Infuriating and funny, the film forges a disturbing diagram from the avarice and chaos of a slapdash, heartless system.

Few films combine a dense and tingling atmosphere with the headlong pacing and adventure of The Bourne Ultimatum.

Fresh, funny and unfailingly observant, Rocket Science is a mood-swinging movie about adolescence that lifts audiences' spirits even when its hero is down in the dumps.

This film about fierce competition among classic video-game players is a comic action epic in documentary form. It captures fear -- and heroism -- in a handful of dusty video games.

The rousing new Western 3:10 to Yuma has the sweep of an epic and the economy of a stopwatch.

Even if you have no interest in Joy Division, this picture is worth seeing for the unsentimental empathy and passion of the moviemaking.

Wristcutters: A Love Story is a lousy title for a lovely-loony picture about an afterlife for suicides. It's an off-road "road movie" about people who off themselves.

This movie provides no phony catharsis or closure; it develops a vision of people growing in spurts from their most terrible mistakes.

In a stroke of voice-casting genius, the voices of Marjane and her mother are provided by real-life mother and daughter Chiara Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve, respectively, both of whom bring heft and measured emotion to the characters.

The impact is hypnotic.

For 45 minutes, it zings along on perfectly pitched overstatement.

The gritty heist picture The Bank Job has everything adult action fans could want, starting with a grand, fact-inspired gimmick.

Stays true to the spirit and characters of the book while embellishing it to overflowing.

Shine a Light has two maestros, Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger, and once they begin to mesh, around the third or fourth song, they put on a display of showmanship that erases the line between art and entertainment.

Standard Operating Procedure says that human nature abhors moral vacuums - but sometimes humans get sucked into them.

Downey and Favreau and the special-effects team transform the trying-out of the armor and its powers into slapstick cadenzas. But equally entertaining is Stark's and Potts' recognition that they share more than a mere working chemistry.

The movie has been compared, with some reason, to the French New Wave. But it's like "Jules and Jim" or "Band of Outsiders" blended with "A Hard Day's Night."

The title Tell No One recalls the days when ads proclaimed, "No one will be seated after the first 15 minutes" and "Be considerate of your neighbors: Don't give away the ending of this picture." Both rules apply to this canny, refreshingly emotional and intuitive thriller.

It's a summery idyll: his most entertaining picture since "Bullets Over Broadway" (1994) or maybe "Sweet and Lowdown" (1999).

What makes this movie an up is that even when its characters are crying for help, they're also crying for Help!

A marvelously subversive, slyly manipulative effort.

Few directors are able to showcase actors with fast-cutting techniques. Hill is an ace at it because everything about his action is organic.

Promises may want to unite the audience in humanitarian emotions, but it's more useful as a prod to examine what these children are learning from their schools, their leaders, and their media.

The kind of movie that gives mainstream Hollywood star vehicles a good name.

This movie is about the survival of the open-minded. As far as current American independents go, it's the fastest and the funniest.

It's one of the most ambitious biographical films ever made in this country, and one of the most unusual, moving and exciting.

The union of thought and feeling becomes flesh and blood thanks to four brilliant performers in Iris.

Scratch will make even the uninitiated believe in the joy and propulsive power of hip-hop.

A remarkable film about a remarkable man who's lived the kind of life usually reserved for adventure novels and pulp fiction.

A thoughtful, engaging film.

All about mood, and not one bit about action - which explains why it's at once both the most passionate film of the year so far, and the most determinedly inert.

What the film does, brilliantly, is provoke the intelligent fan to wonder if there's a limit to how far the proceedings can go.

As close to a perfect piece of satire as filmmakers have seen in quite some time.

McTeer delivers a messily cheerful performance as a woman who thinks nothing of brushing her teeth with beer.

In the full-house ensemble of Henry Bromell's Panic, Neve Campbell is the wild card.

The Cider House Rules is about many things -- chance, passivity, free will and self-invention -- but ultimately it comes back to Larch, who emerges as a toweringly noble figure even in his weakest moments.

A frequently hilarious exercise in one sex desperately trying to figure out the other.

A passionate, heart-wrenching film that is a must-see for any romantic.

A thoughtful, bittersweet film biography of the Cuban writer that captures both his irrepressible spirit and his sometimes overwhelming melancholy.

Levinson's quirky caper is rich with laughs.

Filled with delightful sequences.

