Want to know what it's like to be in on the discovery of a new American classic. Check out Boyhood. Richard Linklater's coming-of-age tale is the best movie of the year, a four-star game-changer that earns its place in the cultural time capsule.

This dizzyingly intricate film reveals new facets each time you see it. We leave Vertigo unsettled, like Scottie, who ends up on the edge of a precipice. Hitchcock is daring us to leap. He has prepared the ultimate fix for a cinema junkie: a movie to get lost in.

From the first sight of German soldiers goose-stepping past the Arc de Triomphe to a postscript that spells out the fate of characters whose moral confusion is all too real, Army of Shadows is a movie of its time -- and ours.

Moonlight, which announces Jenkins as a major filmmaker, gets you good. It stays raw from first scene to last.

The hard action, bracing wit and mournful grace of Peckinpah’s cowboy classic shames every new movie around. It’s a towering achievement that grows more riveting and resonant with the years.

Del Toro never coddles the audience. He means us to leave Pan's Labyrinth shaken to our souls. He succeeds.

Throughout his life, Brown refused to give in to public convention or his own despair; he wouldn't play the victim. Brown labored to express all of his feelings, not just the acceptable ones. Day Lewis works the same way. My Left Foot, a keen match of actor and subject, stands as an eloquent tribute to the talents of both.

You just don't expect Hollywood to produce a masterwork so early in the new year. And it hasn't. This slice of celluloid dynamite comes from Romania, and what you see will floor you.

The movie dissects the universal gap between the haves and the have-nots with shocking wit, stinging topicality and gut-wrenching violence. It’s explosive filmmaking on every level.

If a thing of beauty is a joy forever, as John Keats famously said, then the surpassing loveliness and bracing brilliance of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma will never pass into nothingness.

Miyazaki is the Pied Piper -- see Spirited Away and you'll follow him anywhere.

Summer of Soul is both a tribute to the artists and, just as importantly, their audience — which is what makes it not just a great concert film but a great documentary, period.

Proving himself a world-class director, McQueen basically makes slaves of us all. It hurts to watch it. You won't be able to tuck this powder keg in the corner of your mind and forget it. What we have here is a blistering, brilliant, straight-up classic.

No film this year has moved me more with its humor, heart and humanity.

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

What makes Ratatouille such a hilarious and heartfelt wonder is the way Bird contrives to let it sneak up on you.

Sandra Bullock, in the performance of a lifetime, spends most of this wondrous wallop of a movie lost in space, alone where no one can hear her scream.

The movie feels at times like a miracle — not least for what it does not do. McQueen’s ability to render a universe of incident and emotion out of granular details, sounds and visions that feel specific and fully lived, should not surprise us at this point in the career. This is a director whose work has long displayed an ability, and a fascinating eagerness to display, the power of dramatic tangents and uncanny effects of sound and image.

In its sprawling attempt to partially wrap its arms around the Great-Step-Backward Age we find ourselves in, One Battle After Another shares a slight kinship with another shoot-the-moon auteur work of recent vintage: Eddington. Ari Aster’s film stared directly into the abyss and, shuddering, worried about how we could or should fight back. Anderson’s humanistic masterpiece of a movie says: You fight it with love. That’s the end game. That’s how you retain your decency and sanity. That’s the only way you protect the future, and change it. That’s how you live to battle another day.

Keep your eyes on Garfield - he's shatteringly good, the soul of a film that might otherwise be without one. The Social Network is the movie of the year. But Fincher and Sorkin triumph by taking it further. Lacing their scathing wit with an aching sadness, they define the dark irony of the past decade.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire is enthralling on every level. In her hypnotic and haunting film, alive with humor, heartbreak and swooning sensuality, Sciamma has created nothing less than a timeless work of art.

It's unmissable and unforgettable.

Do Not Expect builds on his previous film’s fractured style and broadens the range of his crosshairs, but the puckishness and past-the-boiling-point sense of wrath feels even sharper this time around.

Aftersun, which Wells also wrote, is for the most part a thorough depiction of a brief period in these two peoples’ lives. But its emotional canvas is far more encompassing than this implies.

These two glam stars of French cinema – Riva in 1959's "Hiroshima Mon Amour" and Trintignant in 1966's "A Man and a Woman" – give performances of breathtaking power and beauty. Prepare for an emotional wipeout.

Here's the Iraq War movie for those who don't like Iraq War movies.

The new King Kong of crime movies...Ferocious fun without a trace of caution, complacency or political correctness to inhibit its 154 deliciously lurid minutes.

Hang on tight. The knockout punch of the movie season is being delivered by Zero Dark Thirty.

Watching Collective when it premiered on the fall festival circuit last year, it was easy to see that it should be considered a flat-out masterpiece regardless of timing. Yet to watch it, or rewatch it, now is to experience something even deeper. It’s a story of a nation’s inability to take care of its citizens that comes to us in the middle of a pandemic that’s crippling America’s economy and killing its citizens.

