The most disturbing and effective thriller I've seen in many moons. Rarely, indeed almost never, is such high-wattage brainpower coupled with pitch-perfect acting and an exquisite, unfakable sense of cinema.

The grandest and most vigorous movie he's (Frears) made in at least a decade. Like Okwe himself, it rises above its limitations, and it's just a little bit bigger than the landscape around it.

A marvelous ensemble cast and all the visceral impact and moment-to-moment tension of a fine thriller, together with the distinctive visual style of an art film.

An extraordinary and original creation. It belongs alongside "Amores Perros" and "Memento" on a shortlist of 2001's most exciting revelations.

The ultimate lesson in less-is-more cinema, an intimate and revelatory character study as well as a brilliant, almost symphonic rendering of the distracted, anxious, half-alienated and half-meditative state in which we spend vast amounts of our lives.

A work of loopy, original comic genius.

But the greatness of Chinatown, unappreciated by my adolescent self, lies not in its cynical view of the California dream (that's too easy) but in its fatalistic, even tragic conception of America and indeed of human nature.

A movie for hardcore film geeks and regular folk alike, a stunning, and stunningly improbable, fusion of postmodern pastiche and old-school Hollywood melodrama. It's both a marvelous technical accomplishment and a tragic love story that sweeps you off your feet.

Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman and Julianne Moore bring dignity and Oscar-worthy performances to The Hours, a lovingly crafted meditation on death, loss and literature.

I recognize how few horror movies I've seen before or since that ever manage to capture such a tangible feeling of menace.

Hirschbiegel and Eichinger, along with their large, brave and talented cast, have done something extraordinary for their generation of Germans, and for the world. They have willfully entered their grandparents' dirtiest, clammiest chamber of secrets.

With all his artifice, his prodigious narrative risks and seemingly undisciplined mélange of styles and tones, Desplechin has made a film that feels more like real life than anything I've seen in years, from any source. It's a masterpiece.

One of the greatest of all Holocaust films.

One of the greatest films of recent years.

It's terrific! Shot by the brilliant cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle ("Dogville," "28 Days Later," etc.) and anchored by amazing performances from identical (but not conjoined) twins Harry and Luke Treadaway, Brothers of the Head is not a freak show, or a knockoff "Rocky Horror" camp celebration. It's a work of powerful atmosphere and significant mystery. Plus, it rocks.

Old Joy is only 76 minutes long, but it has the contemplative power of Buddhist meditation. Reichardt gives us long, stoned takes of rural roads; shots of birds, insects and slugs in the spectacular Oregon rain forest; interludes with Mark's dog, Lucy. Some viewers may well be bored, or monumentally irritated, by this. I found it masterly, riveting.

The latest riveting, heartbreaking chapter to one of the supreme creations of documentary filmmaking, the "7 Up" series.

Requiem, the new film from German director Hans-Christian Schmid, is absolutely astonishing. See it if you possibly can.

Manufactured Landscapes may tell you more about how the 21st century world actually works than you really want to know, but it's a heartbreaking, beautiful, awful and awesome film.

One of the year's best movies...It's one of the simplest and best re-creations of downscale urban England during the gritty post-punk years ever put on screen, and it's both upsetting and very funny.

The most powerful documentary I've seen all year, and one of the two or three best films ever made about an artist or musician.

Despite their terrible ordeal these women are heroes, not victims. As Mungiu makes clear in the casual, brilliant final scene of this amazing movie, heroes persevere.

One of the most extraordinary accomplishments in recent American nonfiction filmmaking. It hits hard as to facts, and opens its eyes to inexpressible mysteries. It strikes a clear moral and philosophical stance, and then -- as part of that philosophical stance, actually -- reveals its villain as a tragic and sympathetic figure.

Chang's images of the Yangtze and the new megacities replacing the villages on its banks are spectacular, and his cast of characters rival any fiction film I've seen recently.

A terrific comic-book movie, the most completely satisfying and unsettling one I've ever seen.

If possible, Roberts' movie-within-a-movie is even more amazing than it sounds. She captures a tale of courage, heroism and tragedy more thrilling than any Hollywood spectacle.

Hunger is a mesmerizing 96 minutes of cinema, one of the truly extraordinary filmmaking debuts of recent years. It's also an uneasy, unsettling experience and is meant to be.

Austrian director Spielmann has long awaited discovery by a wider world, and for my money the gorgeous, brooding, unpredictable neo-noir Revanche is one of the year's best films.

