Andrew O'Hehir

I found this beautifully crafted movie to be frequently hilarious, consistently surprising and rigged with spring-loaded narrative bombs, from its opening scene to its devastating final shot.

This is a gorgeous, timely and possibly profound human comedy, and if there’s no disentangling the medium from the message that’s because both are powerful and ambiguous.

Despite their terrible ordeal these women are heroes, not victims. As Mungiu makes clear in the casual, brilliant final scene of this amazing movie, heroes persevere.

It's a distinctive, ominous and hypnotic work of cinema.

In this quiet, beautiful and terrifying fable about a group of lost pioneers, Reichardt combines epic ambition with a focus on intimate, personal detail.

Hirschbiegel and Eichinger, along with their large, brave and talented cast, have done something extraordinary for their generation of Germans, and for the world. They have willfully entered their grandparents' dirtiest, clammiest chamber of secrets.

This movie's an absolute knockout. I know it's only June, but I'm damned if this isn't the breakthrough American film of the year.

Visually ravishing, tonally commanding and built around magnetic performances by Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck as Bonnie-and-Clyde doomed lovers, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints is a tragic but not despairing tale of fatal romance set in the Texas hill country in the mid-1970s. It marks the arrival of an immense talent who will be new to most moviegoers – although Lowery is a well-known figure in the indie-film world – and it’s surely one of the best American films of the year.

This stark and intensely controlled film is the work of a powerful visual stylist and storyteller, one who looks like he belongs on the short list of directors who have carried the narrative methods of the silent era deep into modern cinema.

It’s an enormously resonant work of cultural history that should do much to renew attention to the lonely, prophetic voice of James Baldwin.

It's a brilliant work of cinema, a nonfiction film as intense and visceral as any drama, and an emotional and moral experience that feels horrifying and exhilarating at almost the same moment.

A bona fide summer delight loaded with action, humor, nostalgia, a veritable blizzard of pop-culture references and general good vibes.

Chang's images of the Yangtze and the new megacities replacing the villages on its banks are spectacular, and his cast of characters rival any fiction film I've seen recently.

A terrifying, absorbing 93 minutes spent in hell. It captures the intensity of warfare in a visceral fashion that recalls Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket" and Oliver Stone's "Platoon."

Mythic, thrilling and brilliantly made motion picture.

The ultimate lesson in less-is-more cinema, an intimate and revelatory character study as well as a brilliant, almost symphonic rendering of the distracted, anxious, half-alienated and half-meditative state in which we spend vast amounts of our lives.

Once you start to ride with the rapturous, gorgeous, digressive symphony of images and words and music in this film it's completely absorbing and unlike anything you've ever seen.

An extraordinary accomplishment, a heartbreaking, visually spectacular and largely accessible work from a cinematic master who is more than ready for international attention.

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

Its combination of dazzling cinematic craft, psychological insight and black humor make this one of the year's moviegoing musts -- and even or especially at her most deranged, Kim Hye-ja's amazing mother is profoundly, passionately human.

I recognize how few horror movies I've seen before or since that ever manage to capture such a tangible feeling of menace.

It's a handsome and stimulating film, noteworthy more for its terrific acting and provocative ideas than for any kind of dark Cronenbergundian genius.

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.

Sweetgrass memorably captures a dying way of American life, a marvelously untrammeled American landscape and at least two animals — men and sheep — that despite their millennia-long domestic relationship still have a spark of wildness in them.

Hunger is a mesmerizing 96 minutes of cinema, one of the truly extraordinary filmmaking debuts of recent years. It's also an uneasy, unsettling experience and is meant to be.

What he (Beauvois) conveys, through austere but spectacular visual language, magnificent liturgical singing and an ensemble cast headed by the terrific French veteran actors Lambert Wilson and Michael Lonsdale, is something of the "why."

One of the year's best movies...It's one of the simplest and best re-creations of downscale urban England during the gritty post-punk years ever put on screen, and it's both upsetting and very funny.

This is a handcrafted, passionate and sometimes impossibly beautiful film that argues for both the past and the future, with a poetic spirit that’s extremely rare in American cinema.

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.

A movie so rousing, so real and so full of complicated emotions that it all feels brand-new.

It’s perhaps the first great love story of the 21st century that could belong only to this century.

A ravishing, emotional and often very funny film about a wedding gone wrong, the end of the world and a woman suffering from profound depression.

Politically provocative and visually spectacular Snowpiercer - the best action film of 2014, and probably the best film, period.

A pitch-perfect blend of darkness and sweetness, built around a masterful performance by a great actor.

Austrian director Spielmann has long awaited discovery by a wider world, and for my money the gorgeous, brooding, unpredictable neo-noir Revanche is one of the year's best films.

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.

