A vital documentary in the truest sense.

Serenity is a trim little picture of epic proportions.

It's a marvelously constructed personal journey, both wrenching and bittersweet, whose emotional ripple effects stay with you for days and weeks afterward.

With its cartoonish pace, larger-than-life characters and detours into farce and agitprop, this movie captures the accelerated pace of life in the financial markets and the vast scale of their mendacity far more vividly than a naturalistic drama could.

Stanley Donen's classy crime caper has charm, wit -- and Cary Grant.

Arias' blend of traditional cell animation and 3-D CGI effects is thoroughly mind-blowing, and the film's visual sensibility is utterly distinctive.

Kapadia is a London-born filmmaker who approached Winehouse’s life, as he did that of Brazilian racing legend Ayrton Senna in his thrilling 2011 “Senna,” as a dramatic story with numerous twists and turns and a magnificent and tragic figure at its center.

A triumphant movie about failure.

Affliction is a harsh experience, but the harshness isn't a matter of punishing the audience or of the director, Schrader, showing off his toughness: That unvarnished harshness is the very essence of the material.

Venus belongs to O'Toole. This is, hands down, my favorite performance of the year, largely because I love the way O'Toole (and the filmmakers) refuse to yield to the all-too-pervasive idea that it's "icky" for old people to even think about sex.

This is a noisy, chaotic, technology-crazed 21st-century action film, but also one made with tremendous excitement, vigor and heart, along with a myriad of wonderful details.

Its stars, Emily Blunt and Natalie Press, are film newcomers who give startling performances. The photography is often breathtakingly original.

The film succeeds, and for many reasons: because of Fellini's wonderfully self-deprecating humor — the way he mocks the idea of the director as a genius, the artist as romantic hero; because of his honesty in expressing both his dreams of glory and his self-hatred, anxiety, and dread; and because visually it’s stunning and exhilarating.

A terrifically crafted little movie that bounces off current events and the nation's downbeat mood ingeniously, and that it variously suggests comparisons with the early work of Terrence Malick, Stanley Kubrick and the Coen brothers. Yeah, I think it's that good, but please note that I also said "little."

For the most part, 20,000 Days on Earth – the approximate amount of time Cave has been alive on this planet – is an imagistic and impressionistic work, a Nick Cave-esque tone poem driven by moments of visual and thematic juxtaposition you either have to reject or accept.

It will disturb you as much as thrill you, make you wonder whether the boundaries between life and death, reality and fantasy, imagination and insanity are ever what they appear to be.

Fast-paced, often hilarious fun and involves an imaginative and deeply weird use of cutting-edge digital animation.

A memorable, haunting and highly original American movie.

What contemporary relevance you may find in Alfredson's chilly, marvelously acted and gorgeously composed new film of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - is a highly individual question.

Nasheed has traveled the world describing the Maldives as the Poland of global warming - meaning, of course, Poland in 1939. If his country cannot be saved from rising sea levels, he maintains, then there may be no saving Tokyo or Mumbai or New Orleans or New York.

The first Holocaust movie that's actually about another Holocaust movie, and in some peculiar way it brings us closer to the terror and tragedy of the original event.

This is a muscular and accomplished work of kinetic cinema built around two tremendous acting performances, and it’s really about teaching and obsession and the complicated question of how to nurture excellence and where the nebulous boundary lies between mentorship and abuse.

You either like this kind of ambitious, brave, borderless experiment or you don't, and I think it's absolutely magical and tragic.

There's more drama, and more heartbreak, in March of the Penguins than in most movies that are actually scripted to tug at our feelings.

Mirren's performance is glorious: Rather than impersonate the queen -- which would have been all too easy to do -- she reaches deeper to locate the buried, calcified thoughts and feelings that might guide this deeply inscrutable woman.

The chase scenes in The Italian Job are the most exciting ones I can remember seeing in a movie in a long time, probably because they're the only ones I can remember -- and that's saying something.

This movie's cornucopia of humorous riffs and stunts never fails to amuse or enthrall because it never ceases to be unexpected.

My Joy has a bleak, grotesque, near-perfect poetry in its soul.

Skyfall is a push-pull between the past and the present, an effort to drag a symbol of maleness as iconic as the Union Jack bulldog on M's desk into a world of approximate gender equality and approximate acceptance of sexual difference. I'm not sure how sustainable that is over the long term; this is a smashing entertainment, but also one that feels over-engineered and constrained by its origins.

McDonagh walks a hazardous tightrope from scene to scene, from amiable comedy to black-hearted farce to heartbreaking tragedy, often trying to strike all those notes within seconds. It doesn’t all work equally well, but the cumulative effect is powerful.

