It's a mistake to confuse Zero Dark Thirty for "truth" – that would be a disservice to the high level of craftsmanship, from first-billed actors to below-the-line production crew, at work in this movie fiction – but there is admirably little fat on its bones.

The tension is enough to make you slightly sick, and the overall mood of the thing is deeply dispiriting, but then, nobody ever said that war isn't hell.

I laughed more (sincerely, full-throatedly) at Toy Story 3’s smart comedy than at any other film of the still-young summer movie slate.

A triumph in anguish.

A lovely, quietly thrilling thing.

I don't know if the many plot swerves withstand a second viewing, but I suspect the meat of the matter – the swooning visuals, the expert choreography, the teasing love story – does.

Bahrani's small marvel of a film.

The actors, as a powerful and convincing ensemble, are equally understated and just as devastating.

Moments of almost unbearable beauty.

It's huge and bewildering and it hurts to watch, but it hurts so good it's gorgeous.

One wishes for a chewier whodunit – there just aren't enough clues for the viewer to work with – and the reveal of the mole is perversely anticlimactic. But maybe that's just stickling. We always knew Smiley'd get his man.

It’s not quite as brutalizing as McEwan’s brilliant source novel – it bears too much of a Great Art buff – but it ravishes nonetheless in its grand exploration of the sins of the daughter and a lifetime spent making reparations.

The Vuillards, however fractured, know one another's rhythms and rituals, and Desplechin knows just how to convey them in the subtlest of ways.

Anderson and his co-writer Roman Coppola have crafted an elegant and emphatic metaphor for adolescence, that tumultuous province of firsts and lasts.

Looper makes a full-meal entertainment out of piecemealing genres: It boasts the kicky mental gymnastics that come with time-travel terrain, the relentless rapid heart rate of a crackerjack thriller, and the bursts of extreme violence, buttressed with black humor, of a modern actioner.

This is an animated film that happily has room for both an existentialist dread of death and a grinning joie de vivre.

Excepting the occasional shot that forces the eye on a particular dancer, Wenders largely films the action in a way that re-creates the effect of attending a performance in a proscenium theatre – only without having to scrabble for the best seat in the house. No matter where you are, you're already in it.

It packs a hefty emotional wallop.

Delicious.

Screamingly funny. Like I said, terrific stuff.

Funny and touching, Frances Ha may very well be the most eloquent take yet on a generation in flux – a cinematic talk-back to so many Atlantic articles, minus the scolding and the statistics, and uncharacteristically (for Baumbach) uncynical.

Grief doesn't exactly sound like a promising starting point for a love story, but, really, what a bounty Mills presents to us of beauty and buoyancy and possibility.

Fish Tank isn't an easy watch – it's like two hours of ache – but there are rich rewards to be had in the many ways Arnold and her terrific team rend us to and fro.

Nothing short of majestic.

The sum is something deeply profound: about awkwardness, culture clash, failed connections, and – ultimately – the strength that comes from surviving a trial by fire.

It's all about the little things, and the way in which the little things can steal into your heart in big ways.

I can't remember the last time I felt so seduced by a film.

This drama-horror hybrid, set within a New York ballet company, strikes a tone more along the lines of the terrifying hallucinatories of Aronofsky's breakout film, "Requiem for a Dream," revisiting, too, favorite themes of monster mommies and female hysteria.