Any way you slice it, it's a brave and brilliant act of defiance.

A marvelous ensemble cast and all the visceral impact and moment-to-moment tension of a fine thriller, together with the distinctive visual style of an art film.

If it plays in any theaters beyond New York and Los Angeles, that'll probably come as a surprise to its distributor (the estimable Lorber Films). None of that diminishes the power and intensity of this claustrophobic mini-masterpiece of the Japanese antiwar tradition, which blends a B-movie aesthetic, brilliant use of montage and documentary elements and a scathing critique of nationalism and militarism.

Carol is one of the greatest American screen romances of any era, period – and perhaps that serves as the ultimate vindication of Haynes’ outspoken commitment to “queer cinema.”

What's so remarkable about Louie Psihoyos' documentary The Cove isn't just that it's a powerful work of agitprop that's going to have you sending furious e-mails to the Japanese Embassy on your way out of the theater. That's definitely true, but the effectiveness of The Cove also comes from its explosive cinematic craft, its surprising good humor and its pure excitement.

A sweeping and magnificent work of cinematic craft, by far the best film of Bigelow's career.

Jane Eyre is a passionate, impossible love story, one of the most romantic ever told. But it's also a cold, wild story about destruction, madness and loss, and this movie captures its divided spirit like none before.

Fiennes' crackerjack Coriolanus stays true to the clever, almost mean-spirited twists and turns of the story, and preserves the authentic flavor and texture of the language.

The most disturbing and effective thriller I've seen in many moons. Rarely, indeed almost never, is such high-wattage brainpower coupled with pitch-perfect acting and an exquisite, unfakable sense of cinema.

An Education captures the very limited possibilities for female liberation in early-'60s London -- with massive social change on the distant horizon, but not here yet -- in exquisite detail.

The Equalizer is gripping, mysterious and even sometimes moving, but it’s never pleasant, still less fun. If you decide to go, don’t claim you weren’t warned. If you skip it, you’re missing one of the year’s signal works of superior Hollywood craftsmanship.

An extraordinary and original creation. It belongs alongside "Amores Perros" and "Memento" on a shortlist of 2001's most exciting revelations.

It’s so assured and accomplished, so rigorous on both a human and technical level, and so clearly driven by love for this harsh landscape and its hardened people, that I was entirely swept away by its characters and their story.

Inherent Vice is like that; you’ll have to enjoy it for the pileup of exquisite images and hilarious episodes, and let go of the need to hold the whole thing in your head, or you won’t enjoy it at all.

In its own quiet way, it’s a world of marvels.

It's first and foremost a visual and sonic symphony, and a Dante-esque journey through a New York nightworld where words are mostly useless or worse.

But the greatness of Chinatown, unappreciated by my adolescent self, lies not in its cynical view of the California dream (that's too easy) but in its fatalistic, even tragic conception of America and indeed of human nature.

This telling of the tale possesses enormous cinematic energy and a killer supporting cast full of hilarious delights.

Under the guise of being nothing more than a quasi-documentary about two comedians cutting up and scarfing gourmet cuisine, The Trip may be the wryest and most affecting of all the recent movies about middle-aged male angst.

He (Vinterberg) has accomplished something that is both extremely simple and extremely difficult: This is a gorgeous literary adaptation true to its period and its source material in almost every respect, largely shot in the “Hardy country” along the south coast of England. It’s also a film that feels charged with life and hunger and romantic-erotic energy.

This is a tragicomic fable about an all-too-real social predicament rather a wish-fulfillment fantasy, and the tragic result may be that hardly anyone notices how good it is, or the sickest, weirdest, most triumphant performance of Wiig’s career.

A strange and gorgeous and haunting film that brings the indie aesthetic of the mid-1980s into a context that feels both timeless and highly contemporary.

Leviathan, the fourth feature from Russian director Andrei Zvyagintsev, may be the one true masterpiece of global cinema released in 2014.

Like the very greatest artists in all media -- here I go with the meaningless superlatives again -- Renoir was able to transcend his own perspective, his own prejudices, and glimpse something of the terror and wonder of human life, the pain of misapplied or rejected love, for rich as for poor.

The grandest and most vigorous movie he's (Frears) made in at least a decade. Like Okwe himself, it rises above its limitations, and it's just a little bit bigger than the landscape around it.

It’s a lot easier to convey the broad-brush satirical flourishes of While We’re Young than to explain the subtler and sometimes darker threads of meaning that run through it.

Underneath the laff-riot and the Hollywood satire, Hail, Caesar! is a curiously delicate film built on profound affection for American movies and the illusions they build, and loaded with in-jokes the mainstream audience will grasp incompletely or not at all.

