Affleck's greatest talent, however, may lie in his casting instincts: In addition to the above-mentioned turns by Arkin and Goodman, stand-out performances are also delivered by Bryan Cranston as Mendez's boss and Victor Garber as the morally heroic Canadian ambassador to Iran.

Summer Hours is a lovely rumination on the meaning of things, but one that remains rooted in its human subjects rather than the inanimate objects that are more easily graspable.

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.

Moments of almost unbearable beauty.

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

Williams' shape-shifting, gag-spouting, celebrity-impersonating Genie is truly a hurricane in a bottle. His manic energy and hip humor are so exhilarating that the rest of the movie risks grinding to a halt whenever he's not onscreen.

Sentimental Value lacks the giddy bracinginess of The Worst Person in the World; it’s a more measured, more meditative thing. It is also a return to form, of a sort.

Somewhere between the pop jouissance of Guy Ritchie and the social realism of Ken Loach, this ballsy drama freeze-frames bleak Thatcherite Yorkshire and exposes its racist underbelly.

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.

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

From its brilliant and sublime opening sequence to its self-reflexive ending, The Player distills everything that's wrong with the American film industry with the precision of someone who's been there.

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.

The film's messages of accepting others and following your dreams are well-worn tropes to be sure, but the pace and the style of E&C, not to mention it's wonderful attention to detail, lift the film from being merely sweet to being something special.

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 that feeling of seeing something unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. It’s the experience of witnessing the fresh, the new. And if you love movies, there’s nothing like it.

At long, long last: the real thing.

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

It’s thrilling.

Admirers of Hansen-Løve’s previous film, her English-language debut Bergman Island, may be surprised at how straightforward One Fine Morning is, how resistant it is to delivering a capital-letter Cinematic Moment.

This movie achieves a rare grace: it tells a story that could only exist in the form of a movie (or, perhaps, as a piece of poetry). The story is told not so much in customary narrative structures, but in glimpses, hints, and intimations. It has a way of taking the solid and making it chimerical.

The balloon will resurface throughout, but far more interesting, and substantial, is the slow reveal of Simon's domestic situation.

There’s real magic in every paired-off scene where two characters confront each other – creating wonderful clashes of physical human contact that challenge the disassociation insisted on by the system they’re all being run through.

A carefully constructed thriller whose clever dialogue keeps pace with its fascinating lead actress.

These characters have become so dear; I longed for something more climactic, more cathartic for them. Still, for the time we have with them, they make terrific company.

Roeg's points about the contrasts between noble savages and civilized effetes don't stand up terribly well over time.

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

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.

The pictures are gorgeous, and the words, well, if you listen hard enough, the words say exactly what one needs to hear: that is, to wake up and live.

Lowery’s version works because, like Brian Helgeland and Curtis Hanson’s rewriting of L.A. Confidential, it captures the nature and meaning of the story rather than getting caught up in individual events or plot beats.

Greengrass and co. may have made one of the best action movies in recent memory.

Part 2 is something else altogether. Such digital effects as the marauding giants that squash baby wizards like bugs or the inky terror that is the Death Eaters – acolytes to the mad, bad wizard Voldemort (Fiennes) – are magnificent and experienced in one long, clutched breath. But what's missing is what has been the chief pleasure of the series: the chemistry between its young leads.

In the end, Tea With the Dames peters out as a conversation, given there’s no real beginning, middle or end to the film. It’s a privilege, however, to have been given a tableside seat to listen to this foursome reminisce and ruminate for an hour and a half, with laughter punctuating the conversation every few minutes.

Take Shelter is a deeply unsettling movie. Writer/director Jeff Nichols (an Austin resident and director of the award-winning 2007 feature "Shotgun Stories") doles out information as strategically as a government official.

Rana’s voice comes roaring back in the film’s held-breath third act, in which these amateur actors return to their old apartment to enact a drama with life-or-death stakes. This final 30 minutes are the film’s pièce de résistance.

