The first REALLY great mythic film of the summer has arrived.

The film's real power to move flows from its low, childlike angles, which, rather than infantalize its audience, bring it down to where the hurt and fear, and hence the comfort, loom larger.

It's all such a spectacular show.

A meta-horror film that hilariously parodies the genre's clichés with smarts to spare. It's also the scariest fucking movie Craven has made since the first "A Nightmare on Elm Street."

For all its simplicity, however, the film is entertaining, even uplifting, with Lopez giving a stellar, confectionary performance.

Proves too sincere to exploit its subjects and too honest to manipulate its audience.

A tight blend of self-awareness, humor and fear.

The film's intimate camera work and searing performances pull us deep into the girls' confusion and pain as they struggle tragically to comprehend the chasm of knowledge that's opened between them.

Sabu takes an already wildly original concept and launches it toward brilliance.

Performances that are natural yet weighted with history and frequently heart-wrenching.

Baldwin's perfectly impacted performance as a tough-love provider (the actor gets some of the best lines in the movie).

What makes the film compelling is the filmmakers' ability to blend a studied (occasionally academic) dissection of cultural and sexual decadence with a potboiler plot.

Temple doesn't just highlight the contemporary relevance of Coleridge's liberated words and themes, he shows us how high they still soar.

Both funny and furious -- on why black people are different from white people.

Climaxes in a flood of revelations that, like so much of the film, take us where we least expect to go.

A remarkably moving and disturbing film about the possibility of belonging and the genealogy of violence.

It's cheap thrills all the way, served up with the kind of situational purity that only Carpenter seems to care for these days. It's that simple and that much fun.

Kusturica's always masterful orchestration of chaos, coincidence and caricature really pays off as a sweet, soulful celebration of old friends, new loves and the mad scramble of life at the fringe.

Extraordinarily witty (nothing new for this director) while coming off as a taunt to anyone who'd dare to follow in his wake.

Hartnett's pitch-perfect sexual panic can be hilariously funny.

While there are scenes of wrenching emotional openness and spontaneous charm -- largely due to the irresistible allure and impeccable craft of its ensemble cast -- the degree of calculation apparent in its plot and images undermines its efforts to move and seduce.

Shrek's first 20 minutes are so devilishly funny that letting go of pure belief doesn't seem like such a bad thing.

The Jackass boys achieve true genius, however, when they take their penance public. Before stunned, inert onlookers, these skate-punk Situationists transform official zones of work and leisure -- office parks, golf courses, bowling alleys -- into arenas of dangerous stupidity to remind us that, in the end, we’re all just meat.

Writer-director Fabián Bielinsky's devilish Nine Queens serves as further evidence that Argentina's film industry is at the forefront of a resurgent Latin American cinema.

Remarkable exploration of sexuality and the Jewish faith.

Baumbach weds his verbal gifts to a fresh visual acuity that brings layers of rich detail to a portrait of a family coping, poorly, with self-inflicted change.

The film's plainness, and the understated force of van der Groen and Petersen's performances, sharpen its complexity of feeling until all mawkishness is cut away.

Captivating coming-of-age story.

Spins a warm and fuzzy tale about love and happiness in the cutthroat art business.

Storaro's gorgeous cinematography imbues every frame with an enthralling subjectivity.

Maquiling offers us the unexpected pleasures of taking the side streets in a film about how even minor-key adventures can make a life stuck in low gear something to look back on.

The film's jarring shifts in tone ultimately serve well the complexity of the film's narrative entanglements; they feel more honest than similar Hollywood offerings.

Grisman's warm, loving home movie in the guise of a documentary.

Malkovich and Dafoe play off each other with a devilish hamminess.

Thraves escapes formula by shaping the film around low-key incidents instead of speeches or overt lessons. There are plenty of side streets here.

Bowman and production designer Wolf Kroeger do an excellent job of evoking a twice-baked England, while writers Gregg Chabot, Kevin Peterka and Matt Greenberg keep the script devilishly pitched just shy of preposterous (it's McConaughey who stumbles beyond).

At 60 minutes, the film never stops feeling like a guided tour, while we're wishing it was a sleepover.

How Miike gets us from amiable point A to debilitating point B is a remarkable act of manipulation and control that may leave you feeling sucker-punched, even brutalized, but you won't forget the experience anytime soon.

A deft exercise in atmospheric horror and insanity. Which is why it's unfortunate that, ultimately, Anderson steps back from the brink.

While Stiller and De Niro can play hilariously off one another, the film -- despite its happy ending -- feels unresolved.

It's whiz-bang, techno fun, with a touch of Latino flavor.

A pure font of high-flying kung fu artistry, the likes of which has since transformed the way Hollywood's good guys and bad kick the crap out of one another.

A rosy, hearthside fantasy of acceptance that's so assured in its writing and direction, it's nearly impossible not to believe.

Whether on the high seas or in the Holy Land, the film exhibits a colorful, bouncy sense of the epic (the whale's Jaws-inspired arrival even elicits a few chills), while its saving grace is a consistent sense of its own absurdity.

The old hands still seem to be having a good time, so why the hell shouldnít we?

Slight but charming comedy.

The stadiums and performance halls of Pyongyang become staging grounds for massive, highly choreographed political pageants that make the Nuremberg rallies look like dinner theater. You’ve never seen anything quite like these dazzling displays of groupthink.

It's Garrison and Burnam who hold the film's center, however, with a natural magnetism. Newcomers both, they take the same clean approach to their roles that their characters bring to their tags.

There’s a lot to like in writer-director Ray Yeung’s low-key romantic comedy, once you get past its overly enunciated identity issues, which were, according to Yeung, the film’s raison d’être.

What feels genuine in the film -- mother-son bonds, the wedding party -- is surrounded by overdetermined and formulaic scenes lifted from other films.