A Separation is a landmark film. No way will you be able to get it out of your head.

Schindler's List, despite blatant compromises, is a rending historical document. But the film's near-certain victory is based less on merit than on the marketing of its ambitious intentions. The academy doesn't judge movies, it weighs them by subject matter. On that basis, Spielberg's epic tips the scales.

You leave WALL-E with a feeling of the rarest kind: that you've just enjoyed a close encounter with an enduring classic.

Haynes' commitment to outcasts, then and now, makes Carol a romantic spellbinder that cuts deep. It's one of the year's very best films.

Whatever a modern love story is, Before Midnight takes it to the next level. It's damn near perfect.

It’s the closest thing to witnessing a miracle — just some cameras, a crowd and a voice touched by God.

Dunkirk is a landmark with the resonant force of an enduring screen classic.

A mesmerizer that will creep into your dreams whether you let it or not.

A marvel of delicacy and humor.

Leigh embraces the contradictions in Turner. And in tandem with cinematographer Dick Pope, a master of light, he shows us the world as Turner sees it. The effect is harsh and ravishing. Leigh's beauty of a movie touches the heart not by sentimental gush but by the amplitude of its art.​

With The Irishman, America’s greatest living director creates his late-career masterpiece, a deeply felt addition that vibrantly sums up every landmark in his crime-cinema arsenal, from 1973’s "Mean Streets" through "Goodfellas," "Casino," "Gangs of New York," and the Oscar-
winning "The Departed."

Ang Lee, a world-class director working at the top of his elegant form, has done something thrilling. For all the leaping action, it's the film's spirit that soars.

The idea has been tried — remember TV's "Herman's Head"? — but never with the artful brilliance of filmmaker Pete Docter (Up; Monsters, Inc.).

It’s one of the best films of the year, full stop. But now it’s both invaluable and something of a warning for many of us on the shape of things to come.

Pure movie bliss.

Sheer perfection – that's the phrase that springs to mind when describing the humanist miracle that is Faces Places, the year's best and most beguiling documentary.

A movie that liberates your tears and makes you fall in love with it. It is almost assuredly predestined to be the single best movie you see this year.

This is a film in which ideas resonate as well as action. Gandalf’s words to Pippin about death have a muscular poetry.

It's a swooning new classic and one of the very best films of the year.

The movie crawls hypnotically into the skin of this global assassin and astonishes you with its brazenly violent and sexual audacity.

How does a small tale of love found and lost emerge as a major triumph and one of the very best movies of the year? Marriage Story is more than just a career high for writer-director Noah Baumbach (The Meyerowitz Stories, The Squid and the Whale); it’s a peerless showcase for its stars, Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson, who turn this tale of a contentious divorce into a "Kramer vs. Kramer" for the 21st century.

What makes La La Land such a hot miracle is how the passion for cinema and its possibilities radiates from every frame.

Sciamma is weaving a spell here, so pure in its emotional resonance that it breaks your heart even as it heals wounds.

Just when you think there's nothing original or exciting left to mine from a coming-of-age story, along comes the totally irresistible Lady Bird – a reminder that no genre is played out when there's a new artist around to see it with fresh eyes.

What makes it such a mesmerizing, wickedly witty entertainment is the revealing portrait it paints of an era in which everyone is presumed guilty where greed is concerned... It's an often chilly movie, but the chill cuts to the bone.

Kapadia, as masterful a filmmaker as they come, is happy to let viewers wonder where these stories will intersect, and how they’ll collide into or off of each other.

Like the late Jonathan Demme, director of Stop Making Sense, Lee is here not just to document but to heighten. There are close-ups on Byrne’s face, his eyes, even his feet; dynamic roving views from onstage and off; a keen awareness of the audience. And, of course, there’s the thrill of seeing people standing up in their seats, clapping along, silhouetted against Byrne’s bright, inviting presence onstage. All of it lends a sense of alive-ness to this live performance.

It’s impossible to experience the deep-seated compassion of this film and not be moved to tears.

If you're looking for the best and most beguiling foreign-language film of the year, you'll find it in Maren Ade's Toni Erdmann, a German father-daughter story that will leave you laughing and choking back tears, often simultaneously.

Oscar voters pretend not to see that Sandler’s a clown who can, almost by an act of will, stand toe-to-toe with the best we’ve got.

One thing's for sure about this raw provocation from the Coens: Like the music, the pain runs deep and true. You'll laugh till it hurts.

Perhaps the best thing that can be said about Tár is that it is far more than a mere vehicle for one showboating performance. And even if it were, with a performance like this, who would mind?

In terms of excitement, imagination and rule-busting experimentation, it's a gusher.

It's a snapshot of a small Texas town in the 1950s that's ostensibly filled with bighearted, god-fearing real Americans. But this exceedingly sad film spits in the eye of such homespun niceties: This is an Eisenhower-era world riddled with directionless teens, bored housewives and disenfranchised citizens who can't escape the futility around them.

