A strange and funny film, smart, complex and difficult to shake.

One of the most pleasant foreign films of the year, a funny, graceful and immensely good-natured work.

No admirer of Mr. von Trier's work should miss this compelling rarity.

If Mr. Ghobadi's dominant theme is the devastation of the Kurds, his subdominant tone is one of strength, resistance and fertility.

A more concise and affecting summation of the Tibetan crisis would be hard to imagine.

Dense, contradictory and distressingly honest, Valley of Tears is that rarity among political documentaries: a genuinely thought-provoking film.

At once highly naturalistic and dreamily abstract, playing out its mythic themes through vibrantly detailed characterizations (and remarkable performances by the entire cast). The Return announces the arrival of a major new talent.

To watch the biggest stars of their time in casual conversation, trading riffs and passing bottles, without benefit of publicists, handlers and security goons is to relive an innocent, anarchic time in the entertainment business when music, not marketing, was at the center of the enterprise.

Consistently offbeat and entertaining; at such moments, it is also quite moving.

It is enough of an act of optimism just to raise the specter of heroic nobility, something that Virgil Bliss accomplishes with subtlety and poignancy.

The film is full of ingenious details and effective character sketches (Thomas has a mother who would give Woody Allen the willies) that go a long way toward covering up its conventionalities.

Like his father, Mr. Brown has the magical ability to take his public on a two-hour vacation. It's the next best thing to being there, and you don't need to worry about sand in your beer.

A tiny film that reflects a large talent.

An effective, well-made film that will certainly please its target audience of preteen girls.

It remains a documentary at heart, full of astonishing glimpses of human resiliency that have nothing to do with artfulness and everything to do with patience, persistence and sympathy.

Rather than a feminist martyr, her film presents an artist with a rich body of work, one who still fascinates and continues to cast a wide influence.

A photographer for magazines like Vanity Fair and GQ, as well as a veteran director of commercials, Mr. Jones brings a trained eye to this, his first documentary. The low gray skies of Chicago prove once again to be a boon to photography, and the city has seldom looked better than it does here, in its chilly, minimalist beauty.

In these risk-averse times, it is a pleasure to see a film that fails by attempting too much. Frustrating and demanding as it may be, La Commune (Paris, 1871) is essential viewing for anyone interested in taking an exploratory step outside the Hollywood norms.

Saving the big number for the climax, like any good musical director, Mr. Yuen finishes up with a spectacular variation on the traditional kung fu pole fight.

Lagaan may look naïve; it is anything but. This is a movie that knows its business — pleasing a broad, popular audience -- and goes about it with savvy professionalism and genuine flair.

What's oddly appealing about this film is the sweetness that the director, François Velle, manages to extract from Craig Sherman's rather bitter screenplay.

Here is a rich tale of our times, very well told with an appropriate minimum of means.

For those in search of something different, Wendigo is a genuinely bone-chilling tale.

This tiny film is heartfelt, well made and worthy of attention.

Very well edited by Laura C. Murray and set to an effective score by the percussionist Evelyn Glennie, People Say I'm Crazy is a small film but an extremely affecting one.

Never backing off from big, emotional moments, but also fleshing out the necessary transitions between them, he has realized his finest movie. It's a renaissance for Mr. Schultz, who seems to be speaking with his own voice after all these years.

Obscure by nature and unwieldy by design, Darger's work is difficult to confront and consume; Ms. Yu has brought it a little closer, and that is as fine a public service as an art documentary can provide.

The freer and more sophisticated approach of "Divine Intervention" makes these traditional-minded documentaries look somewhat stodgy and old-fashioned by comparison, but both have a value as reportage that Mr. Suleiman's film does not pretend to have.

Has an edge of cynicism and cruelty that just as often suggests the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone.

Highly irritating at first, Mr. Koury's passive technique eventually begins to yield some interesting results.

In spite of its many flaws, the film never loses its focus on its fascinating central figure.

Maquiling creates an unusual and intriguing tone somewhere between sharp, deadpan comedy and a soft, dreamy surrealism.

Mr. Kelemer captures the sad textures of the Rogala brothers' lives with an appropriate balance of sympathy and detachment.

Mr. McElhinney has created a movie that is not without the flaws endemic in low-budget productions but still projects an amazing degree of stylistic assurance and originality.

Though undoubtedly a vanity project -- the music clearances alone must have cost much more than the film could ever hope to gross -- it functions pleasantly enough as an exercise in free association.

Even the walls seem to be sweating something viscous and unpleasant.

Provides more than enough sentimental catharsis for a satisfying evening at the multiplex.

