BOYHOOD

Late in writer/director Richard Linklater's Boyhood - the finest movie yet by the creator of Dazed & Confused and the Before Sunrise/Sunset/Midnight trilogy - there's a simple scene between a mother and her son. The son, who is either nearing or has just turned 18, is heading to college and is packing a bag in his room; he and his mom talk while she pays bills in the kitchen. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, the mother starts weeping. Her son enters the room and nonchalantly asks what's wrong (this is hardly the first time he's seen her cry), and she replies with a litany of romantic, professional, locational, and maternal decisions that we've watched her make over the course of the film. She asks where all that time went. Her son, offering a slight smile of empathy, goes back to his room and continues packing. The mother buries her face in her hands, and says, "I just thought there would be more."

BEFORE MIDNIGHT

Richard Linklater's Before Midnight - the third and possibly final installment in the director's ongoing screen romance that began with 1995's Before Sunrise and continued with 2004's Before Sunset - climaxes with a half-hour-long fight. You could, of course, say the same about most every superhero or Transformers picture released nowadays. The big difference, however, is that this particular battle royale takes place in the confines of one room and involves all of two characters. The bigger difference, speaking personally, is that this is one 30-minute screen fight that I actually wished would go on forever - though an eternal loop of the movie's first 70 minutes wouldn't have been unwelcome, either.

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.

ALICE IN WONDERLAND

Beginning with 2001's Planet of the Apes remake, Tim Burton has cast domestic partner Helena Bonham Carter in all six of his most recent feature films, and he's never made better use of her beguiling, somewhat perverse charisma than in his new take on Alice in Wonderland.