The triumph of ''Spring, Summer'' is that even those of us who don't happen to be Buddhists can catch a glimpse of ourselves in the spinning wheel of hope, destruction, suffering, and bliss.

The fascination of Dig! is that it invites those of us who aren't alt-rock obsessives into the hive, yet it never feels like a dilettante's tour.

As a flight of fantasy, Jurassic Park lacks the emotional unity of Spielberg's classics ("Jaws," "Close Encounters," "E.T."), yet it has enough of his innocent, playful virtuosity to send you out of the theater grinning with delight.

Painfully beautiful autobiographical kaleidoscope.

The film defuses all preconceptions about the ''issues'' of transsexual identity to arrive at a place of tremulous human power.

Sensational sex-and-its-consequences melodrama.

Crowe, staying close to his memories, has gotten it, for perhaps the first time, onto the screen.

Has the resonance to stand not just as a terrific cartoon but as an emotionally pungent movie.

Dark and giddy at the same time, Leaving Las Vegas takes us into dreamy, intoxicated places that no movie about an alcoholic has gone before.

The result is something as original as it is unlikely: a study in grief that is flooded with happiness.

Has a rowdy, jumpin'-jive vivacity. It's not quite as emotionally rounded as ''Shrek'' was... but it's got heart and delirium in equal doses, as well as a firecracker rhythm all its own.

The film may be bloody, but it's also bloody gorgeous: a grandly fetishized epic of cinematic aggression. It's a tale of vengeance that hinges on Tarantino's love of ferocity as spectacle -- his immersion in action and exploitation, his addiction to the jazzy catharsis of junk-film kicks.

The beauty of Baadasssss! is the way Mario Van Peebles salutes his father's truth by coaxing it into legend.

Just when you're certain that Jarmusch is treading water with his borderline-tedious cleverness, something happens: Coffee and Cigarettes turns into a movie FULL of talk -- rich, supple, hilarious, masterfully orchestrated talk.

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

A singular and haunting experience.

As a musical biography, Ray is driven by the primal excitement of rock-and-soul at the moment of its discovery.

It's wonderful to see a Japanese movie in which a samurai, for all his somber discipline and skill, is also a touching and complicated ordinary man.

Freshly transplanted from the stage, is a thrilling ode to the intertwined glories of sex, showmanship, and lying: what the film calls ''the old razzle-dazzle.''

The rare commercial comedy that leaves you entranced by what can happen only in the movies.

Movie stars radiate a power -- physical, erotic, spiritual -- that draws an audience into their orbit. Yet watching Curtis Hanson's gritty and electrifying 8 Mile, the first thing you notice about Eminem, the most scaldingly powerful artist in pop music today, is how vulnerable he looks.

It's a film noir that grows more potent as its secrets are revealed.

Enchantingly witty.

Romantic comedies usually strike one or two moods, but in Afterglow, the writer-director Alan Rudolph runs through rainbows of feeling in a single scene.

Directed by Tony Scott, Crimson Tide is the kind of sumptuously exciting undersea thriller that moves forward in quick, propulsive waves.

Sheridan, however, works with such piercing fervor and intelligence that In the Name of the Father just about transcends its tidy moral design.

That Thing You Do! is neither overly sentimental nor overly cynical. It looks at the invention of our pop-rock mythology, and the bands that fed it until they were consumed by it, just as you'd expect Tom Hanks to: with open eyes (and a raised eyebrow).

Death and the Maiden doesn't always escape its contraption origins, but it ends with one of the most honest-and poetic- reckonings of human evil in modern movies. It's Polanski braying at his own bitter moon.