Claire Denis, not always an easy director, is in top form here directing an almost all-black cast with grace and delicacy. For the happy few, this is French art house cinema at its unpretentious best.

It is fresh and spontaneous, plausible at its most logically improbable, thanks to Altman's superior direction, Lardner's script, the fine selection of actors and to an omnipresent camera under director of photography Harold E. Stine and operator Bill Mendenhall.

The film comes down to a mesmerizing portrait of a man who in any other age would perhaps be deemed nuts or useless, but in the Internet age has this mental agility to transform an idea into an empire.

Key to the remake's ultimate success is the casting of the troubled young leads.Smit-McPhee and Moretz possess the soulful depth and pre-adolescent vulnerability necessary to keep it compellingly real.

Big crashes, lithe women and roiling testosterone, not to mention the addition of The Rock as a fire-and-brimstone federal agent – there's plenty to pull in the (mostly) young male audience.

Fully justifying the decision, once thought purely mercenary, of splitting J.K. Rowling's final book into two parts, this is an exciting and, to put it mildly, massively eventful finale that will grip and greatly please anyone who has been at all a fan of the series up to now.

Precise, lucid and thrillingly disciplined, this story of boundary-testing in the early days of psychoanalysis is brought to vivid life by the outstanding lead performances of Keira Knightley, Viggo Mortensen and Michael Fassbender.

After a five-year wait since "Sideways," Alexander Payne has made his best film yet with The Descendants. Ostensibly a study of loss and coping with a tragic situation, this wonderfully nuanced look at a father and two daughters dealing with the imminent death of his wife and their mother turns the miraculous trick of possibly being even funnier than it is moving.

A fabulous and passionate love letter to the cinema and its preservation framed by the strenuous adventures of two orphans in 1930s Paris.

Ralph Fiennes directs and stars in Coriolanus as William Shakespeare's Rambo in a production that delivers heavyweight screen acting at its best.

Meticulous care is evident in every aspect of the film. All three actors playing Pi are outstanding.

What comes out of this unlikely comparison between astronomy and history is a totally new perspective, something broader, with glimpses into deeper meanings.

Makes everything in the rival Marvel universe look thoroughly silly and childish. Entirely enveloping and at times unnerving in a relevant way one would never have imagined, as a cohesive whole this ranks as the best of Nolan's trio, even if it lacks -- how could it not? -- an element as unique as Heath Ledger's immortal turn in The Dark Knight. It's a blockbuster by any standard.

Lucas Belvaux's Rapt is two movies, both excellent, for the price of one.

Crisply shot and edited, with effective use of Ashutosh Phatak’s graceful music, this is a powerful documentary that demands to be seen by as wide an audience as possible.

At once the most realistic and beautifully choreographed film ever set in space, Gravity is a thrillingly realized survival story spiked with interludes of breath-catching tension and startling surprise.

Driven by a brilliant, ferocious performance by Michael Fassbender, Shame is a real walk on the wild side, a scorching look at a case of sexual addiction that's as all-encompassing as a craving for drugs.

This is a gorgeously made character study leavened with surrealistic dimensions both comic and dark, an unsparing look at a young man who, unlike some of his contemporaries, can’t transcend his abundant character flaws and remake himself as someone else.

The film's power steadily and relentlessly builds over its long course, to a point that is terrifically imposing and unshakable.

The film is terribly smart in every respect, with ne'er-a-false note performances and superb craft work from top to bottom.

It's very much an art piece, to be sure, but it feels like a genuine one that, while meditated, speaks fluently and truly for the place, people and culture it so indelibly depicts.

Two things stand out: the extraordinary command of cinematic technique, which alone is nearly enough to keep a connoisseur on the edge of his seat the entire time, and the tremendous portrayals by Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman of two entirely antithetical men

It’s a non-stop blast from beginning to end, jam-packed with a wacky irreverence, dazzling state-of-the-art CGI (courtesy of Animal Logic) and a pitch-perfect voice cast headed by Chris Pratt, Elizabeth Banks and Will Ferrell.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes manages to do at least three things exceptionally well that are hard enough to pull off individually: Maintain a simmering level of tension without let-up for two hours, seriously improve on a very good first entry in a franchise and produce a powerful humanistic statement using a significantly simian cast of characters.

The Impossible is one of the most emotionally realistic disaster movies in recent memory -- and certainly one of the most frightening in its epic re-creation of the catastrophic 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

Exhilarating, opaque, heartbreaking and completely bonkers – French auteur Leos Carax's so-called comeback film, Holy Motors, is a deliciously preposterous piece of filmmaking that appraises life and death and everything in between, reflected in a funhouse mirror.

Magnificent in its simplicity and its relentless honesty about old age, illness and dying, Michael Haneke's Amour is a deliberately torturous watch.

Citizen Kane is a great motion picture. Great in that it was produced by a man who had never had any motion picture experience; great because he cast it with people who had never faced a camera in a motion picture production before; great in the manner of its story-telling, in both the writing of that story and its unfolding before a camera; great in that its photographic accomplishments are the highlights of motion picture photography to date, and finally great, because technically, it is a few steps ahead of anything that has been made in pictures before.