Not only is the film a powerful historical record and a warning for future generations, it is an essential reminder to people, including many in Japan today, who might deny that this massacre ever occurred. As such, Nanking honors the highest calling of documentary filmmaking.

Teaming with Depp, his long-time alter ego, Burton makes Sweeney a smoldering dark pit of fury and hate that consumes itself. With his sturdy acting and surprisingly good voice, Depp is a Sweeney Todd for the ages.

The stroke of genius is, of course, the film's hero -- the big, lovable bear that is the Chinese panda.

Witty to the point of hilarity, blood-soaked and thoroughly politically incorrect, Mother of Tears: The Third Mother follows 1970s cult classics "Suspiria" and "Inferno" to complete Argento's "Mother" trilogy.

Even a klutz could hardly make a bad movie about these compelling figures. Thankfully though, Guido Santi and Tina Mascara are superb filmmakers, fully alive in their terrific film Chris & Don: A Love Story to all the undercurrents of art, social class, sexual orientation, challenging relationships and, most especially, the touching love story at the heart of their film.

Hilarious for those on Maddin's mad wavelength and more varied than his strictly fictional features.

A biographical documentary doesn't get any better than this.

It is a sumptuously told tale of childlike wonder in the face of darkest corruption and war, mixing high comedy, surreal sequences and genuine drama viewed from a wise, jaundiced perspective.

Alternately disturbing, laceratingly satirical and affectingly poignant, the film, which he adapted from the novel, Towelhead, by Alicia Erian, is very much a companion piece to the Ball-penned "American Beauty" in its unwavering examination of the dirty little secrets and raging hypocrisies lurking just beyond all those manicured suburban lawns.

A winning mix of sharp comedy and touching bits that keeps the laughter -- a few tears -- flowing.

In Changeling Eastwood continues to probe uncomfortable subjects to depict the individual and even existential struggle to do what is right.

The film is superbly crafted, covering huge amounts of time, people and the zeitgeist without a moment of lapsed energy or inattention to detail.

Poetically composed, with marvelous lumps of wit and perspective, Of Times and The City is a masterwork.

The frequently outrageous Il Divo follows the career of one of the best-known and most tenacious figures in Italian political history in a lively, sensory-overload, cartoonlike fashion reminiscent of "Amelie" and "Moulin Rouge." The fact that it's often over-the-top goes with saying, and is part of the fun.

An edgy entertainment, the movie also remarkably has the feel-good warmth of an old-time Irish film.

Enlivened with droll wit and framed with robust sensitivity, O'Horten is an amusing and entrancing personal portrait. Succinct in its visualizations and crisp in its pacing, its deferential storytelling is in sync with its Odd subject.

A long but powerful true-life drama of 1970s German terrorists features masterful storytelling and bravura performances.

The decibels, energy and overall quality are high in writer-director Kari Skogland's Fifty Dead Men Walking, her supremely well-made, highly stylized, graphic tale of Northern Ireland's "Troubles" in the late 1980s.

This is one helluva good movie that craves the eyeballs of as many American high schoolers as it can possibly get.

A fantastical romp that proves every bit as transporting as that movie about the blue people of Pandora, his "Alice" is more than just a gorgeous 3D sight to behold.

For a film so pessimistic about mankind, Taxidermia erupts with some light-hearted technical inspiration: Cinematographer Gergely Poharnok's compositions are wickedly hilarious, while production designer Adrien Asztalos' concoctions are peculiarly gross.

A superb murder mystery, with twists coming thick and fast yet always at the right moments.

A gem whose intelligent, gentle, deadpan humor is entirely irresistible.

Julia Roberts marches through Erin Brockovich like a force of nature. Granted, the movie gives her all of the best lines — to say nothing of its most eye-catching wardrobe. But the actress seizes the film's eponymous role with fire-in-her-eyes possessiveness and injects the character with all the energy and drive she can muster.

The hundreds of animation artists on this three-year project made enormous contributions to the final film. There is not an off-kilter moment nor awkward effect in the entire movie.

Driven by director Tim Burton (Pee Wee's Big Adventure) and his fanciful imagination, the film is colorful, delightfully deranged and endlessly inventive — a grand-scale funhouse that can be enjoyed by children of all ages.

An extremely funny white-collar satire filled with enough delightfully askew characters to pack a boardroom and the bright talent to do them justice, the picture should strike an achingly familiar chord with 9-to-5ers the world over.

It's the thrills that keep it moving.