Ridiculous comedies can be fine, but the ones that matter creep up close to the truth. This one lives in it.

Dropping by on the same people every seven years like an old friend - or an unwelcome relative - Apted has constructed a peerless, suspenseful work that develops character to a depth that would make Tolstoy jealous. If you have any interest in documentaries, watch the DVD of the first film, "7 Up" (49 Up hits DVD Nov. 14). You won't be able to stop.

A sublime meditation that is one of this year's wisest, warmest and funniest films.

What a sweet collision is Rescue Dawn: the American psycho meets the German kook.

Getting a small cohort of humanity dead right is an impressive artistic achievement, but Mike Leigh's beautifully modulated English drama Another Year advances even farther.

It's not a knock on Steven Spielberg to say he is history's finest maker of children's movies. His capacity to evoke simplicity, awe, beauty and unconditional love are his genius, and his vision of the children's story War Horse is a gorgeous, majestic fable about a boy who yearns to be reunited with his steed.

Deep, disturbing and funny.

56 Up is as good a point as any to get hooked on the magnificent half-century series of documentaries, beginning in 1964 with "7 Up."

Can’t possibly deserve your close attention. Yet it does, with distilled honky-tonk poetry and generous good humor. It’s one of the year’s best, most deeply felt films.

Despite the lingering aroma of Victorian rot shrouding 1961, An Education is excitingly young.

The White Ribbon is one of the finest films that ever repelled me, a holiday in the abyss.

An improbable but hilarious combine of losin’-it comedies and the rarefied, Europhile air of the Cinema du Twee.

The highest praise I can give a superhero movie is that it makes me forget about its 10-cent-comic-book soul.

The details are true and funny, played brilliantly.

Turns out to be one of the most absorbing films of the year. Plus it has lots of wiener jokes.

After seeing Everybody's Fine, Paul McCartney offered to write a song that plays over the closing credits. That may be because the whole movie is like a celluloid McCartney tune: warm and playful and sweetly earnest, but lightly funny, too, and crafted with consummate skill.

Two fins up for The Cove, a documentary that whales on evil Japanese fishermen who kill dolphins for lunch meat.

What "Rent" should have been, Once is: a Bohemian rhapsody.

The Wrestler offers something to pretty much everyone in the audience. Much like "The Sopranos," it creates a world that might make you feel utterly at home or exhilarated by strange horrors. Maybe both.

The Last King of Scotland is a parable shocking in its truth, jolting in its lack of sentimentality, Shakespearean in its vision of the doctor's catastrophic flaw.

Dizzy with celebrity, New York society and gay life (if all that isn't the same thing), Infamous is more fun. But "Capote" is a better movie.

Coppola works in weird ways, but the real Versailles was so much weirder.

Five people did escape, and they contribute their stories to the spellbinding documentary.

If Martin Scorsese were 30 and a Los Angeleno, he'd be making movies much like this one.

Actors tell us that dying is easy, comedy is hard. But comedies about dying are hardest of all.

It's a pulp story pinned to the screen with an ice pick of conscience in a manner that would have pleased Allen's idol, Ingmar Bergman.

Mighty entertainment that makes you feel sorry for the saps next door in the multiplex.

The movie all but proclaims U2 the world's best rock band. Somewhere, Mick Jagger's jaws are grinding.

There is too much funny here for a movie (even though it continues into the closing credits). Step Brothers should be a TV show.

The twists are executed superbly, right up to a climax that fits the David Mamet definition of what makes for a perfect ending: It is both surprising and inevitable.

The slacker comedy-drama-romance-whatever Gigantic will fulfill all your alterna-movie weirdness requirements.

A brutally funny deconstruction, a hybrid of “Watchmen” and “Superbad” filtered through John Woo. It’s a boisterously original piece of entertainment . . . that isn’t for everyone. Note the rating, which should be triple-R, as in Really, Remarkably R.

Lymelife, set amid marital decay and teen frustration, isn't quite the "American Beauty" of the 516 area code, but it'll do.

Few documentaries have covered such an important matter so convincingly and with such clarity. When it comes to public education, we are all New Jerseyans.

The movie could -- should -- be a symphony, and it frequently makes excellent use of spare classical music. When Brosnan pipes up, he is as welcome as a car alarm.

