Who most of these exquisitely costumed people are I have no idea, but they brush past the camera in such rapids of jubilation it's a wonder they don't knock the thing over. I watched most of the film exhilarated, but depressed that I'm not a big Russophile.

The new Abbas Kiarostami film is called Ten, and in it something amazing happens: nothing.

A deep, exhaustive, and moving piece of do-it-yourself detective work.

Like no movie before it, Adaptation risks everything -- its cool, its credibility, its very soul -- to expose the horror of making art for the business of entertainment.

This is a love letter from one auteur to another that doesn't feel like a term paper. Instead, Far From Heaven is an honest-to-God drama with resonance all its own.

Nothing momentous happens here, but Philibert has a magical sense of how to find the simple poetry lurking in the universal routine of being a kid. A lot of the film's lyricism is extracurricular.

The worst thing about the first Quentin Tarantino picture in five years is that after 93 minutes of some of the most luscious violence and spellbinding storytelling you're likely to see this year, Kill Bill ends.

The atmosphere is hypo-stylized, vividly generic and worse than real, like a doomy Frederick Wiseman documentary.

This is the first beautiful performance in the year's first great movie.

Freshly viewed, the movie's melancholy seems to fit uncannily well in the moment we find ourselves now. In the film there are mentions of nuclear annihilation and worries that heedless lust and wanton partying could bring Rome a second fall.

A masterpiece.

This is a brilliantly structured hall of mirrors that wraps Catholicism and the movie industry into a tasty film noir.

Not about crashing into walls or crashing into other people. It's about crashing into yourself and living to tell the tale.

A marvelous, uncommonly observant, and unexpectedly rousing group portrait.

This is a movie from the past that's also eerily of a piece with the film culture of now and tomorrow.

Jane Austen's novel has been rejiggered into a jaunty romantic comedy that leaves us as incandescently happy as its characters.

Maurice Bénichou does the most heartbreaking work in the movie, playing a friend of Georges's. It's a character and a performance I'll have a tough time getting out of my dreams.

Enigmatic as it is, The Intruder dares us to see movies as visual marvels tethered to humanity.

The movie they've assembled is in the vein of 1973's "Wattstax," but it's much more than a concert documentary. It's a jubilant, civic-minded lollapalooza.

A watchful, winding-down tragedy of a movie that delivers what it promises. As commentary, it's grim. As filmmaking, it's a powerfully disturbing odyssey through the Bucharest health care system.

It's a thrill to watch Posey incorporate, at last, some true emotion into her exuberant screwball wit.

It's one of the great movies on the vicissitudes of love, commitment, and attraction.

Fast Food Nation has the dramatic flatness and willful lack of personality of some documentaries -- or at least how Linklater thinks a documentary should be. The movie nonetheless feels like both a work of investigative journalism and an immense human-interest story, veering into muckraking, horror, teen comedy, and what passes for "Twilight Zone" science fiction.

This is an extraordinary artistic breakthrough from a Mexican director who was already fearlessly good to begin with.

Pan's Labyrinth is a transcendent work of art.

As demonstrated in his previous film, a plangent snapshot of subsistence called "Waiting for Happiness," Sissako is a poet, and the filmmaking in this new picture is stuff of a deserving laureate.

A milestone of eloquent understatement that captures the daily life of have-nots as few American movies have.

Astonishing.