What's so remarkable about Louie Psihoyos' documentary The Cove isn't just that it's a powerful work of agitprop that's going to have you sending furious e-mails to the Japanese Embassy on your way out of the theater. That's definitely true, but the effectiveness of The Cove also comes from its explosive cinematic craft, its surprising good humor and its pure excitement.

A brilliant and gruesome work of cinematic invention as well as a passionate and painful human love story.

A bona fide summer delight loaded with action, humor, nostalgia, a veritable blizzard of pop-culture references and general good vibes.

Its combination of dazzling cinematic craft, psychological insight and black humor make this one of the year's moviegoing musts -- and even or especially at her most deranged, Kim Hye-ja's amazing mother is profoundly, passionately human.

An Education captures the very limited possibilities for female liberation in early-'60s London -- with massive social change on the distant horizon, but not here yet -- in exquisite detail.

Bronson owes a little or a lot to Kubrick's "Clockwork Orange," but if that's a crime I wish more people would commit it.

It's a classic and even charming yarn of vanity, hubris and redemption, played out against the bizarre, intense alternate universe of '70s English soccer.

Shot in spectacular black-and-white by cinematographer Christian Berger, and marvelously acted by a first-rate German ensemble, The White Ribbon captures a mood of thickening tension and mounting violence.

It's a highly original film made in a familiar context, and an exciting moviegoing experience you shouldn't miss.

This movie's an absolute knockout. I know it's only June, but I'm damned if this isn't the breakthrough American film of the year.

A terrifying, absorbing 93 minutes spent in hell. It captures the intensity of warfare in a visceral fashion that recalls Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket" and Oliver Stone's "Platoon."

It's a distinctive, ominous and hypnotic work of cinema.

It might well be the most important film you see this year, and the most important documentary of this young century.

It's a tremendously absorbing blend of history, journalism and drama. As soon as it was over, I wanted to watch it again.

One of the best movies of the year.

A movie so rousing, so real and so full of complicated emotions that it all feels brand-new.

A fascinating, mature, beautifully crafted work of art, from a director who continues to surprise us. Sofia Coppola has absorbed the Italian avant-garde more completely than her father ever did, and has made a film about celebrity in the vein of Antonioni and Bertolucci, a film about Hollywood in which she turns her back on it, possibly forever.

A pitch-perfect blend of darkness and sweetness, built around a masterful performance by a great actor.

What he (Beauvois) conveys, through austere but spectacular visual language, magnificent liturgical singing and an ensemble cast headed by the terrific French veteran actors Lambert Wilson and Michael Lonsdale, is something of the "why."

Jane Eyre is a passionate, impossible love story, one of the most romantic ever told. But it's also a cold, wild story about destruction, madness and loss, and this movie captures its divided spirit like none before.

In this quiet, beautiful and terrifying fable about a group of lost pioneers, Reichardt combines epic ambition with a focus on intimate, personal detail.

It's a brilliant work of cinema, a nonfiction film as intense and visceral as any drama, and an emotional and moral experience that feels horrifying and exhilarating at almost the same moment.

My first thought was: It's a temple, a church, a cathedral -- maybe the first one ever built -- and the better-known ones in Rome and Jerusalem and Istanbul are just later versions of the same thing.

Visually spectacular, with wide-screen cinematography from Nobuyasu Kita, impressive, full-scale sets and special effects and exhausting, immersive action scenes, 13 Assassins is pretty nearly the samurai classic it sets out to become.

If it plays in any theaters beyond New York and Los Angeles, that'll probably come as a surprise to its distributor (the estimable Lorber Films). None of that diminishes the power and intensity of this claustrophobic mini-masterpiece of the Japanese antiwar tradition, which blends a B-movie aesthetic, brilliant use of montage and documentary elements and a scathing critique of nationalism and militarism.

More broadly this is a resonant, vivid and finally heartbreaking tale about the universal difficulty of marriage and the endless self-delusion of the human condition, driven by a trio of amazing dramatic performances.

Under the guise of being nothing more than a quasi-documentary about two comedians cutting up and scarfing gourmet cuisine, The Trip may be the wryest and most affecting of all the recent movies about middle-aged male angst.

A stereotype-shattering movie that's full of them, and one that may permanently change the way you think about violent crime in America.

Once you start to ride with the rapturous, gorgeous, digressive symphony of images and words and music in this film it's completely absorbing and unlike anything you've ever seen.

