What's most refreshing about Real Women Have Curves is its unforced comedy-drama and its relaxed, natural-seeming actors.

This is more than a movie: It's Almodovar's design for living.

A deceptively simple movie with a deeply felt message.

Macdonald's film brilliantly telescopes the '70s, an era when every physical action had its equal and opposite political reaction.

A postfeminist valentine to the Paleolithic days of Woman Power when dinosaurs walked Manhattan in heels with matching handbags.

Isn't like the classic Japanese drama "Rashomon," which suggested that one person's perspective of an event gave him a different truth from the person standing elsewhere.

Almodóvar has made a powerfully moving film about men who think they want to lose themselves in their women, then are startled to realize that they're the ones who have been comatose.

The film's recurring image is that of a butterfly fluttering around a flower, a lovely symbol of the reader drawn to a novel's nectar.

An epic docudrama - electric and raw.

Enchanted and thrilling film.

Cholodenko takes us inside a bohemian hive where everyone buzzes around the Queen Bee. McDormand is superb. Likewise Bale and Nivola.

A human-scale comedy that reaches across generations to tickle, connect and embrace.

I love this movie, and I love the pride, spirit and sportsmanship of the kids who represent the best of American pluck and luck.

An unnerving and astonishing thriller.

It's a testament to Cage's canny performance and Jonze's seamless use of special effects that you believe Charlie and Donald are two entirely different people.

Bielinsky's movie builds like a poker game in which the players, having invested everything, cannot afford to fold.

Pure, undiluted joy.

A feverish melodrama about an idealist who, in following his heart and his bishop's orders, leads himself into temptation and his parish into hypocrisy.

The rhythms of Whale Rider are hypnotic as the ebb tide, haunting as the song of the humpback sea mammal, bracing as the ocean spray. It's a movie that rewards the patient viewer.

So incrementally does Eastwood's film build toward what seems like an inevitable resolution that when it concludes, you're sucker-punched. You haven't been watching a police procedural, but a Greek tragedy. You haven't been watching a drama about the catharsis of vigilantism, but sitting vigil for a community diminished, and permanently damaged, by violence.

An intimate epic of infinite grace.

Where Denys Arcand's delightful 1986 comedy "The Decline of the American Empire" celebrated the good life, his profoundly funny sequel The Barbarian Invasions heartily toasts the good death.

Wondrously emotional film, one that sneakily dismantles your defenses and purges grief you didn't realize you had.

McNamara, a robust conversationalist, is so lively that he bursts out of what is essentially a talking-head documentary.

Proves that the most local story is sometimes the most universal, the simplest tale sometimes the most complex.

Shrek 2 is a dream, a sequel as exhilarating and riotously funny as 2001's top-grossing original.

While it's too slight a movie for overpraise, there are such a serenity of vision and clarity of purpose to these characters that we easily are caught up in the boys' struggle to reunite mother and child.

A boisterous and improbably entertaining action comedy.