You won't see a brighter, truer affirmation of the All-American messed-up improvisational family than Little Miss Sunshine.

This movie is both sad and inspiring. It offers proof that Lennon's wit and art are everlasting.

Mirren brings intellect, humor and romance to the role of Elizabeth II.

Thelma Schoonmaker, a Scorsese collaborator for over a quarter-century, did the bull's-eye editing. The moviemaking throughout is swift, unaffected, masterly.

Borat is a terrific, risky comic creation: a village idiot for the global village.

The Dixie Chicks may never regain their prolonged eminence on the country charts. However, the art and entertainment value of this movie (and of their latest album) is off the charts in the best way.

In The History Boys, as in all of Bennett's work, irony is what the characters live and breathe - and I mean irony in its truest sense, of using language to present opposite and often sly alternatives to accepted wisdom.

This Filthy World does many things, including transform tabloid commentary into comic art. But at its best, it shows that the child is father to the wild man.

The unique, serious fun of this movie - and forbidding reputation aside, it is exhilarating - lies in the way that Wiesler, Dreyman and Sieland end up collaborating unknowingly on their own Design for Living (for a while, it's like Noel Coward for moral cowards).

The ovation that Hudson wins from the movie's audience is one of those miraculous moments when a performer's artistry breaks through the screen and makes you feel part of a live audience. I haven't experienced anything like it since Barbra Streisand sang "My Man" at the end of her astonishing debut in Funny Girl.

The tough beauty of the picture is that it lets each viewer weigh the costs and benefits to Gardner. It's a genuinely transporting inspirational movie because it's also a cautionary tale. It doesn't downplay the hero's occasional clumsiness or pigheadedness.

Venus is a magnificent tribute to actors by filmmakers who know they are the essential human material of theater and the screen.

With a surgical saw instead of a hatchet, del Toro takes apart patriarchy and opportunistic religion as well as fascism.

Takes a chaotic moment in the long history of "the Troubles" and turns it into a keening, air-clearing epic.

Killer of Sheep is a miracle movie because it's receiving its first theatrical release 30 years after it was made and because, as a movie, it's miraculous.

In less accomplished hands, Black Book could have been a hopeless mishmash. But Verhoeven proves a sure-handed storyteller, which might come as a surprise, as well as a terrific visual stylist, which shouldn't.

The enthralling documentary Crazy Love is about how a high-flying lawyer's obsession with a young beauty blinded her, metaphorically and literally.

Ratatouille is a sublime dish of a movie, and the company's piece de resistance.

In its entirety, Hairspray has the funny tilt that only a director-choreographer like Shankman can give to a movie.

If any movie can rid Americans of "Iraq war fatigue," it's Charles Ferguson's muscular documentary No End in Sight.

Like "Hairspray," it's not just a spinoff but a wised-up family comedy that's spirited and inventive. It retains the farcical belligerence of the TV comedy but also heightens the series' oddball warmth and expands on its Hellzapoppin' slapstick.

Deep Water is a movie that will connect to anyone whose private fantasies and creative plots have landed them in hot water.

It's both irrefutably concrete and irresistibly uplifting.

A genuine odyssey: a journey to self-knowledge.

No Country for Old Men is about the kind of amoral madness that can sweep across a country and redefine a landscape. It's so admirably lean and sinewy that it deserves not merely a rave review but a Johnny Cash song about matter-of-fact killings in shady hotels and sun-scoured landscapes.

A rapturous, ruefully funny flight of sympathetic imagination. Featuring the first movie role for Frank Langella that ranks with his best stage parts, it's a rare kind of American movie.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly provides an ecstatic lift for movielovers, despite the tragic subject.

Through unexpected and cathartic twists, this movie leaves you with atonement and redemption.