To this day, Dueling Banjoes still gives me the willies.

As concert films go, this is heady stuff.

Wonderful but improbable tale about a group of mercenaries sent to Mexico to rescue their employer's wife from bad man Jack Palance.

It's an extraordinary, tiny, intimate, and deeply touching story of a childhood suddenly filled with that most fragile of gifts: hope.

With original director John Carpenter's blessing, Green manages something that is both a tribute to and an evolution of the 1978 classic, with moments designed to create resonances that are not just re-enactment but part of his bigger theme of trauma-causing scars (there are also, in a nod to his days as an Austin resident, a couple of subtle visual nods to the original The Texas Chain Saw Massacre).

Danny Boyle's 127 Hours is the calm, cool, and tear-your-hair-out exciting mirror image of Tony Scott's bland and formulaic "Unstoppable."

You can take a page from Wes Craven before he went flat and keep repeating, "It's only a movie; it's only a movie; it's only a movie." But is it?

As far from "Slacker" as you could possibly get and still be using a motion-picture camera, The School of Rock is nonetheless pure Linklater, pure rock & roll, and pure fun. Gabba, gabba, hey!

LaBute's narrative structure and visual strategies are rigorously crafted, bespeaking an almost mathematical calculation that, in compellingly contradictory ways, both enhances the dramatic experience while undermining its very authenticity.

It upholds deep respect for everything that makes a rom-com great: unabashed joy.

This is a movie you feel deeply in the pit of your stomach. Sometimes, it literally hurts to watch it.

This movie is delightful – funny and dreamy and sometimes desperately sad.

Pixar's Finding Nemo may well have the best casting of any animated film of the past 30-odd years.

Somebody is nihilistic, misanthropic, and weirdly relaxing. I've never seen anything like it.

For his part, director Stephen Daldry synthesizes the predominant beats of his film work, which has vacillated between feel-good awards bait (Billy Elliot) and feel-bad awards bait (The Hours, The Reader). Feel-good/feel-bad is Together to a T. It feels wonderful.

Kempner's documentary is a streamlined, gorgeous piece of work, full of revelations of time, place, and person.

The Counterfeiters differs from most Holocaust movies in that the emphasis is on the personal moral choices that are made rather than the overall horror and despair.

Pure entertainment, and a true chop-socky classic.

Marks the end of an era of good -- even very good -- Disney animated features, and the start (one hopes) of a new period of great ones.

Yes, Black Panther is a moment. But in 20 years' time (or 100 more Marvel films), when this moment has passed, it will still be the kind of resonant, rip-roaring crowd-pleaser to which all smart action films should aspire.

This fresh adaptation shakes the dust off Jane Austen's early 19th-century novel of manners and gives it a good airing out. The result is a witty and lovesick skirmish of the sexes that exceeds all expectations.

This political satire that's as fresh and exhilarating as anything we've seen come out of Hollywood in quite some time.

1900 is a marvelous movie, Bertolucci is one of the best directors who has ever lived.

Moments of almost unbearable beauty.

The adaptation by Joel and Ethan Coen (both co-credited as writer and director) of McCarthy's as-if-written-for-the-screen No Country for Old Men becomes a marvelous meld of narrative faithfulness and pre-established sensibilities.

This pleasantly rambling absurdist father/daughter drama is also one of the most strikingly unusual films of the year, period.

It's all about the little things, and the way in which the little things can steal into your heart in big ways.

At its heart, Luff Linn is a very sweet love story between Colin and Lulu, punctuated by absurdity and a specific type of humor that (as I’ve referenced before) brings to the screen the spirit of the work of famed graphic novelist Daniel Clowes.