It's an honorable attempt, but there's still no genuine need for this film to exist.

The triumph of this fond, uncontainable documentary is that it lets you hear that voice again loud and clear.

If you're not in the mood, the whole thing will probably seem pretty silly. But if you are -- oh, if you are -- I Am Love may be the richest, tastiest truffle you're likely to savor all summer.

How often are psychosexual lunacy and classic cinema combined so fiendishly well?

Travels around the world via the oceans' floors to show us symbiosis at work in a variety of ecosystems.

The result is both a surprisingly lucid portrayal of clinical depression and dramatically a bit stiff.

One of the transporting film experiences of this or any other year.

Of all the comic book movies that have spun out of theaters this long and pulpy summer, Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy II: The Golden Army is the most unapologetically comic book-y.

Please Give is a moral comedy that feels at times like one of the late Eric Rohmer’s deceptively breezy miniatures, or a mid-period Woody Allen movie minus the fussiness.

Polite but emotionally devastating, How I Killed My Father throws such questions out like smart bombs, and they detonate long after the end-credits have rolled.

A black-and-white fever dream, and, like all dreams, its meanings are elusive. It’s opaque, maddening, often pretentious, yet the pretensions may be on purpose, to push us away from the adulterous colonials at the story’s center and reveal the Africa they’re too obsessed with each other to see.

This is the kind of film that reminds you of what movies, at their best, are capable of.

This is the meatiest role Tautou has had post-''Amelie'' and she drops the zombie-pixie act for once, giving us a character who's caught in a daily dance between propriety and abandon, and who can only dance faster as desperation sets in.

It's a honey of a performance: controlled, achingly human, and funny in the deepest ways.

O'Horten is a precise, deadpan drama of slapstick existentialism - a Bent Hamer movie, in other words.

Some movies rest on an actor's face, and The Counterfeiters has a great one.

In After the Wedding Susanne Bier pushes the envelope further, toward operatic passion and the visual symbolism of Ingmar Bergman.

Nolan brings his Batman trilogy to a close with a majestic, almost completely satisfying crash. Everything feels epic about the film: the characters, the effects, the emotional stakes - even the missteps (and there are more than a few).

Less striking for its storyline than for the world it presents -- a rural moonscape of coal-dust, casual environmental disaster, and atavistic behavior.

The movie is more pure, profane enjoyment than a body should have in the dog days of August.

The film bears a resemblance to such multicharacter dramas as Robert Altman's ''Short Cuts" and Paul Thomas Anderson's ''Magnolia" -- like them, it's a portrait of a society straining at the seams -- but it manages the neat trick of being both charming and bilious.

Cool, carnal, and lethal, The Last Mistress is a period drama with a difference.

Too often the movies view the problems of Africa through Western eyes, but "Devil" turns that weakness to a literal strength, because Steidle could do nothing in his position except take photographs.

One of the most hopeful and heart-rending movies I've seen this year.

The Aura is richer and less showy than "Nine Queens," and it lifts off from the gangster genre to contemplate deeper mysteries.

Self-consciously poetic and shot within a luscious inch of its life, the film's also an engrossing heartbreaker: a family saga that spans continents, political administrations, and decades of travail to arrive at a harder, wiser place.

The new film lives up to expectations and, indeed, pushes past them into virtually unmapped territory.

Like a meal prepared by an extreme chef, ''Hustle" is more than a bit of a mess. It still tastes like nothing you've ever had before.