A beautifully shaped piece of work: There are no slack patches, no gratuitous feel-good moments -- if you walk out of Knocked Up feeling good, that means you've earned it.

A spiny, puzzling and highly entertaining film, and whatever you go into it thinking, you're likely to come out thinking something else.

A modest and tightly focused picture, and its very directness makes it piercingly intimate.

Speaking as one New Yorker who lived through 9/11 and saw this film with a packed house of natives at its Tribeca Film Festival premiere, I experienced Man on Wire as an almost mystical incantation.

Supremely economical, pulse-pounding and undeniably bewildering thriller, which plays like a blend of mid-'90s Hong Kong action flick and mid-'70s European crime drama. Arguably this movie amounts to less than the sum of its parts - but hot damn, those are some parts.

The epitome of the small, character-driven film that the indie movement was supposed to champion before it became a hip mirror of the Hollywood star system.

Roehler mixes cheap sex humor, existential darkness, buffoonish satire and profound tenderness in almost classic proportions. Maybe this is too uneven to be a masterpiece, but it's somewhere close.

It’s no ordinary movie: Rabin, the Last Day is a disorienting mixture of drama, documentary and meticulous re-creation, and very little of it takes place on the last day of Rabin’s life.

Completely deranged, and the portrait it paints of our beloved country depicts a dangerous place full of neurotics and obsessives. But lots of fun, with porn, booze, backyard barbecues and elaborate revenge schemes!

Dark, hilarious and oddly moving.

Rudd's timing has always been good, but in I Love You, Man he gives the finest performance of his career, breaking his comic beats down into weird and wonderful fractional increments. It's as if he's invented a new comedy dialect.

The picture's ending -- which is satisfying, possibly even happy, depending on how you look at it -- is almost inconsequential; it's the texture of everything leading up to it that matters. The Pursuit of Happyness, even within its slickness, gets at intangibles that allegedly grittier movies fail to capture -- like how heavy a wallet can feel when you're down to your last dollar.

As this wry, dry and glittering near-masterpiece proclaims, life is full of wrongness, but also full of mystery and wonder.

It's still dynamite, the kind of sexy, paranoid, creepily atmospheric picture that invades all your senses at once.

Schizo is in its way a taut and exciting thriller.

It’s more that the filmmakers close out this oddly inspiring yarn of apocalypse and paranoia with a note of false reassurance. Yes, the world is fundamentally screwed and most people are apathetic or paralyzed. So start ringing doorbells!

A solemn, haunting picture, but it's also a thrilling one, partly because of the sheer bravado with which it's made. It left me feeling more fortified than drained. Cuarón, the most openhearted of directors, prefers to give rather than take away.

The incredible special effects, which make lush cherry blossoms as vivid as the intense battle scenes, are balanced by Disney's tradition of care and painstaking detail in developing and animating its characters.

The result is a tight, taut, witty and highly theatrical entertainment, shot in shades of wintry gray, that will keep you guessing right through its final fadeout.

A prodigious, almost spiritual experience, a luminous, challenging art movie out of the Tarkovsky school that happens to be about a real war and its effects on real children.

As good as it is, Before Night Falls might not work if Schnabel hadn't found a leading man to hold it together and the Spanish actor Javier Bardem has the understated charisma to pull it off.

It's hyperactive, often hilarious and ultimately exhausting.

Bridges performance in Crazy Heart, for my money the finest male performance of the year, reels us right back to understanding why: Instead of dressing up words, he sends them out naked. It's everything he subtracts that matters.

Amusing, ultra-deadpan entertainment. The director was lucky enough to have a cast who were in on the joke and tuned in to his wavelength.

When Vikram Gandhi set out to become a guru, he didn't expect to really become a guru. But that's what happens in his slippery, ambiguous, tense and finally moving Kumaré, which is officially termed a documentary but could also be considered as the video corollary to a thorny work of performance art.

Robot & Frank is such a sly, dry, modest-seeming picture – part science fiction, part social satire, part geriatric comedy – that you don't realize how well it works until it's over.

Grand, juicy fun regardless, tapping as it does into some archetypal pleasure center.

Although there's plenty of music, and plenty of joy, in Once, it's ultimately a quiet, wistful picture.