An outrageously gorgeous spectacle of balletic aggression. At the same time, it offers something we rarely encounter in a whirling martial-arts extravaganza: a romantic passion that's woven into the very fabric of the action.

A film of droll and dry observational precision, its emotional minimalism is almost fetishistic -- and, by the end, a tad frustrating.

When Baron Cohen works without a net, he flies.

Ferguson spotlights two massive mistakes: the looting that was allowed to continue, destroying Iraqi infrastructure and morale; and--far more revelatory -- the apocalyptically stupid decision to disband the Iraqi army, sending half a million angry soldiers into the streets.

The result is a playful, elusive movie that isn't so much heartwarming as soul-cleansing.

Days after I saw The Artist, I was still thinking (and grinning) about it, because the movie's real romance is the one between us, the jaded 21st-century audience, and the mechanical innocence of old movies, which here becomes new again.

Watching Eternal Sunshine, you don't just watch a love story -- you fall in love with what love really is.

By the end, Campion views all her characters with a compassion bordering on grace, a humanity-like her heroine's-as dark, quiet, and enveloping as the ocean.

Until Once, I'm not sure that I'd ever seen a small-scale, nonstylized, kitchen-sink drama in which the songs take on the majesty and devotion of a musical dream.

A buoyant, funny, and disarmingly humane comedy of beautiful losers in revolt.

Capote honors its subject by doing just what Truman Capote did. It teases, fascinates, and haunts.

Mafioso does more than cast its fascinating shadow over "The Godfather." It captures, in a stark yet haunting way, the indelible fact that no man is born a mobster.

What it comes down to is superbly staged battle scenes and moral alliances forged in earnest yet purged of the wit and dynamic, bristly ego that define true on-screen personality.

This is perhaps the only science-fiction film that can be called transcendental.

Working from a superb script by Paul Attanasio, Redford has caught the way a show like Twenty-One offered a carny-barker version of the American Dream.

It makes sense that L'Enfant has been hailed as a masterpiece, since a masterpiece is what it's trying, in every unvarnished frame, to be. If you wandered unknowingly into the film, however, you would see this: a stark, fascinating, and naggingly detached character study.

The richest and most satisfying romantic movie of the year. It's really about two great loves at once -- the love of life and of art -- and the way that Shakespeare, like no writer before him, transformed the one into the other.

Extraordinary new documentary that turns Robert Crumb's twisted life story into a disturbing, exhilarating work of biographical art.

Brokeback Mountain is that rare thing, a big Hollywood weeper with a beautiful ache at its center. It's a modern-age Western that turns into a quietly revolutionary love story.

Painfully beautiful autobiographical kaleidoscope.

Lusts for catharsis yet never quite gets there, because, for all of its bitter romantic anguish, it ultimately coalesces in your head rather than your heart.

The supersmart and rousing Moneyball, which may be the best baseball movie since "Bull Durham," is also about talk, but in a coolly heady and original inside-the-front-office way.

The movie is grand and immersive. It plugs us into the final months of Lincoln's presidency with a purity that makes us feel transported as though by time machine.

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

Slumdog Millionaire is nothing if not an enjoyably far-fetched piece of rags-to-riches wish fulfillment.

The film's most memorable performance is also its most incongruous: As Jimmy, the teen sap who falls hard for Suzanne, Joaquin Phoenix is dead-eyed yet touchingly vulnerable -- a mush-mouthed angel.

A movie of tough excitement and surprise, even grace.

It would be tempting to describe the Up movies as a miracle in the history of nonfiction filmmaking, if they didn't also represent one of the cinema's most singularly squandered opportunities.