The most playful film to come out of the French New Wave, it's also the last time Jean-Luc Godard appeared to have any fun.

Haneke has become known as a dour modern master of cinematic pain, and in this movie he scrubs civilization down to the root level.

As sagas of endurance in the face of ridiculous odds go, this story is up there with Shackleton and ''Into Thin Air.''

I don't usually make recommendations of this kind, but if you or your kids have gone to a burger joint in the last few weeks, you really do need to see this movie.

If there's a larger theme in Zatoichi, it's that nobody is quite who he or she seems.

Scorsese and his team of Grade A talents are working on an operatic scale here, and like many operas, this is long, overwrought, sprawling, and more than frequently brilliant. It also hits just enough discordant notes to keep it from greatness.

Elegant, insistent movie -- a great gray filmmaker's finest in years.

Turns out to be one of the finer peeks into the creative process of staging a play. Granted, that's a tiny genre, and the film's core audience -- theater majors and the people who love them -- is narrow. The lessons, however, are big.

Three quarters of Cold Mountain consist of some of the most masterful and absorbing filmmaking of the year. The final quarter is Hollywood business as usual.

Pixar is so good at what it does that every other kiddie-entertainment purveyor -- including parent company Disney -- flounders in comparison.

Turns out to be a grade-A B-movie that grounds its thrills in particulars of time, place, and character, so that when the time comes to make the leap into the wholly preposterous, we do so willingly. This is a movie that earns our trust -- and then happily abuses it.

A stunningly well-acted drama for grown-ups.

A much better movie than the one it honors.

A comedy, and for all its cliches and clumsiness, close to a great one.

One of the most enjoyable movies I've seen lately, but it has a biting knowledge of that which history gives and history takes away.

Among the most insane mainstream movies ever released.

Such smart, whiz-bang fun that you may not realize what it's about until you're safely home.

As superbly crafted -- as good -- as this movie is, Condon never really owns up to the cloud of pessimism at its center.

Utterly adorable.

Compston's performance and the downer milieu, presented with appropriate paint-peeling profanity, are more than enough to keep an audience riveted and ultimately moved close to tears.

Flattens you with concussive detail and the awfulness of war; it plays like "Saving Private Ryan" as remade by a Continental mathematician flipping out on Ecstasy.

Giants has SO many insistent high points, in fact, that its breathlessness threatens to turn monotonous.

The film is startlingly even-handed.

One of the smarter, more unexpectedly touching documentaries of the year, and I recommend it to you whether you love Rivers or loathe the very thought of her.

Screenwriter Kaufman is in fine meta-fettle here, even if he's still losing control of his material toward the end, and while it's too soon to tell whether Clooney has the stuff of a great director, he certainly knows who to hire.

With pained gentleness, her film insists we make our homelands within us and take them wherever we go.

Deeper, darker currents move through Momma's Man, eddying around fears of letting go on both sides of the generational divide.

A bleakly funny character study of a very particular species of urban fauna - the sports radio call-in fanatic - Big Fan’ is compulsively watchable.