Yet a nigh-miraculous blend of high spirits, poignancy, gentle satire, and unpretentious insight into the nature of human aspiration make this one of the most impressive films you're likely to see this year.

A concept executed with bravura style, intelligent curiosity, and playful wit.

The all-out Love Lies Bleeding is a love story that won’t work for everyone. However, for those who can revel in the blood-soaked, complicated, sapphic delights that make up the backbone of the film, the saga of Lou and Jackie will be one for the ages.

Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher’s fourth narrative feature – a soft kiss of magical realism here, a Keystone Cops caper there – is dreamily disorienting.

To this day one of the most riveting, horrific, and empathetically turbocharged pieces of motion picture history ever recorded, Eisenstein's mind-bogglingly complex composition – utilizing a seeming cast of thousands of extras in addition to the unnamed, iconic main figures – is a gory ballet of marching Cossacks, frantic Odessites, trampled innocence, and doomed dissent.

Hooper's vision is horrid yet engrossing... But the worst part about this vision is that despite its sensational aspects, it never seems too far from what could be the truth.

A one-of-a-kind essay centered on art forgery and hoaxes that is built from spare parts, questionable coverage, obvious overdubbing, and outright bluff, 'F for Fake' is a masterwork most often hailed for its hijacking of documentary form to tease cinema's capacity for making truth out of bullshit

A delightful little wormhole that takes us on a journey to another dimension of consciousness.

It's huge and bewildering and it hurts to watch, but it hurts so good it's gorgeous.

Nabokov’s satire is sensationally cast, with Winters and Sellers delivering some of their best work ever.

Kubrick’s gladiator film is the pinnacle of sword-and-sandal epics, and who isn’t a sucker for stories about rebellious slaves? This is the kind of movie the Paramount’s screen was made for.

Beautifully made, courageously edited, and swift-moving, this challenging, provocative film is a work that is both humanist and revolutionary.

In this magnificent, profoundly tragic film, Nolte and Coburn each turn in career-best performances as a father and son who embody the ancient, seemingly ineradicable male pathology of violence, retribution, and the slow death of the soul.

Edwards' crowning achievement. It is a wickedly funny, impeccably cast, ingeniously subversive satire of the Hollywood film industry.

What makes Nanau’s film utterly compelling is the unfettered access he had to both the Sports Gazette journalists and to Minister of Health Voiculescu. There are no interviews or talking heads here: Everything unfolds as it is happening.

The film is so soaring, sometimes literally, I hardly missed the feeling of hard ground underfoot.

Peckinpah's grasp, for once, matches his reach and in this Western story he achieves a mythological tone for his moral fable.

At a time when so many people are struggling to find something of value in their lives, when people are fleeing jobs, cities, futures they thought they wanted, Cage has crafted a quiet soliloquy about grasping on to something that has meaning. In some ways, this is one of his most emotionally brutal films.

The film is an intensely personal record, yet also a universal contemplation. Faces Places leaves the viewer with a sense of the glories of images and communication – sometimes random, sometimes specific, always continual and cumulative.

So definitive in so many ways, Bonnie and Clyde has become a 20th-century touchstone.

It’s an absolutely crazed fever dream of a film, and like a febrile infant it begins with a few odd notes and barely heard, often off-camera sounds, and then proceeds to build those seemingly minor instances of weird until it crescendos into an ear-piercing, panic-inducing visual and aural shriek.

Virtually flawless performances and directorial execution render The Fighter one of the most thrilling movies of 2010.

Director Keith Maitland’s film is one of the finest documentaries ever made, and it’s also one of the most unusual.

This is the way this ground-breaking monument was meant to be seen: in mind-boggling 70mm.

What sets Phantom Thread apart is that it isn’t an apologia, or an exorcism. It’s a Valentine. The heart, after all, is our strongest muscle.

This essential Billy Wilder film smoothly combines trenchant social observation with hilarious comedy.

Kurosawa's international breakthrough is a masterstroke in unreliable narration.

Do we ever get the whole truth? Only this: The past is never the past. In Farhadi’s wounding worldview, the past is the present and, most certainly, the future, too.

A meditation on survival, The Searchers is about the loss of faith and the death of heroes.

It was written by military-horror storyteller David Rabe (Sticks and Bones, Streamers), and features outstanding performances by this ensemble ñ especially Fox and Penn.

For in relating the true story of Conlon's wrongful conviction and 15-year imprisonment, Sheridan has used the tools of the filmmaker to evoke a visceral echo of Conlon's waking nightmare.

Unlike other filmmakers in the autumn or winter of their careers, Eastwood doesn't seem content to rest on his laurels and give his audiences the tried and the true. For that reason, among many others, he and Million Dollar Baby are true champions.

Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets is as real as it gets, a snapshot stolen from the very year everything turned to sh-t. It’s a masterpiece.

