A sharp shock of a film in an Awards season very full of movies so noble they become immobile. It's wildly unlikely to get much love from the Academy, and that's fine-bluntly, it's too good for them. With its bloody stew of history and hysteria, action taken from movies and atrocities taken from fact, Django isn't just a movie only America could make-it's also a movie only America needs to.

For fans, this is exactly how the story of Jean Valjean's transformation from thief to saint should be delivered: smothered in bombast.

Playing like a mash-up between "Enter the Void" and "The Raid," Day of Reckoning is an uncommonly assured slice of bargain bin cinema, as arresting to watch as it is impossible to comprehend.

A masterwork from a master filmmaker.

What Audiard has created here is nothing less than the rare combination of high art and beautiful filmmaking with visceral power and gut-level emotional reality - it's like a symphony of fists, or a brutal assault by angels.

One of the best kid's films of the year, full of delight and action and charm and comedy.

A "Good Evening" indeed at the movies.

Every frame of silent, lip-biting, pent-up tension in the series has been holding its breath for this -- a 600-minute soap opera suddenly exploding into a Grindhouse slasher.

The result is a masterpiece of moving pieces, a dizzying and obscenely beautiful film that boils down Tolstoy's text to its most basic elements by making literal the theater of high society.

This is not really a biopic of the great President as the title might indicate, but rather a fascinating, savvy look at the inner-workings of the political process and how things in the White House get - or don't get - done.

It's a real film, and a fun one, made with gonzo good humor and plenty of action from the opening brutal battle over which the sound of The Wu-Tang Clan's 1993 single "Shame on a N***a" roars.

Consider it a force in the Best Animated Film Oscar race.

Killing Them Softly tries hard - and succeeds - to be a film of the now with its political parallels right in front of us. Yet it's also an invisible companion to the dirty business at hand - and it is a business.

The emotional journey is articulated with so much nuance, and such a vigorous belief in human possibility, that everything The Surrogate touches becomes its own, and is made new.

This is a curio that demands to be seen.

With a razor-sharp script and Jennifer Garner winning laughs in a nice change-of-pace role, this cynically funny and pointedly pertinent not-so-subtle spin on the national battle between right and left wing politics scores lots of comic bullseyes.

Alcoholic movie characters run the gamut from lovable millionaire (Arthur) to Skid Row bum (Henry Chinaski from Barfly) to all-out, suicidal depressive (Ben from Leaving Las Vegas). As written and performed, Winstead's Kate triangulates between all these approaches and finds a sincerity that plays to the intellect, not to the rafters.

This magnificent stop-motion cartoon is alive - "it's alive! - with laughs and heart.

Arnold's newest testament to passion and squalor strikes a tone somewhere between Cary Fukinaga's emo "Jane Eyre" and Sophia Coppola's revisionist-hip "Marie Antoinette."

Sure it's fun - and painful - but it's not thin.

Rebel Wilson is the peroxided Aussi who stole scenes as Kristen Wiig's roommate in "Bridesmaids," and this is the role that will turn her into a star.

There's more to it than a black-and-white political conclusion, and the laundry list of California documentary heroes in the credits suggests this film is humanist before it's agenda driven.

Clint Eastwood and a superb cast hit it out of the park in Trouble With The Curve, a great entertainment filled with heart, humor, family drama and fantastic acting.

Easily one of the year's best films and one of the best ever in the well-worn cop genre.

The Perks Of Being A Wallflower is a sweet surprise, a funny, touching terrific and quite wonderful movie that gets it all right about the joys and heartbreaks of growing up circa 1991.

If there was any doubt Ben Affleck has turned into an exceptional director, his wildly entertaining, pulse-pounding thriller Argo will handily erase those thoughts.

Director Rian Johnson's resulting film, a cornfield neo-noir, is the coolest, most-confident sci-fi flick since 2006's "Children of Men."

It seems odd to call a detailed portrait of toxic romance lovely, but Keep the Lights On truly is.