It's as if he's spent too much time in the clouds and can't bear to come back to earth. The result is an afterlife with the transcendent power of calendar art, a motel-room portrait of the world to come.

Some of the year's best movies were distinguished by their simplicity, their focus on quiet moments and almost invisible gestures.

At times, it feels like a montage in search of a movie to surround it. The film's underlying eroticism and overpowering sensuality floods out everything else, until all that's left is a dissipating mood.

Blu-rays of The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind are faultless, and the latter in particular is a welcome corrective to decades of souped-up "restorations." But to procure the discs, which list for $85 each, you need to purchase an "ultimate collector's edition," which in Wizard's case includes a matching wristwatch.

Up in the Air hits the predictable beats of a belated coming-of-age story, but it's exceedingly well accomplished, with a confident visual style light-years beyond Juno's functional setups.

There may be no cinematic equivalent to the stark obscurity of Cormac McCarthy's prose, etched in sentences as hard as rock and sometimes as impenetrable.

Akira Kurosawa's four-way account of a man's murder, re-released on a new print, has become so associated with its central device that it requires an effort to see it only for itself.

Do you like montages, but grow bored of the tedious plot bits in between? Then Pirate Radio is the movie for you.

Clooney nearly saves the picture single-handedly by delving into the farcical repertoire he's fruitfully developed with the Coen brothers.

Born out of Lars von Trier's bout with clinical depression (which, to judge from recent interviews, he's not quite over), this harrowing two-hander is an ordeal by design.