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.