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David Denby, New Yorker

1. Compliance 2012 Watching Compliance recently, I also began to squirm and talk back, but not because I disliked the movie, which I think is brilliant. full review
2. Cosmopolis 2012 Despite the constrictions, Cronenberg keeps the space handsome and active. For long stretches, Cosmopolis is dreamy and funny, in an off-centered way. full review
3. Dark Horse 2012 Solondz is a minor master of black comedy-the flattened emotional responses, the grotesque non sequiturs, the perverse desires lurking under a bland surface. full review
4. Detropia 2012 This documentary film, about the deconstruction of a great American city, is surprisingly lyrical and often very moving. full review
5. The Dictator 2012 The film has a vicious edge that the Marx Brothers didn't have, and it's too low-minded to achieve their enchanting blend of anarchy and surrealism. full review
6. End of Watch 2012 Jumpy and exciting. full review
7. Haywire 2012 Carano is strong, fast, relentless. She's not much of an actress yet, but Soderbergh hides her weaknesses well... full review
8. Holy Motors 2012 Carax produces the startling dislocations of reality that Bunuel pulled off, but without the gleeful wit. full review
9. The Hunger Games 2012 Even when two people are just talking calmly, Ross jerks the camera around. Why? As the sense of danger increases, he has nothing to build toward. full review
10. The Imposter 2012 The movie is fascinating, but it leaves you uneasy, because you don't always know who you're watching (actor? family member?), and you begin to feel that you're being scammed, too. full review
11. The Paperboy 2012 It's a good story about people who are not what they seem, about identity wavering in the heat-a true swamp tale-but the movie is messily ineffective. full review
12. Red Hook Summer 2012 A clear failure, yet Lee is getting at things that mystify him. full review
13. Unforgivable 2012 The movie is intriguing and racy, but not always convincing. full review
14. Friends With Benefits 2011 Friends with Benefits is fast, allusive, urban, glamorous -- clearly the Zeitgeist winner of the summer. full review
15. Keep the Lights On 2011 The two characters are ciphers, and the script, which Sachs co-wrote with Mauricio Zacharias, is by turns underwritten or banal. full review
16. Margin Call 2011 Margin Call is one of the strongest American films of the year and easily the best Wall Street movie ever made. full review
17. Page One: Inside the New York Times 2011 It ignores the many other things the paper does well, such as foreign, financial, and national-affairs reporting, and Rossi misses the underbrush, the secret life and murmured music of the place. full review
18. Super 8 2011 Spielberg and Abrams are the unwitting targets of their own irony. full review
19. Cold Weather 2010 The movie is like a butterfly half out of its cocoon, emerging with many fond looks back to the protective walls. full review
20. Morning Glory 2010 Everything in this movie, written by Aline Brosh McKenna and directed by Roger Michell, seems way off. full review
21. The Tempest 2010 Taymor, by turning Prospero into a woman while retaining an "imperialist" view of Caliban, will no doubt simultaneously please and enrage left-wing critics. The rest of us can enjoy the movie's strengths... full review
22. True Grit 2010 Nothing very startling happens, but the Coens have a sure hand, and Bridges, in the old John Wayne role, plays a man, not a myth; you can sense Rooster's stink and his nasty intelligence, too. full review
23. 44 Inch Chest 2009 A very strange, often terrible affair that is nevertheless mesmerizing, in a limited way. full review
24. Hunger 2009 In the end, even though I recognized the need to be reminded of Guantánamo and of crimes carried out there, I was awed but not moved by Hunger. full review
25. Vincere 2009 Her story is one of endurance and martyrdom, and Bellocchio treats her with grave courtesy, focussing on her battered face as she is subjected to years of beatings in the asylum, and on her drive to escape. full review
26. Boarding Gate 2007 [Director Assayas] may have something serious to say about the brutal impersonality of global capitalism, yet he's caught somewhere between insight and exploitation. full review
27. No End in Sight 2007 We need to hear the story again and again, for no amount of rage and disbelief can turn what the Bush Administration did into someone else's problem. full review
28. Shooter 2007 The engaging, fast-talking idiosyncrasy of [Wahlberg's] performance in The Departed has vanished. full review
29. The Ground Truth 2006
30. An Inconvenient Truth 2006 It will be interesting to watch how skeptics will deal with Gore's bad news on the environment without making themselves look very small.
31. Nacho Libre 2006 Nacho Libre, naively made kids' stuff, lacks such minor attributes as a decent script and supporting cast.
32. World Trade Center 2006 The world may not make sense anymore, but Oliver Stone, a warrior still, celebrating courage and endurance, has, in his own way, come home.
33. Casanova 2005 I admit that the picture is handsomely designed in gold and pale blue, but none of the tumult and pomp have any dramatic, comic, or erotic effect whatsoever.
34. Elizabethtown 2005 Leaves one adrift on a raft of morose questions. How could this vacuous movie have got made? Didn't anyone at Paramount, which paid for the film, read the script? And also: What in the world has happened to Cameron Crowe?
35. Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price 2005 For all its missteps, the movie powerfully suggests that Wal-Mart is capable of demoralizing a community so thoroughly that it doesn't have the spirit to carry on its life outside the big box.
36. Bully 2001 full review