With its virtuoso tomfoolery, Fantastic Mr. Fox is like a homegrown Wallace and Gromit caper. To Wes Anderson: More, please!

It's a potent and moving experience, because by the end you feel you've witnessed nothing less than the birth of a soul.

In The Beaches of Agnès, you get addicted to watching Agnès Varda watch the world.

It's a feat of star acting, and it helps make (500) Days not just bitter or sweet but everything in between.

Raimi has made the most crazy, fun, and terrifying horror movie in years.

Ferguson spotlights two massive mistakes: the looting that was allowed to continue, destroying Iraqi infrastructure and morale; and--far more revelatory -- the apocalyptically stupid decision to disband the Iraqi army, sending half a million angry soldiers into the streets.

It whisks you to another world, then makes it every inch our own.

Along the way, Black Dynamite blends satire, nostalgia, and cinema deconstruction into a one-of-a-kind comedy high.

Food, Inc. is hard to shake, because days after you've seen it, you may find yourself eating something -- a cookie, a piece of poultry, cereal out of the box, a perfectly round waxen tomato -- and you'll realize that you have virtually no idea what it actually is.

Keira Knightley, in a witty, vibrant, altogether superb performance, plays Lizzie's sparky, questing nature as a matter of the deepest personal sacrifice.

A triumph -- Demme's finest work since "The Silence of the Lambs," and a movie that tingles with life.

Until Once, I'm not sure that I'd ever seen a small-scale, nonstylized, kitchen-sink drama in which the songs take on the majesty and devotion of a musical dream.

Brokeback Mountain is that rare thing, a big Hollywood weeper with a beautiful ache at its center. It's a modern-age Western that turns into a quietly revolutionary love story.

The Wrestler is like "Rocky" made by the Scorsese of "Mean Streets." It's the rare movie fairy tale that's also a bravura work of art.

Zodiac never veers from its stoically gripping, police-blotter tone, yet it begins to take on the quality of a dream.

By far the best Judd Apatow comedy that Judd Apatow had nothing at all to do with.

It's a hilarious, and unexpectedly moving, documentary about the greatest metal band you've probably never heard of.

Relaunches the series by doing something I wouldn't have thought possible: It turns Bond into a human being again -- a gruffly charming yet volatile chap who may be the swank king stud of the Western world, but who still has room for rage, fear, vulnerability, love.

The Girlfriend Experience is one of Steven Soderbergh's bite-size, semi-improvised, shot-on-DV doodles (like Bubble or Full Frontal), and it's the best one he's made.

Nimble, engrossing, and journalistically eye-opening, a movie that pulls into focus 30 years of porn in America. It also pulls no punches.

It's been a while since a movie made the game of love this winning.

A deeply straightforward yet beautifully crafted documentary.

Fast, convulsive, and densely exciting new British gangster thriller.

Lords of Dogtown is a docudrama, rare in its grit and authenticity, that also strives for the mythical youth-rebel excitement of something like "8 Mile."

Pawlikowski has made a romance that becomes a horror movie in which love, more than anything around it, is a delusionary fever to fear.

Those Oompa-Loompas are the beat, and soul, of Burton's finest movie since "Ed Wood": a madhouse kiddie musical with a sweet-and-sour heart.

It's a quiet dream of a movie, a vision of loneliness giving way to love, then to loneliness again; it's like "Vertigo" remade in a sedately haunted style of Japanese lyricism.

Amy Adams in a performance as deep as it is delightful, is the film's heart and also its flaky, wonderstruck soul.

Rapt, heady, and startling: the most profound documentary I've seen this decade.

Down to the Bone achieves what only the best independent films have: making life, at its most unvarnished, a journey.

To call Match Point Woody Allen's comeback would be an understatement - it's the most vital return to form for any director since Robert Altman made "The Player."

It's a fluid cinematic essay, rooted in painstakingly assembled evidence, that heightens and cleanses your perceptions.

Munich, Steven Spielberg's spectacularly gripping and unsettling new movie, is a grave and haunted film, yet its power lies in its willingness to be a work of brutal excitement.

Of the idiosyncratic ''little'' movies that Soderbergh has made to clear his head (Full Frontal, Schizopolis), this is the first that truly connects.

The enthralling spirit of Dave Chappelle's Block Party, its mood of exuberant democracy, extends to every rap and soul performance in the film.

Russian Dolls captures how being a sexual cad has become an essential phase in the life of the modern male.

Maggie Gyllenhaal is such a miracle of an actress that she makes you respond to the innocence of Sherry's desperate, selfish destruction.

Brilliant and psychologically transfixing documentary.

Sweet Land is a movie of extraordinary tenderness, in which Reaser and Guinee, using a language of looks, make you happy to think about what love once might have been.

It's a poison bonbon tastier than just about anything else out there.

Nader became famous as a "consumer advocate," but as the thrilling first hour of An Unreasonable Man makes clear, that humdrum bureaucratic term didn't do justice to his courage, his vision.

Grindhouse, like "Ed Wood" and "Boogie Nights," celebrates how certain low-grade entertainment, viewed in hindsight, looks different now than it did then, since we can see the ''innocence'' of its creation -- the handmade quality of it -- in a world not yet ruled by corporate technology.

A love poem to the New York City of the '50s and '60s, when Smith, the visionary of camp (Andy Warhol stole from him), more or less invented performance art.

A wee romantic charmer, a delectable Dixie screwball romp that never loses its spry sense of discovery.

A funny and madly arresting new documentary.

