A new American crime classic from the legendary Martin Scorsese, whose talent shines here on its highest beams.

Screenwriting this smart, inventive, passionate and rip-roaringly funny is a rare species. It's magic.

There's no way you won't be captivated by Wallis, chosen ahead of 3,500 candidates to play the tiny folk hero who narrates the story. Her performance in this deceptively small film is a towering achievement.

This emotional climax of the film, with its warring glints of despair and hope, typifies the stunning achievement of The Ice Storm and confirms Lee as a director of the first rank.

The superbly crafted suspense thriller…slams you like a sudden blast of bone-chilling, pulse-pounding terror.

It entered the festival circuit as a politically charged take on the standard there-goeth-the-great-artist story and exited it as a peerless act of personal reclamation. I can’t shake the feeling of being shook by it.

A sharply observant and witty film that plumbs unexpected depths of feeling.

The performances are uncommonly fine...Lone Star isn't built to ride trends. It's built to last.

Oppenheimer is one of those shoot-for-the-moon projects that feels thrilling and wonky, brilliant and overstuffed, too much and yet not enough. It’s also a movie that brings to mind the difficult era-spanning epics of yesteryear, from Reds to The Right Stuff, and is a movie made by adults for adults yet done with the sweep and majesty we now associate with movies made for kids and teens.

Amid the clamor from outraged purists and Shakespeare spinning in his Stratford-on-Avon, England, grave, you should notice that Luhrmann and his two bright angels have shaken up a 400-year-old play without losing its touching, poetic innocence.

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

13th, available in theaters and on Netflix, is one for the cinema time capsule, a record of shame so powerful that it just might change things. Godspeed.

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

Savor their technique and the sizzling performances of Frances McDormand as an adulterous wife, Dan Hedaya as her vengeful husband and M. Emmet Walsh as a private detective from hell.

Unique and unforgettable.

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.

Moore and Portman inject the movie with wattage, dramatic heft, and a push-pull dynamic associated with immovable objects and irresistible forces. Melton gives May December its slow-burn tragedy.

The film leaps off the screen with a thrilling immediacy.

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.

Up is a breathtaking ride into the realm of pure imagination.

Frankly, Cruz’s turn alone is worth the price of admission.

You'll thrill to the action, savor the tasty dialogue and laugh like bloody hell.

Sorry, Baby is a movie with a trauma at its center, but it’s not a trauma drama. It’s about living with such things and still going on with your life. And the manner in which Victor presents this narrative, with such verve and confidence and tenderness and pitch-black humor, defies easy description. It’s simply an amazing display of someone knowing how to get their voice and vision across.

For all its playfulness, it’s the real, stinging, joyful, inconvenient reality of life that Dick Johnson Is Dead gives us. It’s a committed act of preservation: a looping, reeling, repeatable act of love.

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.

Paradis sizzles in a star-making role that gleams like one of Gabor's blades. She's a spellbinder.

Rea and Davidson are incomparably good in an exceptional film that is by turns darkly funny and deeply affecting. Though Jordan's control sometimes falters, it's a small price to pay for his daring.

Far from being exploitive, the effect is inspiring: This is the best of us.