Cellophane wrapper, lately crushed in a monster's fingers, uncrimps on the counter as Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) teaches a gas station owner (Gene Jones) to value the remarkable quarter that has entered his life in "No Country for Old Men"

What pubescent Briony (Saoirse Ronan) saw in "Atonement": a beautiful emerald-green butterfly impaled on the library wall ...

The naked look that unmasks spy, actress, assassin in "Lust, Caution": "Go, now." ... 

Alzheimer's patient Julie Christie's puzzled but gracious, "My, you are persistent," as she greets the stranger -- her husband of 40 years -- who keeps visiting her in "Away from Her" ...

Urbanite "Michael Clayton" (George Clooney) come to an upstate New York hilltop in early morning, and facing three horses in mysterious communion ...

A loop of snaky tail rising out of a cavern pool in "Beowulf" ...

In "The Savages," Wendy (Laura Linney) reaching out to touch a golden Lab's foot while having sex with the dog's owner ...

In "Zodiac," the long, scary look exchanged by investigative reporter (Jake Gyllenhaal) and probable Zodiac killer (John Carroll Lynch) in the hardware store ...

In "Breach," the last, long look passed between the CIA spy (Chris Cooper) and the "son" (Ryan Phillippe) who's unmasked him ... "Pray for me."

In "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," aged Max von Sydow gazes into a mirror, flanked by a photograph of his screen son Mathieu Amalric ... the startling resemblance between these cinematic kin ...

In "Margot at the Wedding," the umbilical/Oedipal boomerang effect during the mother-and-child reunion on the bus (Nicole Kidman and Zane Pais) ...

In "Into the Wild," Alexander Supertramp (Emile Hirsch) looking up from a ravine to see the roof of a bus, where no bus ought to be in Alaska ...

In "No Country for Old Men," Llewellyn's (Josh Brolin) truck on the horizon behind him; him looking back to see another truck pulled up beside it; the boil of backlit dust after he goes over the rim and into the river ...

In "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford," the pebbles sliding away from the vibrating rail as Jesse's boot rests there, waiting to stop his last train ... 

Leaving her friend to wait out her abortion, Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) attends an obligatory birthday party in "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days." The camera holds and holds as she sits frozen, claustrophobically hemmed by babbling guests, until she and we nearly explode with tension ...

In a dim room crowded with frozen figures, the kid in "Cashback," who can stop time, glimpses a hooded silhouette in motion ...

Architectural elision from fantasy to harsh reality straight into heartrending performance in "La Vie en Rose." Edith Piaf's dream of reunion with her lover in her bedroom ... reeling down an apartment hallway at the awful news of his death ... at the end of which she walks out on a stage, to put her grief into song ...

In "Starting Out in the Evening," confronted by a redheaded beauty (Lauren Ambrose), the elderly gentleman (Frank Langella) involuntarily covers his face with his hand -- to hide his age or to shield his eyes from her bright heat ...

Steve Carell, quintessential klutz, boogying with sexy Emily Blunt in "Dan in Real Life"; Don Cheadle and Taraji P. Henson boogying together in their underwear in "Talk to Me" ...

The movie we all need to see in 2008: "Machete," as previewed in "Grindhouse"! The apotheosis of Danny Trejo ...

In "Day Watch," a fugitive smashes a bad guy's mug into some snow, picks the icy life-mask up in his palms and presses it onto his face.

A lascivious avatar presses his palm deep into the body of "Paprika", then unzips her from within ... to reveal the face and form of a "real" woman.

Close up of empty tennies, dangling limply, then -- plumping up with feet, flexing toes, the shoes come firmly down to earth: the resurrection of a child in "The Orphanage" ...

"Eastern Promises'" good guy in disguise (Viggo Mortensen) lolling on a red divan, like a half-naked odalisque, as he's tattooed with "stars" ...

In "Lust, Caution," a little song in a brothel, ravishing its audience of one: "A young girl is to her man like thread to needle" ...

In "Ratatouille," the remembrance of things past courtesy of the eponymous dish: the critic's flashback to childhood ...

In "The Savages," the dad (Philip Bosco) turns off his hearing aid to stare out the car window at a cemetery, while his children (Laura Linney, Philip Seymour Hoffman) wrangle, a universe away.

The moment when serial killer "Mr. Brooks" joins his phantom demon in laughter (somehow, somewhere in the universe, we always knew there had to be a movie in which Kevin Costner and William Hurt would play the same character) ...

You can hear steel strike steel every time the old master (Anthony Hopkins) crosses swords with the sharp, young comer (Ryan Gosling) in "Fracture" ...

Guillotining Lyra (Dakota Blue Richards) from her ferret daemon in "The Golden Compass" ...

In "Eagle vs. Shark," she's the shark, he's the eagle at the costume party, where it takes a video-game duel to tilt this geeky pair into love ...

"Juno" (Ellen Page) propelling a tiny racing car rising over the great swell of her belly ...

Playing her piano by an open window in "Once," a sweet-faced girl (Marketa Irglova) gazes out, perhaps recalling a long-gone friend. The camera recedes, turns and leaves her and the movie behind. " A long, ragged yellow nail points down into a groove, to slowly turn a 78 rpm record in "30 Days of Night" ...

"Eastern Promises:" What to do with a frozen corpse? "Have you got hair dryer?" ...

Night birds: Chigurh, the raven, and the gunshot reverberating off the otherwise deserted bridge, after which the two bend their separate ways in "No Country for Old Men" ...

"There Will Be Blood": Killing God in a two-lane bowling alley: "I'm finished." ...

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