In the Shadow of the Moon finds new resonance in the moment when America redefined progress -- but also when it heeded the siren song of a world so desolate it reminded you what a paradise ours truly is.

It's the first Hollywood Iraq movie to remind me of a Vietnam film like Coming Home, and it does more than disturb. It scalds, moves, and heals.

Between clips of the concerts Seeger staged as hootenanny hosannas, the film chronicles how the blacklisted star stuck true to his beliefs -- which were more patriotic than those of his accusers.

It's better than good; it's such a crackling and mature and accomplished movie that it just about restores your faith.

Mesmerizing.

I'm Not There lets you hear it again, more majestically than ever.

In Oswald's Ghost, his vast chronicle of the JFK assassination and its cultural aftermath, Stone uses little-seen footage to assemble the events of Nov. 22, 1963, with a fascinating present-tense density.

There's a poetic irony to the idea that it took a female filmmaker to finally do justice to Philip Roth on screen.

David Gordon Green's captivating winter-chill tragedy, is a tale that encompasses murder, divorce, adultery, alcohol abuse, mental breakdown, and the disappearance of a small child. In other words, it's downbeat enough to make the recent Oscar-nominated films look like party games.

Searing, powerful, and morally entangled.

The stunning images aren't enough for Herzog, though. He wants us to see how these quirky researchers, in their lust to explore, are acting out a drive as primitive as nature: the need to break away from the world in order to find it.

If they handed out an Academy Award for Most Gripping Graphs and Charts, this film would take it.

A movie as layered and enthralling as its subject.

A rapturous and enlightening look at the history of the environmental movement in America.

A marvelous rock doc that manages to be wistful, tasty, and jam-kicking at the same time.

Lusciously revealing fly-on-the-wall portrait of Anna Wintour.

A marvelous and touching yuletide toy of a movie.

Awesome documentary.

Arenas' life zigzags before us in a manner as heady and unpredictable as it must have felt to the man who lived it.

The beauty of Swingers lies in the irony of its title: Despite their lounge-lizard posing, these guys will never really live up to their Rat Pack dreams.

Someone has finally done it -- made a sexually explicit feature that is also a genuine and harrowing work of erotic drama.

A work of intimate and wrenching humanity.

A candy store for film buffs.

Offers terrific interviews with the surviving Funk Brothers, who provide a tasty insider history of 4 a.m. recording sessions inside ''the snake pit'' (as the fabled Studio A was known) as well as a chilling description of their final kiss-off from Berry Gordy, the Motown mogul who treated them like indentured servants.

A no-frills docu-Dogma plainness, yet Miller lingers on invisible, nearly psychic nuances, leaping into digressions of memory and desire. She boxes these women's souls right open for us.

The movie draws us into the illusion that we're simply eavesdropping on the lives of three inner-city black and Hispanic girls.

It becomes as savage as ''Reservoir Dogs,'' ''The Killing,'' or any of the other dozens of films over which it still casts a shadow.

Fred Leuchter is just one deluded figure, but by the end of this great and chilling sick-joke documentary he stands as a living icon of the banality of evil.

Ulee's Gold is a story of redemption, and Nunez doesn't make redemption look any easier than it is.

Remains the only rock & roll film that exerts the saturnine intensity of a thriller.

This documentary about the triumph of the New Hollywood employs a treasure trove of interviews and clips to create a rich understanding of the many forces -- cultural undertows, really -- that flowed together to fill the void left by the dying studio system.

By the time The Crying Game is over, you'll never look at beauty in quite the same way.

The film catches us by surprise in its moving portrayal of the love between Larry and Althea, played by Courtney Love in a performance that glides from kinky abandon to stark tragedy.

Bleak, brilliant, and unsparing.

Working from a superb script by Paul Attanasio, Redford has caught the way a show like Twenty-One offered a carny-barker version of the American Dream.

The film is sublime entertainment, at once ticklish and suspenseful, cynical and sincere. By its very existence, Altman's comedy about the death of Hollywood lets you know that movies are still alive and kicking.

Beautifully edited, Go Tigers! is an enthralling look at the drama that can transpire in the autumn of one small town on any given Friday.

The most resonant and haunting movie I've seen this year.

The rare Hollywood epic that dares to entertain an audience by engaging the world.

They're like gods at play, paragons of pure delight, as they mock and feign their way through a universe of mere mortals. To see the movie again is to realize that they were never entirely of this earth and that they never will be.

This is the rare movie that gets you to fall in love with characters you don't even like.

A voyeur's delight.

For sheer dramatic wallop outpowers virtually every fiction feature I've seen this year.

Voluptuously engrossing.

No dramatic feature has ever come quite this close to the matter-of-fact ugliness of the Nazi crimes.

Lean, elegant, and emotionally complex -- a marvel of backwoods classicism.

It reveals Bukowski to be a far grander artist than his bum's armor would suggest.

Sensational and accomplished.

A great, searching, incendiary chronicle of the Sex Pistols, the razor-hearted visionaries of punk anarchy.

In E.T., Spielberg proved a herald of the age when moviegoers would make full-time friends with fantasy, but his most special effect was taking us into ourselves.

The movie is pulp, yet it attains a surprising emotional power-especially when Anjelica Huston's Lilly, a survivor who'll do whatever it takes to master her surroundings, is on-screen.

A movie that re-creates its object of satire with such pitch-perfect flair that it all but erases the line between derision and love.

Like David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, and Paul Thomas Anderson, Solondz revels in ironic pop passion. It's a signature moment when he transforms Air Supply's "All Out of Love" into a geek-love rhapsody.