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.

Hysterically funny yet melancholy comedy.

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.

A ferociously entertaining film.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

A wondrous flight of fancy, a stop-motion-animated treat brimming with imaginative characters, evocative sets, sly humor, inspired songs and a genuine whimsy that seldom finds its way into today's movies.

The best one yet.

One of the best film musicals in years -- exuberant, sexy and life affirming in equal measure.

Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers does a most difficult and brave thing and does it brilliantly. It is a movie about a concept. Not just any concept but the shop-worn and often wrong-headed idea of "heroism."

The film, narrated ably by Leonardo DiCaprio, who seems to share the audience's amazement at what is appearing onscreen, is over too quickly in a mere 43 minutes. So line up and see it again.

Kill Bill-Vol. 2 puts to shame doubts entertained about aesthetic strategies or structural imbalance provoked by "Kill Bill-Vol. 1." Now that the entirety of Quentin Tarantino's epic revenge melodrama is on view, "Kill Bill" emerges as a brilliant, invigorating work, one to muse over for years to come.

This is one of the most wildly romantic movies in ages.

Not only (Kaufman's) most accessible and romantic screenplay, it's his most complete. The third act works like a charm and pulls all his themes, characters and conflicts together beautifully.

Pixar again hitches top-notch storytelling to the very best in CG animation.

Anurag Kashyap's Black Friday is a superb and devastating piece of cinema that with justification can be compared favorably to Gillo Pontocorvo's classic "The Battle of Algiers" in its dispassionate yet sweeping journalistic inquiry into cataclysmic social and political events.

The film comes down to a mesmerizing portrait of a man who in any other age would perhaps be deemed nuts or useless, but in the Internet age has this mental agility to transform an idea into an empire.

What this strange yet strangely beguiling film does is capture one of pop culture's great entertainers in the feverish grips of pure creativity.

This is a marvelous family story, tapping into all sorts of childhood dreams and nightmares involving Mommy, monsters and heroic youngsters. Selick's imaginative sets and puppets are in perfect pitch with Gaiman's fantasy.

Downey plays off his own bad-boy image wonderfully. The writers give him great lines to work with and ditto that for his Girl Friday, Gwyneth Paltrow's Pepper Potts, whose own svelte lines cannot be improved on.

The filmmakers were right to believe that a live-action version of this story would have failed to achieve the universality Persepolis does.

Now Eastwood turns on a dime and tackles not just his first war movie but two war movies of considerable scope and complexity. If he doesn't nail everything perfectly, he nevertheless has created a vivid memorial to the courage on both sides of this battle and created an awareness in the public consciousness at a most opportune moment about how war feels to those lost in its fog.

A fascinating mix of high-minded gossip and historical perspective, examines the clash of values -- of ritual and traditions versus media savvy and political ambition -- that leads to a crisis for the British monarchy.

Spicing up the entire package is a screenplay by Canet and Philippe Lefebvre that bristles with wit and energy.