Miike's goofy, gallant, action-packed fantasy deserves to become a classic family film.

The film rests entirely on Poupaud's shoulders, and he rises to the demands of a complex, deeply unsympathetic role.

The film's prestige is a doozy, both dazzling and preposterous, but if you're watching closely -- as Cutter advises in the film's first few minutes -- it's flawlessly set up.

Nelson's film eschews sensationalism, and knowing how the story ends in no way diminishes its visceral impact.

Murphy is a revelation as James, and what American Idol castoff Hudson lacks in technical acting craft she makes up for in raw energy and a voice that could melt the rhinestones off a beauty queen. To complain that Beyonce pales by comparison is to fault her for nailing the essence of the infinitely malleable Deena.

It's a lavish entertainment that revels in lurid colors and yet more lurid emotions.

Skrovan swears that during two years of filming, Nader's only demand was, "Make sure you talk to people who oppose me."

The vicious clamor the film occasioned in the U.K. is simply the measure of how volatile a subject the relationship between England and Ireland remains more than eight decades after the film's events, and the thinking viewer can hardly help but see parallels between the Irish insurgency and all subsequent guerrilla conflicts.

While Rachel's story is fiction, many of its incidents are rooted in historical events carefully researched by Soeteman and the film's briskly staged action and stunning reversals of fortune ensure that its two and a half hours fly by.

It's as laceratingly entertaining as its predecessor.

It's a high-energy blast.

It's sometimes wrenching to watch, but it's too gripping to turn away from.

Like "Air Guitar Nation," the stranger-than-fiction cast of characters is fascinating, and their high-stakes machinations are nothing short of mind-boggling.

An icily seductive parable about family, power, unconventional justice and the perils of answered prayers.

Bar-Lev also explores the freakish popular appeal of child prodigies, the family dynamics that come into play when a child's celebrity and earning capacity overshadows the adults', and the remarkably conflicted and contradictory admissions drawn from Brunelli about Marla's work.

Tim Burton's grand guignol fantasy transforms Stephen Sondheim's 1979 musical-theater piece into a cheerfully gothic morality tale.

McCarthy's flawless casting may be the film's greatest strength: Veteran character actor Jenkins and his costars vanish into their characters -- their performances are so subtle and unforced that they don't feel like performances at all.

Margaret Brown's documentary is actually an examination of the racial divide in a city that claims there is none.

Bleak, darkly humorous and surprisingly unsentimental, Michael Winterbottom's film has the desperate air of a cri de coeur, and unlike many fiction films about war, its use of real-life footage seems in no way inappropriate or exploitative.

The result is hypnotic.

Audacious, hypnotic and utterly breathtaking.

David Lynch lite.

This is absolutely not a film for all tastes, but it's a masterpiece of pitiless power whose audacious, ambiguous climax strikes a note of insane romanticism as haunting as it is perverse.

Offbeat documentary filmmakers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato dissect the history and legend of perhaps the best known and most profitable pornographic movies ever made.

An intoxicatingly beautiful, maddeningly elliptical and utterly enthralling meditation on the fleeting pleasures and haunting aftermath of doomed romance.

The only constant in Park's brilliantly cruel world is this: No matter how badly things seem to be going, there's a twist of fate lurking around the next curve that will make them worse.

Overall the film is a fascinating glimpse into an insular world that gives the lie to many clichés and showcases a group of dedicated artists.

The roots of Steve James's disturbing documentary lie in youthful idealism.