By Richard T. Jameson and Kathleen Murphy Special to MSN Movies
"A Christmas Tale": In a house otherwise teeming with family,
a black dog appears in the empty sitting room, then lunges out, curling the
corner of the rug as it goes. ...
In "The Edge of Heaven," a brown ribbon of road glowing under
the last shrinking patch of blue in a lowering, end-of-day sky ...
On a static-riddled miniature screen, and through the eyes of WALL∙E, a scene from 1969's "Hello, Dolly!" takes on a
grandeur it never had. ...
With voluptuous abandon, the Dark Knight (Christian Bale) plunges off a Tokyo skyscraper into an ebony
abyss ... what the fall of God's most beautiful angel must have looked like. ...
"It's very difficult for me to do everything in one shot. I'm 47 years old."
-- But he just did it. Jean-Claude Van Damme in "JCVD" ...
In "Che," the most romanticized revolutionary ever (Benicio Del Toro) staggers up a steep wooded hillside,
wheezing with asthma. ...
"Gran Torino": Walt Kowalski (Clint Eastwood), in the act of rejecting more of that "gook
food" from the Hmong women, pauses: "Is this that chicken dumpling thing?"...
Randy the Ram (Mickey Rourke) in "The Wrestler," self-styled "old broken-down piece
of meat" in a shower cap, selling choice cuts in the deli ...
A scene of pastoral skinny-dipping suddenly turns cold and black with the
threat of death, and in "Tell No One," nothing afterward is as it seems. ...
The way corrupt rancher Randall Bragg (Jeremy Irons) guns down the sheriff at the
beginning of "Appaloosa," firing the fatal shot as casually as you'd swat
a fly ...
Wendy (the superb Michelle Williams) gazes helplessly from the backseat of a
cop car as her tethered golden Lab recedes from view -- the first in a cascade
of losses in "Wendy and Lucy."...
A trolley, its windows leaking warm gold, curves through the blue twilight
of a Bremen street in "The Reader" (Chris Menges is God ... or is it Roger Deakins? In any event, the best-photographed movie of
the year). ...
"Let the Right One In": At snowy evening, a man
making his way home passes out of a tunnel, and the dark little creature Eli
drops on him as if from above the screen itself. ...
Stairway to the center of the Earth in "The Fall" ...
Sharing God's dispassionate POV in "The Edge of Heaven," we look down into a
hotel room where a mother (Hanna Schygulla) writhes on the floor, howling in
grief. ...
Back to the womb/tomb in "A Christmas Tale": A sterile plastic hospital
curtain separating them, Junon (Catherine Deneuve) teases her long-estranged, ever-loving
son Henri (Mathieu Amalric), wondering whether her body will accept or
reject his spinal marrow. ...
Two Hansels and a Gretel in the suburban woods of "Revolutionary Road"; the way April (Kate Winslet) blows off the electroshocked genius's (Michael Shannon) terrible intellectual loss:
"Mathematics are boring, aren't they?" ...
In "I've Loved You So Long," Juliette missing the suicidal signal in her
parole officer's "There's nothing here to hold me back" ... one soul coming into
safe harbor, the other sinking ...
In "Appaloosa," Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen) throwing his arms around Virgil
Cole (Ed Harris) to stop him from beating too long on the
teamster; the hold restraining, but also soothing and settling ...
In "Frost/Nixon," Richard Milhous Nixon (Frank Langella) disapproving of Italian shoes to his
adversary-to-be David Frost (Michael Sheen): "You don't think they look
effeminate?" ...
In "Milk," chatting up Spain-bound Cleve Jones (Emile Hirsch) on the street outside his camera store, Harvey
(Sean Penn) just beams at the perfectly adorable boy in
oversized horn-rimmed glasses ...
In "The Promotion," John C. Reilly's aria of comic desperation in
which, as he speaks with some black civic leaders, the phrase "bad apples" takes
an irretrievably ruinous turn ...
"Gran Torino": Walt, getting set to finish things, smoking in his bathtub
eyed by his dog Daisy and sighing, "Let a man enjoy himself, will ya gal?"...
A barroom meditation on how hiding out "In Bruges" is "all a bit
overelaborate" ...
Benjamin enjoys caviar at midnight in a silent Moscow hotel, growing younger
and wiser in the company of an English adventuress (Tilda Swinton) in "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" ...
A long-awaited embrace in Eric Rohmer's highly stylized "Romance of Astréa and Celadon," when the almost accidental
baring of a lovely breast takes your breath away with its erotic charge ...
Bella (Kristen Stewart) smelling her armpits in chemistry class
after Edward (Robert Pattinson) practically holds his nose every time
she's near in "Twilight" ...
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