No Country for Old Men
The Coen brothers’ multilayered, intense and suspenseful chase thriller is their best feature to date, an uncommonly brilliant film ferociously executed with superb direction, taut editing and faultless sound design.

There Will Be Blood
Ambitious and uncompromising work of art by writer/director P.T. Anderson, it is filled with gorgeous cinematography, compelling musical score, terrific production design and Daniel Day-Lewis’s terrifying performance.

Eastern Promises
David Cronenberg’s follow-up to his 2005 masterpiece A History of Violence is a provocative, brutally violent and resonant thriller that descents into the underground of the Russian mob in London.

The Assassination of Jesse James
A skillful and confident examination of one of the most notorious killings in American history, the movie emerges as a bleak, hypnotic and poetic Western that has a surreal movie-going experience on a viewer.

Zodiac
An epic-scale psychological mystery from maverick filmmaker David Fincher, the film is a massive undertaking on both narrative and visual grounds, as it follows a serial killer in 1970s San Francisco.

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
A sucker-punch of a movie, old school director Sidney Lumet’s latest opus is a shocking and demoralizing chronicle of a destruction of a family, initiated when a perfectly planned heist goes horribly wrong.

Across the Universe
An audacious and free-spirited musical set entirely to the soundtrack of The Beatles is a fictional love story, which combines live action and animation to courageously recall a defining time in American history.

Juno
Perhaps the sweetest and most likable comedy of the year, filmmaker Jason Reitman’s smart movie about teen pregnancy is a heartwarming tale propelled by offbeat characters, wickedly clever script and the adorable Ellen Page.

Michael Clayton
A profoundly intelligent legal thriller about a “fixer” thrown in a deadly web of deception, the movie is a well crafted picture, richly dense in its narrative structure, mainly benefiting from a taut screenplay and perfect casting.

Into the Wild
Sean Penn’s harrowing, deeply emotional and devastatingly sad film is his most personal work, which celebrates America as it observes one man’s journey of self-discovery going into the heart of loneliness.