Well worth the wait.

Brosnan turns his typical talent on its head. So does director Boorman, who forsakes his usual tingling virtuosity.

Accomplishes a delicate balancing act, that of entertaining the audience with the thrills and adventure of the Andrea Gail's final journey.

Takes 20 minutes to burst into fierce, inspired filmmaking.

Paints a vivid and darkly humorous picture of a world where directors are all-powerful and vampires are real; whether you want to buy into either fantasy is up to you. I did, and had a grand old time.

The movie's steady good humor and respect for character is pleasing - even energizing.

The potential for action never lets up; you never know what's coming around the next corner.

A movie of unforced nobility and quiet pleasures, Butterfly works on all sorts of levels.

The Cockettes is a grand place to visit, even for those who wouldn't want to live there.

Until the final shot, the movie keeps you wondering how it will turn out.

Himalaya does for yak caravans what "Red River" did for cattle drives: it sees them as the stuff of epic conquest.

Offers a welcome continuation of what has proven a fascinating journey both for the film's 11 subjects (three of the 14 opted out of the project this go-round) and its audience.

Experiencing this film is like hurtling down a verbal slalom.

A souped-up roadster of a film, a relentless action flick that looks great and moves with more grace and speed than seems possible.

A headlong pastiche of lower-depth melodrama and absurd black comedy.

If the movie has a flaw, it's that the working out of Vincent's psychology is too perfect.

The picture has immediacy, force and humanity. It's a muckraking work of art.

The movie has dual strengths that silence most objections. Even more than "X-2" or "American Splendor," it is, in a good way, the most comic-booky movie of the year. It's also the human Winged Migration.

Offers a welcome perspective, reminding us that extremism in the name of a values system is nothing new -- not even on these shores.

One genuine small triumph of American Splendor is that the title isn't ironic. The movie is a splendid, inventive piece of urban Americana about that hardboiled original, Harvey Pekar.

The movie may not be perfect, but it's jam-packed with goodies -- like a breakfast cereal fun-pack with a prize on every box-top.

The movie's best moments belong to Bill Murray,

Except for the Mozart music and Tharp movements around the edges, Amadeus plays like a monument to mediocrity. The movie belongs to Salieri.

The film mixes the psychological with the supernatural, the profane with the ridiculous, the self-indulgent with the understated, and dares you to assume anything. It's all great fun.

There's a good heart beating at the core of Victor Vargas, one that belies its R-rating.

The movie never undercuts his brilliance and his unexpected charisma. No matter how high his degree of malevolence, he cuts a bigger figure after you see the movie than he did before.

This documentary could have been a simple downer. Instead, it's a giddy, manic-depressive roller coaster - because it brings us eye to eye with Gilliam.

There's great action moviemaking here: You learn what it means to "carve" a pool, as you learn what it means to "close off" the boxing ring in Ali.

A sophisticated thrill. And incandescent Thandie Newton is a worthy successor to Audrey Hepburn in 'Charade.'

The movie's jabbing originality is what sticks in your memory.

The images here are graphic and disturbing. But Miike somehow manages to stop just short of disgusting.

Although it's in the same genre as "The English Patient," it's a vastly better movie --more surprising and original, more rigorous and sympathetic. This film is oddly shaped. It is also heartbreaking and exhilarating.

Absorbing, artfully executed.

It's sometimes said that the greatest test of a chef is cooking something cheap and simple, like a piece of chicken or a hamburger. In a movie that testifies to simple pleasures, Taylor and company pass that test again and again.

This is a marvelous film, a look at the strange, exasperatingly labyrinthine process of adolescence and the diverse ways people find to deal with it.

It gets under your skin and into your head, and you don't want it to leave.

This picture is jagged and exciting; it tells several plots imperfectly, yet makes them add up to a great American story about integrity challenged and triumphant.

The perfect film for anyone who finds the Keystone Cops a little too understated and I mean that as a compliment.

Italian for Beginners, on its own small scale, is a one-of-a-kind movie: a baggy-pants spiritual comedy.

Turns the kleig lights around to produce a wry and dead-on commentary on the film industry and the journalists who cover it.

Isn't an act of expiation but a gift of understanding.

It's a deft sleight-of-story Aniston, White and Arteta pull off, giving us a character who seems more than she is, but is really less than she appears.

Passionately acted and grittily convincing.

