By forgoing actual human beings, the director has made his most charming, least annoyingly fey film - a thing of lovely comic wisdom.

Osama works simply as the story of one unlucky young girl.

In the pop high it delivers, this is the greatest prequel ever made.

The ''R'' rating is understandable, but absurd. This is a family film in the most complicated and, ultimately, most cheering sense.

There's a quiet metaphor here: How do you teach children without touching them - their minds, their souls, their sensitivities?

An engrossing and enraging drama of one chimpanzee and his life's journey across a landscape of human folly.

The movie’s not all glorious noise.

Where Pina excels - where it resembles no previous dance film - is in the staging of several of Bausch's signature works for Wenders's cameras.

You probably won't see a better directorial debut this year than David Michôd's Animal Kingdom.

An exhilarating tale of magic, machines, memories, and dreams, Martin Scorsese pulls off the neatest trick of all. He marshals the marvels of modern movie technology - up to and including the dreaded 3-D - to create a love letter to the earliest of movies and, by extension, to every movie from then to now.

What's most unusual about the original 24 years later, though, is its elegant minimalism.

It's Cronenberg's finest film, it's star Ralph Fiennes's riskiest role, it's a tour de force for actress Miranda Richardson.

The attitude of many “UP” fans hovers between voyeurism and concern, between cherishing these people as distant friends and as extensions of ourselves. They’re canaries in the coal mine of human existence.

Set two years later, the sequel's the better film.

The result is insanely good, and the best time I've had at the movies in ages.

The film is startlingly even-handed.

After 152 epic minutes, ‘Lake of Fire’ comes down to this: If you’re not living this woman’s life, maybe you shouldn’t tell her what to do.

Blistering and brilliant work.

Terrifically compelling and, more than that, unexpectedly moving.

Sweeney Todd comes as close to raging at normalcy as Burton has dared. It's no coincidence that the rage is borrowed from a greater artist.

Venus is rollickingly funny at times -- but there's an undercurrent of extraordinarily clear-eyed sadness.

It’s much too easy to call Ajami an Arab-Israeli “Crash,’’ but it’s a pretty good place to start.

The scene appalls but doesn't offend; it's a "Worst-Case-Scenario Survival Handbook'' nightmare that resonates on the metaphysical level.

A handcrafted jewel of a movie, The Illusionist understands the illusions that sustain us in youth and that we have to let slip in the end. It's the rare work of art that cherishes both the magic and the trick.

A mystery, a melodrama, a prison film, and a love story, Incendies is foremost a scream of rage at a society destroyed by religion and by men.

Entertaining and enraging.

Essentially a dramatic reenactment of a generation's coping strategies.

An exquisitely filmed, emotionally transfixing epic about a white South African boy's journey to return his pet cheetah to the wild.