Ridiculous comedies can be fine, but the ones that matter creep up close to the truth. This one lives in it.

Dropping by on the same people every seven years like an old friend - or an unwelcome relative - Apted has constructed a peerless, suspenseful work that develops character to a depth that would make Tolstoy jealous. If you have any interest in documentaries, watch the DVD of the first film, "7 Up" (49 Up hits DVD Nov. 14). You won't be able to stop.

A sublime meditation that is one of this year's wisest, warmest and funniest films.

What a sweet collision is Rescue Dawn: the American psycho meets the German kook.

Getting a small cohort of humanity dead right is an impressive artistic achievement, but Mike Leigh's beautifully modulated English drama Another Year advances even farther.

It's not a knock on Steven Spielberg to say he is history's finest maker of children's movies. His capacity to evoke simplicity, awe, beauty and unconditional love are his genius, and his vision of the children's story War Horse is a gorgeous, majestic fable about a boy who yearns to be reunited with his steed.

Deep, disturbing and funny.

56 Up is as good a point as any to get hooked on the magnificent half-century series of documentaries, beginning in 1964 with "7 Up."

Can’t possibly deserve your close attention. Yet it does, with distilled honky-tonk poetry and generous good humor. It’s one of the year’s best, most deeply felt films.

Despite the lingering aroma of Victorian rot shrouding 1961, An Education is excitingly young.

The White Ribbon is one of the finest films that ever repelled me, a holiday in the abyss.

An improbable but hilarious combine of losin’-it comedies and the rarefied, Europhile air of the Cinema du Twee.

The highest praise I can give a superhero movie is that it makes me forget about its 10-cent-comic-book soul.

The details are true and funny, played brilliantly.

Turns out to be one of the most absorbing films of the year. Plus it has lots of wiener jokes.

After seeing Everybody's Fine, Paul McCartney offered to write a song that plays over the closing credits. That may be because the whole movie is like a celluloid McCartney tune: warm and playful and sweetly earnest, but lightly funny, too, and crafted with consummate skill.

Two fins up for The Cove, a documentary that whales on evil Japanese fishermen who kill dolphins for lunch meat.

What "Rent" should have been, Once is: a Bohemian rhapsody.

The Wrestler offers something to pretty much everyone in the audience. Much like "The Sopranos," it creates a world that might make you feel utterly at home or exhilarated by strange horrors. Maybe both.

The Last King of Scotland is a parable shocking in its truth, jolting in its lack of sentimentality, Shakespearean in its vision of the doctor's catastrophic flaw.

Dizzy with celebrity, New York society and gay life (if all that isn't the same thing), Infamous is more fun. But "Capote" is a better movie.

Coppola works in weird ways, but the real Versailles was so much weirder.

Five people did escape, and they contribute their stories to the spellbinding documentary.

If Martin Scorsese were 30 and a Los Angeleno, he'd be making movies much like this one.

Actors tell us that dying is easy, comedy is hard. But comedies about dying are hardest of all.

It's a pulp story pinned to the screen with an ice pick of conscience in a manner that would have pleased Allen's idol, Ingmar Bergman.

Mighty entertainment that makes you feel sorry for the saps next door in the multiplex.

The movie all but proclaims U2 the world's best rock band. Somewhere, Mick Jagger's jaws are grinding.