Terrifically choreographed, violent and amoral, but never wantonly cruel, Miss Bala is a knockout.

What we see in Stanley Nelson’s urgent and necessary documentary The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution is the story of an organization that meant many different things to many different people, and that changed so dramatically during five years or so in the national spotlight that it could almost be described as reshaping itself month by month and putting forward a distinctive face at almost every moment.

Although Cutie and the Boxer is one of the most unsentimental and unstinting portraits of marriage ever brought to the screen, there’s considerable hopefulness and love in it, and it illustrates the adage that whatever you can survive will ultimately make you stronger.

This film never feels like copycat Americana to me. Its vision of the bleak, ruined, urban-cum-rural landscape of Naples and environs is distinctively European and postmodern, redolent of the spiritual and physical desolation Antonioni captured so memorably in "Red Desert."

This is a rigorously crafted film steeped in the French tradition, but it's meant to be a sensual and emotional experience, not a verbal or analytical one. Most of all, it's a spectacular eyeful.

Extraordinary.

A dark and mesmerizing immersion into a distinctive world.

An almost perfectly realized poetic vision of people who continue in their everyday existence certain that life in a larger sense has passed them by.

Turns a hysterical night of African-American humor into the hottest little picture of the summer.

A sprawling and adventurous tale of teen alienation, might just be the movie that pushes the Japanese new wave out of the film-geek ghetto.

This explicit movie about a sexually insatiable 19th century courtesan emerges like an erotic dream.

An intimate, gorgeous and wrenching portrait of a working-class marriage in what may be a state of terminal decay.

A distinctive achievement, a World War II movie unlike any other and one of the few films ever to address a topic that makes almost everyone want to look away: What happens to women in wartime.

The holiday season's best movie so far.

Creates such memorable images out of squalid surroundings that I sometimes wondered whether I was being distracted from the devastating stories of these kids by the beautiful cinematography.

In his dazzling and luxuriant new thriller Femme Fatale, De Palma turns trash into chic. It's a sexy, violent, glamorous, sinfully funny movie with a surface as hard and brilliant as diamonds.

Crisply and competently filmed, Tell No One is an intriguing sample of new-school French cinema at the more commercial end of the spectrum.

Great cinema? Hell, I don't know. But one of the most satisfying movies of the holiday season, that much is for sure.

Dark, sleek, funny and creepily infectious, the genetic-engineering horror-comedy Splice is a dynamic comeback vehicle for Canadian genre director Vincenzo Natali, who made a splash a few years ago with "Cube."

One of the best American movies of the year and one of the lushest movies in recent memory.

A highly unusual combination of craft, emotion and integrity.

Wonderful...It's funny and offbeat, sometimes raucous, but it still manages to come at you in gentle layers.

The GoodTimes Kid has a whimsy, a passion, a sophistication and, above all, a vigor that's mostly drained out of Amerindie cinema over the last decade or so.

It's both happy and sad. That's exactly the way to describe Hou's marvelous film as well.

Mike Leigh returns to the council flats of London -- and delivers a richly Dickensian masterpiece about working-class family life.

A narrative picture with many of the qualities of a documentary, not to mention a comic book -- is one of those rare, inventively made movies that isn't so taken with its own novelty it loses sight of its characters. Its warmth is for real, and it enwraps you.

It's a carefully and almost classically balanced combination of ingredients, blending dirty-faced realism (so much more damning because it judges and condemns no one) with mystical fable of quest and homecoming.

Of course the films and the books each have to stand on their own, but Grisoni's stripped-down narrative definitely offers advantages, throwing some of the story's archetypal themes into sharper relief.

A stylish and muscular thriller with some nifty twists and turns, a wicked sense of humor, several terrific performances and not one or even two but three of the best car chases in recent action-flick history.

In the long and fraught history of Franco-American cultural relations, this movie is more than a peace offering; it's a loving, goofy, joyous French kiss.

Fontaine and cinematographer Caroline Champetier create many subdued and unexpected moments of simple humanity, or of what a more generous Catholic than the Mother Superior might call grace.

Next to the Hong Kong action picture So Close, nearly every Hollywood thriller of the summer looks like an elementary-school project thrown together the Sunday night before it was due.

Safe is both a slavish imitation of cinema gone by and a movie for our time. I found it wickedly entertaining and perversely refreshing in its total lack of contemporary piety.

If this willfully peculiar and daring Cymbeline isn’t to all tastes, it brings back the blood, the thrills and the sense of moral discovery to a long-neglected work.

