LIFE OF PI

Some 45 minutes into director Ang Lee's Life of Pi, there's an image that's so deeply resonant and beautiful and sad - one that's presented with so little melodrama or fuss - that I immediately welled up and felt compelled to stifle a sob. I remember the image clearly because I rarely stopped feeling that way for almost the entire hour-and-a-half that followed.

SKYFALL

Longtime fans of the franchise can, and likely will, argue over whether Skyfall is one of the all-time best James Bond films or whether it just feels that way because it's now been six years since the last decent one. (Despite having friends who'll stump for everything from Moonraker to The World Is Not Enough, I don't know anyone who really cares for 2008's Quantum of Solace.) But here's a question that I'm not sure merits any argument: Prior to this latest adventure, has any other Bond movie looked quite so spectacular?

CLOUD ATLAS

I've seen plenty of movies in which a number of excellent passages can't seem to blend into a satisfying whole. But prior to the release of Cloud Atlas, the film version of David Mitchell's sprawling 2004 novel, I don't think I'd ever seen a movie in which so many merely adequate sequences combine to form a whole that's not only satisfying but downright exhilarating. Directed by Tom Tykwer and siblings Andy and Lana Wachowski and running just shy of three hours, this genre fantasia should be a mess, and it oftentimes is. It's also, however, a hypnotic, glorious, grandly entertaining mess, one that's probably far more enjoyable than a more presentationally faithful adaptation would've been.

ARGO

It sounds like an all-too-Hollywood idea for a high-concept suspense thriller: A sextet of State Department employees are trapped in Iran, and their only hope for escape lies with an ingenious CIA official who plans to free the Americans by having them pose as a location-scouting team for a Canadian science-fiction movie. Yet within its first minutes, director/star Ben Affleck's Argo - based on a recently declassified chapter of the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-80 - registers as terrifically, nerve-rackingly authentic, even if the film's most enjoyable elements are, in truth, as Hollywood as they come.