It's the third feature Miller has shot using lightweight digital video cameras, and the result is a special lightness in the work itself -- the glowing images ease into one another like leaves turning in a summer breeze, while the performances are similarly effortless.

Strikes me as one of Godard's most accessible works - one in which the graying, stubbly maestro, who turns 74 today, presents himself and his ideas to the audience in a less combative way than he sometimes has in the past.

Put simply, the film is a dazzling and fearless piece of showmanship.

If Blake Edwards wrote a script and then Abel Ferrara directed it, it might look something like Nowhere Man.

The movie catches us up so profoundly in Frankie's self-destructive spiral (and gradual rehab), it's as though we’re seeing it all for the first time. I'd like to say that's because the story is true, only it isn't.

It's a style at once ravishing and mysterious, austere and intimate, carrying with it the suggestion that even cinema may be powerless to invade the most clandestine antechambers of human behavior.

In its depiction of a fleeting, but nevertheless factual, peace in the Middle East, Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven may seem a more quixotic Hollywood fantasy than all six Star Wars movies lumped together.

The most enjoyable film Besson has had his name on in eons.

Of course, a Batman movie is nothing without a Bruce Wayne, and, by a mile, Bale is the best of a lot that has ranged from the square-jawed slapstick of Adam West to the more dedbonair stylings of Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer and George Clooney.

The acting is uniformly superb.

The imagery is startling not just for its symbolic resonances, but for the breathless intensity with which it sears the screen.

There may be no other actor (Thornton)working today (or as frequently) who is this good each and every time out.

The result is a film chilly and externalized in all the ways that Mood was bottled up and woozily dreamlike.

Whether you take it as horror show or social commentary (or both), this is sublimely terrifying stuff.

The emotional truthfulness of Clean enters into our bloodstreams with its muted vigor, and we find ourselves getting hooked by this tale of getting unhooked.

This ridiculously entertaining sequel is that rare part deux that leaves you hankering for part trois. The action is, in a word, spectacular, but also playful, inventive and witty.

This is still powerful, undiluted stuff -- a jolt of backwoods moonshine whiskey injected into the veins of the atrophied American relationship drama.

This meticulously well-made picture is disarmingly funny at times - not least during the ballet of bloody absurdity that is the assassination itself - but also subdued and straight-faced, with one eye planted on 1979 and the other on the violent student demonstrations looming in the distance.

The Weather Man begs to be taken seriously and can't easily be dismissed; it kicks around in your mind for a good long while after you've seen it. Cage, who does his finest work since "Leaving Las Vegas," has stripped himself bare of the patented tics and mannerisms he honed in one Jerry Bruckheimer movie too many.

Its jazzy rhythm and economy of form place it closer to a 1950s film noir, shot through with humor so dark you need a flashlight to see it.

Queen Latifah gives a spectacular performance in this hugely enjoyable wish-fulfillment fantasy.

This is some of the best filmmaking ever done by director Richard Donner, a longtime Hollywood journeyman known more for his proficient deployment of three long-running movie franchises (The Omen, Superman and Lethal Weapon) than for his lyricism.

Shot quickly and cheaply in high-definition video and almost entirely on one set, the movie has almost zero visual energy, but it teems with snappy dialogue and the same carnival anarchy Lumet brought to "Dog Day Afternoon" and "Network."

The heist at the heart of Inside Man is brilliant, and so is the movie.

It's the kind of movie that used to be called "trashy good fun," only there's nothing trashy about it: Gunn, who scripted the 2004 "Dawn of the Dead" remake, is clearly punch-drunk with horror-movie love; Slither is, among other things, a freewheeling homage to "The Blob, Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and just about everything by George Romero.

At once playful and thorough, the documentary is also stacked teased-hair high with wicked performance footage.

This remarkable film from Australia, the debut feature of writer-director Cate Shortland, moves to the lyrical rhythms and unhurried pace of a 1970s road movie.

Becomes one of those wonderfully weird adventure stories beloved of children who don't mind getting a good old-fashioned case of the heebie-jeebies. It's kind of a blast for adults too.