A fully believable, flesh-and-blood (albeit not human flesh and blood) romance is the beating heart of "Avatar." Cameron has never made a movie just to show off visual pyrotechnics: Every bit of technology in "Avatar" serves the greater purpose of a deeply felt love story.

It's rare for a movie to be at once so biting and so moving. If Ryan's future seems bleak, there's something exhilarating about a movie made with such clear-eyed intelligence.

Topped by a fine cast, a first-rate script by Nick Hornby and tight direction by Lone Scherfig, the film is a smart, moving but not inaccessible entry in the coming-of-age canon.

It's a superb cinematic work and an appropriately serious one, given its subject matter and its intentions.

No true fan of science fiction -- or, for that matter, cinema -- can help but thrill to the action, high stakes and suspense built around a very original chase movie.

Winsome, touching and arguably the funniest Pixar effort ever, the gorgeously rendered, high-flying adventure is a tidy 90-minute distillation of all the signature touches that came before it.

It is a work of great fantasy and charm that will delight children ages 3 to 100.

Hysterically funny yet melancholy comedy.

Daniel Day-Lewis stuns in Paul Thomas Anderson's saga of a soul-dead oil man.

Bale again brilliantly personifies all the deep traumas and misgivings of Batman's alter ego, Bruce Wayne. A bit of Hamlet is in this Batman.

Powerful, stripped to its very essence and featuring a spectacular cast (of mostly non-professionals), Matteo Garrone's sixth feature film Gomorra goes beyond Tarrantino's gratuitous violence and even Scorsese's Hollywood sensibility in depicting the everyday reality of organized crime's foot soldiers.

There's really very little to say about this film beyond that it's absolutely brilliant.

A ferociously entertaining film.

Director Julian Schnabel and screenwriter Ronald Harwood have performed a small miracle in adapting for the screen Jean-Dominique Bauby's autobiography The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

The visual design of Wall-E is arguably Pixar's best. Stanton, who wrote the script with Jim Reardon from a story he concocted with Peter Docter, creates two fantastically imaginative, breathtakingly lit worlds.

Shot rivetingly by cinematographer Brooke Aitken, who combines digital, night-vision and thermal-imaging formats into a formidable package, the footage is edited tautly by Geoffrey Richman and enhanced measurably by J. Ralph's suspenseful score.

Brad Bird and Pixar recapture the charm and winning imagination of classic Disney animation.

A film whose lightness of touch rides a wave of family conflict to perfectly balance smiles and tears.

The film has enormous charm and zero pretense.

Anne Proulx's 1997 short story in the New Yorker has been masterfully expanded by screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana to provide director Lee with his best movie since "Sense and Sensibility" in 1995.

Under Eastwood's painstakingly stripped-down direction -- his filmmaking has become the cinematic equivalent of Hemingway's spare though precise prose -- the story emerges as that rarest of birds, an uplifting tragedy.

Superbly made and winningly acted by Brad Pitt in his most impressive outing to date.

An epic success and a history-making production that finishes with a masterfully entertaining final installment.

Greengrass has made not only a thoroughly fact-checked film but a film that uncontrovertibly comes from the heart.

A ferociously entertaining thriller with sympathetic characters, stunning set pieces and pulsating excitement.

Capote represents something unique in cinema.…Most eye-catching for critics and audiences in the weeks to come will be Philip Seymour Hoffman's brilliant metamorphosis into the persona of the late author.

One of the best war movies ever made, Downfall is a powerful and artistically masterful re-creation of the last days of the Third Reich.

With a delirious mix of the sublime and the silly, Hong Kong comedy king Stephen Chow Sing-chi has taken the kung fu comedy genre to new heights of chop-socky hilarity.