The triumph of A Mighty Wind is that it makes an audience love the sing-along catchiness of folk and still break up at its banalities. This tiny titan of a movie is a perfect melding of form and content.

Little miracles spring up throughout this picture.

A moral, not a moralistic, movie. It's also a bracing aesthetic achievement, creating a fictional version of a factual case that illuminates as it entertains.

When it comes to the oft-doomed genre of seafaring adventure, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World is a spectacular throwback and a great leap forward.

A first-person documentary with the subterranean pull of a superb confessional novel.

In America is the most unexpected and personal triumph yet from Jim Sheridan.

A madcap milestone. Not since Disney's 75-minute Alice In Wonderland (1951) has an animator filled the screen with dazzling flights of random invention that manage to hook up into a swift, brief narrative.

It rises, all on its own, to the realm of masterwork.

The glory of Japanese Story is that even after a daringly abrupt plot turn, the cast maintains its empathy and lucidity without interruption.

The movie is a marvel - bold, lucid and succinct (even at 123 minutes). It's also harrowing and moving in its depiction of noncombatant men, women and children caught between terrorism and counter-terrorism.

For audiences, two things keep the tension from becoming too excruciating: the presence of the survivors in front of us and the knowledge that in the grip of Macdonald's humane, lucid filmmaking, we're in the best of hands.

Barbershop 2 makes you want to know what happens next. In its own way, it's the Ivory Soap of sequels: 99 and 44/100% pure.

Russell's conviction is so total that it tingles the spines of the audience.

Twisted is an unusual forensic crime film because it's witty and sophisticated as well as taut and creepy.

As a documentary, The Agronomist, in its excitingly fractured, modern manner, does what Lawrence of Arabia and The Leopard do: It traces the upheaval of a civilization in the profile of a magnificent individual. It's a 90-minute nonfiction film with the impact and the greatness of an epic.

The Prisoner of Azkaban is to Harry Potter what that other No. 3, "Goldfinger," was to James Bond: the movie that takes the invention and gamesmanship of the series to a whole new giddy peak.

Saved! is the audacious feel-good satire of 2004.

Spider-Man 2 offers one emotional or action-packed aria after another; at the end you feel like giving it a standing O.

A vibrant emotional epic.

Unfolds amid the mechanized carnage of World War I. Yet everything in it is personal. That's why it's a masterpiece.

By turns breathtaking and heartbreaking.

If you didn't know that Martin Scorsese made The Aviator, the enthralling new adventure-biography of Howard Hughes, you might think it was the calling card of a neophyte visual genius.

The title captures this film's harrowing qualities, but not its energy, its limpid beauty or its spiritual grace.

The Sea Inside brings us outside and inside ourselves, and takes us to brave new aesthetic depths.

Enraging and enthralling.

Darger made art as if the lives of his subjects depended on it. That's how Yu has made her movie.

An exhilarating movie about sadness and renewal.

Funny Girl is old-fashioned; it is also exhilarating.