For the most part it delivers the goods.

It would all be too obviously feel-good if Ducastel and Martineau weren't also tuned in to the liberating drift of the open highway and a sharp native humor that adds needed flesh and blood to their walking metaphors.

A hyperreal, visually layered period style that finds film noir shadows creeping in at the edges of a blue-sky, get-along-to-go-along America.

Manipulative filmmaking at its most gently persuasive.

Kessler frames it all with an ironic eye (Stiller's misfit mogul holds court in cheap motels and burger joints) and with enough big-hearted tenderness to keep the humor from going sour.

Director Chang builds some chilling suspense into the cop's grim investigative routine -- as well as generous helpings of blood: It runs, splashes and sprays as the amputations continue.

Chop Suey really captivates with surfaces; look away for an instant, and the spell is broken.

Fate plays both prankster and deliverer in Firode's never-too-clever scheme, buoyed, like his often-winsome images, by romantic fancy.

The film lapses too often into sugary sentiment and withholds delivery on the pell-mell pyrotechnics its punchy style promises.

The rough, watercolor washes of its city backdrops mark the film with nostalgia while its story carries us along at an amiable, buoyant pace.

A conventional if appealing tear-jerker, The Way Home would like to grandmother us all.

Between spy training and sensitivity training, the two (Murphy/Wilson) prove nicely matched comic foils.

What I mean is that to watch The Phantom Menace as a lifelong "Star Wars" fan is to engage in constant, fragile negotiations between a cherished familiarity and the shock of the new.

It's a refreshing change from the self-interest and paranoia that shape most American representations of Castro. At the same time, Bravo anticipates that such a view will drive some nuts.

Nemesis never feels true to itself, its energy never fully engaged. Even with Earth on the line in its climactic space battle, the film seems embarrassed that it couldn't have found a better way to work through its issues.

While Slums of Beverly Hills may sound like a downer, Jenkins tempers the family's downbeat circumstances with sympathetic humor, a quirky camera style and lo-fi retro flavor.

Shadow Magic is rich with detail.

Softley starts out a little awkwardly, as he tries to capture turn-of-the-century flux by opening several London scenes from disorienting, too-obvious camera positions.

Railsback and Snodgrass struggle against caricature in their own fine performances.

It's all part of a larger calculus that the filmmakers hope will translate into a thinking person's thriller. If only they themselves knew how to figure it.

It does, however, fairly bubble with speed-freak energy and a dry, laddish wit that keeps the jokes coming.

Sympathy is disturbingly cast aside so we can wallow in the pathetic. It’s a bad trip, man.

What at first seems emotionally charged, ultimately comes off as contrived.

Writer-director Avi Nesher and co-screenwriter Roger Berger -- upon whose real-life investigations the film is based -- deliver on the hard-boiled promise of this low-key thriller with plenty of gritty twists and turns.

A half-baked classic.

The film's larger, surprisingly mature emotional rhythms are strong enough to pull it through.

Jalil penetrates a carnivalesque subculture of self-reinvention and obsession, emotional need and materialist greed, with a camera that is, by turns, cruel, kind and incisive.

The sharpness of Eyre's opening, however, ebbs away when he takes up the story of Rudy (Eric Schweig) and Mogie (Graham Greene), two brothers with neatly opposed responses to the reservation grind.

It's an amusing scenario, until even Miike seems to lose his taste for the oddly sweet concoction and allows the film to drift aimlessly to a rainbow-hued finale.

While the film throws a solid pop punch, you could still swear you've seen it all before.

The film gives good action (amid more tired spy business) but comes riddled with contradictions.

Far too complex and provoking.

Ironically, for all the paranoia, York's Defiler and his henchman, an always game Udo Kier, are an oasis of wit in an otherwise parched, self-serious script.

Ultimately, Jolie's efforts to establish a character are dashed against the film's increasingly inane dialogue.

These live performances and classic music videos drive home the point that part of the Giants' longevity flows from the fact that they can't be explained, only experienced.

Shooting Fish wants to hang with the hip crowd--witness the vibrant colors, the flashy camera work and the stream of catchy pop songs--but its heart just isn't wild enough.

The movie's real charms lie in its surprisingly dark atmosphere and its almost subversive sense of humor.

An overly mannered film drowning in the symptoms of dysfunction but unable to tap the root causes of this WASPish clan's pain except in the most oblique and cursory ways. This might be Freundlich's point, considering this family deals with its problems through avoidance.

Director Olli Saarela, who co-wrote the script with Antti Tuuri, offers up a trembling romanticism that gradually hardens -- like Eero's consciousness -- with exposure to the horrors of war.

It's abundantly clear that Lozano and company have been re-watching "Pulp Fiction" for the last decade, pausing long enough to pick up the fluid rhythms of "Y Tu Mamá También" and "Amores Perros" while completely missing those films' social and political edges.

It's the zippy chatter among the Serenity's wised-up space pirates that gives the film most of its punch, but with only serviceable action sequences and largely cookie-cutter effects, you can still sense the void just outside.

Written by a team of three, the script is more plagued by groupthink than is the film's future Earth.

A Rumor of Angels beats its wings furiously, only to sink back into spiritualist goo.

Director Ernest -- doesn't skimp on style in a film that bluntly exploits social conscience to pump up its taste for gore.

Kazantzidis struggles for the flavor of classic romance, with a string of standards on the soundtrack to little avail.

None of it rings true, and it distracts from the film's real heart, which, on its own, would have made for a strikingly original first film.

Struggles to achieve a giddy eccentricity that never fully emerges.

Though the two-hour film can go slack with excess explication, Shiri compensates with an overheated drive that forces the myopia of current events toward a broader field of vision.