It’s a brilliant, slow-burning American revenge thriller that hardly puts a foot wrong, a work of startling violence and profound conscience that announces the arrival of an exciting young director.

Requiem, the new film from German director Hans-Christian Schmid, is absolutely astonishing. See it if you possibly can.

With all his artifice, his prodigious narrative risks and seemingly undisciplined mélange of styles and tones, Desplechin has made a film that feels more like real life than anything I've seen in years, from any source. It's a masterpiece.

This High-Rise is a scathing, intoxicating visual and auditory experience, the most truthful and most powerful Ballard adaptation we’ve ever seen, or are likely to.

Manufactured Landscapes may tell you more about how the 21st century world actually works than you really want to know, but it's a heartbreaking, beautiful, awful and awesome film.

A tightly constructed drama that will keep you on the edge of your seat.

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.

A stereotype-shattering movie that's full of them, and one that may permanently change the way you think about violent crime in America.

A movie for hardcore film geeks and regular folk alike, a stunning, and stunningly improbable, fusion of postmodern pastiche and old-school Hollywood melodrama. It's both a marvelous technical accomplishment and a tragic love story that sweeps you off your feet.

One of the most extraordinary accomplishments in recent American nonfiction filmmaking. It hits hard as to facts, and opens its eyes to inexpressible mysteries. It strikes a clear moral and philosophical stance, and then -- as part of that philosophical stance, actually -- reveals its villain as a tragic and sympathetic figure.

Son of Saul is a work of superlative filmmaking craft and moral intensity.

One of the greatest of all Holocaust films.

Instead of sticking with the familiar, Scorsese has followed his impulses into something that feels entirely new but is still distinctively his. He has made a potential holiday classic, an exciting, comic and sentimental melodrama that will satisfy children and adults alike and reward repeat viewings for many years to come.

It's terrific! Shot by the brilliant cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle ("Dogville," "28 Days Later," etc.) and anchored by amazing performances from identical (but not conjoined) twins Harry and Luke Treadaway, Brothers of the Head is not a freak show, or a knockoff "Rocky Horror" camp celebration. It's a work of powerful atmosphere and significant mystery. Plus, it rocks.

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.

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.

A work of loopy, original comic genius.

12 Years a Slave offers no false Hollywood catharsis along with its muted happy ending, because we’re not free from the curse of slavery yet. Looking at it, as it really was, is a start.

The latest riveting, heartbreaking chapter to one of the supreme creations of documentary filmmaking, the "7 Up" series.

A masterful and often deeply moving portrait of a volatile American genius, a portrait that goes far beyond one man, one family and one rain-sodden small town. It depicts the society that nurtured and fed that genius, and that made his unlikely creative explosion possible, as being the same environment that poisoned him — and suggests that the rise and fall were inextricably connected.

If possible, Roberts' movie-within-a-movie is even more amazing than it sounds. She captures a tale of courage, heroism and tragedy more thrilling than any Hollywood spectacle.

Film scholars and queer-theory types will long argue over the intricacies of Whale's Bride as a study of artistic creation and an acidic fable of homoerotic love, but for fans it's simply the most beautiful horror film ever made.

Bronson owes a little or a lot to Kubrick's "Clockwork Orange," but if that's a crime I wish more people would commit it.

A brilliant and gruesome work of cinematic invention as well as a passionate and painful human love story.

My first thought was: It's a temple, a church, a cathedral -- maybe the first one ever built -- and the better-known ones in Rome and Jerusalem and Istanbul are just later versions of the same thing.

Visually spectacular, with wide-screen cinematography from Nobuyasu Kita, impressive, full-scale sets and special effects and exhausting, immersive action scenes, 13 Assassins is pretty nearly the samurai classic it sets out to become.

A terrific comic-book movie, the most completely satisfying and unsettling one I've ever seen.

It's a tremendously absorbing blend of history, journalism and drama. As soon as it was over, I wanted to watch it again.

Something close to a contemporary masterwork, and maybe the best foreign-language film of the year, right at the tail end.

Elegant but never overstated, sinister but never coldhearted, this is a note-perfect masterwork on a modest, human scale.

Offers an exquisite tour of the twilight zone between high school and the so-called real world, as well as between bohemian subculture and the even stranger culture of America at large.

It's a classic and even charming yarn of vanity, hubris and redemption, played out against the bizarre, intense alternate universe of '70s English soccer.

There’s so much that is brilliant and unexpected and often downright thrilling about Mommy, the fifth feature (a fact amazing in itself) from 25-year-old Quebec enfant terrible Xavier Dolan.

Forget the inflated Trumpian moral dilemmas of "Superman" and "Captain America." The summer’s most powerful and most disturbing thriller has arrived, in the form of an intensely atmospheric Korean movie called The Wailing.

One of the greatest films of recent years.