Lou Lumenick

Hands-down the best movie of the year.

Mr. Holmes, derived from a novel by Mitch Cullin, isn’t quite as deep or as poignant, but amply rewards McKellen and Holmes fans willing to go with its leisurely pace.

Morris' most gripping film since "The Thin Blue Line," is the year's scariest movie.

A ho-hum male weepie/road comedy that's worth watching mostly because of a once-in-a-lifetime gathering of England's greatest working-class actors.

Well worth seeing for the terrific performances.

Gives a harrowingly accurate portrait of the indignities sometimes suffered by hospitalized patients - and the sacrifices their families make.

While there are some giggles in the film-within-the-film (also called "Road to Nowhere"), the artsy-fartsy direction and flat-as-a-pancake acting (including a cameo by Variety columnist Peter Bart as himself) invites invidious comparisons to "Mulholland Drive."

2046 is a bit overlong and not for all tastes, but fans of "In the Mood for Love" will relish this second helping, which is more emotionally substantial than the first.

A total disaster.

Gut-Bustingly funny moves are pretty rare, so hustle over to Kung Fu Hustle, actor-director Ste phen Chow's exhilaratingly hilarious and affectionate send-up of Hong Kong action flicks.

Disappointingly routine kidnapping thriller with soap-opera trimmings.

The movie equivalent of a lavish coffee-table book, a love letter to the Golden Age of Hollywood from one of its foremost students.

An exciting and extremely well acted film. Even a nearly unrecognizable Blake Lively impresses in the key role of Jem's sister and Doug's sometime girlfriend.

Has its moments, but overall the effect is uneven.

To enjoy this film, it helps to check your brain at the box office.

If there has ever been a better voice performance in an animated film than Ellen DeGeneres’ in Pixar’s wonderful sequel Finding Dory, I sure can’t think of it. Her tour de force even surpasses Robin Williams in “Aladdin.”

Happy Feet is not only the year's best animated movie, it's one of the year's best movies, period. Go.

Filmmakers Sam Green and Bill Siegel tend to shy from tough questions, allowing their subjects to wax nostalgic about bomb-throwing as yet another youthful folly of the '70s. That's tougher to swallow than some boomers' claims they didn't inhale.

Miyazaki offers a vivid, at times fantastical view of Japan between the wars, wracked by the Great Depression, a fearsome earthquake that leveled Tokyo in 1923, a tuberculosis epidemic and the rise of fascism.

So consistently silly and overwrought that it flirts with the elusive so-bad-it's-entertaining category.

Masterful acting.

Offers well-chosen selections from Aleichem's darkly humorous work.

Less Spartan than some films shot under the Dogma "vow of chastity" (there's actually a little music), but it's raw enough to complement the very real emotions on display.

Noah Baumbach’s While We’re Young amounts to the most hilarious Woody Allen movie in forever.

Sharper and far more entertaining than most political documentaries.

It’s a remarkable story, vividly and urgently told by French-Canadian director Vallée (“The Young Victoria”) from a pointed, schmaltz-free script by Craig Borten and Melissa Wallack.

Truth be told, Firth's transcendent performance in A Single Man renders that stylistic gimmick utterly unnecessary -- Firth provides all the emotional color this movie needs, and then some.

Jim Carrey mostly plays it straight as the narrator. The 3-D effects are uncanny; much of the audience ducked when sea snakes lunged at it. You can't get that on your TV set. Yet.