With shocking humor and surprising grace, Von Trier creates something unique and memorable.

Sirāt...is not for everyone. But it is the sort of overwhelming cinematic experience and undeniable work of sound and vision that could be life-changing for those ready to receive it.

Deliver it does, big time.

Kelson ushers in a more meditative tone for this entry, which reveals that it is, among other things, a coming-of-age story. Yet this swerve into more emotional territory doesn’t dampen the tension or the terror that Boyle remains an expert at conjuring up; if anything, it acts as a countermelody to the genre aspects.

A portrait of a sycophant as a pure, unbridled sociopath, Lurker understands the relationship between fame and fandom all too well.

You can feel the heat that ignites this gripping tale, and the humor and humanity that root it in feeling. Sayles knows how to use his social conscience: He lets it rip.

Rules needs that dose of hilarity. Ellis' satire, filtered through Avary's harsh lens, is hard to stomach, harder to ignore.

Delivers more suspense than a tombful of mummies.

Taking it's framework from classic fairly-tale characters like Cinderella, the British story of Little Voice is one of compassion, humor and music.

Take away the serrated satirical edges of this showdown between suburbanites and self-aware smart devices, and you’re still left with a surprisingly delightful, moving story about a dysfunctional family learning how to connect again.

The film, bathed in gorgeous shadow and light by cinematographer Joe DeSalvo, gets more personal as it moves along. You can feel the romantic ache when Bruce and the missus duet on “Stones.”

This is where Fonte comes in. An actor who can make Marcello seem like a pitiful beta-male grotesque one second and a noble, sympathetic hero the next, he’s the thrumming motor behind this fairy tale of dogs and monsters. It’s hard to underestimate how his award-winning performance — good call, Cannes Film Festival — shapes the film and sets its humanistic tone.

The Sound of My Voice ends with a very different voice, as we see Ronstadt, filmed this year, attempting to sing a Mexican folk song with a cousin and nephew. Parkinson’s has clearly weakened her, but she still watches her relatives attentively and opens her mouth to verbalize along with them as much as possible.

A potent thriller that grows in intensity as the audience realizes that the character it likes most is most likely a nut job.

Told in five chapters and across multiple storylines, Tost’s first feature is an admirably weird and engaging odyssey that’s like Tarantino meets The Sugarland Express (with a healthy dose of Smokey and the Bandit). It’s brimming with ideas and winning turns, in particular Sweeney and Hauser, whose romantic chemistry is terribly endearing, and McClarnon as the deadpan-hilarious face of anti-colonialist vengeance.

It may not be Larraín’s best film (we’d nominate No). But it’s unquestionably the movie he was, in so many ways, born to make.

It’s the essential conflict between mother and daughter that brings The Truth into Kore-eda territory, where life is always a delicate balance. He’s lucky to have Deneuve and Binoche tempering the verbal fireworks with a tenderness that that allows for pain, regret and the hard-won knowledge that they must both face the truth to move on.

For a film so consumed with hitting something over a net, O’Connor’s work here is practically an ode to performing without the safety of one.

It’s a power house.

A potently acted, buoyantly funny film that trades on emotion without making you gag on it.

All praise to Elisabeth Moss, who brilliantly plays Jackson as a volcano on the verge of eruption, and director Josephine Decker, whose experimental "Madeline’s Madeline" reveled in leaving folks in a twist.

You wanna feel all right? This is the holiday movie that will do it.

Leaves you feeling tense and terrific. It's fun to be fooled.

Bravo, abetted by a cast that couldn’t be more game, turns a classic case of “These white people will be the death of me” — a familiar idea among the rest of us, I think — into a dazzling, once-every-blue-moon experiment in how to tell an utterly modern, utterly mediated, confusing, offbeat story.

Restores our belief in the power of movies to transform reality, even temporarily. So what if it's not perfect? It's magic.

What starts out as an impressive mix of various classic-Italian-cinema strains turns into something much richer, rewarding and singular. Rohrwacher isn’t interested in resurrecting the ghosts of movies past so much as channeling the spirit of the Brothers Grimm and modern-day anger.

The result is a film of surprise and wonder, lyrically attuned to the ticking intensity of romance.

A blast of comic irreverence that serves as a starring vehicle for two stoner characters who had previously been relegated to the sidelines.

What the Beatles did in 1964 alone continues to change the world—and Beatles ’64 is testimony to that ongoing story.

