McQueen and his stellar cast take us on a difficult journey, an odyssey that will make you want to avert your eyes. It is to their great credit that we don’t.

Bullock and Clooney make their peril our peril in this absolutely gorgeous, moving and sometimes exultant reminder that the real terrors of space are scary enough, without invented bug-eyed monsters thrown in.

And as long as it is, it would be a pity to cut one moment of Spall’s immersive, utterly convincing portrait of this common man with an uncommon gift.

The movie is so “interior,” it so zeroes in on Isaac and his baleful stare, that we’re relieved any time something overtly funny happens.

Is it better to have loved and lost than never to have logged on at all?

It goes on too long, but this is personal essay filmmaking at its best, one that passes that ultimate test of such self-involved projects. It has a story worth telling.

Using archival footage, inventive animated recreations of incidents and chilling aerial smart-bomb views of air strikes as they happen, Moreh creates a simple yet elegantly damning film.

Exarchopoulos is a revelation, wearing her neediness, vulnerability and arousal with every muscle in her face, her posture, even her hair. It’s an utterly naked performance, literally and figuratively.

The disco decadence, the seedy era before Times Square became a theme park, the lowered expectations of an endless recession, everything that was then and is now makes up American Hustle. And that’s what makes this the best movie of this holiday season.

The script and Simmons, known for TV’s “The Closer” and as tantrum-tossing editor J. Jonah Jameson in “Spider-Man,” make Fletcher a monster, and then look for ways of explaining him.

An old fashioned Japanese folk tale beautifully rendered in old-fashioned hand-drawn animation.

We should all be so lucky as to live in a world designed, peopled and manipulated by Wes Anderson. His latest film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, is a dark, daft and deft triumph of design details.

Serious and silly, self-aware and ironic, it’s the movie that questions stardom, fame and celebrity, built around a role Michael Keaton had to become a has-been to play.

A scruffy, anarchic picture that gets better as it stumbles along.

This solo ordeal won’t be to every taste, but All Is Lost is a grand vehicle for the actor and for that viewer ready to consider his or her own mortality, the problems, conflicts, strengths and shortcomings you’re sure you leave behind when you just sail away.

Chilling, cruel and funny — in an icy, Swedish way.

And Dern, a great character actor who made his mark opposite everyone from Redford and John Wayne to Jane Fonda, embraces the roll of a lifetime.

Manages to pop the hairs on the back of your neck more than most repetitive, predictable and gory Hollywood horror films these days.

Like the characters in this inter-connected world, you may feel the need to let go of The Past, only to realize, after the credits, the hold it still has on you.

Michael B. Jordan (“Red Tails”) is never less than riveting as Oscar, and he has to be.

It’s more an instant cult film than a picture with any prayer of reaching millions.

The Wind Rises was a dream project for the great Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, and this gorgeous film makes a fine capstone for his career.

This is as thorough a take-down of a business and its practices as you’re likely to ever see.

It’s still a welcome, entertaining and overdue delivery of credit where credit was and is due.

The Lego Movie amuses and never fails to leave the viewer –especially adults — a little dazzled at the demented audacity of it all.

Gloria has a palpable loneliness about it, and Garcia makes us feel that and fear the emptiness that is staring Gloria in the face. Not a lot happens in this closely-observed character study, but few recent movies have dared to show this stage of life, the creeping solitude that memories of your disco past cannot fend off.

56 Up feels like the most hopeful film of them all - amusing, entertaining, and touching.

Under the Skin isn’t conventional, thrilling or particularly satisfying in a sci-fi aliens-are-hunting-us sense. But it manages something far more sinister and fascinating. It gets under your skin and imprints on your memory.