It's first and foremost a visual and sonic symphony, and a Dante-esque journey through a New York nightworld where words are mostly useless or worse.

A ravishing, emotional and often very funny film about a wedding gone wrong, the end of the world and a woman suffering from profound depression.

It's a handsome and stimulating film, noteworthy more for its terrific acting and provocative ideas than for any kind of dark Cronenbergundian genius.

Instead of sticking with the familiar, Scorsese has followed his impulses into something that feels entirely new but is still distinctively his. He has made a potential holiday classic, an exciting, comic and sentimental melodrama that will satisfy children and adults alike and reward repeat viewings for many years to come.

Fiennes' crackerjack Coriolanus stays true to the clever, almost mean-spirited twists and turns of the story, and preserves the authentic flavor and texture of the language.

The most exciting action flick of the year, by a huge margin.

Something close to a contemporary masterwork, and maybe the best foreign-language film of the year, right at the tail end.

You don't have to know the first thing about modern dance to be transported to an alternate state of consciousness by Pina, which is utterly free of Wenders' cloying sentimentality (perhaps because it's an elegy for a dead friend) and might be the first of his films I've loved all the way through since his 1987 masterpiece, "Wings of Desire."

Any way you slice it, it's a brave and brilliant act of defiance.

A breakthrough movie after its own fashion, a mysterious existential thriller that's brilliantly acted and masterfully directed, without a second of wasted screen time.

Rapturous and hilarious.

Easy Money may well be the crime film of the year, or the decade.

If The Dark Knight Rises is a fascist film, it's a great fascist film, and arguably the biggest, darkest, most thrilling and disturbing and utterly balls-out spectacle ever created for the screen. It's an unfriendly masterpiece that shows you only a little circle of daylight, way up there at the top of our collective prison shaft - but a masterpiece nonetheless.

Mythic, thrilling and brilliantly made motion picture.

This is an elegant, powerfully emotional and courageous film, worth seeing entirely on its own artistic terms, and also for what it conveys about the complexity of African-American life and the resurgence of African-American cultural expression.

Whatever sense you make (or don't) of the spectacular, hallucinatory Holy Motors, it's the coolest and strangest movie of the year, and once it gets its druglike hooks in your brain, you'll never get them out again.

Its too-muchness is also the source of its power; I was absolutely never bored, and felt surprised when the movie ended. It's an amazing, baffling, thrilling and (for many, it would appear) irritating experience, and for my money the most beautiful and distinctive big-screen vision of the year.

Whatever moment of inspiration caused Spielberg to cast her (Sally Field) as Mary Todd Lincoln, it was sheer genius, because this is a role that demands bigness.

One of the year's best films precisely because it can't be boiled down to a message or synopsis. It's an exercise in style that risks trashiness in search of transcendence, and it's a sizzling celebration of the power of music, the power of images, and the electric, destructive power of the human body.

A sweeping and magnificent work of cinematic craft, by far the best film of Bigelow's career.

This is an unforgettable love story set at the close of day, as tragic and beautiful in its way as "Tristan und Isolde," and a portrait of the impossible beauty and fragility of life that will yield new experiences to every viewer and every viewing.

If you have the patience to watch this film develop and unfold, like some bizarre night-blooming orchid, what you'll see is not just the last movie released in 2012, but possibly the most original of them all.

I also understood that while this movie is deliberately constructed so that almost nobody will “get it” or like it – and I’m not sure how I feel about that perversity – it’s a masterpiece despite that, or because of that or just anyway.

A masterful accomplishment...teems with its own sense of life, crackles with daring, walks the tightrope between satire and pathos with a rare assuredness.

Turns a hysterical night of African-American humor into the hottest little picture of the summer.

It's a difficult film to follow and at 172 minutes is maybe a half-hour too long. But simply as a sensory experience The Fast Runner is amazing.

It's a funny, strange, sad and wonderful picture, packed with delightful performances by Hollywood stars and made by a director with a startling facility for the form and an expansive cinematic imagination.

What emerges is an astonishing debut, unlike anything else you'll see this year.

Above all a cracking good yarn that earns its laughter, its wonder and its tears.

Extraordinary.

A sprawling and adventurous tale of teen alienation, might just be the movie that pushes the Japanese new wave out of the film-geek ghetto.

One of the most exciting Hollywood action films in years, and the best Vietnam movie since "Apocalypse Now."

One of the finest cops-and-robbers thrillers of recent years.

