier songs on the soundtrack.

Although the character of Aladeen seems awfully predictable by Baron Cohen standards, the movie itself veers from one hilarious, absurd and patently offensive setup to the next.

A wonderful adventure film that's no less thrilling for its modest scale, and a film whose emotional power and intelligence sneak up on you.

Laranas does cultivate a mood of distinctive menace and mystery, not to mention a convoluted and ambitious chronology.

Dark Shadows offers potent atmosphere and delirious '70s fashions and hilarious gags and some really terrific performances, none better than Pfeiffer's triumphant return to the screen as a pitch-perfect family matriarch.

What I see in The Avengers, unfortunately, is a diminished film despite its huge scale, and kind of a bore.

Sound of My Voice has such creepy-crawly, brain-tickling energy that I wanted a much bigger payoff out of the final collision of all these people and episodes. Maybe they're saving that for the sequel.

Both a wrenching journalistic exploration of real life and something close to great cinema.

Safe is both a slavish imitation of cinema gone by and a movie for our time. I found it wickedly entertaining and perversely refreshing in its total lack of contemporary piety.

But at his best - and his new movie, The Day He Arrives, is among his very best - Hong offers a strange mixture of magic, mystery, rueful melodrama and dry comedy that's like absolutely nothing else.

If anything, Think Like a Man, the awkward but intermittently amusing black-centric ensemble film built out of comedian Steve Harvey's self-help bestseller "Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man" deserves a gold star for its generous portrayals of Caucasians.

This is a rigorously crafted film steeped in the French tradition, but it's meant to be a sensual and emotional experience, not a verbal or analytical one. Most of all, it's a spectacular eyeful.

The doggie in Darling Companion is a big, warm bundle of puppy love; his owners are lost forever in a big chill.

An entertaining diversion, mostly because Rossellini and Hurt are a pair of seasoned and graceful pros who know how to work every line and every gesture, and it's great to see them playing characters who are exactly their age.

I'm recommending that you rush out and see it, but not altogether because I think it's so totally great and completely works. Quite a bit of it is great, and most of it works, and the stuff that clicks is outrageously entertaining and funny, sometimes with surprising depth. But I also want you to see it so we can argue about what works and what doesn't.

Damsels in Distress is deliberately and purposefully irrelevant; its irrelevance is its strength. It's zany-in-quotation-marks and also flat-out zany. I laughed until I cried, and you may too (if you don't find it pointless and teeth-grindingly irritating). Either way, Whit Stillman is back at last, bringing his peculiar brand of counterprogramming refreshment to our jaded age.

Nasheed has traveled the world describing the Maldives as the Poland of global warming - meaning, of course, Poland in 1939. If his country cannot be saved from rising sea levels, he maintains, then there may be no saving Tokyo or Mumbai or New Orleans or New York.

An earnest and moving documentary made for and about tormented preteens and teenagers.

This yarn about an innocent-looking but desperately horny teenage girl might not have that much commercial upside, but its bittersweet, faintly depressed brand of Nordic humor is definitely enjoyable.

That whole aspect of October Baby creeped me out a lot more than the blood-curdling failed-abortion story did, honestly. I've seen a lot of movies where crazy and impossible things happen, and you just have to roll with them. Real life is much more frightening.

It offers some of the best Asian martial-arts choreography of recent years and an electric, claustrophobic puzzle-palace atmosphere that'll leave you wrung out and buzzed.

The Hunger Games has some cool moments here and there, and is never entirely dreadful. Lawrence is both radiant and triumphant. They haven't screwed it up badly enough to kill it, although they've tried.

Considered as a whole it's a wonderful and hilarious phenomenon, most of it is executed to Dadaist perfection.

People will either love Detachment or hate it, and either way it provides powerful testimony to the unrivaled passion and undiminished craft of director Kaye, whose notoriety in the film industry is matched by his near-total invisibility to the general public.