Supple and engrossing, a liquid-smooth street-rap testimonial.

A swankily austere piece of jeepers-creepers sci-fi.

Director Niels Mueller's attempt to create a middle-class "Taxi Driver" (he tips his hand a bit smugly by respelling Byck's name to evoke Travis Bickle) has a creepy, meticulous exactitude.

Pacino shows you what is only subliminally in the text: that Shylock's heart of stone is really a wall of wounded pride.

Everything in the movie -- family demons, May-December sex, the lessons of writing -- ties together with pinpoint precision. That's a pleasure, to be sure, and a limitation, too.

De-Lovely is something dishy and rare: a biopic about a happy, and even enchanted, man.

Ice Age never matches the brilliance of ''Toy Story'' or the heartfelt heft of ''Shrek,'' but it's an antic and sweet-spirited pleasure.

Rapt and beautiful and absorbing.

Heavier on mood than incident, but its vision of a doomed erotic power war has a lurching authenticity.

Code 46 has a noirish fatalism that renders it a close cousin to ''Blade Runner,'' but Winterbottom's film, shot mostly in the light, uses the theme of memory erasure to peer into the eternal sunshine of tragically altered minds.

It would be tempting to say that fractured time sequences in movies have become a cliché, except that Wicker Park makes your brain spin in surprising and pleasurable ways.

Harold and Kumar share a quality the overgrown adolescents in films like this are never allowed to possess: They're witty, focused, and highly aware. They make having a brain look hip.

Michael Mann's tensely funny and alive Los Angeles night-world thriller, is, in its own twisty way, a very high-stakes buddy movie, yet it doesn't look like one, because it leaps off from a situation more jangled and threatening than we're used to.

Shot in spooky gradations of silver and shadow, The Prisoner of Azkaban is the first movie in the series with fear and wonder in its bones, and genuine fun, too.

Is it really possible to make a comedy about abortion? Alexander Payne, who cowrote and directed this mischievous bit of sociological screwball, has brought it off.

A large-scale military drama with a quiet, almost mournful center.

U-Turn is an overdue event, a chance for Stone to apply his hypnotic acid-trip-of-the-soul wizardry to something sexy and lowdown.

A stylish B horror movie about giant insects in the catacombs of Manhattan, it's by turns queasy, gross, terrifying, and -- never underestimate this one -- enthusiastically dumb. It's everything you want in a big-bug thriller.

In this quiet, absorbing, shades-of-gray drama, a kind of thriller meditation on the schism in Northern Ireland, we get the story of not one but two powerfully opposing heroes.

As the village is destroyed, its people humiliated, hunted down, and murdered, Singleton brings the images and underlying psychological truths of American racial violence to the screen with a brute dramatic force that few directors have matched.

More than just a walking fat joke, Sherman Klump is Eddie Murphy's winking rebuke of his own arrogance.

Basquiat is an engrossing spectacle, but by the end, as a zoned-out Basquiat stands regally in a cruising Jeep, we realize that Schnabel has reconfigured his story as a kind of ghostly myth, and that we've never completely seen the man behind it.

The final affirmation of this romance is really an affirmation of Baumbach's talent: that a young filmmaker fixated on the solipsistic rituals of guyhood understands the hearts of women, too.

True Lies is so eager to give you a giddy good time that you're more than happy to let it work you over. It's a likably disposable pop cocktail.

Return to Paradise is "Midnight Express" remade from the outside, as existential quandary. It has the moody, disquieting undertow of a true moral thriller.

The Truth About Cats & Dogs is very funny around the edges... but as the characters begin to hang out together, forming a platonic menage a trois, the mistaken-identity ruse never escalates into true screwball lunacy.

A rousingly square romantic epic spiced with dashes of sex and bloodlust; it's "Robin Hood" meets "The Last of the Mohicans" meets "Death Wish".

The film knows how absurd this is, yet its triumph is that, by the end, we're actually rooting for Mary to see the library as her salvation.

The movie, like the book, is a work of opportunistic gamesmanship, a luridly farfetched conspiracy thriller masquerading as an inquiry into the zeitgeist. You can't take Disclosure very seriously, yet the film has been made with cleverness and skill, and with a keen eye for the latest styles in corporate paranoia and ruthlessness.

The story, at heart, is earnest and humorless teen romantic glop, but its feelings aren't fake, and the movie is compulsively watchable; it has a passionflower intensity.

The whole movie is a diversionary activity. It's trash so compacted it glows.

An enjoyably supercharged and ultraviolent teen-rebel comic-book fantasy that might be described -- in spirit, at least -- as reality-based.

Will take you places you haven't been, and also places you have.

Wiseman reveals the victims of domestic abuse in all of their pity and terror.

The fascination of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, the sharp, funny, unreasonably compelling adaptation of Barris' autobiography, is the way it soft-shoes past our skepticism.

People Say I'm Crazy doesn't defuse, or romanticize, the trauma of mental illness. It just humanizes it.