For all its flaws, In the Bedroom is an unusual accomplishment, a serious drama about violence and morality that plays out with a fatalistic intensity somewhere between Greek tragedy and film noir.

It's a dark and dazzling spectacle.

The thing is, it works. Or at least it works for me. I left the theater convinced that House of Fools is Konchalovsky's best work in almost 20 years (which it is) and that it might be something close to a masterpiece.

This movie may not have the highest production values you've ever seen, but it's the work of an artist, one whose view of America, history and the awkwardness of human life is generous and deep.

A big movie for the ages, full to the brim with sympathy, imagination and sheer visual delight.

Soderbergh's film is probably not the equal of either Tarkovsky's 1972 predecessor or the memorably Byzantine prose of Lem's novel, but in the end, almost despite himself, this able craftsman has made a brave and lovely companion piece to both of them. His ending is pure cinema at its most marvelous and moving.

A highly enjoyable failure, a quandary that can't resolve itself.

Offers an exquisite tour of the twilight zone between high school and the so-called real world, as well as between bohemian subculture and the even stranger culture of America at large.

An elegantly crafted entertainment, balanced between the psychological and the supernatural, that gets extra credit for not relying on computer effects.

Inevitably a little patchier and less startlingly original than its predecessor -- S2 is an ingenious, often hilarious, movie that does nothing to diminish the well-deserved cult reputation of its director.

I love Jackson's "Rings" saga despite his propensity for whimsical animation whenever he tries to strike a chord of dread or menace.

Features an astonishing pair of lead performances and one of this year's most impressive directing debuts. If this movie isn't quite the contempo-Greek tragedy it wants to be, it's still a powerful, unforgettable meditation on fate, cultural collision and the morality of renovating a house that isn't really yours.

A surprising, puzzling and in many ways brilliant work.

Creates such memorable images out of squalid surroundings that I sometimes wondered whether I was being distracted from the devastating stories of these kids by the beautiful cinematography.

This bloody celebration finally gives the American Revolution the epic it deserves.

Masterfully paced and constructed, and the performances are memorable.

One of the most beautiful and endearing nature films you've ever seen, despite being filmed almost entirely within a major metropolis, and a love story that will repeatedly reduce you to tears.

Although Turtles Can Fly is a lyrical, often lovely film with touches of humor, it's also a remorseless tragedy that doesn't offer its child protagonists any false redemption.

A powerful Czech drama with comic flourishes.

A nerve-jangling work of visual poetry and ironic juxtaposition, and a powerful human story of a group of brave young Americans.

I'm not going to tell you this is the best European film of the year, but it's definitely the hottest -- it's the one you want to run out and see as soon as you possibly can.

This delicious little period piece from Spanish writer-director Pablo Berger is like one of those really expensive chocolates, where you start out expecting a brief sugar buzz and end up surprised by the sophistication and delicacy of the flavor.

In some ways Shake Hands With the Devil hits harder than either "Hotel Rwanda" or the recent HBO film "Sometimes in April."

An inexpressibly beautiful and moving film, even though (or because) it seems to be about someone unimportant doing something irrelevant, perhaps something silly, in the face of insurmountable odds and a world that doesn't care.

Its stars, Emily Blunt and Natalie Press, are film newcomers who give startling performances. The photography is often breathtakingly original.

A tightly structured thriller with a brilliantly moody performance by Jeanne Moreau, and depending on your point of view, it's either one of the few genuine French noir films or an early entry in the New Wave.

You may feel lost or bewildered at times in 2046 (and I certainly did), and you may feel that Chow is suffering from self-inflicted wounds. But every new adventure with every new girl vibrates with possibility, and the filmmaking is so stunning that you may not care that this is less a movie with a plot and characters than a hermetically sealed universe of romantic regret.

A vital documentary in the truest sense.

Although Josh Olson's script was originally based on a graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke, it has now unmistakably become a Cronenberg movie, and one of his finest.

A compelling family melodrama somewhat in the manner of late John Cassavetes or early Robert Altman…the film combines high production values, terrific acting and a distinctively American lyricism in a combination you hardly ever see these days.

The cut-rate colossus didn't just ride the tide that sucked industrial jobs out of our towns and cities and spat out low-wage service-sector jobs in the sprawling exurbs -- it helped create it, and at the very least drastically accelerated it.