Boasts a smart screenplay by Robert Benton and David and Leslie Newman, striking cinematography by Geoffrey Unsworth (especially in the Smallville sequence), bright comic turns by Margot Kidder and Gene Hackman, and of course, that winning performance by Christopher Reeve in the title role. Believe a man can fly? You bet!

The camera tracks, cranes, and dollies through the dance space, anticipating with the boldness of the greatest director working at MGM in 1951, that the New Wave is, indeed, not so very far away. Finally, like all of Minnelli's collaborations with Lerner (Brigadoon, Gigi, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever), An American in Paris is a paradox - a musical that embraces solitude and romantic despair. It is a resplendent motion picture.

Given its nonlinear structure, Your Name requires your trust, but once you place your faith in screenwriter/director Shinkai’s expert hands, the reward will come. (Not surprisingly, the film is the fourth-highest-grossing film in Japan’s history.)

It is not a failed love story, but it is a lost love story, as its characters fall victim to the realities of time and circumstance and are left wondering what may have been if either of those things had been different.

Funny, vibrant, insightful, tragic, achingly timely, and yet with an underlying message about empathy that is timeless, Blindspotting may be the summer's most essential movie.

Not entirely without some laughable or dated scenes, Halloween remains an original that continues to inspire a genre and probe middle America's fears about what's really lurking in the laundry room after midnight.

Across the Spider-Verse isn't just mind-bending spectacle – although it definitely dazzles in every frame. It's mind-bending spectacle in service of a thrilling story about a teenager facing the horrifying possibility that he can't fix everything.

As for words? The script gives Stuhlbarg – a character actor who elevates everything he’s in – the monologue of a lifetime, which he delivers sotto voce, all kindness. And that is perhaps the prevailing note of Call Me by Your Name – of kindness, of tenderness.

Disturbing and grim in its portraits, Wise Blood is nevertheless marvelous storytelling and its performances are virtually divine.

When you see a great Peckinpah film like his second feature, Ride the High Country (1962), you feel that the director has found a way to tell a story that lays his own soul across the screen. This movie celebrates a hero of self-control. But each frame is energized with a sense of what that self-control has cost the man in love, friendship, and glory.

Although made in 1969, this French masterpiece is receiving its first stateside release with a new print struck for the occasion.

“Subtle” is the watchword for this kind of arthouse film. That can be a backhanded compliment, a buyer-beware to attention-deficit audiences, but Haigh is really quite plain with his preoccupations: the constant tick-tock of time, and the illusion that in marriage two are melded into one.

Hamaguchi has a beautiful outlook on mistakes and the complex emotions that make up humanity, and his tenderness toward each character he brings to life makes him one of the best storytellers working today.

In the end, The Fog of War offers a couple of hours of brilliant clarity amid the noise and chaos.

The film's sense of family values will make your head hurt and the chase scenes will set your noggin spinning.

The performances are riveting and the visuals are stunning. The boxing sequences are brutally realistic - there are no crappy Rocky theatrics here - and the humanity oozes out of every scene.

An amazing work, a film that seems to gurgle up from the American heartland, resonant and fully formed, ripe with possibilities.

It's paved with delightfully irregular and unanticipated bits of business that stimulate the viewer to stay fully alert, while renewing our faith in the sheer joy of watching movies.

Kidman inhabits the lead character of Suzanne Stone (yes, Suzanne Stone) with such sly and delicious zest that we can only wonder why this aspect of her acting has been buried under blonde dramatic ambitions.

"Write hard. Aim low," Mank is told. Instead, Fincher filmed low, aimed for the brain, and hit a deadly shot.

A smart, creepy, violent, funny, and modern vampire movie that benefits from some wonderful performances, a stunning visual texture, and music by Tangerine Dream.

A chilling classic, the movie is a scabrous satire about human deviance, brutality, and social conditioning that has remained a visible part of the ongoing public debate about violence and the movies.

The Northman lives and breathes like the old epics; not Old Hollywood's cartoonish depictions of warriors with horned helmets, but the ancient tales to which he pays deep respect.

Hepburn brings Truman Capote's Holly Golightly to vivid life. [Review of re-release]

Burnham’s sociological precision as a screenwriter and director, however, would likely not feel as genuine if not for Fisher in the pivotal role of Kayla. She doesn’t act the part as much as she breathes it. It may be the most honest performance you’ll see in a movie this year.

As good as the story and direction are, though, the true strength of The Killing lies in the characters and characterizations.

Director James Cameron and producer Gale Anne Hurd (both of whom co-wrote the script) demonstrate their storytelling virtuosity.

Certainly one of the very best films in each of Donen and Hepburn's careers, this devastatingly lovely remnant of Hollywood's anything-goes Sixties (with a script by Frederic Raphael) tells the story of a marriage by showing a couple over the course of successive trips to the south of France.