Lee offers no reassurance, no uplift, no call for all races to join hands and spout liberal platitudes. What he does offer is a devastating portrait of black America pushed to the limit, with the outcome still to be written. There’s only one way to do the wrong thing about Do the Right Thing: that would be to ignore it.

The performance footage alone makes this worthy of study by musicologists and historians. There are too many great scenes to mention.

Brother's Keeper has the texture, emotion and raw urgency of a Woody Guthrie anthem -- it keeps coming back to haunt you.

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.

You leave feeling like you’ve just seen a truly extraordinary late work produced by one of the era’s greatest working auteurs, quickly followed by the sense of experiencing a sucker punch when you remember that the man driving away from the scene of the crime onscreen isn’t able to go anywhere once that screen fades to black.

This landmark film takes a clear-eyed look at the digital future and honors the one constant that journalism needs to stay alive and relevant: a fighting spirit.

The movie will wipe you out. Schnabel's previous two films (Basquiat, Before Night Falls) also focused on artists. But this is his best film yet, a high-wire act of visual daring and unquenchable spirit.

Fierce, funny and moving, The Class graduates with honors. It's unmissable.

Joel and Ethan Coen's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel is an indisputably great movie, at this point the year's very best.

Willem Dafoe should be on top of Oscar's Best Supporting Actor list for his stellar work in The Florida Project, a film that's as hilarious and heartbreaking as it is unclassifiable.

When E.T. debuts on DVD, you can choose between the new version, which better matches E.T.'s words to his lips, and the sweetly clunky, digitally deprived version redolent of penis breath. I don't need to phone home to know which one I'm buying. [2002 re-release]

With Apocalypse Now Redux — one for the ages when it comes to the moral battles of war — Coppola has reached the finish line at last. It smells like victory.

The friendship at the heart of this film, as indelibly portrayed by two brilliant young actresses — Flanigan is a wonder to behold, while Ryder nails just the right notes of supportive and warmly sympathetic — is a thing of beauty. Hittman’s urgent film is an emotional wipeout. It’s hard to watch. It’s also impossible to forget.

Fellowship is the real deal, a movie epic that pops your eyes out, piles on thrills and fun, and yet stays intimately attuned to character.

It’s a work that forces you to reexamine how we’ve processed this chapter of history and restores a proper sense of ungraspable horror.

Redford blows the dust off a 35-year-old scandal about rigged TV quiz shows and makes it snap with up-to-the-minute relevance.

Why should you suffer through a 140-minute Russian film that is basically a contemporary remake of The Book of Job? Because it's a stupendous piece of work, that's why, and because it represents the kind of challenging, intimate filmmaking that transcends language and borders.

A joy to behold.

Written and directed by the bracingly brilliant Joanna Hogg, this delicate, dazzling memoir traces her own origin story, and there is something superheroic about her struggle to look back without hitting the brick wall of formula and weepy nostalgia.

Martin Scorsese scores again with his gritty, kinetic adaptation of Nicolas Pileggi's best-selling "Wiseguy."

What initially seems like a series of cryptic aside soon turns into a bigger-picture revelation about what Filho has been chasing all along: the passage of time, and how it never really heals all wounds. That’s not really a secret. But it is a point that bears repeating, especially when its echoed in a movie as graceful and gratifying as this one.

This stunning, slow-build thriller from South Korean director Lee Chang-dong sizzles with a cumulative power that will knock the wind out of you.

It’s during this last act that It Was Just an Accident becomes a truly remarkable parable about empathy, mercy, righteousness, regret, and unfulfilled rage.

Diop’s direction of Saint Omer is spare in style but dense in emotional intelligence, heavy with its own inquiries.

What distinguishes this documentary from other movies about mass incarceration is the novelty with which Bradley subverts the mass and trains our eye, frequently literally, on the particular.

Don't stall about seeing Sofia Coppola's altogether remarkable Lost in Translation. It's a class-act liftoff for the fall movie season. Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson give performances that will be talked about for years.

There's nothing trivial about this Hungarian masterwork from first-time director László Nemes. You don't merely witness horror, you feel it in your bones.

Jonze is a visionary whose lyrical, soulful meditation on relationships of the future cuts to the heart of the way we live now.

Surprisingly timely and enduringly timeless.

It's comic, touching and a visual knockout.

Tótem is one of those films about death that overflows with life, and it’s a testament to filmmaker Lila Avilés that this gentle drama never collapses under its own weight or lets sorrow fully take the wheel.

The result, with its flashing perspectives and stealthy wit, is unique and unforgettable.

What the filmmaker and his collaborators have given us is something truly special: a radical work of art that channels a tsunami of radical empathy. And it couldn’t feel more necessary or vital at this moment in time.

No one needed further proof that he’s a master. This meditation on grief and growing up does solidify the position, however, that Miyazaki remains the greatest living animator today, period.

Ida is an art film in the finest sense of the term — it is austere technique counterbalanced by emotions that bleed.