In the pop high it delivers, this is the greatest prequel ever made.

Movies like The Kids Are All Right -- beautifully written, impeccably played, funny and randy and true -- don't come along very often.

It's the only film that exists of the Ghetto, and it's both revelatory and profoundly suspect.

On the level of craft, the movie's just absurdly enjoyable. Sorkin's dialogue dazzles; the photography is burnished and sleek; the editing confidently sorts out a complex narrative.

The result is a masterpiece of investigative nonfiction moviemaking - a scathing, outrageous, depressing, comical, horrifying report on what and who brought on the crisis.

A strange and very beautiful documentary about the gray area between obsession and art.

A handcrafted jewel of a movie, The Illusionist understands the illusions that sustain us in youth and that we have to let slip in the end. It's the rare work of art that cherishes both the magic and the trick.

This is a movie whose power comes from the alignment both of Mija's discovery with ours and of a tremendous writer and director with his star.

Offers a surprising and revealing look at Russia's past and present.

There's humor in "Le Quattro Volte," and then a deep, abiding sadness, and beyond that a larger, more graceful comedy that extends to the horizons.

An innovative hybrid of documentary, staged reading, fictional feature, and confessional, The Arbor defies categorization not merely for art's sake - although its artistry is without question - but because conventional forms seem inadequate for such a harrowing story.

In an age in which it feels as if seemingly pure intimacy no longer exists, this film thrives on nothing but intimate moments.

The immediacy and caprice of violence in The Interrupters are just as strong as in nearly every documentary I've seen about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It's a funny, fearless, suspenseful sex comedy that, in drawing on science and philosophy and art and death, risks accusations of pretentiousness. But, even in its romantic idealism, the movie proceeds according to recognizable rhythms of how some people live.

One of the truest, most beautiful movies ever made about two strangers.

An exhilarating tale of magic, machines, memories, and dreams, Martin Scorsese pulls off the neatest trick of all. He marshals the marvels of modern movie technology - up to and including the dreaded 3-D - to create a love letter to the earliest of movies and, by extension, to every movie from then to now.

Michael Hazanavicius's love letter to classic cinema isn't perfect but it's close enough to make just about anyone who sees it ridiculously happy - and that includes children and grown-ups who have never come across a silent film.

This is a trenchant emotional thriller that you watch in dread, awe, and amazing aggravation. It's entirely predicated upon the outcome of bad decisions - and it is not a comedy. The situation that unfolds approaches the absurdity of farce but denies the relief and release of humor. It's a tragic farce. No option or choice is to be envied.

The Dardennes achieve lyricism without seeming to try.

In short, This Is Not a Film is the world within an apartment, and it is quietly devastating.

The entire movie is pitched at a scream. But the screaming is more Janis Joplin, Axl Rose, or Mary J. Blige than Jamie Lee Curtis. All the tears I shed were hard-earned. So were all the laughing and clapping and eye-covering. In each case, it was involuntary.

Moonrise Kingdom is Anderson's seventh movie, and it's the first since "Rushmore" that works from the opening shot to the final image.

She's (Hushpuppy) trying to make sense of this world, and the movie, pitched between realism and fable, is the story of how she finally does. That balance is the key to the movie's magic.

Alison Klayman's documentary is one of the most engagingly powerful movies of the year almost completely on the strength of Ai's rumpled charisma and the confusion it creates in the bureaucratic mindset of the Chinese Communist Party.

The surface of Oslo, August 31st is as cool and crystalline as a Scandinavian lake, but at its core is a benevolence for the life we all share and tears for the man who can no longer share in it.

Nothing as big and strange and right as The Master should feel as effortless as it does. That's not the same as saying that it's light. It's actually heavy. It weighs more than any American film from this or last year. It's the sort of movie that young men aspiring to write the Great American Novel never actually write.

We're now far enough from that era that seeing it all again feels like a slap to the face in the same way that watching certain moments in the civil rights epic "Eyes on the Prize" chills your bones. This doesn't have that series' stately magnitude. It's smaller and crasser, but it's comparatively galvanic.

The movie, a simple yet immensely pleasurable tale of a little boy and his undead dog, is good enough on its own. If you know the back story, it's even better.