Chow's savagely funny cinematic love letter places Hong Kong legends Yuen Wah, Leung Siu Lung and former Bond girl Yuen Qiu in well-cast pivotal parts, establishing Kung Fu Hustle not only as an endearing homage to a genre's history, but an astonishing piece of cinema in its own right.

A sweaty, vital masterpiece that's always one step ahead of its audience.

It makes you sweat, laugh, squirm and self explore like few films -- fictional or documentary -- can.

So well crafted, so original, that each overlapping scene swells with new life and interpretation.

In the tradition of indie films "Girlfight" and "George Washington," Sollett's emotive, sub-improvising style leads to pitch-perfect performances from a watertight cast in a loose, joyfully fresh film.

Confidently directed and tightly constructed, Carnage announces the presence of a fresh, powerful directorial mind with each frame.

Gets under your skin with laughs that are fast, slick and slippery and with visuals as vivid as anything this side of Demerol.

A noir masterpiece with Oscar-caliber performances, Sexy Beast slowly turns up the heat until we squirm.

McKee, like Amenabar, knows how to position his film against type -- which ultimately makes May a refreshing, macabre tale.

Separate interviews with Flansburgh and Linnell inject the most life and gentle conflict into the film, peeling back their unique musical marriage and friendship.

While Tattoo borrows heavily from both "Seven" and "The Silence of the Lambs," it manages to maintain both a level of sophisticated intrigue and human-scale characters that suck the audience in.

More effort could have been made to fully flesh out the international perspective on this "people's president," but as a play-by-play look at a modern coup, it's an amazing, insightful film.

So well cast and well captured is Touching the Void that it suspends disbelief, making us feel as if we're actually watching Simpson's own icy version of Dante's "Inferno."

Finally, a teen sex comedy that's funnier than both its trailer and its outtakes. More important, Eurotrip -- with its laser-guided sex toys and infectious theme song, "Scotty Doesn't Know" -- just might be the best comedy so far this year.

A virtuoso piece of dark storytelling.

A counterintuitive, riveting documentary so honest that it will either become a rock movie classic or a severe embarrassment for the heavy metal band.

Takes a simple story and molds it into something eloquent and menacing.

With 20 additional minutes of screen time, the director's cut of Richard Kelly's genre-splicing "Donnie Darko" offers new viewers a second chance to discover his mind-bending masterwork.

Belongs to that brand of sweeping, conflict-era drama epitomized by "Saving Private Ryan," "Gone with the Wind" and TV miniseries "North and South."

A gleefully gory, pitch-perfect parody of George Romero's zombie films. But this isn't a movie about other movies. Shaun of the Dead stands on its own.

Infusion of comedy elements keeps the story light, without dragging it into the cartoonish.

Delivers the perfect union - a vivid, sublime parody and valentine to the superhero genre.

The kind of well-crafted, character-driven work that wows regional film festival crowds and public television audiences but seldom gets seen outside those circles.

Think "Mad Max" in wheelchairs.

If "Nightmare" was a jazzy pop number, "Bride" is a waltz--an elegant, deadly funny bit of macabre matrimony.

A brash, funny, action-packed bit of sci-fi ecstasy--and a giant raspberry to the execs who let "Firefly" fall out of the sky.

Black's retro-noir reminds us why we love movies: because they can surprise us, even when we're ankle deep in bullet casings, bodies and enough twists to tie us in knots.

Establishes the comedian as just that: notorious -- in all the best ways outlaw comedy can make you a star.