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

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

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.

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

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.

It's an astonishing movie, with a real-life feel.

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

It's a terrific movie.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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