Writer/director Lonergan succeeds at capturing eloquently the disappointments of growing up and growing old. But he isn't always successful at reining in the schmaltz.

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.

Not only does this genre exercise deliver the little jolts and inside laughs that keep modern horror fans pleased, Get Out is also one of the smartest, funniest, and most socially astute films to come around in a while.

Spielberg suppresses his worst tendencies in the uncharted territory of his first movie musical. His solid direction respectfully doesn’t oversentimentalize the material.

To extend the boxing analogy, poker’s Raging Bull is the 1974 Robert Altman masterpiece, California Split.

In a genre dominated by computer-generated compositions and design, its old-school simplicity is sweetly anachronistic, while its hand-drawn elegance is often something to behold.

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.

In The Edge of Heaven, a more tempered Akin seems content to allow the incidental lives of incidental people merging incidentally to pass quietly and at their own paces. Which indicates a much-needed maturation of the "Babel/Crash" formula but also fails to rattle your bones the way those movies did. Pick your poison, I suppose.

Jenkins' superlative work proves her first film was no fluke; let's hope it doesn't take another nine years to hear from her again.

But for all our Tony Montanas and Pablo Escobars, both imagined and real, I guarantee you have never seen a drug-trafficking movie like Birds of Passage.

A distinctive story with universal appeal.

The scoped camerawork is a shrewd tactic; only occasionally does its flat, proscenium effect make the action feel overly staged.

It’s a slow burn of a film, one that creeps through the consciousness. But it is not without levity.

What truly binds this film is the love story that lies at the heart of it. It’s a love battered by fate and bad luck, quite the opposite of such forces as planned redesigns of China’s social and geographic landscapes.

Never devolves into the type of “man's man” adventure story that has become so fashionable again over the last couple of years, but instead trusts the power of its unembellished images and words to tell its tale.

The Rider is a stunning piece of fiction played close to the bone.

Effortlessly charming and more than a little generous with its asides, The Delinquents is a film that lays out surprises and delights like a lavish feast – although it’s no surprise for those who’ve been paying attention.

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.

It’s endlessly arguable and open for debate. At the very least, we can all agree that Banksy has found a new wall on which to plaster his art – that of the silver screen.

Thornton, who wrote, directed, and stars in Sling Blade, has created an unforgettable character and situation, a film that's sure to become an American classic.

Titled Girlhood for its American release in an obvious ploy to be viewed as a counterpart to last year’s widely hailed Boyhood, this film is better described by its original French title Bande de Filles, which translates as Girl Gang.

This is Iranian cinema at its most accessible: a bit slow even in its 92 minutes, with more environment than story, but deeply immersive and thought-provoking, and quite often funny.

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]

Like most of Apatow's work, Knocked Up walks a perilous line between sarcasm and sentimentality, and though it's extremely funny in bursts, the movie flirts once too often with schmaltz before toppling into melodrama in its third act. The fault lies as much with Apatow's casting as his writing.

An emotional triumph.

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.

It was the greatest rock & roll party you never heard of.

Proof that movies don’t always have to be busy to entertain and enrich, this tale of life at a bucolic Korean monastery is at once profound and simple.

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

One wishes for a chewier whodunit – there just aren't enough clues for the viewer to work with – and the reveal of the mole is perversely anticlimactic. But maybe that's just stickling. We always knew Smiley'd get his man.

The key to a great literary adaptation is not to slavishly replicate but to find a way to change everything for the new medium except the heart. The Wild Robot, the 49th animated feature from DreamWorks Animation, doesn’t just put a digital coating on that heart, but celebrates every vibrant beat.

Mesa Soto initially mines wry humor from Oscar’s sad-sackness; he and editor Ricardo Saravia are especially good at scene transitions that land like a punchline, and the marvelous Rios – small of stature and existentially slumped – cuts a comical figure. But the film, which won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at Cannes last year, subtly evolves (more successfully than Oscar, it turns out) to find just as much to scorn in the poetry center elites, and to nudge the viewer toward a more compassionate approach to its luckless sorta-hero.

