It’s a major achievement, and for my money, sure to be one of the best films of the year.

Sentimental Value is uncommonly rich in emotional rewards and contemplative in its reflections on the places where we live becoming a permanent repository for our memories, remaining there even after we move on. The movie’s poignancy accumulates gradually, every supple turn expertly modulated as the presence of generations past becomes more tangible.

One of del Toro’s finest, this is epic-scale storytelling of uncommon beauty, feeling and artistry.

Eight years since her last feature, Kathryn Bigelow returns with an unrelenting chokehold thriller so controlled, kinetic and unsettlingly immersive that you stagger out at the end of it wondering if the world will still be intact.

For a three-part piece, it gains a gorgeous fluidity from the gossamer ribbon of melancholy threaded through it. Like Paterson, it’s a film whose simplicity, sweetness and unvarnished ordinariness make it seem almost a miracle.

Time stands still and leaps across the epochs in Below the Clouds, which reveals how much our world has been transformed over the millennia, while also remaining the same.

Calling the movie an archival doc or concert film might be accurate but somehow seems almost reductive. Much more than that, it’s a transcendent theatrical experience, an exhilarating party, a giddying visual and sonic blitz that will be an elixir to the Elvis faithful and an unparalleled primer for those who have never quite grasped what all the hysteria was about.

Gray and his superb cast are in blazing form and full command here in a bruising movie that reveals the heavy price of pursuing the American Dream too recklessly.

The beauty of the film is that it doesn’t judge viewers for what they do and don’t know, but rather encourages us to open our minds to history and see the connections between then and now.

It is immaculately performed by Zischler and especially Hüller, grounding the film throughout with an uncanny, expressive stillness.

Los Javis execute this mighty vision with thrilling technical bravado. Nearly every shot in the film is a carefully composed wonder, either an eye-popping still-life tableau or a breathtaking bit of camera movement, all done up in lush, expensive-looking period detail. It’s a dazzlingly assured film, delivering the heady satisfaction of seeing something ambitious actually land its nervy attempt

Sachs has not made an AIDS movie we’ve seen a million times, largely because it’s not so much a movie about death as one about wringing every last drop out of life, whether it’s fuel for creativity, love or one last surge of passion and pleasure.

Tensely action-packed and muscularly directed by Kathryn Bigelow, this tale of an elite U.S. army bomb disposal unit in Baghdad is a familiar story in new clothes, targeted at the young male demographic.

Anderson has created a world as stylized and inventive as anything he's done... "Fox" is a visual delight.

Three superb performances by Helen Mirren, Christopher Plummer and James McAvoy should have Oscar handicappers drooling.

What this strange yet strangely beguiling film does is capture one of pop culture's great entertainers in the feverish grips of pure creativity.

A piercingly funny, twisted "whatever-happens-in-Vegas" caper.

Bright Star may not be a joy forever but it will do until the next joy comes along.

Raimi's still very much up to his old tricks, retaining that deliriously over-the-top brand of Grand Guignol horror that he had abandoned by the mid-'90s in pursuit of other genres.

This is a marvelous family story, tapping into all sorts of childhood dreams and nightmares involving Mommy, monsters and heroic youngsters. Selick's imaginative sets and puppets are in perfect pitch with Gaiman's fantasy.

Most of all, Earhart wanted to be able to fly free as a bird above the clouds, and director Nair and star Swank make her quest not only understandable but truly impressive.

Polished, funny and utterly charming.

Downey plays off his own bad-boy image wonderfully. The writers give him great lines to work with and ditto that for his Girl Friday, Gwyneth Paltrow's Pepper Potts, whose own svelte lines cannot be improved on.

The filmmakers were right to believe that a live-action version of this story would have failed to achieve the universality Persepolis does.

Apatow's gleefully raunchy movies are, in an odd and charming way, extremely family-friendly.

Now Eastwood turns on a dime and tackles not just his first war movie but two war movies of considerable scope and complexity. If he doesn't nail everything perfectly, he nevertheless has created a vivid memorial to the courage on both sides of this battle and created an awareness in the public consciousness at a most opportune moment about how war feels to those lost in its fog.

Spicing up the entire package is a screenplay by Canet and Philippe Lefebvre that bristles with wit and energy.

The filmmakers succeed brilliantly in weaving these stories together, taking time to explore depth of character and relationships. The suspense builds throughout as everyone involved becomes lost in a place they don't understand with people they don't know if they can trust.