You’d have to search hard to find a movie this hypnotic and haunting.

What shakes the dust off this period piece is the vibrant acting.

A Best Actress Oscar nomination for Jennifer Lopez? You better believe it. Her see-it-to-believe-it performance in Hustlers is that dazzling, that deep, that electrifying.

Blunt honesty and rare introspection sets Howard apart from the usual cut-and-paste trips down memory lane.

It's a moody horror movie that favors metaphor over mayhem until its violent, chaotic final third, at which point the screaming starts in earnest. A bit more balance between gnawing guilt and plain old gnawing would have done this scare-parable wonders. Its bark is worse than its bite. But you hear every point that bark is making loud and painfully clear.

Eddie Murphy is funny again. Sadly, he lacks the guts to follow through on the cathartic self-satire that gives the film its distinction.

Craig Zobel's potent and provocative Compliance is torture to sit through. It's also indispensable filmmaking. How is that possible? Check it out.

Clark is a talent to watch. He's made a transfixing film about a family that looks touchingly and unnervingly like yours and mine.

It's a blast.

Like his characters, Guiraudie is walking a tightrope, finding the point where sex and death exude a similar allure. You won't be able to look away.

Steve Carell, best known as a team player on "The Daily Show," "The Office" and such movies as "Anchorman," earns top-banana status as Andy. He is flat-out hilarious.

The haunting, heart-piercing Elah isn't perfect. It's something better: essential.

An offbeat mix of typically quirky elements, and it could have easily been hard to stomach. But the author and director Lasse Hallstrom's affection for these characters shines through. Their greatest asset is the young Leo himself, in his first Oscar-nominated role, bringing great sensitivity and complexity to a part that might have come off as cloying or cynical.

What links the two films in fun and ferocity is the big game, a ripsnorter that is irresistibly entertaining.

Blending humor and heartbreak in a performance that makes a small movie a richly satisfying one, Caine truly is magic.

Killer-funny documentary.

Credible? Not really. But Cage and Rockwell play off each other with devilish finesse. And Lohman (White Oleander) is on fire -- she's a comer.

Primed to keep your pulse racing so your brain will stop thinking, "WTF!" Go with the illogic or you'll miss the fun.

Dawn is dynamite entertainment, especially in the rousing first hour.

Warrior aspires to myth. It's Cain and Abel battling it out in the face of a decidedly ungodly father before humanity goes down for the count. Strong stuff.

You'll laugh till it hurts at Cold Souls.

Cruise finds the core of Reacher in his eyes, with a haunted gaze that says this lone wolf is still on a mission and still a long way from home. That's the Reacher Lee Child created in his books. And Cruise does him proud.

The film is technically raw, but the sight of Van Peebles playing his father at a defining moment in movie history exerts a potent fascination.

Elliott is a recognizable archetype. Thanks to Park’s writing and Stella’s ridiculously charismatic performance, she’s anything but a generic one.

Nonstop mayhem follows in a stampede of comic terrors ready made for Halloween. Sure it's exhausting. But Goosebumps, knowing its audience, lets it rip.

Araki gives his hypnotic film a raw intensity heightened by a surreal landscape and a jagged score from the likes of Braindead Sound Machine, KMFDM and Coil.

This is a Ferrell you've never seen before, nailing a role that calls for breakneck humor in the final race against the clock and touching gravity in the love scenes with Gyllenhaal.

At its best, De-Lovely evokes a time, a place and a sound with stylish wit and sophistication.

The best hip-hop film of all, taking on obvious targets (misogynist lyrics) and sacred cows (political rap) alike.

Malkovich weaves something delicate and devastating.

Estevez keeps his touch light, with a minimum of pedantry. The Way is really a gift from this son to his father. Sheen, gradually revealing a man painfully getting reacquainted with long buried feelings, who gives the film its bruised heart.

The actors are world-class charmers, and the magnificent Dame Maggie is the diva divine. Her wit still stings, as it does on "Downton Abbey."

You can certainly argue just how speculative this film version of Churchill is as history. But Cox's performance cannot be faulted. It's a master class in acting.

Nil By Mouth is a shockingly intimate portrait of entrapment that may leave you wincing. It’s Oldman’s Raging Bull.

It's a wet dream for anyone who's ever dreamed of getting an edge on the information highway. The worst side effect is that you won't believe a word of the damn thing in the morning. Fair exchange.

A tasty swig of holiday cheer.