Unlike the first two Decline films, this one is only tangentially concerned with music.

Steel City could have used more rhythmic drive, but if Jun keeps weaving together characters this compelling, he could be a major film artist in the making.

Joshua does grow a bit repetitious (it lacks the cathartic climaxes of a horror film), yet it has cool and savvy fun with your fears.

There's an unconvincing last-act twist, but this is the movie "Little Children" wanted to be.

A highbrow chick flick that made me feel older, in a good way.

Can a movie be gripping and repellent at the same time? In Funny Games, a mockingly sadistic and terrifying watch-the-middle-class-writhe-like-stuck-pigs thriller, the director Michael Haneke puts his characters in a vise, and the audience too.

If you want to hear juicy inside tales of the scams devised by Lee Atwater, the right-wing visionary of media-age dirty tricks, you'll find loads of them in Boogie Man.

It's memorable when it meditates on the changing face of where we look at art, and how that changes the art itself.

When You're Strange, a documentary history of the Doors directed by Tom DiCillo, is for people like me who can stumble onto the scrappiest Doors video on VH1 at 3 a.m. and sit there, mesmerized.

Chesney makes an art form out of strolling down the catwalk while singing. He turns each song into a blissed-out journey homeward.

Unlike its obvious influence, the 1999 Japanese shocker "Audition," The Human Centipede has no real-world echoes. It's an only-in-the-movies sick goof.

Fans will gorge on this deft, year-by-year portrait of the ultimate enduring cult band.

Yes, Stone gets cozy with Hugo Chávez, soft-pedaling the Venezuelan president's crackdown tendencies, but he also captures South America in a paradigm shift, wrenching itself free of centuries of colonial control. The film is rose-colored agitprop, but it catches a current of history.

I found The Girl Who Played With Fire more gripping than "Dragon Tattoo," because this one doesn't just play with thriller conventions -- it puts them to work.

The first rock & roll kung fu videogame youth love story.

The film offers evidence that Vicious spent the entire night out cold on barbiturates. It plants resonant doubts.

Unravels the deceptions -- and the deep dishonor -- that inflated life-size valor into fake superheroism.

Going the Distance may be a minor movie, but it's also the rare romantic comedy in which you can actually believe what you're seeing.

Even when nothing is happening, the often dead-silent shots tend to grow scarier the more you look at them.

The surprise of Let Me In is that director Matt Reeves (Cloverfield) hasn't just remade the Swedish cult vampire film "Let the Right One In" into a more fluid and visceral movie. He's made it more dangerous.

Too goofy-surreal to pack a lot of emotional punch, but it's antically light on its feet, with 3-D images that have a lustrous, gizmo-mad sci-fi clarity.

The movie's redemptive structure is a bit routine, yet I watched nearly every scene with a sense of discovery. Coppola is a true filmmaker, and in Somewhere she pierces the Hollywood bubble from the inside.

The Debt is basically an entertaining riff on "Munich." It's about a (fictional) operation of top secret Israeli revenge, carried out by three highly trained agents whose plan goes off the rails in ways that are more fascinating than the mission itself.

Fair Game gets you riled up all over again at a deeply unpatriotic abuse of power.

Lurid and voluptuous pulp fun, with a sensationalistic fairy-tale allure. You can't take it too seriously, but you can't tear your eyes away from it, either.

It's a minimalist "Sideways," not so much mumblecore as talkycore.

A rivetingly journalistic account of a scoundrel's rise and fall.

Arnold Schwarzenegger appears as the rare politician who supports reform in this timely exposé of how our democracy has slipped off its tracks.

Deepens the saga of New York's former governor and attorney general into the paradoxical morality play it really was. Spitzer, almost three years after he was caught soliciting escorts, comes off as chastened but still regal, like a hawkeyed Jewish Kennedy.

Paul Giamatti, dialing down his trembly-voiced neurotic energy to good effect, gives a holy hell of a performance as Barney Panofsky.

If this is what it sounds like when a new millennium goes pop, I'll take it.

High-octane trash, but you will go "Ohhhhhh!"

Here, as in "The Hangover," the laughs aren't just staged, they're superlatively engineered.

At times, Kung Fu Panda 2 suggests "Bambi" redone as an episode of Oprah. Yet it's a more-than-worthy sequel.

In Limitless, a potently fanciful and fun thriller about a drug that turns you into a genius, Cooper proves a cock-of-the-walk movie star.

Far more grotesque than the first Human Centipede - in fact, The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) could be the sickest B movie ever made.

Win Win, it turns out, isn't a tale of facile victory. It's a movie about how loss makes everyone do things they'll both defend and regret.

A puzzle of a highly rarefied order. At times it's enthrallingly clever and subtle; at others it's borderline incomprehensible.

Last Night is on to something fascinating. It meditates on the meaning of adultery: the purposes it serves, beyond sex.

The movie is like a less original "WALL•E," but it's still vibrant and touching.

