Excites us with words not spoken, passions not played out. A mood story more than a love story, it's all about sustaining a state of exquisite melancholy in the face of desire.

A magnificent documentary.

One of the great films of our time, or any other.

Essentially a coming-of-age story set in working-class North Carolina in the 1970s. But it's so startlingly original that it transcends the genre. This is a wonderful film, from puckish start to momentous finish.

Pirandello didn't have a patch on its complexities. Here's a popular entertainment with an eclectic soundtrack raising penetrating questions of identity in astonishing sequences that interweave live action with comic-book art.

Casts a spell and then some -- a ringing testament to the power of motion pictures.

An improbably bountiful subject -- kids on skateboards turning themselves into virtuoso artist-athletes -- has been brought to life in a wonderful, unpretentious documentary.

Give yourself away to this movie and you'll be glad you did.

The kind of movie they don't make any more -- a seriously beautiful, deliberately paced drama that meanders for a while at the pace of a summer romance, then explodes with phenomenal force.

Transcends its star's controversial career and, in the bargain, stands head, shoulders and heart above every other Hollywood movie that we've seen so far this year.

Magnificent.

Beautiful (sometimes sublimely so), daring (sometimes outrageously so), seriously crazed and terrifically funny.

Against all odds in an era of machine-made spectaculars, Mr. Jackson and his collaborators have created a film epic that lives and breathes.

Everywhere in Nowhere in Africa, skill and art translate into vivid life.

Goes from good to great in 90 minutes, and then it's over, except that it's really not, because this small masterwork grows even deeper and more affecting as it takes up permanent residence in your memory.

It is plainly, though not simply, a masterpiece from an acknowledged master of contemporary animation, and a wonderfully welcoming work of art that's as funny and entertaining as it is brilliant, beautiful and deep.

Giddily funny in a singularly American idiom, and shot, by Lance Acord, with an eagle eye for cultural absurdities, Ms. Coppola's film is also a meditation on love and longing, shot through with a sensibility that's all the more surprising for being so unfashionably tender.

This joyous farce is a big, big deal, and Jack Black is nothing less than majestic as a scruffy, irreverent rocker passing himself off as a pedagogue in a private school.

Just as Aubrey's authority springs from skill and knowledge, so does the film's power. They don't make movies like this any more because few people know how to make them.

The invisible wizard Peter Jackson makes use of every scene to show us the meaning of magnificence. Never has a filmmaker aimed higher, or achieved more.

An absolutely thrilling recreation, in documentary style, of a now-legendary story.

One of those rare collaborations that artists dream of, and that film lovers crave.

Here's an entertainment to warm the heart of anyone who grew up (or failed to) on the formative joys of action movies.

Once in a great while a film seems right in every detail. Andre Techine's Strayed ("Les Egares") is such a film.

Please see this movie, and take any kids old enough to read subtitles. It's one of a kind.

One of those rare and complex dramas that you can enter, not simply watch.

Sideways makes you glad about America, about movies, about life.

Rapturously beautiful, startlingly audacious and often very funny, the film employs many of the techniques that were used so pleasingly in "Amélie."