At once monumental and ghostly.

This shocker is often shameless, not least in the climactic confrontation with Sister Bridget, but it's impossible not to be moved by the ending -- if only because the torture is finally over.

No Greek tragedy, this Hollywood Sweeney is a FUN creepy-crawly. If nothing else, Burton has learned that the successfully gruesome is its own reward.

For its 80 minutes, the movie creates the illusion that not just Tati but his form of cerebral slapstick lives.

Soberly entertaining documentary.

A movie of elegant understatement and considerable formal intelligence.

Tender, cruel, and very funny, Baumbach's fourth feature turns family history into a sort of urban myth.

More analytical than contemplative, never less than straightforward, Dream of Light makes no showy bid for the sublime.

Jack Black is consistently hilarious--and not just in his dreams of moshpit glory.

A superbly balanced piece of work, addressing the passion of Irish Republican martyr Bobby Sands.

The verbal jousts are droll and the countryside is splendid, although the food - an endless succession of fussy little presentations - may be an acquired taste.

Downfall may be grimly self-important and inescapably trivializing. But we should be grateful that German cinema is more inclined to normalize the nation's history than rewrite it.

Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy is exactly that: The Iranian modernist's first feature to be shot in the West is a flawless riff on our indigenous art cinema.

Detailed yet oblique, leisurely but compelling, perfectly cast and irreproachably acted, the movie has a seductively novelistic texture complete with a less-than-omniscient narrator.

This affecting eulogy underscores not only Demme's own tribute to Dominique but also the film's homage to radio. This is a motion picture that's in love with the magic of airborne speech.

Increasingly muddled, cumulatively monotonous, would-be heartwarming, Three Kings becomes its own entertainment allegory -- searching, Hollywood style, for the point at which blatant self-interest can turn humanitarian, while still remaining profitable.

Le Havre is utopian precisely because it shows everything as it is not.

The action is largely psychological, but it's accelerated by Audiard's nervous camera, chiaroscuro lighting, and jangling montage.

Primordial and laconic, this remarkably assured debut feature has the elegant simplicity of its title.

Forget "Irreversible," this is the season's most piercingly feel-bad movie.

Leisurely and digressive, this generally exhilarating saga ("a storm of misadventures" per Ruiz) variously suggests Victor Hugo, Stendhal, and (thanks in part to the unnatural, emphatic yet uninflected, acting) Mexican telenovelas. The score is richly romantic; the period locations are impeccable.

Kosashvili's camera is restrained, the better to render Late Marriage superbly brash, raunchy, and confrontational.

Waking Life doesn't leave you in a dream, specifically the dream of Linklater's previous films, so much as it traps you in an endless bull session.

A 157-minute police procedural at once sensuous and cerebral, profane and metaphysical, "empty" and abundant, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is closer to the Antonioni of "L'Avventura," and it elevates the 52-year-old director to a new level of achievement.

Self-contained, enigmatic, illuminated from within, Huppert banks a performance that pays dividends throughout the film.

As straightforward in narrative as it is gut-wrenching in effect, A Simple Plan is a sort of slow-motion skid down an icy blacktop— it's a movie you watch with a mounting sense of dread...[It's] an extremely credible thriller and an affecting brother-story.

The filmmaker might be accused of preaching to the choir were the story not so compelling and the performances so strong.

What's truly extraordinary about this movie--which strikes me on two viewings as Maddin's masterpiece--is that it not only plays like a dream but feels like one.