You can't imagine a soapier setup, but Gilles' Wife taken on its own terms is a spectacular achievement, a heartbreaking cinematic work that finely balances melodrama, family love story and devastating tragedy.

One of the most remarkable explorations of recent history ever conducted.

This is a fine example of British commercial filmmaking at its highest level of craftsmanship.

It's an electrifying, suspenseful film, full of street-level political drama.

Almost as exhilarating as it is depressing. Puiu's filmmaking technique is remarkable, and all the more so because it's almost invisible.

It's a magnificent miniature, a supremely tender work that's full of emotion and even sentimentality.

A haunting and riveting work, unlike anything else you can see at the movies and as such an explicit challenge to the unambitious, anesthetic character of most contemporary cinema. But is it easy, or delightful, or fun? It is not.

One of the best films of the year.

Burns has accomplished something both remarkable and reassuring. Remarkable because this is a compelling film, blending astonishing historical images with long-winded talking-head interviews, in vintage Burnsian style, and reassuring for almost the same reason.

I can't imagine anyone not being both horrified and fascinated by Stanley Nelson's Jonestown: The Life and Death of People's Temple.

So truly and exceptionally fine, a spiny and dispassionate little masterpiece of a marriage movie.

Another remarkable chapter in the career of Asia's most important living filmmaker. After "Pan's Labyrinth," this is the movie to see this season.

The GoodTimes Kid has a whimsy, a passion, a sophistication and, above all, a vigor that's mostly drained out of Amerindie cinema over the last decade or so.

It's a carefully and almost classically balanced combination of ingredients, blending dirty-faced realism (so much more damning because it judges and condemns no one) with mystical fable of quest and homecoming.

A magical and supernally beautiful meditative drug-trip head-space picture (a full-fledged ZZM, q.v. above) for which all Euro-film masochists should rearrange their schedules. It'll be out on DVD soon, and that's great. But Garrel's films are almost never seen on the big screen, and this one's worth it.

What feels at first like a quiet, straightforward picture builds into one of the richest and most satisfying of the year so far, in any genre or any language.

Stop Making Sense is so beautifully choreographed that in some ways it's more like theater than a rock show. [Review of re-release]

It's a tremendous experience, whatever it is; the kind of thing supposed art-movie audiences used to tolerate and pretty much don't anymore.

I was thrilled and transported by it. It's a two-hour movie, and I'm only sorry it isn't two or three times as long.

Arias' blend of traditional cell animation and 3-D CGI effects is thoroughly mind-blowing, and the film's visual sensibility is utterly distinctive.

Pitch-perfect social comedy.

A wrenching, funny and wise little picture, with a diva-like junior star at its center.

May well be the most exciting documentary of the year so far. I guess it took a British director, David Sington, to capture the story of the dozen American men who walked on the moon -- the only human beings in our species history yet to visit another celestial body.

It's the most original picture by an American director I've seen this year, and also the most delightful.

A dark and mesmerizing immersion into a distinctive world.

It's the most ambitious and impressive Coen film in at least a decade, featuring the flat, sun-blasted landscapes of west Texas -- spectacularly shot by cinematographer Roger Deakins -- and an eerily memorable performance by Javier Bardem, in a Ringo Starr haircut.

What makes the movie memorable is the precision of its tone, its finely calibrated combination of bitterness and warmth. Of course the acting is tremendous, and you'd expect nothing less.

Announces the arrival of a director radically out of step with the dominant conventions of American moviemaking, one who blends a social-realist vision and a passion for cinematic poetry.

It's both happy and sad. That's exactly the way to describe Hou's marvelous film as well.

A compact near-masterpiece that combines a slow-motion romantic comedy with a docudrama-style portrait of a remote, nomadic culture as it is gradually eroded by the tides of the 21st century.

Gibney's immensely funny and sad new motion picture Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson -- the "Dr." was a mail-order divinity degree -- is principally intended to rehabilitate Thompson and introduce his work to a new audience.

Crisply and competently filmed, Tell No One is an intriguing sample of new-school French cinema at the more commercial end of the spectrum.

A highly unusual combination of craft, emotion and integrity.

If this actually were 1968, the pipe-smoking sophisticates of "Esquire" and "Playboy" would be proclaiming I Served the King of England a nettlesome masterpiece. For whatever good it does this film today, I'll stick my pipe in my mug and agree.

Intimate, terrifying and positively riveting documentary.

The results, in my judgment, are stunning...and at certain moments during the film I wondered whether I had myself fallen asleep and was dreaming its hellish, haunted images.

