Whatever a modern love story is, Before Midnight takes it to the next level. It's damn near perfect.

Del Toro never coddles the audience. He means us to leave Pan's Labyrinth shaken to our souls. He succeeds.

You just don't expect Hollywood to produce a masterwork so early in the new year. And it hasn't. This slice of celluloid dynamite comes from Romania, and what you see will floor you.

What makes Ratatouille such a hilarious and heartfelt wonder is the way Bird contrives to let it sneak up on you.

Keep your eyes on Garfield - he's shatteringly good, the soul of a film that might otherwise be without one. The Social Network is the movie of the year. But Fincher and Sorkin triumph by taking it further. Lacing their scathing wit with an aching sadness, they define the dark irony of the past decade.

You wanna feel all right? This is the holiday movie that will do it.

Hang on tight. The knockout punch of the movie season is being delivered by Zero Dark Thirty.

A Separation is a landmark film. No way will you be able to get it out of your head.

Miyazaki is the Pied Piper -- see Spirited Away and you'll follow him anywhere.

When E.T. debuts on DVD, you can choose between the new version, which better matches E.T.'s words to his lips, and the sweetly clunky, digitally deprived version redolent of penis breath. I don't need to phone home to know which one I'm buying.

The new King Kong of crime movies...Ferocious fun without a trace of caution, complacency or political correctness to inhibit its 154 deliciously lurid minutes.

Here's the Iraq War movie for those who don't like Iraq War movies.

You leave WALL-E with a feeling of the rarest kind: that you've just enjoyed a close encounter with an enduring classic.

Pure movie bliss.

This is a film in which ideas resonate as well as action. Gandalf’s words to Pippin about death have a muscular poetry.

The movie crawls hypnotically into the skin of this global assassin and astonishes you with its brazenly violent and sexual audacity.

These two glam stars of French cinema – Riva in 1959's "Hiroshima Mon Amour" and Trintignant in 1966's "A Man and a Woman" – give performances of breathtaking power and beauty. Prepare for an emotional wipeout.

What makes it such a mesmerizing, wickedly witty entertainment is the revealing portrait it paints of an era in which everyone is presumed guilty where greed is concerned... It's an often chilly movie, but the chill cuts to the bone.

Ang Lee, a world-class director working at the top of his elegant form, has done something thrilling. For all the leaping action, it's the film's spirit that soars.

Schindler's List, despite blatant compromises, is a rending historical document. But the film's near-certain victory is based less on merit than on the marketing of its ambitious intentions. The academy doesn't judge movies, it weighs them by subject matter. On that basis, Spielberg's epic tips the scales.

The result, with its flashing perspectives and stealthy wit, is unique and unforgettable.

A marvel of delicacy and humor.

The movie will wipe you out. Schnabel's previous two films (Basquiat, Before Night Falls) also focused on artists. But this is his best film yet, a high-wire act of visual daring and unquenchable spirit.

Fierce, funny and moving, The Class graduates with honors. It's unmissable.

A fiercely poetic study of violence. Stunningly shot in black-and-white. [14 Dec 1989, p.23]

In terms of excitement, imagination and rule-busting experimentation, it's a gusher.

Fellowship is the real deal, a movie epic that pops your eyes out, piles on thrills and fun, and yet stays intimately attuned to character.

A joy to behold.

It's comic, touching and a visual knockout.

One of the best and liveliest movies of the year - funny and touching in ways you can't predict.

Unique and unforgettable.

Get ready to be knocked for a loop.

Joel and Ethan Coen's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel is an indisputably great movie, at this point the year's very best.

The Gatekeepers cuts deeper than any political thriller. It's a powerhouse.

Rea and Davidson are incomparably good in an exceptional film that is by turns darkly funny and deeply affecting. Though Jordan's control sometimes falters, it's a small price to pay for his daring.

A new crime classic.

Winter's Bone is unforgettable. It means to shake you, and does.

This is the untamed Apocalypse that Coppola envisioned in 1979 before money and mental pressures made him fear he had created something too long, too weird and too morally demanding for the masses.

Leave it to a g-rated cartoon to give the live-action epics a lesson in action, fun and bracing originality.

The year's most beguilling and touching surprise. Bravo.

The crazy-ass imagination at work in Being John Malkovich hits you like a blast of pure oxygen...this movie of constant astonishments will make you laugh hard and long.

There is something uniquely unforgettable in the way Linklater, Hawke and Delpy (equal collaborators on the script) find nuance, art and eroticism in words, spoken and unspoken. The actors shine.

Bird has crafted a film -- one of the year's best -- that doesn't ring cartoonish, it rings true.

If you haven't already sold your soul to rock & roll, Almost Famous should seal the deal.

Not your typical biopic. But it is one of the best times you'll have at the movies this year.

Gosford Park abounds in scenes to savor. It's a feast, and one of Altman's best.

Far from being exploitive, the effect is inspiring: This is the best of us.

It's a modern horror story that gets you where you live.

The script, co-written by Antonioni and Peter Wollen, focuses on a TV journalist (a superb Jack Nicholson).

Don't stall about seeing Sofia Coppola's altogether remarkable Lost in Translation. It's a class-act liftoff for the fall movie season. Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson give performances that will be talked about for years.

The acting is electric. By the end of this haunting, hypnotic film, you feel you have watched lives being lived, not just imagined.