A grand, sweeping nostalgia trip that evokes the sickness of an era even as it tries to find its essential humanity.

It's the rare film that trusts both its audience's intelligence and its emotions.

In its peak moments, the movie delivers, all at once, genuine street wisdom and psychology and wrenching expressions of family and friendship.

Nothing seriously detracts from the film's overall brilliance.

De Niro and Stiller combine to bring on laughs you don't have to feel guilty about.

Well-paced, scathingly funny satire of the fashion industry and its eminently lampoonable pomposity.

Taymor conjures images that are as indelible as they are wordlessly articulate.

This is Mitchell's show, and his performance lives up to his triple billing as writer, director and star.

Viewers impressed by the fairly standard martial-arts action of "Crouching Tiger" will really be wowed after seeing this film.

What a relief to see a movie in which an audience responds with peals of laughter to subtle facial shifts as well as punch lines.

The movie is, to borrow Rob's phrase, unassailably cool.

Greengrass and his tremendously smart and emotionally agile lead actor, James Nesbitt, paint their portrait of a good politician without illusion or sentimentality.

A dizzying - sometimes frustrating - marvel of moviemaking instinct and ingenuity.

The conventional and the cliche are slam-dunked in favor of a fresh, authentic take on passion, ambition and coming of age.

Hard to take in its particulars.

As the sequence builds, it accretes so many heroic and nightmarish associations it plays like a prelude to apocalypse, which of course will come in Episode III. Attack of the Clones is part soda pop, part witches' brew - and all visual ambrosia.

The only thing missing from this rich production is an emotional charge, which Highsmith could create on the page but which Minghella doesn't quite capture on screen.

Captures the feel of a first-rate comic book. It puts the pop back into Pop Art: It blows viewers away with a blast of kinetic energy.

It's every bit as thrilling and engrossing as the best spy thriller or cop flick.

An unconventional and engrossing French thriller.

An unrelentingly dark vision that's as hard to watch as it is impossible to walk away from.

There's a dignity to Mondays in the Sun that manages to keep the film buoyant, helping to keep all the despair at bay.

Screwball farce, romance, domestic tragicomedy and literary frolic rolled into one.

Unsparing and uplifting - a wickedly difficult combination to pull off, but one that gives the film an emotional weight that's impossible to dismiss.

Hannibal isn't art. But for filmgoers with a taste for the absurd and a tolerance for the blackest of black humor, it's one heck of a thrill ride.

One of the year's most unsettling -- and perhaps most illuminating -- films.

A computer-animated burlesque fairy tale that generates more belly laughs than any live-action comedy since "Best in Show."

The whole plot is a shambles. And yet none of this matters much when you're laughing as hard as this film makes you laugh.

It's a documentary about acknowledging genius, about just desserts, about artistic muses that refuse to give up. It's about great camaraderie and great music.

Dense, ironic and thoroughly engrossing caper melodrama.

A snarling satire of Hollywood single-mindedness and its lack of any moral underpinning.

It's a zombie flick that moves -- no stumbling, staggering living dead here -- in an atmosphere that feels like a Gothic docudrama, and it's freaky beyond all reason.

A joyful celebration of spirit and endurance.

L’Auberge Espagnole (The Spanish Hotel) is unexpectedly entertaining because it captures the point in young adulthood when life is unseriously serious, or maybe seriously unserious.

There are no surprise twists, no characters who rise above themselves, no cheap happy endings. There are just people struggling with emotions and situations they think are beyond their control.

Has nearly perfect pitch.

Offers plenty of honest, good-natured laughs in the process. That's something young and old can appreciate equally.

A first-rate sail into Adventureland.

Entertaining, thrilling and honestly sentimental, it's an equal-opportunity crowd-pleaser.

Without proclaiming itself a wake-up call for the West, In This World cries out for some new method of achieving international trust.

The Station Agent has craft and pace and that far rarer quality, fellow-feeling.

Alien, even with some scene tinkering that has left this "director's cut" one minute shorter than its original release, is still one of the creepiest, scariest, most shocking films ever.

Replete with so many wisecracks, puns, double entendres and visual jokes that you almost need a flow chart to keep up with them all. But try; the effort is definitely worthwhile, and the results are hilarious.

Gloriously funky in the good old meaning of the term. Its vulgarity may be offensive, but it's also pungent and real, and it fuels some ferocious humor.