This film never feels like copycat Americana to me. Its vision of the bleak, ruined, urban-cum-rural landscape of Naples and environs is distinctively European and postmodern, redolent of the spiritual and physical desolation Antonioni captured so memorably in "Red Desert."

Gray's peculiar accomplishment here is to turn this story into an intense emotional drama, beautifully photographed and profoundly ambiguous, suspended somewhere between realism and psychosexual allegory.

A work of tremendous passion, daring and delicacy.

What makes Tulpan remarkable are the extended unbroken scenes, both dramatic and comic.

A moving, surprising and provocative baseball flick that rises immediately to No. 1 with a bullet on my personal list.

Unmistaken Child stands above most others in offering us an intimate look at Tibetan Buddhism in action, with no external commentary or narration.

An engaging and often wrenching film, Food, Inc. covers a wide range of material, including the horrific, the humorous and the exemplary.

A distinctive achievement, a World War II movie unlike any other and one of the few films ever to address a topic that makes almost everyone want to look away: What happens to women in wartime.

Dark, sleek, funny and creepily infectious, the genetic-engineering horror-comedy Splice is a dynamic comeback vehicle for Canadian genre director Vincenzo Natali, who made a splash a few years ago with "Cube."

It's both a supremely controlled exercise in form and tone and an intriguing exploration of the ways new technology intersects with age-old questions of dominance, control and individuality, particularly in the school setting.

Absolute dynamite.

A remarkable accomplishment, a swirling, choral sea of humanity that forces us to confront that a man who does terrible things can also be a loving father who gives his infant daughter a bath.

Of course the films and the books each have to stand on their own, but Grisoni's stripped-down narrative definitely offers advantages, throwing some of the story's archetypal themes into sharper relief.

A gorgeous transcription of medieval decorative art and its themes into a contemporary animated narrative, one that should enthrall children older than 8 or so, along with the adults lucky enough to watch with them.

Well, if you care about movies, I'm telling you to carve out time for Vincere, a strange and powerful blend of historical fact and dreamlike imagination that captures both the charisma and the murderous madness of the young Benito Mussolini.

Coffin and Renaud's execution is fresh, sincere, often lovely and a great deal of fun -- and in this kind of movie, and this kind of movie summer, execution is everything.

Junger and Hetherington take our conflicted ideas about war and its let's-make-a-man-out-of-you purpose and throw them in our faces, in a way "Hurt Locker" never does.

The Kids Are All Right ranks with the most compelling portraits of an American marriage, regardless of sexuality, in film history.

The first Holocaust movie that's actually about another Holocaust movie, and in some peculiar way it brings us closer to the terror and tragedy of the original event.

It's a fascinating film, full of drama, intrigue, tragedy and righteous indignation, but maybe its greatest accomplishment is to make you feel the death of one young man -- a truly independent thinker who hewed his own way through the world, in the finest American tradition -- as a great loss.

This is a solid, spellbinding drama based closely on real history, which along the way offers a not-so-subtle commentary on the diverse, immigrant-rich society of contemporary France.

An imaginative and largely intact retelling of this gory, troubling, uniquely sweet and uniquely dark vampire tale.

All I can say about Timberlake's performance as the thoroughly odious, desperately seductive, textbook-case metrosexual Parker is that he brings so much reptilian fun that he unbalances the movie, almost fatally.

The good news is that Alfredson finds his footing in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest and delivers a rousing, grueling, almost operatically scaled finale to the series.

It's a warm, richly funny and highly enjoyable human story that takes an intriguing sideways glance at a crucial period in 20th-century history.

Bruno Dumont's Hadewijch is one of two small-release art films this season that deliver nuanced and fascinating portraits of faith.

An intimate, gorgeous and wrenching portrait of a working-class marriage in what may be a state of terminal decay.

Applause may present as gritty European realism, but the struggle inside Thea is almost theological in scale, and worthy of Milton or Kierkegaard.

Aladag's point, I think, is that no matter how righteous we may feel about this kind of zero-sum cultural collision, for the human beings involved it often results in unbearable tragedy.

It's by far the funniest and warmest movie Araki has ever made, with much less juvenile angst and much more command of his craft.

Trapero makes naturalistic films with plenty of sex, violence and dark humor; in Carancho you can see the influence of 1950s film noir, the ballsy renegades of 1970s American cinema (especially early Martin Scorsese) and a little touch of the Coen brothers.

