Kundun, which was written by Melissa Mathison ("E.T.") from interviews conducted with the Dalai Lama, doesn't make you greedy for its images the way some gorgeous films do. It allows you to drink each one in tranquilly.

Munich is both astonishing and frustrating. It's not easy to tell how much of the tone comes directly from Spielberg and how much comes from Kushner, who was called in to polish the script after Roth completed it.

A sweet little picture with a sense of humor as well as a mission. If money can't buy you love, at least it can buy you 90 minutes of warmth.

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.

Amid the dozens of documentaries made about various aspects of '60s society and culture, Commune stands out for its ambiguity, honesty and sheer human clarity.

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.

A showcase for a uniquely sympathetic virtuoso performance by legendary stage actor Ian McKellen in an otherwise minor film.

Given the debased standards of action cinema these days this might be enough to make The Town a hit. But almost everything else about the movie is badly off balance, starting with Affleck's decision to cast himself as the implacably sexy and good-hearted Doug.

Visually ravishing, tonally commanding and built around magnetic performances by Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck as Bonnie-and-Clyde doomed lovers, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints is a tragic but not despairing tale of fatal romance set in the Texas hill country in the mid-1970s. It marks the arrival of an immense talent who will be new to most moviegoers – although Lowery is a well-known figure in the indie-film world – and it’s surely one of the best American films of the year.

An enjoyably off-kilter romantic comedy with a touch of madcap farce and just a hint of darkness.

Liman's buoyant direction is almost enough to make one forgive the film its heavily appropriated plot (including its groaner of a punchline).

So this is the greatest Shyamalan movie ever made by someone else, or maybe it’s Christopher Nolan’s best impression of what a Shyamalan movie ought to be like. No doubt that sounds like a backhanded compliment, but I don’t entirely mean it that way.

The resulting film is both beautiful and fascinating, and offers a thrilling travelogue through a spectacular landscape few of us will ever see first-hand.

A surprisingly wise and funny meditation on the nature of what it truly means to be a man.

Combines memorable images of the gorgeous, rugged wilderness, meticulous sound design that emphasizes the characters' isolation, a dash of dark wit and a dose of madness.

In Order of Disappearance possesses both a striking soulfulness and a sense of beauty. (Much of the credit goes to cinematographer Philip Øgaard, whose images are memorable but never showy.)

The material has crackle, but its vibrancy feels far off and muted, like a fireworks display going off in a neighboring town.

That sense of one small, private world shattering within the larger and even more unstable one around it is the essence of Michael Winterbottom's unmooring, bleakly beautiful film version of A Mighty Heart.

It will change your understanding of the Vietnam era, even if you were alive then.

A mildly rousing and reasonably satisfying picture about one man's efforts to mend the rifts among his countrymen.

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.

There’s so much that is brilliant and unexpected and often downright thrilling about Mommy, the fifth feature (a fact amazing in itself) from 25-year-old Quebec enfant terrible Xavier Dolan.

The picture has an unsettling, haunting quality that I haven't been able to shake.

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.

Wag the Dog is such a crisply delivered political satire, so packed full of wickedly amusing details and expertly modulated performances and with its heart so obviously in the right place that I really, truly wish I could tell you it was also a good movie.

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.

A keenly constructed and tragic film, probably the best documentary so far to depict the Iraqi side of the current conflict.

Veers unpredictably between wrenching psychodrama and "Spinal Tap"-style mockumentary.