Monsieur Ibrahim is about people interacting as people, not symbols (one reason, Sharif has said, he took the role was to help his grandchildren's generation understand that idea).

This picture boasts a story about a yarn-spinning Southern father (Albert Finney) and a sober-sided son (Billy Crudup) that gives it ballast and staying power beyond anything in previous, precious Burton fables like "Edward Scissorhands" or "Ed Wood."

Director and dancers catch the audience up in a web of imagination.

Spring, Summer values life, beauty and even human fallibility, ascribing to humanity a nobility we neglect at our own peril.

The Saddest Music In the World may not be for all tastes, but maybe it should be.

A Slipping-Down Life may be low-key, but if you enter its unique atmosphere, you will leave exhilarated.

It's a top-notch action film, albeit on the bloody side, complete with decisive action, mysterious characters and a nobility and sense of purpose that allows its excesses to be forgiven.

Remarkable documentary.

A near-great British neo-noir, harsh yet hypnotic. Its psychological vortex can suck you in and leave you reeling.

To discover why movie fans are screaming for more Will Ferrell, and to savor the work of improv wizards like Carell, go see Anchorman.

The risks these guys take seem outlandish, their accomplishments otherworldly.

The true heartbreak of Maria Full of Grace is that it never comes.

Greengrass has a fine sense of pacing, keeping events moving. It's rarely hard to guess what's going to happen next, but events unfold with such gusto that there's barely time to notice that.

Garden State is filled with characters you long to know more about, in situations to which almost anyone can relate. And that's as near a can't-miss movie formula as one can get.

The result is a highly critical and impossible-to-dismiss examination of the administration's rush to war that is sure to move both sides of the political spectrum to apoplexy.

Gloriously retro, unashamedly celebratory of the joy of moviemaking and the love of old-fashioned heroism.

A Dirty Shame is certainly dirty, and maybe it's even a shame. But this is the John Waters we've come to know and cherish, and that alone is cause to celebrate.

Lightning in a Bottle has breadth, both in its multitude of perspectives and its spectrum of performances.

Like the coolest train set a kid ever had. It's not real and the faces on the toy people don't look human, but it has bells and whistles galore and will take you as far as your imagination allows.

The glory of the movie is Depp, who achieves his own immortality.

Guerrilla provides one huge compensation: the getting of historical wisdom.

(Penn)'s is a lovely, soulful performance in a movie that manages to imbue tragedy with just the right grace note of insouciance -- a movie worthy of Woody Allen himself.

The love that heals and the love that kills are one and the same in the exhilarating Head-On, Fatih Akin's overgrown dead-end-kid romance for live-wire adults.

Kore-eda expresses the terror of the kids' predicament with a touch that's equally tender and dispassionate.

Original, unfailingly entertaining marital-breakup movie.

The movie's sweetness, wit and charm go beyond its can't-we-all-just-get-along premise.

A stinging elegy for lost American dreams.

Baseball, Boston and Drew Barrymore. Certainly sounds like a winning combination.

An insightful, clear-headed look at relations within a Chinese-American family.

Disturbing, maddening, often confusing, but also charming, engaging and challenging in all the best ways.

Sure, this movie is proudly profane, but it's also funny.

There's an element of the nature film to Grizzly Man, and those passages are truly stunning, offering an up-close look at these magnificent animals.

Probably the most sweet-spirited sex comedy ever made. It's pretty funny, too.

Will be hailed for its macabre imagination and inventive farce. But it also elegantly renders an archetypal teenage tale.

For at least two-thirds of its length, all elements combine for a taut thriller, a Hitchcockian exercise in suspense pitting human frailty - can our minds be trusted? - against human resourcefulness.

It flows like fast-moving lava to a climax filled with pyrotechnics. And for once in a summer blockbuster, the fireworks are both emotional and physical. The movie leaves you sated, yet wanting more -- just what you want from a series with two entries left to go.

The results are often as surprising as they are funny.

The astonishingly versatile Kinnear proves note-perfect as a huckster who slowly rids himself of slime.

Bolt proves a refreshing throwback to the animated classics of yore.

It overflows with a combustible blend of street sensitivity and testosterone.

Goes down like a single-malt aged for 25 years.

Ron Howard has made his best movie with Frost/Nixon, an electric political drama with a skin-prickling immediacy.

Soars on the strength of strong acting and a script that stubbornly refuses to go all sappy and preachy.

