A brilliant film--vivid, haunting, intelligent and in good taste, wonderfully acted, wonderfully written and directed.

It's a celebration of young American women, finding them smarter, tougher, shrewder, more rigorous, more persistent and more honest than any movie in many a moon.

But [Raimi]'s instructed his fabulous Style to take a hike, and, working from Scott Smith's brilliantly reconfigured script from Smith's own (much darker) novel, delivers a piece that is severe and disciplined in its evocation of the cold terrors of fate.

A superior adaptation that bypasses the Ann Reinking version now on Broadway.

A wonderful, piercing and hilarious examination of high school politics and how bitter and ruinous it can become.

Gripping, whole and nourishing. Certainly of the fantasy film series currently in American theaters -– I include "Harry Potter and the Secret Toity" and "Star Trek: Halitosis" -– The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is the best, and not by just a little.

A beautiful story, told in measured cadences by a master of old-timey narrative compression and expression.

Payne is a comic miniaturist, who works in a small compass, as if through a magnifying glass with tweezers.

The story is told so passionately that it demands as much of you as it does of its performers, all of whom are up there, giving everything.

It's brilliantly acted. But best of all, it's brilliantly made.

If you don't fall in love with it, you've probably never fallen in love with a movie, and never will.

It's a trip to Hell and back, and testimony for embittered cynics of all that a movie can be.

It's wondrous, it's fabulous, it's -- all but unprecedented.

Searing, heartbreaking, so intense it turns your body into a single tube of clenched muscle, this is simply the greatest war movie ever made, and one of the great American movies.

Surely the most creative trick of the year and grimly funny throughout.

It never disconnects from two values: its honesty and its intensity.

Delivered with such high panache and brio, it's mesmerizing.

The results are as riveting as any action movie ever made.

It's funny, it's heartbreaking, it's scary, it's exhilarating. It's got love stuff and lots of laughs and cool gunfights. It's really long and it feels like it's over in 15 minutes. It does something so few movies do these days: It satisfies.

Misanthropic, cruel, hostile, corrupt, blasphemous and basically pretty evil. I loved it.

This is an absolutely brilliant film but in a quiet way.

A terrific piece of filmmaking. It's taut, believable as it unspools. It's charismatic, with a slow buildup of tension in near-real time that finally explodes into a blast of violence.

The sheer joy of letting go as a tale overwhelms your senses and drives the known world away -- that's the story.

In some ways Soderbergh does a much better job than Tarantino. He handles the time shifts more adroitly, always keeping us on track; he goes easy on the violence, and when he does unleash it, it's short, fast and ugly.

It's a terrific movie.

Two hours and six minutes has never seemed so much like two and six-tenths seconds. It's pure pulp metafiction.

It's the best sports documentary since "Hoop Dreams," a great piece of work."

The genius of the film, besides Hoffman's stunning performance, is that it knows exactly how much is enough. It never overplays, lingers or punches up.

Jackson's big monkey picture show is certainly the best popular entertainment of the year. The film is a wondrous blend of then and now: It honors its mythic predecessor of 1933 while using sophisticated movie technology to seamlessly manipulate the fantastic.

It's a strange enough film, yet weirdly great. No movie has quite gotten the clammy weight of fear, the sense of hopelessness that would necessarily haunt underground workers. To see it is to sweat through your underclothes. It'll melt the pep out of your weekend.

Stands with the best movies of this young century and the old one that preceded it: It's passionate, honest, unflinching, gripping, and it pays respects. The flag raising on Iwo might have indeed become a pseudo-event as it was processed for goals, but there was nothing pseudo about the courage of the men who did it.

The genius is in the writing and in keeping all gambits created by the individual writers in sync, so the piece has a tonal consistency and a narrative flow. A lost art in Hollywood? It's really one of the best movies of the year.

This is the rare American film really about something, and almost all the performances are riveting.

Genuine, amusing and, best of all, humanly scaled and humanely oriented.

The director isn't much on orgies; he's all talk. But that's good, not bad, because his talk is so brilliant. Stillman is the Balzac of the ironic class, the Dickens of people with too much inner life.

It's funny and human and really pretty damned wonderful, all at once.

The movie's stroke of sheer genius is its wondrous ending.

I love the unsettling details.

Brilliantly played by Denzel Washington

Profane, sacrilegious, pornographic, sadistic and Sade-istic, titillating and the most honorable movie of the year.

It's a brilliant, profound movie, but it's almost no fun at all.

The Blue Angel it's clear to Von Sternberg, and to us, that he's connected with some pure being of cinema, whose power to ignite an audience was unstoppable. She became a great star.

It's sad, funny, shocking and completely unlike any movie in a dozen years.

The fabulous Elizabeth reinvents English Tudor history as gangster movie.

It's a new new thing, classic myth from both literature and the movies, commingled, set to great folk music, and untrammeled by any sense of predictability, urgency, realism or believability but hypnotic, graceful and seductive.

Sad and lovely.

The trick of this movie is that it's so changeable: You think you've got it nailed and it slithers away to become some other new, fabulous thing.

That tale gets a first-class Hallmark Hall of Fame treatment in Kevin Reynolds's swaggering The Count of Monte Cristo, which is old-form moviemaking at its best.

