Sly, sophisticated and surprising.

A compelling existential tableau: sweating bodies, creaking mills turned by numbed oxen, people facing the daily and seasonal cycles of life with little hope of breaking free. Behind the Sun is forceful stuff.

A fine, inventive '70s period piece about friendship, first love, and growing up to face the hard lessons of life.

A devastatingly funny portrait of a wildly dysfunctional clan, Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums is a movie about how people never really mature in ways that matter.

A story of obsession and honor, deception and self-deception set against a sharply etched landscape of political upheaval and intrigue. Malkovich orchestrates all this with assuredness, and Bardem, looking weary and worn, inhabits his character with a realness, a truth, that's downright spooky. And beautiful.

To say this bone-chilling, gut-turning feature is "The Crying Game"-meets-"In Cold Blood." But this is a film - writer/director Peirce's first - that matches those pictures in power, in surprise, and in unnerving drama.

A smart, sensuous and sensory mind trip that caroms around a universe of thought.

A mordantly funny, clear-eyed view of an extended family's mounting dysfunction in a changing society.

To be sure, there are goofy flourishes here, the in-jokey, left-field rummies that are the Brothers Coen's stock-in-trade. But this is altogether a quieter, more philosophical sort of endeavor.

Smart and novelistic and spiked with more than a bit of The Catcher in the Rye, Steers' movie is a prickly coming-of-age tale in which everybody -- but especially Culkin -- shines.

Exhilarating, alternately funny and horrific film.

Odd, and awkward in places, but its lyricism and power stay with you.

Tully is at turns heartbreaking and heart-stirring. And it's from the heartland, so I guess that makes perfect sense.

A super-taut and superbly acted three-character piece.

It's a beautiful, grim tale.

Charming is such an overused, film critic-y designation, but The Way Home is that, and more.

Kinetic and kooky, with a climactic shoot-out at a rail station that's daring in its ridiculousness.

The film is a sharp, funny, touching tale.

Made in a forthright, unfancy style and utilizing a cast of born naturals, Washington Heights deftly draws parallels between father and son's complicated relationship and the tensions that pulse through this predominantly Dominican American community.

Although the pervading mood of Twin Falls Idaho - a beautifully shot, noirish thing - is one of sadness and loss, the Polishes' film is playful, too.

Filled with bleak, beautiful Hopperesque tableaus and strange characters whose lives intersect.

Rife with dark humor, Little Otik presents a cautionary variation of the creation myth, and a warning that tampering with the natural order of things may not be such a wise idea.

You can feel the world closing in, which, I would venture, is exactly how Fassbinder wanted you to feel.

Ozon has crafted a near-perfect film, a mournful, moving kind of cinema poetry.

Add Mostly Martha to the list of great mouth-watering food flicks - "Eat Drink Man Woman," "Big Night," "Babette's Feast" -- but don't stop there. Add it to another list: movies that get at the heart of what family, and love, is all about.

A film full of a sense of impending danger, betrayal, seduction and destruction. Quite simply, it's great stuff.

This is the kind of unusual but involving picture that's ripe for a Hollywood remake - but while you're waiting for the Sandra Bullock-Ethan Hawke edition (it's a good post-movie game: coming up with your own casting ideas), Read My Lips is well worth checking out.

A dour-faced but sublime comedy about the kindness of strangers -- and about the strangeness of people who find themselves in oddball moments of grace.