No Country for Old Men - The race for this year's Oscar officially starts with this Coen brothers adaptation of punctuation-hating novelist Cormac McCarthy's (All the Pretty Horses) True Romance-ish tale of an average Llewelyn (Josh Brolin) who randomly happens upon a gristly scene that appears to be a major drug deal gone wrong in a dusty, barren area of 1980 Texas.  Walking away almost completely unphased with a suitcase full of cash, Llewelyn realizes (after going back to gank the heroin), he's probably going to be pursued by both sides of the failed exchange.  What he doesn't expect is that the pursuit might be led by the devil in a Dutch-Boy haircut (a brilliantly diabolical Javier Bardem) while the self-doubting local sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones) really feels as if he might actually be getting too old for this shit.  The cat-and-mouse game which follows is absolutely brilliant, peppered with equal doses of jet black humor and gruesome, unapologetic Cronenberg-style violence.  It's the Coen's masterpiece, and it has cutie Kelly Macdonald ditching her Scottish brogue for a West Texas lilt that made me weak in the knees.  Okay, maybe it was the blood.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days - Cristian Mungiu's Golden Palm winner from Cannes (the third time in the last decade that a bleak, bare-boned, neo-realistic European flick shot with a hand-held camera walked away with the top prize) is about one crazy day shared by a pair of college roommates in the final throes of Communism in late 1980s Romania.  Găbiţa (Laura Vasiliu) is knocked up, and her friend Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) makes arrangements for the two to make a visit to a black market abortion provider.  Beginning with Găbiţa not being completely upfront with how far along her pregnancy is (see: title), things do not go smoothly, and Mungiu's decision to shoot Days with nothing but unbroken static shots should prepare the more knowledgeable viewers for the horror that will eventually be presented to them (though, in all honestly, it's nowhere nearly as upsetting as last year's Lake of Fire).  Produced and photographed by The Death of Mister Lazarescu's Oleg Mutu, Days is definitely worth checking out, but also not worthy of beating a handful of other pictures in Cannes competition (like, say, No Country for Old Men).

Alexandra - It's going to be very difficult for Alexsandr Sokurov to top 2002's Russian Ark, but as long as his efforts continue to be as strong as this film, I'm not going to complain one bit.  We first see the titular Alexandra (played by legendary opera star Galina Vishnevskay) as she's pushed onto an armored train car, and then in to a tank, being bent in and out of tight places you'd never expect to see a woman of her age.  She's on the way to visit her grandson, Denis (Vasily Shevtsov), a Russian soldier living on a military base in Chechnya.  She's stocky and spunky, and she has a big black pocketbook.  You can practically hear her cankles filling with fluid, and the number of times she says, "Oy," almost becomes comical.  But it's the fish-out-of-water aspect of Sokurov's story that brings Alexandra to life.  The expression on the faces of the soldiers who aren't exactly expecting to run across a stubborn, feisty grandmother on their base are priceless, as is the performance of 80-year-old Vishnevskay.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford - Most of what I know about Jesse James was culled from his brief appearances on The Brady Bunch and Little House on the Prairie during my youth.  All of what I know about his assassin, Robert Ford, was taught to me by Bob Dylan in the lyrics of "Outlaw Blues."  Now, after spending nearly three hours with these two real-life characters in this biopic from Chopper director Andrew Dominik (based on the Ron Hansen novel), I know a whole lot more.

The action starts with Jesse's (Brad Pitt) 1881 Blue Cut train robbery in Missouri, which is where he first crossed paths with the wide-eyed Charles Guiteau-ish Ford (Casey Affleck) who is hell-bent on worming his way into the life of his ultimate hero and the exclusive club attendant thereto (which, ironically, includes a character played by Garret Dillahunt, who portrayed the coward assassin of "Wild" Bill Hickok in Deadwood).  Since the title gives away the ending to the more historically-challenged viewers out there, what will they make of the loping, lyrical, contemplative, poetic, Malick-meets-David Gordon Green style which Dominick chooses to infuse his movie with?  Surely they'll say things like, "It's as agonizingly long as its pretentious title," and they'd kind of be right.  This is definitely the sort of picture I'd much rather watch outside of an enormous film festival (and definitely not movie number five of the day), where I'd be able to enjoy it a lot more.  Not that I didn't enjoy it -- because who'd have the nerve to hate on a gorgeous flick shot by Roger Deakins?