The imagery is uniquely that of Oshii, who deserves a place in the pantheon of visual artists.

It does a masterful job of capturing a specific time and place while reminding us how timeless the abortion dialogue is.

A masterful epic charting love's labyrinths.

A pepperpot bubbling with pungent insights and sharp wit, Spanglish is about how people, like cultures, are more alike than not.

A gut-punch of a drama.

Collins and Pacino plumb the depths of acting, of Shakespeare, of the difference between law and justice.

Almereyda's smart, streamlined adaptation is full of such neat little ironies.

While its careful pace and seemingly opaque story may not satisfy every moviegoer's appetite, the film's final scene is soaringly, transparently moving.

Paolo Virzi's film looks at school as the microcosm of society and at fathers too self-absorbed to be there for their daughters. He combines the themes played in "Mean Girls" and "Look at Me" and makes them vibrant.

What begins as Lafcadia's journey into the heart of darkness ends as his pilgrimage into the light. Stunning.

Brilliantly detailed, richly painted portrait.

A cracking police procedural from Belgian director Erik van Looy, has a jaw-dropping premise so smartly executed that if this movie weren't in Flemish I'd swear that Michael Mann had directed it.

Miller and Futterman tell their story with plain, uninflected film language, permitting the ambiguities to surface. Theirs is not the anti-capital-punishment tract of Richard Brooks' excellent 1967 film "In Cold Blood." It is a story about an accomplice to crime who lived to tell the story.

Insightful, funny-sad memoir of divorce, intellectual style and emotional rebirth.

Urgent and stunning movie.

What gives North Country urgency is that it's about how a man comes to understand that it's bad for him and for his community to deny his daughter privileges and prerogatives he'd grant his son.

In refusing to pigeonhole its characters, Nine Lives is less like those L.A. road-rage melodramas "Short Cuts" and "Crash" than those all-of-us-are-interconnected dramas "Amores Perros" and "21 Grams."

Whatever number it is chronologically on the P&P parade, Wright's film ranks first in verve. Quite simply, it is the essential P&P.

While Gyllenhaal has playful puppy eyes and energy, his performance as Jack is a blur of mustaches, sideburns and spurs that never achieves the weight of Ledger's.

The $200 million result is an irresistibly entertaining, if grandiose, saga of doomed love and directorial hubris.

Not since Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" and Malick's own "Days of Heaven" has a movie been both so breathtakingly beautiful and so narratively abstract.

L'Enfant begins with the birth of a child, but its real concern is the moral rebirth of a man.

A disarming, funny and animated Al Gore, once a robot among presidential candidates, proves himself a rock star among environmental activists.

The script by Andrea Berloff is stunning in its simplicity and aching details.

Funny as it is fierce, breathtaking as it is life-affirming.

Vibrates with exuberance and erudition.

Bill Condon's screen adaptation of the 1981 Broadway sensation is, if possible, as dazzling and energizing as its source.

Zodiac is a reproach both to those dedicated to unscrambling "The Da Vinci Code" and to those hooked on forensic crime shows where all the evidence leads to a tidy conclusion. That Zodiac's manhunt is inconclusive makes it all the more haunting.