One of the enormous pleasures of genre filmmaking is watching great directors push against form and predictability, as Mr. Romero does brilliantly in Land of the Dead. One thing is for sure: You won't go home hungry.

Audiard's superb remake improves on the original significantly, investing it with aesthetic grandeur and emotional depth.

One of this year's indisputably great films.

Like Hitchcock, Mr. Wong is at once a voyeur and fetishist par excellence.

Mr. Herzog is also no ordinary filmmaker. It is the rare documentary like Grizzly Man, which has beauty and passion often lacking in any type of film, that makes you want to grab its maker and head off to the nearest bar to discuss man's domination of nature and how Disney's cute critters reflect our profound alienation from the natural order.

A masterpiece of indirection and pure visceral thrills, David Cronenberg's latest mindblower, A History of Violence, is the feel-good, feel-bad movie of the year.

This film, which was never released in America and will now be making its way across the country in limited release, has been immaculately restored and features new subtitles. You can get lost in the blackness of its heart and its shadows. You might never come back.

Together with his extraordinary performers, Mr. Chéreau breathes life into characters who long ago set a course for death.

A triumph of modesty and of seriousness that also happens to be one of the finest American films of the year.

A sublimely nimble evisceration of that cult of celebrity known as the British royal family.

Nikolaus Geyrhalter's superb documentary is an unblinking, often disturbing look at industrial food production from field to factory.

Children of Men may be something of a bummer, but it’s the kind of glorious bummer that lifts you to the rafters, transporting you with the greatness of its filmmaking.

The result is an American masterpiece, independent to the bone.

Mr. Greengrass knows how to do his job, and there’s no one in Hollywood right now who does action better, who keeps the pace going so relentlessly, without mercy or letup, scene after hard-rocking scene.

The film is above all a consummate work of art, one that transcends the historically fraught context of its making, and its pleasures are unapologetically aesthetic. It reveals, excites, disturbs, provokes, but the window it opens is to human consciousness itself.

It’s a pitiless, violent story that in its telling becomes a haunting and haunted intellectual and aesthetic achievement.

Duchess of Langeais seems to me a nearly impeccable work of art -- beautiful, true, profound.

A haunting, voluptuously beautiful portrait of a teenage boy who, after being suddenly caught in midflight, falls to earth.

A film of startling originality and beauty -- feels like a communiqué from another time, another place, anywhere but here.

To say that Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York is one of the best films of the year or even one closest to my heart is such a pathetic response to its soaring ambition that I might as well pack it in right now.

With Where the Wild Things Are Jonze has made a work of art that stands up to its source and, in some instances, surpasses it.

The latest masterwork from Hayao Miyazaki, places emphasis on the natural world, its tumults and fragility.

Glorious and goofy and blissfully deranged.

One of those rare films in which the moral stakes are as insistent and thought through as the aesthetic choices.

Black Swan is visceral and real even while it's one delirious, phantasmagoric freakout.

Ms. Denis has an extraordinary gift for finding the perfect image that expresses her ideas, the cinematic equivalent of what Flaubert called le mot juste.

In some ways, much like Charles Laughton's "Night of the Hunter," which the Coens quote both musically and visually, True Grit is a parable about good and evil. Only here, the lines between the two are so blurred as to be indistinguishable, making this a true picture of how the West was won, or - depending on your view - lost.

The importance of seeing, seeing the world deeply, is at the heart of this quietly devastating, humanistic work from the South Korean filmmaker Lee Chang-dong.