Unfolds, skipping blithely from comic to melodramatic vignettes and back again, it follows the classical structure of a Shakespearean forest comedy, sorting out the mismatched couples and finding appropriate mates (or at least appropriate friendships) for everyone involved.

There are subtitles to reduce everything to simple English declarative sentences. This gives the viewer a decidedly unfair advantage over the characters: we can understand what they cannot and are invited to laugh at their mutual incomprehension.

For those looking for a vacation from the irony and the cruelty that have invaded so much of American popular culture, this scruffy little Indian film is a delightful getaway.

A rueful, reflective companion piece to "Born to Lose."

This stuff is much too strange and much too disturbing to be invented.

A product neither of Hollywood nor the New York-Sundance indie axis, Manna From Heaven is a true outsider film, and while it would be easy to fault its lack of technical polish, somewhat discursive script and uneven performances, it is also refreshingly sincere, gentle and good-natured.

The film uses standard techniques to tell its tale -- videotaped interviews with survivors interspersed with newsreel images from the period -- but does so with integrity and attention to detail.

Without exaggerating their lovability or condescending to their foolishness, Mr. Siegel makes vivid, likable people out of his three protagonists as they affect one another and are affected in turn.

Sunny, pleasant, squeaky-clean family film in which nothing surprising happens, and that is the point. Ms. Wood has a poise and wistfulness beyond her years, and she seems likely to follow the path of the child star Diane Lane into more nuanced adult roles.

Polished, well-structured film.

Because the characters are so well established -- Ms. Perkins is particularly good as the shy, resentful Brigitte -- the film can have fun with its own premises without turning into an empty camp exercise.

Whether or not you buy Mr. Broomfield's findings, the film acquires an undeniable entertainment value as the slight, pale Mr. Broomfield continues to force himself on people and into situations that would make lesser men run for cover.

The picture unfolds as a light romantic comedy that adults will probably find familiar but tolerable, while their age-appropriate offspring will be transported to new heights of cinematic enchantment.

Revels in directorial assertiveness, including an omniscient narrator and an intrusive use of slick, magazine-style graphics to identify characters and spell out slogans.

Ms. Slesin sums up the complicated feelings of Secret Lives with one well-chosen phrase: what these people are suffering from, she says, is the "trauma of gratitude." Her film is as complex and moving as that formulation.

Whether he's working in nonfiction or science fiction, Mr. Cameron remains an artist of great instinctive power. In Ghosts of the Abyss, he uses every means of probing that modern science has put at his disposal -- electronic, mechanical, sonic -- only to find that the tragic reality of the Titanic, its myths and its meanings, remain tantalizingly beyond his reach.

Has the undiscriminating temperament of a fan, blithely placing Mr. Coppola's magnificently made "Godfather" on the same plane as Mr. Hopper's slapped-together, and today all but unwatchable, "Easy Rider."

While previous editions have had six or seven short films, Boys Life 4: Four Play requires only four titles for its 87-minute running time, a sign of how much more substantial and ambitious work in the field has become.

Functions best in its voyeuristic, sociological mode, offering fragmentary glimpses of complicated lives and the complicated social rituals that shape them.

Using a fly-on-the-wall camera technique that suggests the cinéma vérité documentaries of Frederick Wiseman, Ms. Cammisa and Mr. Fruchtman vividly capture the dynamic of tenderness and rage that characterizes Sister Helen's relationship with the 21 men who live under her roof.

There is no denying the force of Mr. Brisseau's bizarre imagination and the personal conviction he brings to it.

Works in the end because of its commitment to its characters and a handful of fine performances.

Mr. Gudmundsson has created a sleek, light and entertaining work, with a few contrasting pockets of darkness and mystery.

Offers no answers and is all the more moving for it. An honest befuddlement may be the most apt and true response to the world as it is.

The beauty of Mr. Naderi's filmmaking lies in his combination of acute social observation (with the subway population providing its habitual cross section of New York classes and cultures) and pure, almost mathematical formalism.

The messages blend seamlessly into the fantasy and comedy in what is surely one of the best films for older children in quite some time.

Mr. Ratnam is a dynamic, natural filmmaker who happily uses every device at his disposal, from rapid-fire MTV editing to sped-up action scenes that recall silent serials, to keep his lengthy film moving at a brisk pace. The film flags only when Mr. Ratnam must turn his attention to the soggy romantic subplots.

Mario Van Peebles, of course, inhabits a very different world from that of his father: a world that his father, in some small way, helped to create. It is his awareness of this paradox, of the progressive import of his father's film and of the repressive import of his father's personality, that informs this modest but interesting work.

A feel-good documentary.

The writer and director, David Barker, discards the didactic tone of so much American independent filmmaking in favor of a character study that leads to no easy conclusions.

