For those who only recall Bana from his bland showing as Ang Lee's super-thyroidial meltdown monster, his performance here is a revelation.

Sophie Scholl plods along inexorably, one step after another, to its grim, sad end. It's almost unbearable.

As with all of Lee's films, there's much more going on beneath the surface than is immediately apparent.

There's so much information and so many finely honed arguments in this ultimately joyous film that it's liable to send audiences scurrying home to their computers to download the bands they've just heard.

Park is one sick puppy, and I mean that in the very best sense of the phrase.

Cavite isn't a horror film, per se – its nightmarish sense of unreality is thoroughly grounded in the geopolitical here and now – but the emotions it conjures from the audience can be traced straight back to Shockers 101.

It ends up seeming more real and more artistically, morally, and spiritually honest than any dozen bedrock documentary films you'd care to name.

Factotum, for all its grim grind, is funny-serious, and smart-stupid. Just like you after four beers, and me after eight.

This feature-length expansion of Cohen's deliciously ridiculous character accomplishes what decades of Soviet propaganda failed to do: It points out and underscores issues of race, religious intolerance, classism, and all manner of very American social ills by giving the culprits just enough rope to hang themselves by their own petards (and then some).

The quiet respect Venus displays toward lions in winter, defanged though they may be, is rare enough; the film's respect for unfinessed lionesses-to-be is rarer still. Wherever they're going, no one here is going quietly.

This is the sort of masterpiece that will obliterate memories of lesser, later efforts in the "meeting the parents" comedy lineage. Brilliant.

The story (even more so if you weren't around in July of 1969) is gripping, eloquent, and powerful stuff, the right stuff right down to its pioneering heart, taking manifest destiny to the stars themselves.

It's Cronenberg's film, but it's the actors who elevate Eastern Promises from mere thriller to some other, more disturbing plane.

While the evil that men do to one another in this film may well be rooted in the Cain-like enabling of original sin from one doomed brother to another, the final familial tragedy feels exactly like classic Lumet.

Crowe has rarely been better, and the same goes for director Scott, who parallels and then dovetails Lucas and Roberts' stories with sublime, gritty precision, working up to a magnificent "Godfather III"-style crosscutting sequence that electrifies an already explosive tale.

Cloverfield is the most intense and original creature feature I've seen in my adult moviegoing life, and that's coming from a guy who knows his Gojira from his Gamera and his Harryhausen from his Honda. Cloverfield isn't a horror film – it's a pure-blood, grade A, exultantly exhilarating monster movie.

Paranoid Park shows the Portland-based director to be working at the pinnacle of his art in every frame, in every composition. It's breathtaking, heartbreaking, tragic, gorgeous, and true all at the same time.

12 is every bit as much of a moral powerhouse as its predecessors but with the added bonus of being simultaneously intellectually riveting and, at times, almost indescribably poetic.

It's the truth, unshackled and captured against all odds, and it's one of the most powerful documentary films I have ever seen, period.

The end result is an electrifying, morally complex story of the evil that men (and women) do in the name of the greater good.

Harris' thought-provoking performance art/life isn't yet over, but by film's end he's become unplugged, both literally and metaphorically.

Amreeka is anything but a depressing digression on American wartime paranoia.

It's an out-of-this-world, real-life adventure for kids of all ages, budding Neil Armstrongs and Ray Bradburys alike.

You can't help but feel conflicted watching this superb documentary about the seminal New York-based punk rock vanguard, the Ramones.

Pollock is that rare breed, a biopic that makes you want to learn more about its subject, as much as you can, as fast as you can.

So upbeat it might as well arrive on a sunbeam.

Piglet, your time has arrived. Sooth us.

Kempner's documentary is a streamlined, gorgeous piece of work, full of revelations of time, place, and person.