Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast is a true classic in every sense of the word.

Terrence Malick’s fifth motion picture The Tree of Life is a breathless cinematic miracle that’s unlike anything else I’ll see in all of 2011.

Marvel’s Thor may be silly, but that doesn’t make it any less entertaining.

Even with its simplistic plot, Avatar is a stunning achievement in next-level cinematic bravado. Watch it on the biggest screen possible. Prepare to be blown away.

Coraline is a treasure, and if families don’t take the time to discover it, they’ll be missing out on a creepy angelic sensation worth cheering.

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.

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.

Ultimately, if The Return of the King isn’t quite the thrilling conclusion we were all hoping for, it is still very much a rousingly successful culmination to what may be the most satisfying cinematic trilogy of all time.

Despite a winning moment here and a wonderful one there, The Haunted Mansion has more in common with The Country Bears than it does Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, and that’s too bad.