A stylish and muscular thriller with some nifty twists and turns, a wicked sense of humor, several terrific performances and not one or even two but three of the best car chases in recent action-flick history.

I suppose the perfect ending to the chapter would be to report that The Beaver is a masterpiece. It isn't quite, but it does offer an astonishing and resonant performance by Gibson, who spends most of the movie playing two simultaneous characters, often in the same shot.

The Tree of Life is pretty much nuts overall, a manic hybrid folly with flashes of brilliance. But even if that's true it's a noble crazy, a miraculous William Butler Yeats kind of crazy, alive with passion for art and the world, for all that is lost and not lost and still to come.

A sad, sweet, funny and ultimately unforgettable love story about a man and a woman and a father and son, and also ranks among the most affectionate and sensitive portraits of homosexuality ever crafted by a straight person.

It's an expertly constructed thrill ride with wonderful atmosphere and tremendous good humor; if its heart of gold is artificial, that won't stop you from enjoying the heck out of it.

A haunting, beautifully told tale about a genuine American original.

A gripping, mysterious use of no-budget cinema at its finest, and an intimate character study with surprising emotional power.

This story about Joyce McKinney, a one-time beauty queen who found herself not once but twice at the center of outrageous, tabloid-friendly news stories, is another of Morris' alternately hilarious and disturbing inquiries into the slippery nature of truth.

You don't have to know or care anything about Formula One auto racing, or ever have heard of the legendary Brazilian driver Ayrton Senna, to become fully drawn into this film's universe.

It's also possible, I suppose, that a movie as deranged and grotesque and spectacular as Álex de la Iglesia's near-masterpiece The Last Circus, an overcooked allegory that's been dialed to 11 in all directions, simply doesn't appeal to you. But if you like your baroque sex and violence with a side dish of heavy-duty symbolism, and if the idea of an unholy collaboration between, say, Guillermo del Toro, Federico Fellini and William Castle appeals to you, then put The Last Circus on your must-see list right now.

Ultra-violent and ultra-stylish, Drive stands out in this year's Cannes competition for its calculated, hard-edged brilliance.

A chilly, fascinating thriller at odds with itself.

A terrifically crafted little movie that bounces off current events and the nation's downbeat mood ingeniously, and that it variously suggests comparisons with the early work of Terrence Malick, Stanley Kubrick and the Coen brothers. Yeah, I think it's that good, but please note that I also said "little."

My Joy has a bleak, grotesque, near-perfect poetry in its soul.

For the right kind of film buff, it's absolutely one of the most enjoyable pictures of the year - and if you've never heard of the guy before, I can't imagine a better place to start.

Full of imaginative, outrageous and egregiously insulting 3-D gags.

There are so many great things happening on almost every level of this movie, from Swinton's haunting, magnetic and tremendously vulnerable performance, which is absolutely free of condescension to the suburban American wife-ness of her character, to the many unsettling individual moments.

In the long and fraught history of Franco-American cultural relations, this movie is more than a peace offering; it's a loving, goofy, joyous French kiss.

What contemporary relevance you may find in Alfredson's chilly, marvelously acted and gorgeously composed new film of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - is a highly individual question.

What a handful of patient moviegoers may find in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, however, is a subtle, gorgeous and mysterious allegory that may be Ceylan's masterwork to date.

This is a wonderful, passionate, well-nigh unforgettable adaptation of a great novel about the horrors of love, and the wonderful fact that at least some of us live through it and come back for more.

Most famously, Belafonte ignited immense controversy both within and without the black community by repeatedly suggesting that Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice were the "house slaves" of the George W. Bush administration.

Terrifically choreographed, violent and amoral, but never wantonly cruel, Miss Bala is a knockout.

In the case of French actress and director Valérie Donzelli's striking and imaginative film Declaration of War, the autobiographical element is so strong that the movie's virtually a docudrama – but a dazzlingly strange docudrama with musical numbers, choreographed interludes and prodigious cinematic verve.

A dazzling and delightful work of modernist animation, a classic movie romance and a hip-swinging, finger-popping tale of musical revolution, Chico & Rita is the first big serendipitous surprise of 2012.

You either like this kind of ambitious, brave, borderless experiment or you don't, and I think it's absolutely magical and tragic.

Undefeated is a genuine crowd-pleaser, a rousing and inspirational flowers-in-the-junkyard fable of hope and possibility in grim circumstances.