It's one crazy love story, but Carrey and McGregor make it work by making us buy the romance as the real thing. There's something about these Marys that pulls you in.

A vibrant, bizarre hybrid of sci-fi and fantasy with avant-garde, jazz-inflected music by the composer, Forbidden Zone still remains unique decades after its inception.

This Wrinkle in Time is undoubtedly flawed, wildly uneven and apt to tie itself in narrative knots in a quest to wow you with sheer Technicolor weirdness. It's also undeniably DuVernay's movie as much as Disney's, and works best when she puts her feminine energy, high-flying freak flag and sense of empathy front and center.

Even when the drama gets overcooked, Lymelife sends off sparks.

Martin excels in the title role.

This is rock-solid entertainment. McConaughey, a cunning mesmerizer in the courtroom, steers this Lincoln into what could be a hell-raising franchise. More, please. Soon.

Force Majeure is a jolt. You won't know what hit you.

Phantom, still running on Broadway after sixteen years, is a rapturous spectacle. And the movie, directed full throttle by Joel Schumacher, goes the show one better.

Tsunashima is superb, and a never-better Collette (The Sixth Sense, About a Boy, The Hours) has a radiant intensity that hits you right in the heart. She burns this movie into your memory.

Affleck may strike you as off-putting at first, hitting wrong emotional notes, but hang on. State of Play keeps the twists coming.

It’s sexy, suspenseful fun, and gorgeous-looking to boot.

Rogen is a nonstop hoot, but it's the byplay between Frost and Pegg that roots the laughs in characters we care about. That's right: characters. No anal probes.

Harron needed just the right actress to play Bettie. And she lucked out big time. Gretchen Mol (The Shape of Things) is hot stuff in every sense of the term. She delivers the first performance by an actress this year that deserves serious Oscar consideration.

The Painted Veil has the power and intimacy of a timeless love story. By all means, let it sweep you away.

A brilliant chronicle of the life and twisted times of a most unlikely bad boy, a skinny, four-eyed, sex-obsessed misanthrope with no weapons to fire back at the society that rejected him save one: The nerd can draw.

Writer-director David Michôd catches you in a vise and squeezes - hard.

There's no sense to the scene in which the boys get together for a close-harmony rendition of "Afternoon Delight" -- just pure pleasure.

Slick thrills and the star's blue eyes are enough to make Ransom the fall's monster hit. Instead, Howard and Gibson stake out a Moclock side in all of us that won't be banished, not even by a happy ending. I'll be damned.

Some people find this twisty and twisted psychological thriller arty and pretentious. I find it arty and provocative.

The young star, maturing nicely past the boyish enthusiasm he showed in "Slumdog Millionaire" and "Marigold Hotel" films, enters a new phase of his career with fierce commitment. Lion is one from the heart.

This movie will get under your skin.

It's important to note what Portman the filmmaker is doing here. She is most assuredly not providing CliffsNotes to Oz's book, letting us see what Amos sees and only partially understands.

Director and co-writer Christopher Smith, mischievously blending "The Office" with "Friday the 13th," keeps things fierce and funny enough to give Steve Carell ideas.

Kudos to Stewart for making Rosewater more than an earnest plea for journalistic freedom. He makes it personal.

It's rare to find a movie that uses music to define love without sentimentalizing it. But Begin Again, with songs by Glen Hansard and New Radicals frontman Gregg Alexander, is a wonderfully appealing exception.

The special effects vacillate between defiantly shitty and endearingly resourceful, and Carpenter and O’Bannon's sense of humor covers a similarly narrow ground between Loony Tunes goofiness and dorm-room stoned.

And Pfeiffer gives a funny, scrappy performance that makes you feel a committed teacher's fire to make a difference.

But for all its visionary brilliance, the movie version of Interview never lets us close enough to see ourselves in Louis. We're dazzled but unmoved.

Even when the film goes too far over the top to be saved, McConaughey mesmerizes.

Even readers with reservations about the ways the film fails to measure up to the book should appreciate a smart, passionate, steadily engrossing thriller in a summer of mindless zap.

There's enough plot here to sink a soap opera, but the actors prevail. Parker is a no-bull charmer. Driver leaves bite marks on her juicy role. And Mbatha-Raw, so good this year in "Belle", is dynamite.

The result is something you won't see coming. Don't look for sweet and embraceable. This movie is not afraid to show its claws. Like the spirited teamwork of Kazan and Dano, Ruby Sparks is honest, deep and true.