This Tarzan doesn't bellow, he kvetches; he doesn't dominate, he persuades; he doesn't rule, he seeks consensus. He isn't the king of the apes, he's a citizen of the animal planet.

One of the year's best films.

The genius of the film is its utter commitment to the Pekar point of view.

The movie may take five extra minutes to end and could do with one less sunset but . . . other than that it's damned near perfect.

The next worst thing to being there. That's how real it feels.

It's a highly professional project complete with exquisite production details and superb actors, yet its subject matter is so far out of the mainstream, it feels almost radical.

The film is a strictly no-bull proposition.

The longest, hardest sit of the season -- you are stuck there, a single tube of puckered muscle, waiting for the extremely ugly violence to occur -- but it is driven by performances of such luminous humanity that they break your heart.

A dead-on sense of how rich kids live and talk today, a sense of the melancholy of a dysfunctional family, and some great dark laughs.

It takes the rock movie into regions it has never been before.

It is in fact a traditional mystery more reminiscent of Agatha Christie than the reigning film noir aesthetic of 1947. But it's fabulously entertaining.

A stunner -- as big and messy as a war, as small and perfect as a diamond.

Isn't much of a movie, but it's a whale of a story.

The movie becomes something quite rare and magical: a text about a text that is also full of life. In other words, it's a true first: It's both postmodern and fun!

It's a classic story in form, and in this country it used to star Jimmy Cagney.

The creepiest, clammiest, twitchiest squealfest in months. It offers, among its many pleasures, the happiness of safe fear.

Stephen Frears's stunning Liam, -- a vivid, intense evocation of another British time and place.

Charlotte Rampling takes you so far inside the pain of Marie Drillon it leaves you stirred, shaken and a little in awe.

Friendship matters to those of us who still claim membership in the human race, and Goldbacher's merciless autopsy on it is both illuminating and dispiriting.

It begins by scaring you to death by evoking a monster, and by the end it has seduced you into caring for him.

What a good movie. Sometimes you get tired of 'splaining and you just want to say: Hey, this one's really very good. That's all, folks. It's a damn good movie.

An exuberance, a celebration, a hoot, a kick and a half.

Huge, sprawling, and utterly absorbing.

Mamet loves two things: scams and dialogue. This movie is rich with both.

Puerile, pitiful, grotesque, offensive, immature, repulsive and, of course, extremely funny.

When you think you've figured out Bielinsky's great game, that's when you're in the most trouble: He's the con, and you're just the mark.

A character so real and poignant (yet hysterically funny), she'll linger for months or years.

The tension is never crushing, as it would be in an American job. Instead, it grows by increments, until you realize the movie, in its quiet way, has you snared entirely.

It gets at something exquisitely human, so human that even movie stars feel it.

The interplay between Glass and Lane is riveting and rigorous.

The movie itself is a miracle: tough, smart, relentless, provocative and, above all, serious.

The movie is -- how can I say this? -- funny as hell. It's like an old Mad magazine "Scenes We'd Like to See" put together by someone on crystal meth, with a vicious streak, an existentialist streak and no mercy anywhere in his soul and only the tiniest flinch at the end, which is probably, sigh, the best way to end.

Then, finally, there are the endings, all six of them...For us outsiders, it seems like too much of a good thing...But all those are minor rants: The big fact is that The Return of the King puts you there at Waterloo, or Thermopylae or the Bulge, any desperate place where men ran low on blood and iron and ammo, but not on courage.

Straightforward, droll, brutally honest and arresting.

It's not the sort of film one can be said to enjoy, but it is the sort of film that has the clarity of a dream and lingers for hours.

And that's the surprise of the movie, beyond even the humor and humanity of its inside look at contemporary American Indian culture. It's really the oldest and most primal story forms, the one about the old man and the boy.

About as good a picture of a writer's real life as we are likely to get. It is wide-ranging, it is fair, it is thorough, and although it admires, it is also tough enough to condemn.

The summer's most rousing action picture.

Jon Heder in the magnificent Napoleon Dynamite, is one of the most winning movie creations in years.

The cutting is so sinuous and breathtaking, the music (by Danny Elfman after too much coffee) so onrushing and the camera so penetrative of the depths and heights of midtown Manhattan at cloud level, that the illusion, despite its artificiality, works. You don't believe it but you "believe" it.

You will laugh. Then you will laugh some more. Then you will laugh still again.

The best kind of genre filmmaking: It plays by the rules, obeys the traditions and is both familiar and fresh at once.

It conforms to that twisted French genius's typical opus: grisly, ironic but minuscule and sordid.

A brilliantly amusing couple of hours.

Witherspoon's simply terrific, and it's amazing how quickly and easily she sheds speculation that she was too modern for the role.

I don't think "Queimada" is as great a movie as "Battle of Algiers," but it retains its vitality, its outrage, its savagery and its spirit.

But the movie has a great deal of zest and charm, and Yakusho gets so exactly that crest of melancholy that is a man’s early 40s, until he decides to go for another kind of life, that the movie is infinitely touching.

You may not want to hang with the haunted Caouettes, but the movie is so compelling, it doesn't give you a choice.

In its insistence on the centrality of the war to the collective consciousness of mankind, it's of a piece with "The English Patient," rather than "Saving Private Ryan."

Delightful, delicious, de-lovely.