Von Donnersmarck has crafted the best kind of movie: one you can't get out of your head.

Forget "Hero" -- that cult hit was just Zhang Yimou's warm-up for this martial-arts fireball that throws in a lyrical love story, head-spinning fights and dazzling surprises.

You won't know what outrageous fun is until you see Borat. High-five!

The Artist encapsulates everything we go to movies for: action, laughs, tears and a chance to get lost in another world. It just might leave you speechless. How can Oscar resist?

Martin Scorsese scores again with his gritty, kinetic adaptation of Nicolas Pileggi's best-selling "Wiseguy."

Chases so many ideas that it threatens to spin out of control. But with our multiplexes stuffed with toxic Hollywood formula, it's a gift to find a ballsy movie that thinks it can do anything, and damn near does.

Eastwood's direction here is a thing of beauty, blending the ferocity of the classic films of Akira Kurosawa (Seven Samurai) with the delicacy and unblinking gaze of Yasujiro Ozu (Tokyo Story).

It's a magical, beguiling wonder.

Let the unsettling secrets of this outrageously funny and steadily engrossing meditation on the life of two high school misfits after graduation catch you by surprise. It's that good.

Capote is a movie that doesn't pull its punches. It's a knockout.

Recoing gives a performance that won't soon be forgotten. Neither will Time Out. It's a great movie.

Begins like an episode of "I Love Lucy" and ends with the impact of "Easy Rider."

All the acting is first-rate -- Dukakis gives major dimensions to a supporting role. And Christie, a Sixties screen goddess in "Darling" and "Doctor Zhivago," shows that her spirit and grace are eternal. She's a beauty. So is the movie.

Spectacular in every sense of the word, even if you don' t know an Orc from a Uruk-Hai.

It may sound silly, but Lord and Park conjure up a world of visual miracles.

Two men alone create an epic landscape of feeling in one of the very best movies of the year.

Up is a breathtaking ride into the realm of pure imagination.

Cuaron's hot-blooded, haunting and wildly erotic film revels in the pleasures of the flesh without losing touch with thought and feeling.

Redford blows the dust off a 35-year-old scandal about rigged TV quiz shows and makes it snap with up-to-the-minute relevance.

Renier and Francois give deeply affecting performances that help soften the film's harsh blows. But only in the compassionate eye of the Dardennes do these three children achieve a state of grace.

So fasten your seat belts for Gomorrah, just snubbed in the wussy Oscar race for Best Foreign Film (so you know it's dynamite).

Incisively witty, provocative and acted to perfection, this sublime entertainment is a career peak for producer Ismail Merchant, director James Ivory and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

You will laugh yourself silly.

A brilliant chronicle of the life and twisted times of a most unlikely bad boy, a skinny, four-eyed, sex-obsessed misanthrope with no weapons to fire back at the society that rejected him save one: The nerd can draw.

Marston builds incredible tension. But it's the human drama etched on Moreno's young, weary face that gives Maria its potent punch.

This unique and devastating look at the Holocaust is drawn from the autobiographical novel of 2002 Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertesz.

It will knock you for a loop like no other movie this year.

As Joe blurs the line between reality and the supernatural, his haunting and hypnotic film exerts a hold you don't want to break. It's a beauty.

Ang Lee's unmissable and unforgettable Brokeback Mountain hits you like a shot in the heart. It's a landmark film and a triumph for Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal.

What an exhilarating gift to watch Harry and Company go out in a blaze of glory and amazing grace.

The result is a film that defies description. I'd call it some kind of miracle.

It's original, outrageous and murderous fun.

Herzog conducts his own expedition into knowing the unknowable -- the true task of any filmmaker. Herzog makes it an art.

Pedro Almodovar's transfixing tragicomedy -- the best foreign movie of the year -- is also the best showcase for actresses in ages.

Moneyball is one of the best and most viscerally exciting films of the year.

The result, glitches and all, is a great American movie.

A movie of prodigious power and feeling that is also high-spirited, hilarious and scorchingly erotic.

This documentary succeeds triumphantly on so many levels that its full impact doesn't hit you until you have time to register its aftershocks.

Brimming with humor and heartbreak, Slumdog Millionaire meets at the border of art and commerce and lets one flow into the other as if that were the natural order of things.

To Die For, sparked by a volcanically sexy and richly comic performance by Kidman that deserves to make her an Oscar favorite, is prime social satire and outrageous fun.

Lynch takes us on a journey of shattering understatement -- a remarkable accomplishment.

The knockout punch comes from Eastwood. His stripped-down performance -- as powerful as anything he's ever done -- has a rugged, haunting beauty. The same goes for the movie.

The actors are to die for. Bening and Moore nail every nuance of a relationship going adrift. And Ruffalo is dynamite as a man keeping himself at a distance. Kids makes its own special magic. It's irresistible

A shockingly intimate and deeply affecting film about the roots of sexual role playing.

An uncommonly good movie - a thriller that transcends thrills to become a heartfelt and heart-stopping personal drama.

Just so we're straight, Ben Affleck doesn't merely direct Argo, he directs the hell out of it, nailing the quickening pace, the wayward humor, the nerve-frying suspense.

It's a role of fierce demands, and Rampling meets them all. In a summer of crass, Rampling is a true class act.