Through the meat of the movie, I’m Still Here is unassailable: a gripping story, sensitively performed, with outstanding production and costume design effectively reproducing the era.

Annaud (The Lover, The Name of the Rose, Quest for Fire) may be, with all due respect to Stanley Kubrick, the most talented adapter of literary source material in recent film history. Seven Years confirms his mastery by doling out a perfect ratio of moving interpersonal drama and visual enchantment.

Teen Witch is an all-around delicious flick, both despite and because of the afterschool special quality of its message.

This is one of those rare movies about children but not necessarily for them, and it treats its adolescent subjects with bravery and compassion.

If this is Scorsese's bid for the commercial big time, then let the cash registers ring.

It's not a pretty picture, but it is a hellaciously gorgeous and original film.

Bamako, with Sissako's poetic blend of the humdrum and the theoretical, is altogether fascinating. Dramatic features born and bred on the African continent are rare commodities on these shores, and the opportunities they offer can stretch far beyond film appreciation and into the realm of world understanding.

A smart, funny, and youth-savvy relationship film.

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.

This is entertaining fare that's still potent today in all its pre-censorship seediness.

One of the truest-seeming movies I've seen in some time and as one of the most odd and haunting.

If ever there were a happy summer movie, it’s Hairspray. But for all its bubbly musical numbers and effervescent good humor, this film adaptation of the hit Broadway musical feels oddly lacquered -- it’s John Waters by way of Disney.

Down With the King the album was a response to a rap scene that was leaving the originators behind: Down With the King the film is about a musician abdicating his throne, an existential crisis laid out with delicacy and insight.

Mixing Ken Loach-style social realism with Mike Hodge’s grasp of stylish murder, much in the vein of 2012’s equally razor-balanced sniper shocker Tower Block, you’ll be cheering for this good woman when she faces the inevitable showdown.

You don't just root for Harold and Kumar to get the girl, get the weed, and, above all, get the burger – you want to hang out with them while they' doing it, and see if they'e free next Friday night, too.

Gorgeously animated in 3D in Daxiong's signature, hyperdetailed/hyperstylized artwork, Eternal Spring is a chronicle of dissidence, and Daxiong's attempts to come to terms with how the movement got to this point of non-violent resistance - an act with which he disagreed because of the backlash.

Alan Partridge is one of the more satisfying comedies in recent memory, and with rumors of a sequel, let’s hope that this is the beginning of Alan Partridge, movie star. He definitely wouldn’t have it any other way.

Homicide may not be Mamet's most accessible film, but it combines those elements of the playwright/director's work -- theatricality, stylization, rough poeticism -- that might be most off-putting to the typical movie audience with enough tension and mystery to keep them in their seats.

Guilt, shame, and regret are all frequent topics of discussion, as the family comes to terms with this impending event in wildly different ways. But however acutely intimate and emotionally formidable Last Flight Home can be (it is relentlessly both), it is thankfully tempered by the human being at the center of it.

An entirely sympathetic portrait of the artist at an advancing age. That's right, artist – and to a generation that knows Rivers only as a screeching red-carpet provocateur or as an overknifed monstrosity, that revelation alone is worth the cost of admission.

Appearing in almost every frame of Blue Ruin, Blair – who previously starred in "The Man From Orlando" and writer/director Jeremy Saulnier’s first feature, "Murder Party" – owns this film.

Armstrong presents a warm, funny, and believable rendering of the March family.

Sarah Smith pulls the various threads of this wholly original – well, as original as can be reasonably expected given the thousands of cinematic iterations Christmastime has provoked over the years – together into a very coherent, visually stunning, oftentimes laugh-out-loud hilarious holiday film.

Mann's decision to restrict this portrait to such a limited time period may leave audiences a little dissatisfied that important events are only recounted, not depicted. But then, if you're on the most thrilling corner of a track, you may not see the finish line.

There is, quite simply, a rather refreshing ordinariness to Remember Me in the unflashy, knuckle-down attention it gives to character development and the building of plausible and involving family and friend dynamics.

Of those who will seek this out, they’re either going to really dig it or just absolutely loathe it. There is no middle ground here, but Riseborough’s performance deserves to be seen by everyone.

It's impossible to take in all the information in one sitting and at times threatens to spin off in too many directions, but I guarantee this movie will provide plenty to mull over and inspire consumers to demand greater accountability from their media purveyors.

Trees Lounge gives the appearance of being slight, spontaneous, and effortless. It would be easy to write off Buscemi's maiden effort as a serendipitous fluke, but just like that squirrely face of his, you know that surface values are merely the outer layer.