Its daring dive into the mind of Brian Wilson feels right. God only knows (to borrow a Pet Sound song title or two), but you still believe in . . . Brian.

The film has the dog-eared look of a homemade valentine and the improvised sound of '60s jazz, courtesy of a score by Mark Suozzo and a spirited soundtrack including Marvin Gaye's "Ain't That Peculiar," which might be the film's anthem.

Julian Temple, the British music-documentary director who helmed the 2000 Pistols' flick "The Filth and the Fury," has done such cinematic justice to the punk humanist born John Graham Mellor, who died of a congenital heart defect in 2002.

Just a few barrels short of being a masterpiece.

While it's too slight a movie for overpraise, there are such a serenity of vision and clarity of purpose to these characters that we easily are caught up in the boys' struggle to reunite mother and child.

Muscle Shoals isn't perfect. Neither Bono nor Alicia Keyes has any business being in the movie, though Bono does wax poetic about the genius of the music recorded there, and Keyes teams with the Swampers for a strong performance of Dylan's "Pressing On."

Historical drama of the highest order - teeming with big ideas, and anchored by the nicely nuanced performances of Vikander and Mikkelsen.

Fences is also very much an actors' movie, with breathtaking performances from Washington and his costars, including Davis, Stephen Henderson, Jovan Adepo, Russell Hornsby, and Mykelti Williamson.

Amelie is utterly charming. And so, too, is the film.

Feig, who wrote the Spy screenplay, encouraging his actors to improvise along the way, has his own stealth mission. For all the over-the-top comedy, zigzagging chases, and choreographed fight scenes, Spy is very much a tale of female empowerment.

Opens the window on a pivotal time in 1960s (and early 1970s) pop culture.

Devilishly delightful.

Add Mostly Martha to the list of great mouth-watering food flicks - "Eat Drink Man Woman," "Big Night," "Babette's Feast" -- but don't stop there. Add it to another list: movies that get at the heart of what family, and love, is all about.

Dense, richly textured, and emotionally fraught - uplifting and devastating in equal parts - Shane Carruth's masterful sophomore effort is an abstract, elusive, but emotionally engaging love story that's more tone poem than drama.

A fascinating, suspenseful story about obsessive love, money, the Mafia, and murder.

In this, Alfred Hitchcock's centenary year, Felicia's Journey so startlingly channels the obsessions of the late director that it might be the greatest Hitchcock movie the master of suspense never made.

Tells Wilco's story so well that you'll leave the theater thinking the album is a work of genius.

A heady stew of psychological disorders and classic tragedies, borrowing from Shakespeare, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and the Greeks.

Bill Condon's screen adaptation of the 1981 Broadway sensation is, if possible, as dazzling and energizing as its source.

It's not a critique but a rather graceful, witty, and stylish film that offers possible solutions to the problems Moore believes plague the United States.

Wonderfully evocative, funny, sad, complex, and essential passages from a man's childhood and adolescence.

A wise, wistful study of hope and dread.

OK, first off, anyone who shares his or her life with a dog, or has done so in the past, go see My Dog Tulip.

Paolo Virzi's film looks at school as the microcosm of society and at fathers too self-absorbed to be there for their daughters. He combines the themes played in "Mean Girls" and "Look at Me" and makes them vibrant.

Never mind Hollywood's big-star, big-budget hand-wringing about Africa - Bamako is the real thing.

At once a deeply personal film and an important historical document, The Man Nobody Knew leaves us with an incomplete portrait of a man. Did Colby have a moral core? Did he know what was truth, and what was a lie? Did he sanction assassination plots? Did he love his family? Was he even capable of love?

Jafar Panahi's Taxi looks onto a world where the social order and the spiritual order are at odds, in flux, where the conversations are sometimes cutting, sometimes comic, sometimes troubled, sometimes profound.

Andre Techine creates living characters instead of sociopolitical symbols.