Goes where all too few films dare to venture these days -- into the heart of moral darkness.

Bean's commitment to serious theological examination is exciting, Gosling's performance is riveting, and this fiery and imperfect feature shines as a demonstration of independent filmmaking at its most uncompromising.

Lathan, charismatic and beautifully strong, holds the screen in every scene.

Minghella makes an enticing, intelligent, well-shaped picture about the extreme perils of class envy and sexual panic.

There aren't many at all like Spielberg and Kubrick, directors willing to lasso dreams (that's Steven) and nightmares (that's Stanley) or die trying. A.I. is a clash of the titans, a jumble, an oedipal drama, a carny act. I want to see it again.

What matters for today's hero is the good fight, and Gladiator KOs us with a doozy.

Noyce's movie works because the director -- trusts himself, and his audience, to understand that catastrophe isn't always a matter of loud ideology. Rather, it's the result of age-old human weakness. And sometimes it's quiet.

Expertly sinister, office-as-devil's-playground French thriller.

Emotional presence and a sophisticated understanding of commitment-phobia (as something other than a comedic punchline or an excuse for sex scenes) distinguishes this intense, contained drama, as does the unforced, sensual, and sensitive cinematography of Uta Briesewitz.

It's ''Moskowitz's March,'' really -- and it ends in stirring victory

Superb psychological thriller.

Nothing I've read about Iraq or seen on TV in the past few weeks has felt nearly as real and intimate as this commanding fiction.

Grant is the rare actor who can mix the characteristics of sex appeal and ambivalence in believable, rather than irritating, proportions.

Lives happily ever after because it's such a feisty but good natured embrace of the inner ogre in everyone.

Turns out to be the funniest, most risk-taking, most incisive movie of the summer.

Thrilling little epic set in the bewildering arena of the English language.

Serendipity has no business working, but it does. And by the way, Eugene Levy has no business almost stealing the show, but he does, too.

A fast, loose, and very funny parody that pulls off the not-so-simple feat of tweaking Trekkies and honoring them.

The notion of meta has never been diddled more mega than in this giddy Möbius strip of a movie, a contrivance so whizzy and clever that even when it tangles at the end, murked like swampy southwestern Florida itself, the stumble has quotation marks around it.

Everything is vast and hugely ambitious in Martin Scorsese's magisterial, scrambled historical epic.

Haunting and hopeful.

A funny, shrewd, no-bull family comedy about the relationship between mothers and teenage daughters that allows Curtis the comedian to remember her days as a slinky starlet while making use of her wisdom as the mother of an adolescent girl herself.

Realer and more consequential than much being packaged for TV and movies these days as ''reality,'' the fictional In This World unfolds with the deceptive dispassion of a documentary, but builds with a sure sense of dramatic epic.

This funny, gory stab-athon is as sophisticated about the mechanics of Part 2s as the original was savvy about horror flicks.

A story in full billow; it sails through stretches of bloody battle, anxious waiting, wine-soaked relaxation, and marvelous scientific discoveries by the remarkable Maturin (Paul Bettany, well matched again with his ''A Beautiful Mind'' costar).

If ''Finding Nemo'' is an awesome Pixar superpower, The Triplets of Belleville is a charming, idiosyncratic, self-governing duchy with huge tourism potential on the other side of the animated-movie planet.

Ah, monsieur, you can lead a Frenchman to the Big Apple, but you can't make him a New Yorker -- and that's exactly what makes The Professional so fascinating.

That the story is so oldfashioned and domestic and the family so average and secular is, in its way, the wind beneath this Broken Wings.