All the pieces hang together. You can't say that about many movies.

Think "The Hurt Locker," which shares a cinematographer in Barry Ackroyd with no damage to the Bard's bruising poetry. Neat trick.

In the end, the audience is rewarded with a steadily riveting provocation that jabs at the culture of money that makes us all complicit.

Evocatively shot by "Selma" wizard Bradford Young, A Most Violent Year reflects a world where nothing is held sacred. You watch with nerves clenched, holding on tight.

David Fincher's shockingly good film version of Gone Girl is the date-night movie of the decade for couples who dream of destroying one another.

Scrappy, funny, hot-to-trot biopic.

Fierce, funny and vividly moving.

Kingsley creates an unforgettable monster. Acting rarely gets this hypnotically explosive.

Dear White People marks an auspicious debut for writer-director Justin Simien, an African-American who laces his satire with delicious mirth and malice.

Broken Flowers may be too low-key for laugh junkies, but Jarmusch fills his sharply observed comedy with wonderful mischief. The mix of humor and heartbreak brings out the best in Murray.

The film sneaks up on you, quiet-like, until its implications accumulate. And then it crushes you.

No one with a genuine belief in the possibilities and mysteries of cinema would think of missing Silence. It's essential filmmaking from the church of Scorsese, a modern master who lives and breathes in the images he puts on screen.

It's both gravely serious and a demonically funny, a blend meant to catch audiences off balance. Mission accomplished.

From "The 39 Steps" and "The Lodger" to "Rear Window," "Psycho" and all stops in between, this film gets us drunk on Hitchcock's movies again. My only problem with Hitchcock/Truffaut is that it's too short at 80 minutes. More please, and soon.

Appearances by Adam Ant, the Slits and Siouxsie and the Banshees, along with U.S. trans icon Jayne County, ground it in the moment, but Jarman's suggestion that even the most vocal nihilists would sell out their ideals — if given enough encouragement, naturally — provided a glimpse of the future.

A film of awesome power and blistering provocation.

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

The movie is moving — the source material has been hanging around since 1883 for good reason — but del Toro’s better at the violence and the dark irony, better at revealing the ways in which this story was already sort of twisted.

La Llorona is the kind of tale of mystery and imagination that prefers to get under your skin rather than shock your central nervous system, which only makes its near-suffocating feeling of foreboding more potent.

This bonbon spiked with malice is a triumph for Jaoui, who takes witty and wounding measure of the small betrayals that leave bruises on us all.

The French-Canadian filmmaker has delivered an expansion and a deepening of the world built off of Herbert’s prose, a YA romance blown up to Biblical-epic proportions, a Shakespearean tragedy about power and corruption, and a visually sumptuous second act that makes its impressive, immersive predecessor look like a mere proof-of-concept. Villeneuve has outdone himself.

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

A brilliant piece of nasty business that races on a B-movie track until it switches to the dizzying fuel of undiluted creativity. Damn, it's good. You can get buzzed just from the fumes coming off this wild thing.

The Fighter, its heart full to bursting, is an emotional powerhouse that comes close to spilling over.

Keep "Survivor" and "Fear Factor," and give me this spellbinding mind teaser, the ultimate game for movie buffs.

It's the remarkable Attah, whose young face reflects a hellish journey, that makes this fierce movie a blazing, indelible achievement.

Apollo 10 1/2 starts off as a fantasy, a family comedy and a loosey-goosey flashback. It exits as a tribute to imagination, which — like so many of Linklater’s best movies — uses something personal as a jumping-off point for something poignant, funny, expansive, and ultimately moving.

Saddle up for a rowdy, rip-snorting, hilarity-and-hellfire western full of riding, fighting, hanging, shooting, gold prospecting and bloody massacres — plus silly songs, a limbless poet, cowboy love rituals and philosophical musings about the inevitability of dying. Yes, it’s all in one movie. Who does things like that? Try Joel and Ethan Coen.