Movies don't come more original, inventive, or outlandishly entertaining.

In top form, Joel and Ethan Coen offer up feel-bad experiences that, like fine blues medleys, make you feel good (although with an acidulous aftertaste). Inside Llewyn Davis is one of their best. So many movies are emblazoned with happy faces; this one wears its sadness, and its snarl, proudly.

Exhilarating doses of style, imagination, and sheer energy.

It's inexplicable that Wong's early masterpiece has been virtually absent from American screens since he completed it in 1991.

Sprawling yet cramped, There Will Be Blood may not be the best movie of the year, but it's certainly the strangest. It evokes passing comparisons to everything from "Giant" to "Citizen Kane" but it's impossible to pigeonhole.

With its ingenious camera style, keenly dramatic music score, and brash yet indomitable humor, Do the Right Thing is the richest and most thought-provoking portrait of underclass experience that Hollywood has ever given us.

This is as challenging as movies come, alluding to everything from philosopher Thomas Hobbes to the history of Western music.

Absorbing but disturbing documentary.

This extraordinary film, which, despite its tragic trappings, is often surprisingly playful, can be appreciated without knowing anything about Panahi or his long-term battles with the authoritarian regime.

Mastroianni gives what might be the greatest performance of his legendary career, making an ideal focus of attention for Fellini's cinematic pyrotechnics. [09 Apr 1999, p.14]

It plays out all the usual tropes of the investigative-journalism genre – the hot tips, the clandestine meetings, the hand-wringing about ethics, etc. – without adding a jot of novelty.

Stands with the greatest science-fiction movies ever made.

Superb performances by Setsuko Hara and the great Chishu Ryu also contribute to the film's impact, which is at once deeply moving and profoundly thoughtful about moral and spiritual issues. [10 Nov 1994, p.12]

This masterpiece of 1952 is one of the gentlest, subtlest tales from one of Japan's all-time-great filmmakers, combining the sweep of a novel with the intimacy of an elegy. [10 Jan 2003]

They don't make 'em like this anymore! [13 Nov 1998, p.B2]

In a film that overwhelmingly avoids happy-faced pronouncements, this one sticks out.

Wherever you were schooled, in public schools or private, in the slums or in the suburbs, you will recognize yourself in this film and laugh and beam and cower.

The movie is true to its own fierce vision and it's the better for it. I haven't seen a stronger or better American movie all year.

The credo of Italy's fabled neorealist movement was that movies rooted in real, unadorned experience carry more dramatic impact than studio concoctions can dream of, and this 1952 masterpiece exemplifies that argument brilliantly.

An astonishingly fine movie about the vagaries and frolics of childhood as seen largely through the eyes of its pint-sized protagonists.

Sissako, a Muslim, frames his story as a cry against religious intolerance. One of the characters, speaking of jihadism, says, “Where is piety? Where is God in all this?” It is the central question of this movie – and of much more now than this movie.

The effect is intended to be ghastly – which it certainly is – but I was equally repelled by this film’s conceit. Oppenheimer allows murderous thugs free rein to preen their atrocities, and then fobs it all off as some kind of exalted art thing. This is more than an aesthetic crime; it’s a moral crime.

Doesn't make it a masterpiece, but it's fun. [2002 re-release]

The timeless fairy tale about a young woman who agrees to dwell with a mysterious monster, as interpreted in 1946 by one of cinema's most brilliant visual stylists and mythmakers.

The expanded "Redux" is even more resonant - partly because of its added material, and partly because the passage of time has increased the film's value as a key cultural document of the Vietnam War era and its aftermath. It's a movie not to be missed.

Far from the movie of the year, the first installment of the long-awaited Lord of the Rings trilogy is an all-around disappointment.

Yes, we can draw links between then and now, but, in a way, Glazer’s film contradicts his own public sentiments. His depiction of this agonized world is so enveloping and unrelenting that, at least for me, it stands wholly alone, untethered to our current traumas.

Leviathan is, in the widest sense, a horror film.