The year's most thrilling, FEELING mainstream movie.

Kidman, in a career-best performance, and Eckhart lend pitch-perfect calibration to the couple's shared and separate agonies. It's as if previous treatments of the subject were a series of failed experiments, and Rabbit Hole is the Eureka! moment.

The rewards for paying attention are mammoth and exhilarating. This is a high-IQ movie that gives viewers an IQ high.

This is a true-life heist movie, and the thieves not only got away with their billions, they're still doing business. Pay attention and blow a gasket.

It's a cocktail-party movie with a Molotov-cocktail finish: a tribute to the 88-year-old auteur's artistry - and his con artistry as well.

A document that is raw, eloquent, horrifying and essential.

Caught in the movie's grip, you are simply hypnotized by the damned thing.

An expensive flop and the latest Iraq movie to be shunned by the mass audience, Green Zone was still the year's most visceral, thrilling entertainment.

On its bright face, The Imitation Game, written by Graham Moore and directed by Morten Tyldum, fits into that cozy genre of tortured-genius biopics that sprout like kudzu just in time for the Oscars. But that’s not fair to the film, which outthinks and outplays other examples of the genre.

We the viewers are its beneficiaries, watching and waiting for something awful to happen. Here it does, first subtly, then spectacularly. The twist is not revealed until the last shot--if you keep your avid eyes open.

A work of great joy and expressiveness, a tower of song with room for everybody.

It is a ripping yarn and a spectacularly new and odd vision.

It is among the best and most delicately managed films of the year.

His films will never be mainstream fare; audiences who wander into the theater may well find them derisive, needlessly shocking, perhaps unforgivable. But I'd call them, and especially Life During Wartime, unforgettable.

The Grapes of Wrath is possibly the best picture ever made from a so-so book. It is certainly the best picture Darryl F. Zanuck has produced or Nunnally Johnson scripted. It would be the best John Ford had directed if he had not already made "The Informer."

This is a declaration of love: The Opposite of Sex is the smartest, edgiest, most human and handsomely acted romantic comedy in elephant years.

Even by the out-there standards of "Basic Instinct" and "Showgirls," Paul Verhoeven’s latest, Elle, is a thing to behold. Part thriller, part obsidian-black comedy, part cerebral firebomb, it’s confrontational, terrible and glorious. You almost can’t believe such a picture exists.

Mark down the date: June 27. That's when American moviegoers will see this perfect storm of a film, and the tiny force of nature that is Quvenzhané Wallis.

The movie is not just spectacle; it's got a tender, ultimately tragic love story and enough deadly political scheming to fill a Gaddafi playbook. Indeed, in its narrative cunning, luscious production design and martial-arts balletics, Detective Dee is up there with the first great kung-fu art film, King Hu's 1969 "A Touch of Zen." We'd call it "Crouching Tiger, Freakin' Masterpiece."

In 2007, Jamie Foxx won Best Actor for his subtle performance as Ray Charles. Boseman exceeds that solid standard. Incarnating James Brown in all his ornery uniqueness, he deserves a Pulitzer, a Nobel and instant election to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

A coda that will have the movie's audience gasping in exhilarated exhaustion, whispering astonished gratitude to Sokurov for having created vigorous art out of 21st century video technique and asking themselves, "What's the Russian word for Wow!?"

No matter what you take away from writer-director Halina Reijn’s daring, alluring, and ultimately joyful Babygirl, one idea flutters around it like a potent perfume cloud: both desire and the memory of it are what make us feel alive.

It is a whale (2 hr. 41 min.) of a story, and in the telling of it, British Director David Lean (Brief Encounter, Great Expectations) does a whale of a job. He shows a dazzlingly musical sense and control of the many and involving rhythms of a vast composition. He shows a rare sense of humor and a feeling for the poetry of situation; and he shows the even rarer ability to express these things, not in lines but in lives. Most important of all, he understands the real nature of the story he is telling.

There’s something about A Complete Unknown that pushes against traditional Dylan worship and cuts a path toward something far more beautiful, flawed, and human.

What Lawrence does in Die, My Love is so delicately textured, even within its bold expressiveness, and its fiery anger, that it leaves you scrambling for adjectives. It’s the kind of performance you go to the movies for, one that connects so sympathetically with the bare idea of human suffering that it scares you a little.

It takes its place on the very short list of the unforgettable movies about war and its ineradicable and immeasurable costs.

BlacKkKlansman is both hilarious and exquisitely direct, and had it been made before November 2016, you might call Lee’s approach a little alarmist. But if anything, he’s restrained. This is an angry film as well as a hugely entertaining one, and Lee has complete control over its shifting tone, minute by minute.

If this were not such great American-vernacular moviemaking -- hilarious yet hypnotic -- one would be tempted to see something Greek in the tragedy that Ed never comprehends.