Marc Savlov

A romance of fantastique proportions, a cautionary tale that revels in throwing caution to the wind, and a de facto monster movie with loose but loving ties to director Jack Arnold’s classic "Creature From the Black Lagoon" and Cocteau’s "Beauty and the Beast," del Toro’s latest is a masterpiece of compassion and insight into the (in)human condition and the transformative power of love.

Filled with brilliant, stand-out performances.

The Duke of Burgundy doubles down on the genre conventions and ends up being all the better for it. That’s thanks in large part to the score by the UK group Cat’s Eye, the two flawless lead performances, and cinematographer Nicholas D. Knowland’s keen eye for creating a more-than-acceptable simulacrum of Franco and Rolin’s hallucinatory, dreamlike vibes.

Gorgeously lensed and delightfully structured, however, this is, in a word, wonderful.

The Kids are All Right, a grin-cracking great portrait of a modern American family in minor and then major crises.

A far cry from his earlier films sex, lies, and videotape and Kafka, Soderbergh skillfully pulls off what could have ended up as a sappy glob of treacly nostalgia. Instead, the director populates his young hero's chaotic world with genuinely disturbing people, images, and events.

All three leads give subtly wrenching performances that wouldn’t have been out of place in Ingmar Bergman’s oeuvre.

It's something of a Tiananmen Square face-off, minus the overt politics, which makes it all the more spellbinding.

While the evil that men do to one another in this film may well be rooted in the Cain-like enabling of original sin from one doomed brother to another, the final familial tragedy feels exactly like classic Lumet.

Like the culturally complex and often overwhelming island nation itself, Black Mother is a haunting and singular experience unlike any other.

It's a thrilling, powerful movie, and one that certain people in certain quarters may have at one time called dangerous. Some of them may yet still.

Green, who looks like a chinless, hollow-eyed pederast at the best of times, is simply out of his league here, and the fact that the film drags interminably when it's actually a very average 90 minutes long betrays its essential emptiness.

There are few wins and more than enough sorrow to go around here.

Ponyo is another conceptually and thrilingly original masterstroke from an animator who long ago left Walt Disney in the dust.

Filmmaker Steve James is apparently incapable of making an uninteresting documentary, even when his subject matter might presumably be thoroughly played out.

This knuckle-whitening depiction of a man of God toppling into his own spiritual abyss is one of Schrader’s finest and most excoriating films to date.

It's a jaw-droppingly good performance from this pint-sized, first-time actor.

Definitely not for the squeamish, Wake in Fright is calibrated for maximum psychic impact. Its madness is viral and disconcerting. Truly, you're going to want a stiff drink and a hot shower, or a noose, after visiting the Yabba.

Szpilman takes to performing sonatas in thin air, eyes closed, those jittery fingers stroking nothing but air. It's a wonderful moment in a wonderful, ghastly film, and one of the most moving arguments for the redemptive powers of art ever made.

The gut-wrenching Amy is, in the end, as much an indictment of our celebrity-obsessed (global) pop culture as it is of the perils of rampant success arriving unexpectedly fast, tires squealing and driving a hearse.

Doesn't just raise the bar on sci-fi and action films, it rips that sucker off and sends it spiraling into the sun.

This is a dream cast for both Scorsese and the viewer, and everyone is working at the peak of their craft. Nicholson's flawless performance as the increasingly unhinged crime boss is a marvel of manic, paranoid ruination.

You miss out on this and you miss out on something entirely, amazingly original and jaw-droppingly entertaining. C’est magnifique!

Half Nelson, with its bleakly hopeful view of humanity both damned and redeemed – simultaneously – is uncomfortably, almost exactly right.

It's all a little too polished, a little too smug to be ranked up there as one of the great journalism films.

The only thing here that feels truly, utterly alive is Ledger's maniacal, muttery Joker. The last laugh is his and his alone. It's enough to make you cry.

While there’s hardly a plot to speak of, that’s never hobbled Linklater before and is indeed the director’s keenest, cleverest trick: the ability to make something sweet, honest, and true out of the ephemeral marginalia of youth minus the rose-tinted bullshit.

Guaranteed to inspire many more belly laughs than it does actual shivers. Boo, scary? I think not.