In terms of storytelling, The Avengers is for the most part a highly functional, banged-together vehicle that runs on synthetic franchise fuel. Yet the grand finale of CGI action, set in the streets of New York, is - in every sense - smashing.

The story in Madagascar 3 is functional, but the antically civilized spirit is infectious.

Bellflower is stylishly watchable - even when it's preposterous.

A fascinating and in many ways tragic documentary, takes us back to one of the high-water marks of the apes-are-people-too era.

I'm not sure what it all adds up to, but The Devil's Double puts its hooks in you and keeps them there.

Higher Ground breaks crucial, sacred ground in American moviemaking.

Beats is a welcome blast of '90s nostalgia, taking us back to a time - and a sound - that pulsates with optimism.

A Better Life was directed by the eclectic Chris Weitz (The Twilight Saga: New Moon, About a Boy), who weaves the torpor and anxiety of immigrant life into something dramatically true, if at moments a bit draggy.

So scrupulously researched and argued that only a fool would ignore its findings.

Harper Lee hasn't been interviewed in 47 years, but this meditation on her only novel, "To Kill a Mockingbird," puts you inside her skin.

A lively, original, and scattershot-hilarious ramble of a Judd Apatow production.

Depp's performance is more than just funny - it's ghoulishly endearing.

Savages is Oliver Stone doing what he should have done a long time ago: making a tricky, amoral, down-and-dirty crime thriller that's blessedly free of any social, topical, or political relevance.

A tangy raw stew of history, even if it never begins to confront the contradictions that bedeviled black militancy.

As long as the MPAA is issuing its cavalier decrees, though, they're the ones acting like bullies.

Jeff Prosserman's riveting documentary takes a question that haunted the Bernie Madoff scandal - how did he fool everyone for so long? - and answers it with a decisive "He didn't."

For a documentary that's almost engineered to lift your heart, Undefeated is very well done.

Won't Back Down says that whatever your feelings about the subject, lack of change cannot be the answer to our public-education crisis. Trying to cram an informational exposé and a vintage inspirational awards-bait weeper into one movie, Won't Back Down is awkward at times, yet it's also passionate in a surprisingly smart way. It makes a genuine drama out of impossible issues.

Throw in a nagging divorce settlement, an unplanned murder, and Billy Crudup - hilarious! - as a raging security man, and Jill Sprecher's film enjoyably fuses cleverness and sheer desperation.

Sound of My Voice doesn't follow through on everything it sets up, yet it has a hushed and revealing psycho-intensity. It also has an oh-wow Twilight Zone ending that truly made me go, ''Oh, wow.''

Director David Gelb pulls back the curtain on the kitchen rituals of sushi, inviting us to experience the savory-smooth sensation of ''umami,'' roughly translated as ''Ahhh!''

Ruby Sparks is a romantic comedy that takes off from a premise so fanciful it needs every bit of the freshness that Dano brings it.

Helgeland works in what I think of as a conservative — or maybe it's just really, really basic — neoclassical Hollywood style, spelling everything out, letting the story unfold in a plainspoken and deliberate fashion, with a big, wide, open pictorial camera eye. It's like the latter-day Clint Eastwood style, applied to material that's as traditional as can be.

Side Effects is mostly a good Saturday-night movie, but by the end, it's caused a few unintended side effects of its own: a bit of head-scratching, and a giggle or two of disbelief.

Robot & Frank is sentimental high-concept fluff that works.

The best thing about the movie is that it keeps drawing conclusions in opposite directions.

The movie is fascinating, though it smacks its own lips a bit too much at the tackiness of freak '70s stardom.

Cloud Atlas is certainly out to be a ''visionary'' mindbender, but the film's secret is that it's a nimbly entertaining and light-on-its-feet Hollywood contraption, with the actors cast in multiple roles as if playing a game of dress-up.

An alienated-teen movie that surfs along on the whims and casual cruelties of its central character runs a risk: It can wind up as random and undisciplined as she is. Instead, Little Birds is a touching and distinctive achievement.

When we finally see the time-lapse images his cameras took, they're awesome and terrifying - a meltdown out of a poetic horror film.

Urgent, heartfelt, and not-quite-as-predictable-as-you-think environmental rabble-rouser.

It's a perfect summation of why he was the ultimate filmmaker.

Posey, her attention divided up into slivers, is funny as hell, but she's also terrifying in her evocation of a kind of moment-to-moment PowerPoint existence.

Spitting obscenities at the film's director, Jay Bulger, Baker recalls his days as: the '60s thrash caveman who gave Cream and Blind Faith their transcendent power surge; the pioneer of druggy hotel-room rampages; and the damaged purist who left the pop world for Africa. The movie salutes the rhythms and the wreckage.

The movie is playful and makes no easy moral judgments.

Highlights Gaskin's down-home gumption as an advocate for the glory of natural childbirth.

As a politico, Ed Koch loved power a little too much. But as a leader, he was a storybook embodiment of New York's contradictions, which is why his chapters in the city's saga loom so large.