After a summer of computer-generated blockbusters, the amiably low-tech Benji: Off the Leash! seems like a breath of fresh air.

Americans now want a rooting interest in their journalism, just as they do in their sports and entertainment. Mr. Moore knows how to give that to them, and so - in a much more dignified, documented way - does Mr. Greenwald.

Mr. Anderson's screenplay provides a steady series of inventive action situations, and the director, Alexander Witt, makes the most of them. His work is fast, funny, smart and highly satisfying in terms of visceral impact.

It is a strange, beautiful, disturbing and at times literally painful work, an original and distinctive expression by a gifted young Philadelphia-based filmmaker who here confirms the talent he displayed in his 2001 film, "A Chronicle of Corpses."

It is an endearing, likable film, though its benign surface may cover some subtle propaganda on behalf of China's centralized government.

A spare, painterly and scrupulously unsentimental look at the plight of illegal Mexican immigrants massed at the United States border.

Each of these stories is terribly sad and terribly moving in its own right. Yet the film that Mr. Corcuera has spun around them only increases the viewer's sense of helplessness and passivity. No solutions are suggested, no actions are proposed, no reflection is invited. The misery of these people becomes just another voyeuristic spectacle, to be consumed and forgotten.

In trying to reproduce the griot's tone, Mr. Kouyaté rejects psychological nuance and dramatic shading: this is a tale that advances quickly and boldly, peopled by deliberately one-dimensional characters.

Though 30 Years to Life doesn't break any new ground, it's a light, engaging, well-carpentered film, with a quick wit and a sense of character just deep enough to lend some weight to the laugh lines.

Ms. Chaiken isn't much interested in melodramatic plot developments. Her talent lies in an evocative, accurate observation of a distinctive milieu and in the lively, convincing dialogue she creates for her characters.

It's the best kind of homemade movie, created with skill, modesty and a pleasing awareness of what works in an ultra-low-budget format that tends to be performance and storytelling, rather than visual expressiveness and technical polish.

As he did in "The Cup," Mr. Norbu provides a lot of ingratiating comic moments. His Buddhism is the laughing, playful kind, and does not ask the Western audience - for whom the film is clearly intended - to deal with any uncomfortably complex religious issues.

Less consumed by behavioral details than many of his filmmaking compatriots, Mr. Rasoulof makes bold use of symbolic imagery - a satellite television is confiscated and tossed overboard - suggesting that utopias inevitably come at the price of isolation and authoritarianism.

Sustains the charm of an early 60's New York romance.

Veers between the light naturalism of American television and the pulsing melodrama of Bollywood entertainment.

Emerges as an engaging if occasionally hokey inspirational melodrama about the importance of community in the face of life's disappointments.

By and large Mr. Hoch's portrayals are as harsh and authentic as a police photograph, but an occasional touch of sentimentality creeps in.

This is a bumpy ride, but one worth taking.

Handsome, well-executed film that nonetheless feels a bit long at 111 minutes. Those who are already anime fans will certainly find it stimulating; but this may not be the one to convert the uninitiated.

Mr. Sawyer eventually overreaches, striving for tragedy with a grim, cautionary ending that seems meant to evoke "Frankenstein." But the film's offhand, homemade quality sustains a quirky appeal.

The resulting compromise does not produce a perfect film, but it is a fine record of a classic production and an important reminder of an event that has not stopped echoing in American culture.

As broad and cartoonish as the screenplay is, there is an accuracy of observation in the work of the director, Frank Novak, that keeps the film grounded in an undeniable social realism.

Has the bad luck to come on the heels of Kathryn Bigelow's beautifully made and politically impassioned "K-19," making this submarine picture -- a relatively modest, low-budget affair -- seem skimpy by comparison.

Entertaining, lightly mocking documentary.

The material continues to carry its inherent emotional power and moral importance. As banal as the telling may be -- and at times, All My Loved Ones more than flirts with kitsch -- the tale commands attention.

Emerges as an uncommonly sober, well-researched film of its type.

She (Baur) has clearly earned the trust and respect of her subjects, the first qualification for any responsible documentarist, and they have repaid her with an intimate glimpse into their singular lives.

As soon as the medallion appears, so do the digital maneuverings -- speeded-up movement, composite images, objects and people morphing into supernatural thingamajigs -- that undercut the genuine thrills of the genuine action.

Clearly understands its target audience of first-generation Indian-Americans and has its pleasures to provide.

The essential humanity of the characters shines through, giving face and form to a subculture the movies have largely neglected.

Here is one performer (Testud) whose features -- small sad eyes, sharp nose, wide rueful smile -- can sustain a feature by themselves.