Chronicle may go over the top with its climax, but for such a giddy film, it's remarkably down to earth.

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.

As the ugly and bitter witch who yearns for stolen life, Streep’s performance, for the most part, is strangely joyless. Once upon a time, this actress knew how to keep it fresh when going over the top ("Death Becomes Her," anyone?), but here she’s hardly bewitching.

It's definitely quite the spectacle as directed by the modern-day king of epics, David Lean. The movie is something that should be experienced by everyone at least once in a lifetime.

A film that is equal parts a celebration of a young woman’s life and a horrible document on her death, Finding Yingying brings humanity to the often stale true-crime subgenre while also giving us a unique perspective from someone on the outside of the American justice system.

What They Had has a lived-in ring of truth that will be instantly recognizable to any caregiver, spouse, child, or other loved one who has experienced something of this sort.

To the delight of its young audience, juvenile humor abounds in Captain Underpants, but the movie is smart about the way it contextualizes this lowbrow comedy.

These scenes of debauchery and lust that make up the film's centerpiece are among some of the most powerful and disturbing ever put to film.

Fluctuating between the extraordinary and the dull, with sections of narrative explication and tangents, Chicken With Plums can be as frustrating as it is ambitious. It's more like Chicken With Plums – and the Kitchen Sink.

A gorgeous, violent, brilliant puzzle box of a movie that relishes in how convoluted it is, and pays off every second of attention.

By letting her babble on and become a somewhat risible figure, the filmmakers display a somewhat mean-spirited attitude, despite all their fuss about finally appreciating this put-upon survivor.

The dialogue is scattered with so many beautiful gems that conversations glitter.

A remarkable film. From its performances on down to director of photography Roger Deakins' sun-baked, dirty-ochre cinematography, the film is all of a piece.

Never bordering on cheesy, She Paradise is a heartfelt ode to the strength it takes to learn to stand up for yourself in a painful world.

It's a giddy blend of horror and comedy.

In transgressive cinema, there is only one real sin, and that is to be boring. Somewhere around the six-hour mark of Gaspar Noé's 96-minute drug freakout fable Climax.

The actors are all charged up, too; there’s just nowhere in this script for them to go.

Boyle, MacDonald, and Hodge honed this wonderful coupling of music, visuals, and clever words, as well as a strange affection for toy babies, in their first film.

Unlike the other great caper films of the last 10 years, like "Ocean’s 11" and "The Italian Job" – stylish affairs in which punishment is close enough to give the audience a sense of lingering danger but never so close that it gets in the way of the technological fetishism and love of tailored shirts that apparently make grand larceny such a kick – the blowback in The Bank Job is real and ugly and involves some sort of pneumatic paint-stripping machine that would freak out the Coen Brothers.

The decibel level in Little Voice ranges from a delicate whisper to seismic bellowing; aurally speaking, it traverses the spectrum of human sounds.

From James Brown to Sam Cooke, the songs set a mood that lingers for some time after.

The Birth of a Nation most definitely has its finger on the pulse of our times.

So potent it nearly succeeds even as a vacuum sits squarely at its center.

Yet it's really as a director of actors that he's a revelation. Abbott never lets the audience walk away because they have already spent so much time – if not liking him, at least understanding him. We're right there with his wife, Lydia (Newcomb, extraordinary in what could have been a cipher of a role), when her world starts to fall apart. Dumb and evil may be different, Dick Long says, but it doesn't make the damage hurt any less.

Far From Home never forgets that it's a teen comedy-drama-romance, just wrapped up in a superhero story. But oh, that wrapping.

Never makes the leap from a little fantasy about sex with a stranger to a larger story about a woman settling down for life.

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

Possibly due to the story's origin as a Ruth Rendell novel, this is the most coherent, viewer-friendly narrative he's ever filmed.