This movie catalogs a wealth of human ugliness. It’s even been made to look ugly, presumably to underscore the horror movie that is Precious’s life.

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

The movie is also more extraordinary than a mere scenic slideshow.

Pan's Labyrinth is a transcendent work of art.

There Will Be Blood" is anti-state of the art. It's the work of an analog filmmaker railing against an increasingly digitized world. In that sense, the movie is idiosyncratic, too: vintage visionary stuff.

The usual emphasis in a detective film is upended so that procedure, thrillingly, is more important than action. In its own way, this is one of the most intense cop movies you'll see.

I was much more disheartened leaving the movie the first time I saw it than I was the second. Its richness resides in its apparent objectivity. Without sacrificing a sense of hope, Cantet suggests that the school system is just like a certain vexing grammatical tense: imperfect but still fighting against irrelevance.

Both a staggering realist thriller and a jeremiad.

Ferguson's film is a clear-sighted counterpoint to the former secretary of defense's impression. As the title suggests, it's a seemingly infinite mess.

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

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

With impeccable skill, Akin has made a film roiling with cruelty but guided by tough political optimism. No, we can't all get along, but some us of are trying.

This is the most significant feature about poor black life since Charles Burnett's 1977 "Killer of Sheep."

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.

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.

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.

It's so hypnotically breathtaking, you don't realize you're not breathing. By the final shot, you don't realize you're crying either, but there go the tears.

By nearly every measure, Milk is a beautifully made, far less conventional movie biography than most.

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

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