There is a remarkable stillness to many of the film's most indelible images, particularly the exteriors, which are so carefully photographed, and without the usual tiresome camera jiggling, as to look almost frozen.

What helps make The Departed at once a success and a relief isn't that the director of "Kundun," Mr. Scorsese's deeply felt film about the Dalai Lama, is back on the mean streets where he belongs; what's at stake here is the film and the filmmaking, not the director's epic importance.

Tucked in between all the hurt and the jokes, the character development and the across-the-board terrific performances is a surprisingly sharp look at contemporary America.

The latest James Bond vehicle -- call him Bond, Bond 6.0 -- finds the British spy leaner, meaner and a whole lot darker.

Despite the tears, the blood and the booze, Head-On is a hopeful film.

As it is, this collection clocks in at a fleet 87 minutes, which is shorter (and taken together, more lively) than a whole mess of features.

A deadpan comedy shot through with a vein of despair, the Uruguayan film Whisky is a pint-size pleasure.

A heartfelt, emotionally delicate children's movie about life and death and all the parts in between.

One of the strengths of Mr. Nguyen-Vo's film is that despite the overwhelming physical beauty of the landscape and the simplicity of his characters, he doesn't succumb to such aerated thinking. The world in Buffalo Boy" is filled with wonder, but it is a world also filled with real desire, real death, not abstractions.

Mr. Jennings and Mr. Goldsmith have held onto a genuine sense of childlike wonder, which works as a nice corrective to what might otherwise come across as an overabundance of hip.

The newest in British gangland entertainment and the tastiest in years.

Late in his new film Kings and Queen, the wildly gifted French director Arnaud Desplechin yanks the rug from under his characters and sends both them and us reeling.

The strange and delightful Talent Given Us is a movie that shouldn't work but does rather remarkably.

What distinguishes Memories of Murder, setting it apart from rank-and-file thrillers, is its singular mix of gallows humor and unnerving solemnity.

Shows a young filmmaker pushing at the limits of cinematic narrative with grace and a certain amount of puckish willfulness.

It's possible that Maggie Gyllenhaal will never become a major star, but there isn't an American actress in movies today who holds the screen with as much deep-seated soul.

Filled with small, cute kids and large, goofy laughs and buoyed by fine supporting work from Greg Kinnear and Marcia Gay Harden, the director's latest effort won't rock your movie world, but the fact that he manages to keep the freak flag flying in the face of our culture of triumphalism is a thing of beauty.

A delicate wisp of a film with a surprisingly sharp sting.

A soulful, piercingly beautiful story.

Even a starring role in the American version of the British show "The Office," which has given Mr. Carell a higher profile, conveys neither his sheer likability nor his range as an actor, both crucial to making this film work as well as it does.

The casting of the two leads is a nice surprise in Red Eye, as is its modest scale. One of the ironies about the film is that its relatively small-movie feel allows Mr. Craven to focus on the sorts of things - the performances and little bits of business from the extras - that a director like Michael Bay doesn't have time for, partly because he is so busy blowing stuff up.

The title character in this nicely kinked Belgian thriller faces a unique adversary: the enemy hot on his heels is Alzheimer's.

There is something heartening about Mr. Burton's love for bones and rot here, if only because it suggests, despite some recent evidence, that he is not yet ready to abandon his own dark kingdom.

The line between cinematic art and exploitation has rarely seemed finer and nervier, at least in recent memory, than in the French film Innocence.

If all this sounds a bit nuts, dangerously self-indulgent and very of its experimental moment, it is. But it's also highly entertaining and, at moments, revelatory about filmmaking as a site of creative tension between individual vision and collective endeavor.

His (Ralph Fiennes) Voldemort may be the greatest screen performance ever delivered without the benefit of a nose; certainly it's a performance of sublime villainy.

Based on Mr. Lepage's play of the same title, Far Side of the Moon carries traces of the theater both in some of the dialogue and in its schematic construction. That said, it has been beautifully shot by the cinematographer Ronald Plante in the kind of high-definition digital video that makes the future of cinema look rather less grim than usual.

In a film filled with plaintively expressive faces, characters say as much when they don't talk as when they speak Mr. Arriaga's dialogue, which sometimes sounds like hardscrabble poetry, sometimes sounds real as dirt and is, rather surprisingly, often darkly funny.