A delight from top to bottom, packed with romance, adventure, beautifully executed swordplay and a sumptuous period look.

The picture is almost shamefully entertaining, bold and self-effacing at once: Its intelligence reveals itself as a devilish gleam, not a pompous layer of shellac. Why can't more Hollywood movies be like this one?

Birds are not just the movie's stars, but its whole universe. They inspire in Perrin and his crew, and in us, not just awe but humility. You'll never look at them the same way again.

Gray's peculiar accomplishment here is to turn this story into an intense emotional drama, beautifully photographed and profoundly ambiguous, suspended somewhere between realism and psychosexual allegory.

Yes, there are some "middle-chapter" problems, but Peter Jackson's Tolkien adaptation hasn't lost its devastating humanity, its heart-stopping cinematography or its epic sweep.

What a handful of patient moviegoers may find in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, however, is a subtle, gorgeous and mysterious allegory that may be Ceylan's masterwork to date.

Features an astonishing pair of lead performances and one of this year's most impressive directing debuts. If this movie isn't quite the contempo-Greek tragedy it wants to be, it's still a powerful, unforgettable meditation on fate, cultural collision and the morality of renovating a house that isn't really yours.

Together is the kind of picture that makes you feel that there are many good reasons to actually LIKE mankind.

Footnote has two of the best performances I've seen in world cinema over the past year: One from Shlomo Bar Aba (apparently best known in Israel as a stand-up comic and stage actor), playing the aging, bitter philologist Eliezer Shkolnik, and the other from Lior Ashkenazi, one of the country's best known movie stars, as his son and rival, Uriel.

A moving, surprising and provocative baseball flick that rises immediately to No. 1 with a bullet on my personal list.

Absolute dynamite.

It's an electrifying, suspenseful film, full of street-level political drama.

Holds us in a state of horrified empathy.

This is a true fairy tale, and one of the finest fantasy pictures ever made, but please do not take your young children to see it unless you want them to be scarred for life.

A chilly, fascinating thriller at odds with itself.

Every single actor here rises to the occasion.

Full of imaginative, outrageous and egregiously insulting 3-D gags.

Foxcatcher is another strange and compelling anthropological drama from Miller, a director with evident expertise at enabling Oscar-worthy star performances.

This movie may not have the highest production values you've ever seen, but it's the work of an artist, one whose view of America, history and the awkwardness of human life is generous and deep.

From moment to moment, O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a pleasure. But when the Coens are really cooking, when the acting and the conception and the music all come together, it's something more -- Dogpatch rapture.

The film is a pleasure, which the real thing was not. It's also a chilling adventure and a compelling story from beginning to end.

The Great Beauty is an ironic and passionate near-masterwork, like a nine-course dessert that makes you entirely forget the meal.

Consistently interesting without feeling essential until, in its last half-hour, it becomes utterly compelling.

A haunting, beautifully told tale about a genuine American original.

Citizenfour is both an urgent tale torn from recent headlines and a compelling work of cinema, with all the paranoid density and abrupt changes of scenery of a John le Carré novel.

Hope and Crosby accomplished a rare thing, an ad-libbed, brilliantly performed surrealistic romp through the fourth wall of studio convention. Their comic timing has to be seen to be believed, and Road to Utopia is the place to go to be converted.

With this sober, mournful, gorgeously mounted and marvelously acted drama, Miike connects himself to the greatest traditions of Japanese film and to the period of historical self-examination that followed the debacle of World War II. And he also crafts one hell of a fable of heroism.

Sin City is the first mainstream American picture I've seen this year that feels even remotely brash or original. It's a hard, viciously funny little movie, one with all the subtlety of a billy club. But there's artistry here.

It's a tight, taut, expertly crafted thriller from a director to watch.

It's hard to say why The Station Agent sends you out feeling so benevolent. It may have something to do with being in the presence of a director who treats you with respect. McCarthy allows us to feel without telling us how and what we should feel.

Robert Altman's surpassingly beautiful ballet movie feels lighter than air -- but in fact it's the great director's most tender and memorable film in years.

What makes Ida remarkable is how much Pawlikowski is able to accomplish in just 80 minutes, with a pair of mismatched female characters, a handful of wintry and desolate locations, the square-format cinematography of Ryszard Lenczewski and Lukasz Zal, and a soundtrack that combines modernism, Soviet-bloc pop music and a haunting performance of John Coltrane’s “Naima” that seems to capture all the emotional possibilities the characters cannot express.

Sordi is an elegant comic actor in the vein of America's William Powell; the world may confound him, but it can never rumple him.

This is Bond as we've never seen him, more naked, alive and mysterious than ever.