It’s a work of cruel comic genius, in some ways even crueler than “No Country for Old Men.’’

Writer-director Cristian Mungiu confirms the Romanian cinema renaissance while creating a paradoxical marvel: a bleak tale of illegal abortion that powerfully affirms one's faith in people.

On the most basic level the new film is pure vaudeville: a loopy flyaway fantasy that's hysterically funny if only to keep the darkness at bay.

It's a performance (Giamatti's) so nuanced and so real in its everyday pain that it doesn't stand a chance of winning an Oscar. But it should.

The Coens also understand the stark immediacy of this tale, and they visualize it with brilliantly judged details.

You may even feel like dancing in the aisles yourself. Sure, the real world doesn't always work this way. Have you forgotten that this is one of the reasons why we go to movies in the first place?

The best American film of the year to date.

The sight is magical and heartbreaking in equal measure. Look, the movie says: Where so many would fall, a man walks on air.

Once is the first rock musical that actually makes sense. People don't burst into song in this movie because the orchestra's swelling out of nowhere. The guy and the girl are working musicians -- or they'd like to be, if they could make a living at it -- and they're played by working musicians.

Ghobadi shows us a world where a village pond can hold both rare goldfish and unforgivable evil, and where every step is onto booby-trapped terrain.

Eloquent, bloody, and daringly simple.

More than "Unforgiven," more than "Mystic River," it is Clint Eastwood's autumnal masterpiece.

A subtle, often very funny, ultimately touching tragedy of royal manners and meaning.

Murderball is a paradox: a movie about quadriplegics that insists we look beyond their disability.

The Wrestler is a character study, no more and no less, yet it's open-ended enough to function as many things.

In its unhurried fashion, Sugar can take its place with the best baseball movies. Where most focus on the grand slam, this one's about the life that surrounds the game and everything that comes after.

It's an account of what helplessness does to a man whose philosophy of life has been founded on decisive action.

Exhilaratingly slow, which for many will simply mean SLOW... Those who can downshift appropriately, however, stand to be enraptured.

The new film lives up to expectations and, indeed, pushes past them into virtually unmapped territory.

What's most shocking about The Passenger 30 years later? Seeing Jack Nicholson at the lean, sardonic height of his youthful powers? Finding a Michelangelo Antonioni movie with an actual plot?

It's an altogether satisfying drama -- the sort of movie some people complain they don't make anymore. So here it is; what's your excuse?

The New World is something I don't think I've ever seen before on a movie screen: an epic lyrical dialectic. Self-indulgent, gorgeous, maddening, grueling, ultimately transcendent, it's a Terrence Malick movie all the way, and possibly the director's most sustained work since 1972's "Badlands."

It's one of the small, pitch-perfect treasures of the movie year.

The results bear witness to a time when sacrifice was bleached of everything but itself.

The documentary any American with an opinion on our involvement in Iraq owes it to his or her conscience to see.

No matter their wealth or social status, these people share disappointments and elations and a sense that life, in the end, may be what life is about.

A comic put-on of awe-inspiring crudity and death-defying satire and by a long shot the funniest film of the year. It is "Jackass" with a brain and Mark Twain with full frontal male nudity.

One of the transporting film experiences of this or any other year.