Anders Thomas Jensen’s Adam’s Apples was one of the best films I saw during the 2006 Seattle International Film Festival.

300 is a bruising, battering, visually resplendent caterwaul of an action-adventure, and I imagine the fighting men and women it celebrates probably wouldn’t have had their story told any other way.

Zodiac might just end up being Fincher’s masterpiece, and I’ll be curious to see how it withstands the test of time as I’m all but certain this is one thriller we’ll all be waxing poetic about for decades to come.

The movie is a fearlessly unsettling descent into voyeuristic madness overflowing in comedy, drama, tension and insight. It obliterated all my expectations, The Lives of Others a stunning masterwork that marks the arrival of an important filmmaker worth keeping an eye on.

Few films are either as magical or as enchanting as Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth. At the same time, few fairy tales are as perverse, terrifying or as deeply disturbing.

Children of Men is a stunning powerhouse, and it is almost impossible to grasp all it is attempting to say in just a single viewing.

Almodóvar has crafted an instant classic. Volver is miraculous, a joyous enterprise running the emotional gauntlet like no other melodrama I’ve seen in ages.

In a year of so many retreads and also-rans, where much of what’s hit the multiplex looks exactly like what was there just a month ago, The Prestige offers entertainment and wonderment unlike anything else currently in theatres, and that might be Nolan’s greatest magic trick of them all.

All of which makes The Grudge 2 an insidious mixed bag of thrills and chills, and I’m just not sure the good elements outweigh the bad ones near enough to make watching it in a theatre worthwhile.