Before Midnight surpasses the two previous films in this trilogy in terms of its intelligence, narrative design, and vivacity. It’s a grand accomplishment, and I feel greedy about wanting to see this film series continue.

It's a short, sharp, shock to the cinematic system that's virtually impossible to dislike, and if you don't leave the theatre grinning your face off, then buddy, movies just aren't for you.

Barry Sonnenfeld's stunning cinematography and the sharply etched characterizations make this film one for the ages.

With elements of psychological terror, spiritual warfare, and even a dash of repressed sexual urges, Saint Maud is the kind of complicated, slippery horror that fans will talk about for years to come. This is the horror film most A24 titles wish they could be.

Ghost World resists convenient closures and summaries and some may take issue with its open-endedness. But anything else would have been phony, and Enid would never have stood for it.

Gilliam keeps the audience guessing, and in doing so creates a startlingly effective rumination on the nature of sanity and madness cloaked in the shroud of a sci-fi thriller.

Minnelli's direction has seldom attained such a perfect fusion of form and content. The Band Wagon is quite simply a masterpiece.

It's been 40 years since James Dean essayed his quintessential role in as a troubled American teen and, along with co-stars Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo, established an iconography of adolescence whose potency extends into the present.

Garland’s script is not just a warning about the ease in which an armed society slips into violence, but a love letter to journalism.

Sometimes, the movie argues, it’s the things we don’t say that prove how much we care. Billi’s path to acceptance of this makes The Farewell one of the most heartfelt homecoming films in years.

Nic Roeg here offers one of the most disconcerting portraits of otherworldliness ever seen on the screen.

This is a movie to love, that touches you in places you never suspected, that shows you that the road less traveled is the road to your dreams.

A Prophet is the kind of film that makes you remember why going to the movies can be a thrilling experience.

As masterful as the character it portrays, TÁR is a textured, finely calibrated, stunningly composed, and thoroughly contemporary study. Its chords reverberate long after the music fades.

Scintillating black comedy of manners from Yorgos Lanthimos, it latches its fangs in deep.

Divorce severs this marriage like the dull blade of a knife cutting through the tiers of a wedding cake.

This 1964 film, featuring an enduring Lerner and Loewe score, is a classic.

There Will Be Blood is not a movie that disappears quietly.

Near-perfect in every way, The Hours is a compelling meditation on making the most of what we're given in life. For some, it may be too cerebral a film experience, but for those who blissfully fall into its finely tuned modulations, The Hours is timeless.

A wildly inventive, unrelenting thrill that amazes us with its visual and intellectual treats and dazzles us with its ongoing ingenuity.

Anchoring all the wild plot machinations and shocking, garish violence is Wagner Moura’s focused and forceful lead performance.

While all of the performances in this movie are superb, Harris’ turn here is hands-down award-worthy.

By the end of the movie, it’s no longer possible to know anything with certainty -– so convoluted, contradictory, pathological, and long ago have the events become. It’s a movie that will have you talking and thinking for hours.

The film courses with vitality -- and makes you glad to be alive. Kieslowski's deft touch gives Red its real magic; in the end, the subtle nuances are what stay with you.

These creatures of the underworld are the fervid fabrications of del Toro's imagination: More than once they will catch you by surprise and make you gasp.

Fonda and Hopper’s now-classic film hit the old guard with the force of a rifle shot to the head. [Review of re-release]

In Carol, all the elements dovetail perfectly to create a movie that is as irresistible as its title character.

Angela Lansbury's frighteningly in-check performance is alone worth the trip.

But in the genre, as both a movie and a conscious addition to the ongoing celluloid Western mythology, the film is a masterpiece, a stunning and awe-inspiring statement.

One of the most exciting movies of this, or any other, year. It's smart, funny, and wonderfully crafted and performed.

Back to the Future entertainingly deals with the child's eternal question: If my parents had never met, where would that leave me?

Brutal yet elegant, 12 Years a Slave is a beautifully rendered punch to the gut about the most shameful chapter in American history.

Vertigo stands as one of the thrill master's most psychologically dense and twisted works in which obsession, commitment, and dual identities all merge to create a voluptuous tale of thwarted love. [Restored version]

Funny and touching, Frances Ha may very well be the most eloquent take yet on a generation in flux – a cinematic talk-back to so many Atlantic articles, minus the scolding and the statistics, and uncharacteristically (for Baumbach) uncynical.

With Captain Phillips we get a viable thriller whose conclusion is already known, and a character who reacts to circumstances rather than a personal, heroic code. And now, it’s a story preserved in brine.

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

The movie occasionally continues on too long with certain scenes and may strain the sensibilities of anybody not caught up in its delirious visuals and melodrama, but The Saddest Music in the World nevertheless beckons with a seductive and unforgettable melody.