Footnote has two of the best performances I've seen in world cinema over the past year: One from Shlomo Bar Aba (apparently best known in Israel as a stand-up comic and stage actor), playing the aging, bitter philologist Eliezer Shkolnik, and the other from Lior Ashkenazi, one of the country's best known movie stars, as his son and rival, Uriel.

It offers some of the best Asian martial-arts choreography of recent years and an electric, claustrophobic puzzle-palace atmosphere that'll leave you wrung out and buzzed.

Nasheed has traveled the world describing the Maldives as the Poland of global warming - meaning, of course, Poland in 1939. If his country cannot be saved from rising sea levels, he maintains, then there may be no saving Tokyo or Mumbai or New Orleans or New York.

Damsels in Distress is deliberately and purposefully irrelevant; its irrelevance is its strength. It's zany-in-quotation-marks and also flat-out zany. I laughed until I cried, and you may too (if you don't find it pointless and teeth-grindingly irritating). Either way, Whit Stillman is back at last, bringing his peculiar brand of counterprogramming refreshment to our jaded age.

This is a rigorously crafted film steeped in the French tradition, but it's meant to be a sensual and emotional experience, not a verbal or analytical one. Most of all, it's a spectacular eyeful.

But at his best - and his new movie, The Day He Arrives, is among his very best - Hong offers a strange mixture of magic, mystery, rueful melodrama and dry comedy that's like absolutely nothing else.

Safe is both a slavish imitation of cinema gone by and a movie for our time. I found it wickedly entertaining and perversely refreshing in its total lack of contemporary piety.

Both a wrenching journalistic exploration of real life and something close to great cinema.

A wonderful adventure film that's no less thrilling for its modest scale, and a film whose emotional power and intelligence sneak up on you.

It's a marvelously constructed personal journey, both wrenching and bittersweet, whose emotional ripple effects stay with you for days and weeks afterward.

With this sober, mournful, gorgeously mounted and marvelously acted drama, Miike connects himself to the greatest traditions of Japanese film and to the period of historical self-examination that followed the debacle of World War II. And he also crafts one hell of a fable of heroism.

Klayman's riveting, vérité-style film captures this burly, bigger-than-life figure over the past three years, as his activism has heightened, his art has grown increasingly confrontational and he has deliberately blurred the distinction between aesthetics and politics.

Not only does this film gloriously fulfill the potential that Ira Sachs has tantalized movie-lovers with for years, it also help explains what took him so long. Out of lost love comes a terrific work of art; it's the oldest story in the world, but it always feels new when it's done right.

The Master is often spectacular and never less than handsome, and it has numerous moments of disturbing and almost electrical power. I can't say, after one viewing, that I found it moving or satisfying as a whole, but I'm also not sure it's supposed to be. This is an almost apocalyptic tale of thwarted emotion - love cut short - set in a pitiless land of delusions.

I'm not ready to proclaim Looper a sci-fi masterpiece just yet; let's let it sit awhile. But it's a lean, mean, smart, violent picture with a bit of Stanley Kubrick edge, fueled by the terrific Gordon-Levitt.

It's simultaneously terrifying and hilarious, a full-on shotgun blast to the face of rediscovered 1970s weirdness, something like finding out that there's a classic Peckinpah film you've never seen, or that Wes Craven and Bernardo Bertolucci got drunk in Sydney one weekend and decided to make a movie together.

This may test your patience, it's not for everyone, it's a stretch to call this "entertainment" and so on. As far as Heathcliff being black – well, deal with it. Arnold's simply right about that one, and it's Laurence Olivier and Ralph Fiennes and all those costume-drama versions of the story that are wrong.

To Ben Affleck's credit, he's made a terrific, pulse-elevating thriller that will leave the audience cheering.

Skyfall is a push-pull between the past and the present, an effort to drag a symbol of maleness as iconic as the Union Jack bulldog on M's desk into a world of approximate gender equality and approximate acceptance of sexual difference. I'm not sure how sustainable that is over the long term; this is a smashing entertainment, but also one that feels over-engineered and constrained by its origins.

Great cinema? Hell, I don't know. But one of the most satisfying movies of the holiday season, that much is for sure.

It's a tight, taut, expertly crafted thriller from a director to watch.

The resulting film is both beautiful and fascinating, and offers a thrilling travelogue through a spectacular landscape few of us will ever see first-hand.

A troubling, exhilarating and ingeniously realized film that’s part stirring political drama and part devilish media satire.