It's quite a celebration.

With its feverish, percussive soundtrack and bravura cinematography, is like a bolt from the blue, chock-full of unexpected delight.

A lyrical and delightfully goofy study in romantic longing.

A deadpan delight.

Pray the Devil Back to Hell is at once inspiring and horrific.

The story -- which has originality and compelling interest to recommend it -- is forgotten as the spectator, clenching his hands, relives those great victories lost and won "on the wing." [03 Dec 1927, p.11]

Quiet, watchful, out for himself, Sorowitsch is a complicated figure - neither hero nor villain, and certainly no fool. The Austrian actor Markovics is riveting in the role; he is wiry, anticipatory, his eyes darting with intelligence and worry.

Bier primes us for a catfight, but she gives something tastier: a feast of reconciliation and love.

If you just give yourself over to Nolan's sweeping, symphonic Cowled Crusader saga, The Dark Knight Rises is, well, a blast.

A disturbing and forceful drama.

The dialogue is smart, screwball, sublime.

The lack of any readily identifiable star - no Cage, no McConaughey - makes Blue Ruin feel even more authentic, more rooted in this frightening world.

A riveting sci-fi investigation into humankind's experiments with A.I. (with pages from Spike Jonze's Her and Stanley Kubrick's 2001), Ex Machina marks the extremely able directing debut of British writer Alex Garland, of the novels "The Beach" and "The Tesseract," and of the screenplays for Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later" . . . and "Sunshine."

A stunning examination of teenage cruelty, exploitation, and crime that refuses to give us the satisfaction of identifying with the characters.

A gossamer tale about a heavy subject -- a passive creature who slowly emerges as the active author of her own life.

Slower and talkier than the five Potters that came before - but not necessarily in a bad way - Half-Blood Prince is a bubbling cauldron of hormonal angst, rife with romance and heartbreak, jealousy and longing.

Apart from its anthropomorphic, allegorical angle, Zootopia is also a tale of female empowerment and a classic noir, too.

A droll piece of deadpan played with mostly unerring pitch by a talented cast.

The plain, reportorial style of Lost Boys -- which simply records its subjects in various settings and situations -- results in a film that doesn't preach, doesn't politicize.

An exotic and erotic love story about an interracial couple whose cultures have more in common than they ever imagined. [12 Feb 1992, p.D]

A bruising, dark comedy.

Lush. Debauched. Ravishing. And did I mention sexy?

It's the stuff of soap opera, infused with a nonchalant, David Lynch-like surrealism and a nutball Canadian humor. Beer - because of the baroness, and because this is Canada - flows freely.

Even with a voice-over narration, and conversations with her dog, Robyn's nomadic quest is full of grand silences, all the better to take in the sky, the rocks, the world spinning underfoot. Wasikowska plays this wordless wanderer just right. That is, she makes her real.

Tavernier pulls all this off with elegance and style; his battle scenes are tough and bloody, his châteaus grand.

Anderson, 29, does so much in Magnolia, with such nerve, with wily humor and out-of-the-blue bravado, that the film's flaws and lapses don't really matter. It ain't perfect, but it's awe-inspiring.

It's not a very good title, Waste Land - this isn't a bleak film, at all - but just about everything else in Lucy Walker's documentary works, and illuminates.

A superb film that begins with death, ends in renewal, and finds almost as much to laugh about as to cry for.