It is a work of obsessive artisanal discipline and unfettered artistic vision. You have never seen anything like it.

Like "Inglourious Basterds," Django Unchained is crazily entertaining, brazenly irresponsible and also ethically serious in a way that is entirely consistent with its playfulness.

Every shot — everything you see, and everything you don’t — imparts a disturbing and thrilling sense of discovery.

Even as Mr. Mungiu maintains a detached, objective point of view, allowing the details of the story to speak for themselves, he also allows you to glimpse the complex and volatile inner lives of his characters.

In its time, this film represented the arrival of something new, and even now it can feel like a bulletin from the future.

What Maisie Knew lays waste to the comforting dogma that children are naturally resilient, and that our casual, unthinking cruelty to them can be answered by guilty and belated displays of affection. It accomplishes this not by means of melodrama, but by a mixture of understatement and thriller-worthy suspense.

Everything depends on the subtlety of the direction and the charisma of the performances. Augustine is intellectually satisfying partly because it communicates its ideas at the level of feeling, through the uncanny power of Soko’s face and body.

With its swift, jaunty rhythms and sharp, off-kilter jokes, Frances Ha is frequently delightful. Ms. Gerwig and Mr. Baumbach are nonetheless defiant partisans in the revolt against the tyranny of likability in popular culture.

One of the most subtle and inspired comedies you'll see this year.

This dream of a movie is set in such a place; with its delicate shifts of tone, it could be a fairy tale by Faulkner

Fastidious and smart, and Ms. Swinton's fixated intensity isn't ever remote; we're always aware of how deeply she's feeling. Her work is magnificent.

Even better on a second viewing because the film is such a pure expression of the director's love for the music, a love so infectious it should leave you elated.

Has enough going on to make it a classic. You'll want to own it.

Praise will stick with you. It's more than worthy of its title.

Their comedy gives audiences that have never seen anything like it a hilarious window on a new world.

This film has a conquering spirit. The dankness is replaced by an optimistic blast of sunlight at the end, a contrast to the earlier lighting dimmed with human misery. Mr. Frears blasts away the blight, though he doesn't have to work to restore Okwe's dignity. It shines through from the start.

There hasn't been a film in years to use creative energy as efficiently as Monsters, Inc.

Who would have expected Ms. Zellweger --- and Miramax -- to come through in a musical? And it's one of the few Christmas entertainments to run under two hours. Who couldn't love that?

One of the funniest, and most telling, films of the year. The filmmakers call "Kid" a documentary, but the movie is one of the unusual kind that is firmly lodged inside the subject's perspective.

Delicate and altogether satisfying romantic comedy.

Mr. Patwardhan has located so much information and found so many willing interview subjects that his War and Peace has a riveting intelligence all its own and earns its epic title.

Mr. Peck's gambit works, and the result is a great film and a great performance.

Never has a film so strongly been a product of a director's respect for its source. Mr. Jackson uses all his talents in the service of that reverence, creating a rare perfect mating of filmmaker and material.

The movie is full of juices that give it a healthy, pungent flow.

There is no denying that Amélie is, to paraphrase its title, fabulous.

Doesn't try to cram messages of uplift down its audience's gullet. It's a great eggscape from banality.

It's undeniably a trifle, but rarely is something like this done with such skill and, well, savoir-faire.

There's more to everyone here than we're initially led to think. The Good Girl is like a neurotically charged post-millennial take on the trailer-park comedies that Jonathan Demme once claimed for himself.