As much as any earnest historical drama, Secret Ballot serves as an eloquent argument for civic life, showing its human elements to be no less flawed for being so necessary.

The kids in Nobody Knows are most decidedly not crazy, and we come to care for them to an almost excruciating degree.

The performances are accomplished, but the real star of Hustle & Flow is Brewer, a playwright who has written and directed a few other movies but who is effectively making a breathtaking national debut here.

Despite all of Van Sant's narrative feints and coy protestations, the audience is left with one searing memory after seeing Last Days, and that memory is of Cobain. Was he, as Gordon's character suggests at one point, simply a rock-and-roll cliche? Or was he a visionary genius, as the name of Pitt's character implies?

Manages to be one of the genuinely fresh discoveries of the summer, a little gem that deserves to become a big sleeper hit.

Gromit's every facial move -- every grimace, scowl, eye-roll and glance askance -- is sublime.

A small, self-contained gem of incisive writing, superb acting and rich, expressive visuals.

Koltai is an accomplished, Oscar-nominated cinematographer (for 2000's "Malena"), and Fateless is meticulously composed and shot.

Extraordinary on many levels...because Mountain Patrol instead becomes what might be the first Chinese conservationist spaghetti western ever made.

United 93 unfolds with the terrible inevitability of a modern-day "Battle of Algiers," with Greengrass exerting superb control of tone, structure and pace...United 93 may be the best movie I ever hated.

Shot through with cheeky wit and hilarious musical numbers by the aforementioned slugs, Flushed Away features an eye-popping boat chase through London's watery nether regions, as well as the winning vocal talent of Kate Winslet, Bill Nighy and Ian McKellen, doing his best Sydney Greenstreet. Well done!

Mafioso may have been made in another era, but it stands as a classy, even radical rebuke to the film school posers who keep recycling the same tired gangster tropes.

The news is good for Bridge to Terabithia fans. The beloved children's book has not just survived but thrived in its adaptation to the screen.

Turns out to be not just rude, crude and outrageously funny but a deceptively sophisticated meditation on moral agency -- with pot jokes!

That such a masterful depiction of American heroism and can-do spirit has been created by a German art film director known for considerably darker visions of obsession is an irony Herzog no doubt finds delicious.

Sean Penn sings a powerful and poetic hymn to America with Into the Wild, his sweeping, sensitive and deeply affecting adaptation of Jon Krakauer's best-selling book.

This uncommonly intelligent thriller evokes the great films of the 1970s ("All the President's Men," "Klute," "Three Days of the Condor") that managed to elicit gritty urban realism while maintaining a suave sense of style and moral complexity.

Gosling's performance is a small miracle, not only because he's so completely open as a man who's essentially shut off, but because he changes and grows so imperceptibly before our eyes.

Bringing a tough, astringent wit to a subject too often wrapped in the cozy blanket of sentimentality or cute humor, Tamara Jenkins takes a frank look at the indignities of aging in The Savages, a black comedy that invites viewers to laugh or at least smile ruefully at the dying of the light.

Anamaria Marinca delivers an utterly transfixing performance as Otilia, a young woman who helps a friend (Laura Vasiliu) obtain an illegal abortion in the waning days of Romania's communist Ceausescu regime.

As he has done in all his movies, from creature features such as "Mimic" to serious dramas such as "Pan's Labyrinth," del Toro creates unforgettable images, filled with color, texture, lyricism and horror.

It's beautiful. I loved it. And it broke my heart.

Made with uncommon skill and assurance, the film never succumbs to rank sentimentality, but it manages to get at the nuances of human relationships.

Like all good fairy tales, this outsize celebration of perseverance and moral triumph contains within it a deeper idea -- in this case, the relative nature of what we think we know, and what's worth knowing at all. No doubt Dickens himself would approve.

Thanks to an exceptionally deft touch, Mottola manages to capture the absurdity and anguish of young adulthood, while never sacrificing meaning on the altar of crude humor.

Explodes in a burst of energy, musical chops and an eerie political prescience that makes it feel like something beamed from some past-is-future time warp.

Paris is a funny, sad, romantic and deeply felt love letter to a great city. If you can't book a trip now, it's the next best thing.

Manages to be both engrossing history and astonishingly germane to present-day political debates.