This is a psychological study that rejects psychology, an erotic drama of surpassing coldness, and a story of amour fou in which the madness is calculated and the love frozen.

Their doomed fling is oddly hypnotic and ultimately haunting.

Audacious, hypnotic and utterly breathtaking.

First-time feature director Tucker displays an astonishingly assured touch, allowing his phenomenal cast to creep into their characters' skins and surrounding them with images of shimmering and slightly threatening beauty.

28 Weeks Later is flawed -- the constant reappearance of one key character verges on the absurd -- but it knows where it's going, and it gets there in a chilling blaze of fire, blood and poisonous fog.

Yugoslavian-born writer-producer-director-editor Vladan Nikolic weaves together the intersecting stories of lost souls who bring their international miseries to New York in this cool, cynical thriller.

Lafosse's razor sharp dissection of relationships strained to the breaking point is hypnotic in a road-accident kind of way.

It's as hard not to ask what former New York Doll David Johansen is doing in their company, prancing his way through an irrelevant version of Howlin' Wolf's "Killing Floor," as it is not to wonder why the audience is so overwhelmingly white.

It's a raw, haunting experience.

A huge hit in France, this ensemble drama revolves around two very different social groups whose encounters with each other change several lives in surprising ways.

This quietly gripping film is both universal and particular.

The look is rough, but Bujalski's talent is evident.

The same super-heated visual imagination that made Guillermo del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth" such a darkly thrilling delight is very much in evidence in his sequel to "Hellboy." It's a shame that it's at the service of such a blandly conventional story.

Utterly enthralling even for viewers unfamiliar with the Congo's complicated political history.

John Walter's documentary suggests that Johnson, who made no distinction between his life and his art, designed every detail of his own mysterious 1995 suicide with the same whimsical care that went into his painstakingly assembled pieces, and provides an engaging overview of Johnson's eccentric career in the process.

Though overlong and repetitive, Hirsch's film is vitalized by the same music that helped keep the revolutionary spirit alive.

Froemke and Dickson's film opens a window onto rural poverty so dire it's almost inconceivable that it exists in 21st-century America.

Ejiofor's subtle, infinitely humane performance is the invisible glue that holds everything together and Chris Menges's darkly shimmering cinematography lends the story a gritty, coolly seductive glamour.

An intensely internalized portrait of external pandemonium, a slippery, insidiously haunting work of poetry rather than brilliantly realized pulp.

Director Carl Franklin, who also adapted the screenplay from Walter Mosley's prize-winning novel, isn't particularly concerned with the machinations of mystery plots. Nor is he seduced by the temptations of noir visual style (although Tak Fujimoto's camera work is plenty stylish).

Ultimately, the material is so familiar that it's hard to work up any enthusiasm for another trip though the seamy underside of glittering gaming life.

Nolan's intention was clearly to cast the material in a more conventional Hollywood mold without turning it into namby-pamby nonsense, and he succeeds admirably.

Fincher gets it all right, and Donovan's hippie-dippy "Hurdy Gurdy Man," which bookends the story, has never sounded so hauntingly menacing.

Errol Morris' characteristically distanced documentary is empathetic without being especially sympathetic.

Bielinsky's "Nine Queens" was a complex romp through the machinations of high-stakes con artists, but this intricately plotted mystery ventures into darker psychological territory and never misses a step.

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

A giant leap forward in Stephen Chow's ongoing assault on Jackie Chan's status as reigning balletic clown-master of martial-arts mayhem, this extravagantly nutty crime comedy is a work of some kind of genius. Not everybody's kind of genius, to be sure.

Brooding ghost story is rich with psychological and political implications that never obscure its fundamental creepiness.