It's a frustrating film in that its characters resolutely defy convention, and its story offers no epiphany, no one moment when everything becomes clear.

This film teaches the rewards of patience for directors, for actors and for audiences, too. The compelling reality of Juliette's plight comes from how subtly and gradually she emerges from her carapace.

Most contemporary horror films derive shocks from mere torture. Let the Right One In locates most of its fright-power in the needs and confusions of people who are usually overlooked.

The outcomes of all the mini-dramedies are too messy and equivocal to produce morals; that's just as it should be in a farce about confusion. Co-directors Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath are most intent on completing the circle of comedy.

Four Christmases works because of some genuinely funny setups, a pace that never dwells on one gag (or even one family) too long and a careful mix of slapstick and bawdy humor. But mostly, the film works because of the astonishing acting talent the filmmakers brought together to make it.

It's not a great movie, but it is an enlivening and unusual one: an effervescent political film that also packs a knockout punch.

The combination of 3-D photography and puppet-animation - centered on actual figures designed by hand and manipulated frame by frame - creates a world that's dense, active and fluid: a sensory Jacuzzi.

The movie is supremely nonjudgmental and balanced.

It's intelligent and emotional, not studied or sappy.

A bittersweet joy. Its humor and romance are refreshing because the writer-director, Greg Mottola, realizes that maturity is a two-steps-forward, one-step-backward process.

Sugar is a near-great movie with qualities more unusual than some all-time classics. It resists cliche at every turn and puts something solid in its place: raw yet controlled observation that gives the film the form of a flexing muscle.

Whereas the TV series rarely flinched when it came to showing the animal world as it is, Earth always pulls back at the last second. It shows a cheetah pulling down a gazelle, but not the feast that follows.

Without ever telling viewers what to think or how to feel, it raises more questions about the corruption of crime and crime fighting than any expose or thesis.

A delirious surprise .

Humpday mixes hilarity with upset as the irresistible force of male pride meets the immovable object of sexual identity.

Paul Giamatti - that huddle of broiling instincts, out-of-control impulses and aggravated ardor epitomized in "Sideways" - you feel his soul's absence as dearly as its presence.

The result is an exciting, infuriating, combative experience.

It's a nightmare that starts like a normal daytime drive and ends in a vortex-like sinkhole.

Bright Star delivers a prismatic depiction - tart, funny and piercing - of the romance between poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne in the three years before he died, in 1821, at age 25.

Nolte brings this movie a piece of his heart, and grants us peace.

Rambles and sometimes wobbles like a runaway movie. But Schreiber's instincts keep the film frolicsome and vital.

Despite the movie's several shortcomings, it leaves us sated. That's because, unlike Oliver's workhouse, it does give "some more" - more emotional breadth, more hardscrabble farce, and more haunting drama.

In a society where athletic competitions are too often likened to war, the recognition that everyone's equal once they're off the playing field is a welcome reminder of that little thing called perspective, not to mention sportsmanship.

Jew or Gentile, a good story well told is a thing to be cherished.

Cool!

Until it detours into dysfunctional-family comedy-drama, Transamerica rides cross-country without ever running low on bracing, cactus-spined surprises.

The most exhilaratingly horrifying movie to come out in years.

A humorous bounty of flesh and fantasy.

When it comes to what's great about King Kong, it's not the harum-scarum. It's the girl.

Both handmade and souped-up, it beautifully renders two types of camaraderie: the bonds among eccentrics and the fellowship of speed.

It does offer that most pleasant and valuable of viewing experiences: A message movie in which story and character come first.

As good as Willis is, he's no match for Mos Def.

Some of the movie's sunniest moments arrive as Chappelle ambles through Ohio. He's an observational comic with a drawling syntax that's almost as sly as Mark Twain's.

The Wachowski Brothers once again they prove themselves our reigning masters of murk.

It twists in on itself mercilessly, rarely pausing to let the viewers catch up, but that's OK. A movie like this depends on staying at least a step ahead of its audience, and this one surely does.

A movie like this could easy slide into Shirley Temple territory, showcasing a child actor so full of sweetness and light and good, old-fashioned spunk that audiences wince. But Palmer, whose enthusiasm and energy never seem forced, avoids all those traps; her Akeelah is never less than believable.

Jacobson and his actors do so much with the characters that they leave an ambiguous residue of blood-streaked regrets and sadness.