A little bit of "Crime and Punishment" and a whole lot of "The Postman Always Rings Twice," Revanche, the Austrian candidate for last year's Best Foreign Language Film, is a surprisingly unruffled tale of love, thievery, murder and revenge.

Few directors working today make films with the grace and magisterial power of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's best work.

An uncommonly tender and observant documentary on the phenomenon that is "A Chorus Line."

It is a work of great beauty that rewards continued visits.

A miraculous, American-made Hindi film that is every bit as tranquil as the blue-green reservoir that serves as its abiding metaphor.

An impressionistic work that is perfectly in tune with its subject’s hallucinatory music.

Chandor's shrewdest bit of business is figuring out how to make an A-list movie with a $3.5-million budget. Solution: buy low, sell high. Hire last decade's A-list – Spacey, Irons and Demi Moore – and give them their best parts in years.

The most gripping war movie you'll see this year, We Were Here tells first-hand the story of how AIDS attacked San Francisco, killing more than 15,000. Whole peer groups were happy, healthy, and then dead in months.

Detective Dee is the action flick of the year, a two-hour epic that blows the "Pirates of the Caribbean" to the Bermuda Triangle.

Nothing short of mesmerizing.

Palindromes is a cracked American picaresque.

In classic B-movie style, The Dark Hours was created in a fever, written in two weeks and hurriedly shot in 16 mm (blown into a crisp 35 mm print). Nevertheless, the film provides evidence of talent everywhere.

As provocative as it is timely.

Another angry, searching document about pedophile priests, Deliver Us from Evil makes for unexpectedly gripping drama.

For all its fuss and fury, Flight of the Red Balloon succeeds magnificently.

An astonishing multimedia diary.

Guy and Madeline is a decidedly modern film, whose frightened, impulsive, charming characters could walk into our lives tomorrow.

It is our tour guide that makes Cave of Forgotten Dreams an often thrilling experience. His producer, Erik Nelson, has joked Herzog is the first filmmaker to use 3-D for good, instead of evil. There is no question that the technology enhances our visit, giving perspective and shape to the jagged Chauvet Cave – an open mouth the size of a football field.

In art there are no rules, just stuff that works. And for the second film in a row, Marsh has created a movie we can't keep our eyes off.

Noir connoisseurs, however, will receive Moverman's latest like a double-bourbon from heaven. Rampart is the best crime-movie fix from Hollywood since "Gone Baby Gone."

The film's greatest achievement is that it allows us to know Ray.

Watching Moon is kind of like seeing a booster rocket thrust seventies' sci-fi films deeper into orbit.

Handsomely mounted, emotionally involving sci-fi movies don't often show up in the darkened galaxies of our theatre chains. So Alvart's English-language debut is definitely a film you want to catch on the big screen. Just don't sit too close, lest you end up with a dose of pandorum.

Benefits from one standout performance: Timothy Olyphant ( Deadwood ) plays the part of Nick with ingratiating comic relish.

We don't get a good look at a painting until 35 minutes into the film biography of Séraphine de Senlis, the early 20th-century French painter discovered by German art collector Wilhelm Uhde. The film Séraphine is not about paintings.

Watching 9 , we know how 8 feels. Sci-fi fans will find heaven in Shane Acker's feature-film debut.

As expected, it has gaping holes where back stories used to be. Still, it's a historical war movie with impressive sweep, strong characterizations and the kind of idiosyncratic flourishes that made Woo such an irresistible storyteller.

One of this enlightened B-movie's many pleasures is French director Jean-François Richet's handling of atmosphere and setting. Shot almost entirely at night in a blinding snowstorm, the crime drama is an intriguing remodelling of a classic film noir.