Maybe it wouldn’t be so confusing if what passed as the film’s “resolution” involved something more than the antics of bratty anarchy. It’s impossible to support the girls on such shaky ground.

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

A gripping presentation of a little-known true story and its historical lessons.

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

As sad and poignant and potentially hopeful as it is amusing. The movie is our story as much as it is Schmidt's, no matter if it's viewed as a self-reflection or cautionary tale

A terrific piece of work.

Trần’s script (very loosely adapted from Marcel Rouff’s 1924 novel La vie et la passion de Dodin-Bouffant, gourmet) isn’t simply an ode to the idea of food being the food of love. Instead, it’s an utterly charming and touching description of a tender relationship between two people in middle age.

In this sushi age of methamphetamine concert DVDs and dysfunction junction music tell-alls, Jonathan Demme dreams us back to the golden age of performance films.

This French movie uses remarkably expressive stop-motion animation to create an honesty and sense of whimsy that help offset the darkness of the intrinsic story.

Atlantis isn’t an easy film to watch, and it’s not meant to be. It’s an anti-war film without solutions, but what it clear is that Vasyanovych believes in humanity rebuilding from tragedy.

The film ostensibly is about bees and honey and how that affects these families' lives and income, but what really hits home is a broader impact of humanity (in all its messy glory), and a document of so many things: grief, loss, happiness, and joy.

A screen spectacle that beseeches its audience for adoration and mass acceptance.

Holy Motors is as individualistic a movie as you're likely to encounter – both in terms of the filmmaker's intent and the viewer's takeaway. Warmth and humor abide within its every frame but, like Carax's dreamer at the film's outset, you must find the key within yourself that unlocks the mysteries.

What writer/director Lee (himself from hill farming stock) catches is that their passion is welded in pragmatism. Homophobia, xenophobia, bigotry, and callousness all float beneath the surface here, but as quiet subtext. This is the silence of the hills, where three words are volumes.

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.

This film, the inspiration for the less successful Sorcerer, is a textbook case of how to handle suspense. It has also been called the cruelest movie ever made and it certainly earns that title by the film's end.

While Raes may not be able to replicate the experience of the show for the cinematic audience, she undoubtedly leaves them with a new perspective on the curator's calling, and the work of Vermeer himself.

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.

The film moves at a slow and deliberate pace, much like the wheels of justice. As viewers, we come to feel ensnarled in the grip of bureaucratic entanglement, much like Kornyev, fighting for justice against diminishing odds.

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.

Scott subtly weaves those stories together by having every talking head be simply a voice, unified in their belief that this weekend was vital, an affirmation that it was OK to be young and broke.

Onscreen, Lighton explores the imbalance between the two and gently leads the audience with sympathy and empathy to a perfect resolution that asks both to face their own dysfunction.

At a silkily dispatched hour and a half, Black Bag is perfectly portioned and entertaining as all get-out.

It’s only in the last quarter of the film, when Wang strays from her own family’s touchstones to explore a case of separated twins, that One Child Nation loses just a touch of its urgency.

Loud, hilarious, and enormously entertaining, 24 Hour Party People makes you want to toss current FM radio out on its pre-fab, corporate-sponsored backside. And not a moment too soon.

An unsettling feeling hums through the film, and remains well after. Less of a jolt, then; call it a sustained current.

Chatwin may be the nominal subject, but this film is really about Herzog: Not in a self-serving way but, rather, self-analyzing.

It’s not quite as brutalizing as McEwan’s brilliant source novel – it bears too much of a Great Art buff – but it ravishes nonetheless in its grand exploration of the sins of the daughter and a lifetime spent making reparations.

Even when The Tree of Life does not achieve the heights for which it aims, it soars boldly and fearlessly.

The twists and convolutions can seem overwhelming, but Park sustains this high-wire act effortlessly. It’s about trust, you see, about letting go, and doing so will reveal as sublimely satisfying a romantic mystery as you're likely to see.