Majid Majidi's exquisite film The Willow Tree"is likely to make a very brief stop in theaters en route to home video, so catch it when and if you can.

Among DiCillo's best, and returns to the central theme of his career: the elusive and destructive nature of fame.

Gorgeous and terrifying.

Ultimately Gordon's movie becomes both a hilarious story about an unbelievable collection of arrested-teenage morons and, yes, an inspiring fable of persistence and redemption. I haven't mentioned this movie's fabulous addition to the English language yet, so here it is: the verb "to chumpatize."

All in all, an exciting and terrifying new perspective on an era you probably thought you understood.

Gruesome and terrifying things happen in The Last Winter, but there's no gratuitous gore or torture, and the film's real power comes from its building sense that something really, really bad is ABOUT to happen.

Highly compelling, if overlong and overwrought.

A powerful documentary.

No single film or book can dispel the cloud of enigma surrounding Kurt Cobain, but simply sitting in the dark and hearing him talk to you for 90 minutes, while the dreary gray-green beauty of his home state moves through your eyeballs and into your brain, goes a pretty long way.

Nanking both calls attention to a horrifying set of war crimes that remains little known in the West and crafts an impossible-but-true hymn to the power of the individual conscience.

Honeydripper offers a leisurely, atmospheric production with lots of time to appreciate his largely African-American cast, along with rocking musical interludes and just the faintest wash of spirituality.

Has an irresistible tragic and romantic undertow.

Dark, hilarious and oddly moving.

In its best moments, and they are considerable, Chicago 10 makes you see 1968, that near-apocalyptic year, with fresh eyes, as an extraordinary turning point in history now at least partly set free from boomer nostalgia and regret.

A glossy, enjoyable thriller that isn't quite as tricky or Hitchcockian as it wants to be, Roman de Gare gets by on high style and nice central performances by rubber-faced Dominique Pinon.

Like all poetic inward journeys, My Winnipeg is likely to resonate with sympathetic viewers in unexpected ways. In viewing his apparently placid prairie city, and his apparently placid prairie childhood, as an intensely symbolic landscape of mystery and terror, Maddin invites all of us to view our own equally ordinary lives in the same light.

If Full Battle Rattle begins as surreal, almost goofball farce, with a bunch of beefy guys playing a fancy-dress version of laser tag in the desert -- aided by a bunch of rented Iraqis who'd rather be watching TV in suburbia -- it ends on an ambiguous and haunting note, much closer to tragedy.

Trumbo is a terrific picture, a blend of interviews and archival footage and readings of Trumbo's letters and speeches.

A compelling, compact melodrama that packs an emotional wallop. It's my nominee for sleeper surprise of the summer, at least so far.

Baghead is a kick in the pants.

Once you get past the question of why someone would make a movie this artificial in the first place and move on to the answer (purely for the hell of it), Sukiyaki Western Django is a blood-drenched, dynamite, often hilarious and uniquely weird big-screen entertainment.

More than anything, The Betrayal is a cinematic essay about family and loss and home, one that's ironic and elegiac in tone and requires some patience.

Milk is good enough, thanks mostly to Penn's uncanny evocation, to bring Harvey Milk alive as a vital and highly relevant figure, rather than a distant political abstraction or gay saint. (He very definitely was neither.)

Reichardt is a tremendously conscientious filmmaker, and not out to torture the audience. Yes, this is a fraught and agonizing story, but the way it ends, although heartbreaking, is absolutely right.

This latest film from Iranian director Majid Majidi has the same combination of quiet contemplation, whimsy and tragedy that made his "Children of Heaven" an international smash a decade ago.

Given that "Chorus Line" is almost the paradigmatic backstage story, I guess Every Little Step is a meta-backstage story, capturing the "American Idol"-scale audition process.

Something like a cross between a torn-from-the-headlines docudrama, a Middle East conflict rendered in miniature and Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard," this latest film from the terrific Israeli director Eran Riklis revolves around the amazing lead performance of Palestinian-French actress Hiam Abbass.

Certainly it isn't the greatest of Coppola's pictures, or even of his independent productions, but those are pretty high standards. It has a verve and vitality that's been missing from his pictures for 25 years, and its various and visible flaws all result from too much of that verve rather than too little. I enjoyed it tremendously.