The deliriously enjoyable noir comedy-thriller Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang does nothing by halves and everything by doubles.

Of all the shocks in the riveting and timely political thriller Paradise Now, the most unsettling may be the dignity bestowed on a pair of prospective Palestinian suicide bombers.

In a season of bulging Movies Earmarked for Importance, it is almost startling to come across something as unhyped - and perfectly swell - as The Ice Harvest.

The director of The Descent is savvy enough to suggest even more than he shows. And he's old-school enough to load up on glimpses of good, clean, gruesome gore.

Many have tried, but none can match Malick's touch for shuffling a deck of elegiac images (water/sky/clouds/rain) and fanning out the hand to express what speech cannot; he's a master, too, of incorporating sound that is often wordless but never empty.

In the juxtaposition of cataclysmic matter-of-fact misery and cinematic poetry, the filmmaker finds a calmly stunning way to convey the experience of living with death as something intimate, and, unnervingly, almost natural.

Duck Season unfolds with a slaphappy logic that only looks casual. In fact, every unfinished conversation and banal picture on the wall (one's of ducks) matters as four little people share one memorable little day.

The jazzish score, by Lee's music man, Terence Blanchard, is typically intrusive. But the mood is right, the twists are new. And with one casting inspiration, Inside Man furthers the rising stardom of Chiwetel Ejiofor (Serenity).

"Old Boy's" vivid star Choi Min-sik plays a terrible schoolteacher -- yet another damned soul in Park's inflammatory, inimitable movie inventory of hell on earth.

A pitiless yet elegiac Australian Western as caked with beauty as it is with blood.

A work of American art as classic as it is modern. Note to tourists: Leave before the very end of the credits and you'll miss some of the best and funniest roadside sights.

It's a stylish scramble of evocative footage, groovy music, and crazy-candid reminiscences from key players still proud to score.

Kenan directs with a zingy sense of kids, comedy, fright, and visual perspective. But the movie also shimmers and shakes in all its motion-capture animated beauty with the slyly deep sensibilities of executive producer Robert Zemeckis.

A jolting, artfully made drama set in and around a suburban playground somewhere between "American Beauty" and "In the Bedroom" on America's psychic highway.

Exquisitely structured, pitiless study of a middle-aged man trapped in a stagnant emotional weather pattern.

Each and every character in Christopher Guest's latest hilarious cultural corrective is something inspiring to behold.

Ricardo Darín, wearing a mild-mannered expression of emotional remove, plays the unnamed antihero, obsessed with imagining the perfect robbery. The ''aura'' is the clarity with which he sees -- or imagines he sees -- the world in moments preceding an epileptic attack.

Jafar Panahi's wonderfully funny, outspoken shaggy-dog story, a light counterweight to his sadder 2000 feminist drama "The Circle."

Talented filmmaker Susanne Bier (Brothers), armed with an outstanding compositional sense, keeps control over the storms of melodrama that swirl in this rich weepie.

Gere is terrific at suggesting the kind of addictive cocktail of excitement, panic, chutzpah, creativity, and naked hunger for fame and megabucks that might inspire such big, fat lies.

If only for the comedy glory of Sigourney Weaver as a TV network president who confuses acid reflux with gut instinct, this very smart, very funny movie about the making of a network sitcom is a cut-glass gem of a showbiz conceit.

I mean no impertinence when I say that as a portrait of love and grief, writer-director Mike White's exceptional film Year of the Dog deserves the same admiration accorded Joan Didion's exceptional memoir "The Year of Magical Thinking."

A satisfying contraption of twists, missteps, and blithe repartee that produces old-fashioned, honestly earned guffaws.

A muscular sequel to To's riveting 2005 gangster picture "Election."

While the young people chatter about life and literature with sometimes overbearing self-satisfaction, the astute filmmaker observes their pretentious gum-flapping with a mixture of amusement, compassion, and wised-up rue.

Fantasy leaks into reality.

Out of a harrowing story set in a foreign thicket, Herzog has found American beauty.

There are no zombies to distract from the plausibility of Right at Your Door. And that's what makes this smart, coolly horrifying American indie thriller one of the scariest movies you're likely to see all year — a post-9/11 nightmare about terrorism, panic, and paranoia with real, waking-life implications.