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

It's the year's best movie sex.

Meanders around Holly Springs, Mississippi, with the fuzzy benevolence of a Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation.

Gets diagnosably schizo.

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

Ethereal.

Elegant.

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

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.

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.

Spellbinding.

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

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.

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]

Mike Leigh's great big, superbly performed homage to the creative process.

The shenanigans have been pared into 84 minutes of transgressive, potty-minded farce, that is often Waters at his most cheerful and most thematically focused.

It's the boys' most immediately gratifying movie: The goods are delivered in a hearse.

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

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

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

Soberly, deeply effective.

A movie too smart and too urgent to be categorically awful. Clinically insane may be another matter altogether.

If nothing else, The Filth and the Fury is a searing, forceful, entertainingly biased reminder only that the English group mattered - as musicians and as anti-social curs.

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.

Staggering, gorgeously ambiguous.

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

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

A triptych whirling on a Lazy Susan of revolving character perspectives.

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.

The amazing thing about the film, for anyone who hasn't had an intentional Hollywood scare lately, is that it still delivers on the most visceral level

Boys Don't Cry's intensity sneaks up on you like a snake.

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

Imbued with infectious pluck. It's also a lucid, competent, titanically entertaining movie loaded with workable gags.

More often than not the film casts an infectious, evocative spell.

Hysterical-depressing, vividly sobering.

A work of strangely bold, distinctly American pop art - proud to be ashamed, ashamed to be proud, unafraid to ignore its commercial bearings.

Almodovar imbues his Harlequin-novel-meets-Marvel-comic-book melodramas with something more than a wink and a smile, and it's beguiling.

A knock-down, haywire ballad of the adrenalinization of love and despair.

Blair Witch forgoes a literal boogeyman in favor of the unseen, which, in this case, is as scarily bone-chilling as anything they could show you.

Like laughing into a mirror for 113 minutes.

Beautiful, wandering little love story that wants to break your heart and probably will.

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.

A document of vexing (and vexed) immediacy.

The majestic pageant of images - no sylvan landscape has been this indelibly, dimensionally alive - is inextricably welded to the multifold spiritual / ecological questions about the future that Miyazaki is contemplating.

It's a gas, dude!

It's the rawest, most hot-blooded, provocatively audacious, dangerous movie to come of out Hollywood this year.