It's strange enough to be raised by your aunt. For young John Lennon, things get stranger still when he finds himself dating his mother.

A small but shattering film that marks its writer-director, Derek Cianfrance, as an artist of real depth, observes relationship dynamics at a molecular level, welling with as much understanding as Ingmar Bergman's "Scenes from a Marriage."

As a former president of the United States remarked, "Childrens do learn," and what they learn in the heartbreaking yet thrillingly hopeful documentary Waiting for 'Superman' is that adults are finally starting to notice how badly kids have been betrayed by teachers unions.

Cool It -- complete with its own slide show and witty graphics -- amounts to a devastating rebuttal to Gore-ism.

For boldness of execution as well as vision, The Red Chapel stands out as a singular, important comedy.

A deeply felt evocation of a place and a people by writer-director Matt Porterfield, who set this largely improvised film in his own lower-class Baltimore neighborhood.

Adding goofy uncertainty to shoulders as wide as the East River makes for a disarming hero in one of the spiffiest WWII action yarns ever to march out of Hollywood.

This is all as pure and sunny as lemonade.

I still can't believe I Melt With You went there. Over the top, off the hook and just plain bonkers, it makes its mark.

Thanks to his (Oldman) mastery, and Alfredson's, no film this year left me hungrier for a sequel.

The excruciating and the hilarious mingle nearly to perfection in this marvelously visualized and deeply felt British film.

This movie doesn't get huffy, it gets laughs.

Everything Must Go is cinematic pointilism. The big picture is familiar -- busted middle-age man, suburban alcoholic despair -- yet the details are so finely rendered that the overall impression is potently strange.

The funniest movie I've seen in more than a year.

Gorgeous set pieces thrill the senses, but there is philosophical inquiry as well. "Alien" was, after all, just "Jaws" in space, but Prometheus ponders where evil comes from and how it conquers its makers.

The surprise of Ted is that it goes for honest Spielbergian wonder, too, and even earns some tears.

File this one in the same category of edgy Long Island comedies as the equally smart 2009 Alec Baldwin film "Lymelife."

Unlike many films that hope to be called black comedy, it does not skimp on either the black or the comedy.

This small movie carries great allegorical weight as it echoes the Manson Family, the long list of failed utopian communes that culminated in Bolshevism and the one-child policy that in China has prevented the births of untold numbers of girls.

Sincerely directed by one woman (Phyllida Lloyd, who did "Mamma Mia!") and smartly written by another (Abi Morgan), the film stars an unsurpassable Meryl Streep, whose ability to empathize with her characters has never been more gloriously impassioned than it is in this titanic performance.

A bit more context about some of the topics the witnesses discuss would have been welcome, but Whitaker's stark, unshowy style is probably the most effective way to approach 9/11.

Werner Herzog looks at the death penalty in Into the Abyss, and as is almost always the case, to look through his eyes is to marvel.

Like a dedicated teacher, this is a film that stays with you.

Bouncy vocal rearrangements of pop songs, sparkling choreography and a hilarious script make for a movie that's made to be obsessed over, seen 50 times, quoted as devoutly as such sacred texts as "Heathers" and "Bring It On."

Picture Graham Greene crossed with James Bond, with a splash of Sacha Baron Cohen, and you'll start to imagine the nervy talents of Mads Brügger, the fearless Danish filmmaker who has for a second time come up with a stunning, funny, and vital piece of guerilla cinema.

A dizzying lowlife saga that’s fast, smart, wicked, sort of ambitious and blazingly ironic. It’s as unpredictable as a Lindsay Lohan drive to the grocery store, as overstuffed as the pictures on Anthony Weiner’s Twitter feed and as hilarious as me on the bench press.

Don't let the quiet, indie stylings of The Place Beyond the Pines fool you. This is a big movie with a lot on its mind. Slowly, it unfolds into a kind of epic.

A fantastically entertaining biography.

McAleer is an expert practitioner of cinematic jujitsu.

This exhilarating brain-twister is a nonstop visual, aural and intellectual delight, steeped in movie conventions and yet fizzing with freshness. It’s what happens when film noir goes out to a rave.