Ethereal.

So phenomenal that Bill Murray can't even steal it. And he tries. So excellent that Murray's MTV progeny Tom Green can't sink it.

Makes a term like neo-noir seem like a fatuous catch phrase.

Gets diagnosably schizo.

With Election, Payne announces himself as one of the keenest purveyors of the scattered pieces that once was an American morality.

Spellbinding.

A momentously, shockingly moving fit of shape-shifting by a filmmaker grown tired of the macabre.

Elegant.

It's a glimmering hunk of fractured brilliance riddled with Orwellian paranoia encased in a production design seemingly pieced together from the shared dreams of Franz Kakfa and Salvador Dali, and shot from cruelly low angles.

It's the film we leave most movie theaters wishing we'd seen instead.

It's that rare movie with a sense of timeliness that is eternal, and a protagonist whose soul-crushed angst, even at its most fatal, speaks to the little boy/girl lost in everyone.

Part aerobics workout, part self-styled dreamscape, Sense is a hyperactive piece of performance art that begins as the stripped-down dress rehearsal of a garage band and builds into a mighty, exhausting spectacle that shakes as much ass as it kicks. [Review of re-release]

Turns into something like a screwball farce, an intimate, self-aware one.

It's the year's best movie sex.

A monumentally graceful union of two extremely dissimilar stars, one inspired cinematographer and an exceptionally patient, curious, independent-minded director.

Madhouse satire manages to disarm the second you realize it's laughing with you - and sometimes harder.

Soberly, deeply effective.

Feels like it could go blow up at any time. It implodes instead, and the meltdown, though visible in one of the final sequences, is still corrosive.

Funny and untouched by cynical, ironic bids to be taken seriously.

It's the hypnotic long-form music video Smoke never got to make.

In Criminal Lovers, the "Bonnie and Clyde" model of killing-as-erotica gets a shrewd, funny, decidedly French workout.

Through it all, Ozon supplies a sense of pathos that makes fun of its own soullessness, transforming a self-serious suicide note into an existential love letter.

No-fat filmmaking aided by Berri's muscular formalism that, here, occasionally assumes the gritty focus of a taut, action thriller.

Segues from the merely quirky into the bizarrely unthinkable.

If there's a granddaddy of breezy situationalism, it's probably Buñuel.

Staggering, gorgeously ambiguous.

The first more-than-halfway-decent movie of a new millennium.

The least opaque of Antonioni's films, unburdened by stylishness and his imagistic inflammations.