Andrew O'Hehir

The most exciting action flick of the year, by a huge margin.

Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell is two or maybe three dangerous kinds of movies all at the same time, and handled so brilliantly that the result is a transformative, unforgettable work of art.

As with the Antonioni film that Farhadi has so ingeniously turned to his purposes, you shouldn’t go see About Elly hoping for a Hitchcock-style thriller that will answer all your narrative questions. But if “L’Avventura” is a deliberately frustrating portrait of European postwar anomie and a study in abstract, black-and-white composition, About Elly is more dynamic and more realistic.

You need to give Love Is Strange your eyes and ears and attention, let it work its effects on you gradually, like the lovely Chopin piano music that forms the spine of its soundtrack.

A fascinating, mature, beautifully crafted work of art, from a director who continues to surprise us. Sofia Coppola has absorbed the Italian avant-garde more completely than her father ever did, and has made a film about celebrity in the vein of Antonioni and Bertolucci, a film about Hollywood in which she turns her back on it, possibly forever.

Bruno Dumont's Hadewijch is one of two small-release art films this season that deliver nuanced and fascinating portraits of faith.

Unmistaken Child stands above most others in offering us an intimate look at Tibetan Buddhism in action, with no external commentary or narration.

One of the finest cops-and-robbers thrillers of recent years.

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.

Announces the arrival of a director radically out of step with the dominant conventions of American moviemaking, one who blends a social-realist vision and a passion for cinematic poetry.

In Order of Disappearance possesses both a striking soulfulness and a sense of beauty. (Much of the credit goes to cinematographer Philip Øgaard, whose images are memorable but never showy.)

The cut-rate colossus didn't just ride the tide that sucked industrial jobs out of our towns and cities and spat out low-wage service-sector jobs in the sprawling exurbs -- it helped create it, and at the very least drastically accelerated it.

What emerges is an astonishing debut, unlike anything else you'll see this year.

This is one of Anderson’s funniest and most fanciful movies, but perversely enough it may also be his most serious, most tragic and most shadowed by history, with the frothy Ernst Lubitsch-style comedy shot through with an overwhelming sense of loss.

There’s a terrible wonder in this rare glimpse inside a country that has tried to empty itself of all thought, all commerce and all civil society — of pretty much everything except an especially lame version of hero worship and despotism.

It's the most original picture by an American director I've seen this year, and also the most delightful.

It's also possible, I suppose, that a movie as deranged and grotesque and spectacular as Álex de la Iglesia's near-masterpiece The Last Circus, an overcooked allegory that's been dialed to 11 in all directions, simply doesn't appeal to you. But if you like your baroque sex and violence with a side dish of heavy-duty symbolism, and if the idea of an unholy collaboration between, say, Guillermo del Toro, Federico Fellini and William Castle appeals to you, then put The Last Circus on your must-see list right now.

If this isn’t quite a great movie, it should be an immensely gratifying one for sci-fi fans tired of the conceptual overkill and general dumbness of “Prometheus” or “Star Trek Into Darkness.”

I was thrilled and transported by it. It's a two-hour movie, and I'm only sorry it isn't two or three times as long.

A big movie for the ages, full to the brim with sympathy, imagination and sheer visual delight.

This story about Joyce McKinney, a one-time beauty queen who found herself not once but twice at the center of outrageous, tabloid-friendly news stories, is another of Morris' alternately hilarious and disturbing inquiries into the slippery nature of truth.

A sad, sweet, funny and ultimately unforgettable love story about a man and a woman and a father and son, and also ranks among the most affectionate and sensitive portraits of homosexuality ever crafted by a straight person.

A highly enjoyable failure, a quandary that can't resolve itself.

Mixing sweetness, darkness, violence and delirious gags, this 1928 must-see showcases film's greatest comic.

For the right kind of film buff, it's absolutely one of the most enjoyable pictures of the year - and if you've never heard of the guy before, I can't imagine a better place to start.

I found this dark odyssey through an amoral dream Brooklyn curiously invigorating; it’s a masterful construction that held me rapt from first shot to last, that builds intense electrical energy and then releases it.

As a pure head-trip visual and auditory experience it feels like one of the biggest discoveries, and biggest surprises, of 2014.

This delicious little period piece from Spanish writer-director Pablo Berger is like one of those really expensive chocolates, where you start out expecting a brief sugar buzz and end up surprised by the sophistication and delicacy of the flavor.