Moving and eerily beautiful.

A sturdily diverting old fashioned heist thriller that looks like a masterpiece of sheer competence next to the slovenly action fantasy F/X grab bags that have been passing for summer entertainment.

A romp of romantic larceny built out of spare parts we've seen in countless other films.

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

The rare case in which a filmmaker's unadulterated worship of his subjects adds force and resonance--and not just luster--to the way that we see them.

It may be the first movie that mirrors, in its very syntax, the ''snap crackle and pop'' narcotic superficiality of the E! channel. I mean that as a compliment.

Passionate and saucy comedy.

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

It's like Woodstock without the mud, and it leaves you feeling clean.

A pulsating snapshot of America caught in a mad, liberating identity crisis.

Somberly fantastic new mystery thriller.

To an astonishing degree, O gets the tragic Shakespeare mood, that somber stentorian passion born of hidden slivers of ambition and betrayal.

The hit-and-run outlandishness of "Clerks" was a stunt. With Chasing Amy, Smith has made his first real movie.

In the scurrilously enjoyable documentary Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy, we get to know the man whom Al Goldstein dubbed ''the hedgehog of porn."

The cast is a pitch-perfect assemblage of pretty young things, but James Van Der Beek, as a slit-eyed dorm stud, proves that he can be an actor of cruel force.

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

A little too programmed in its despair, but it coasts along on the jagged music of the modern lothario's song.

The final 20 minutes of Blue Crush can stand as one of the few highlights in a movie summer of mostly hollow action-carnival fireworks. The trick, for once, isn't that we're watching superhuman stunts; it's that we're watching deeply human stunts.

Starts out as mind-bending futuristic satire and then turns relentless -- it becomes a violent, postpunk version of an Indiana Jones cliff-hanger.

You never forget you're watching a derivative, machine-tooled entertainment; the fun is in how the machine keeps spinning off course.

Even from the safety of a movie seat, you can just about feel the stinging hardness of the surf. Blue crush? This is more like white smash.

Powerful and searching documentary.

To explain a serial killer is to diminish his madness, but Dahmer does something quietly riveting. It lets you brush up against the humanity of a psycho, without making him any less psycho.

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.

A good satire that had the untimely bad luck to be about a U.S. soldier who will do anything it takes to party, except fight for the right.

It was only with the advent of digital technology that the notion of an entire film done in a single take became possible. Mike Figgis got there first with ''Time Code,'' and now the Russian director Alexander Sokurov has brought off a comparably startling feat with Russian Ark.

Gripping in its intimacy.

The movie has a mystery, and moral unease, that lingers.