Fully realizes its ambitions as a tale about confronting and navigating life's land mines with humor, tenacity, and hope.

Astounding. It is also bizarre, challenging, and, at times, admirably overreaching. In short, it's the kind of ambitious little film that can leave critics in a swoon and American moviegoers scratching their heads.

The film's most endearing trait is that these people sincerely love movies, and they truly love their own idiosyncrasies. And is that not the greatest love of all?

In the absolutely moving new documentary Watermarks, seven women in their 80s return to the Vienna swimming pool of their youth.

Spare and elegant and harrowing, it's an ode to childhood trust being stretched until it snaps.

Remains worth seeing as an achingly nostalgic farewell to youthful idealism, tinged with a kind of loving contempt.

Judy Irving's terrific documentary 'The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill is ostensibly about birds, but only in the way that a game of Scrabble is about tiles.

A delightfully deadpan comedy from Germany, is one of those movies where nothing whatsoever seems to happen until you look closely, at which point everything happens.

A slowly flowering miracle: an epic of normal life.

Rambles without apparent purpose, and yet it blooms in emotional impact as it goes.

Tarantino may have nicked the title first, but this is the real ''Pulp Fiction," with all the drama and the dead ends that implies.

Stylish and only superficially superficial, Happily Ever After plunks us down with three male friends as they dance on the edge of their 40s.

Entertaining and enraging.

With pained gentleness, her film insists we make our homelands within us and take them wherever we go.

A smartly observed, unpretentious, and unconventional comedy of manners -- or more properly, it's a comedy of mannerisms.

A collection of beautifully acted encounters, conversations, symbols, and vignettes woven into an evocative and unforgettably surreal garment.

The film is a tower of literary and cinematic references, tangential yet somehow essential characters, and one fantastic performance after another. It's a simple movie yet is anything but.

The real deal, an often awkward but nonetheless terrifically compelling high-stakes human drama.

An uncommonly intimate portrait, in large part because the filmmaker, Bradley Beesley, is a longtime neighbor, friend, and collaborator.

A broad, foursquare piece of populist filmmaking that happens to be tremendously moving.

A riveting and sobering way to spend a Saturday afternoon.

Remarkably, ''Me and You" doesn't shock so much as soothe.

There's a delicate balance here between expression and belligerence.

The film confirms director Audiard as a master of visual mood, in this case one of barely expressed emotional panic.

The director is becoming a master of blending the political and the personal with eloquence and deceptive lightness.

Builds slowly and naturally to an unbearable personal crisis.

In its unstated cynicism, beauty, and self-pity, Last Days fits the myth of Cobain like a torn pair of jeans.

The Aristocrats -- the movie, not the joke -- is a working demonstration of the pleasures of the profane.

An exquisitely filmed, emotionally transfixing epic about a white South African boy's journey to return his pet cheetah to the wild.

Timothy Treadwell was killed, along with his girlfriend, by a rogue bear in October 2003.

If Keane is a downer, it's a stupendously well-conceived one.

Burton, who directed the film with animator Mike Johnson, has rarely been in brisker, friskier form.

The film has the perverse intelligence of Cronenberg's other movies. It's not his best, but it is certainly his most accessible, least stagy work, obeying the laws of chronology and serving up characters whom we recognize as people.

Richly provocative entertainment, as heady as a cocktail party with the Manhattan literati and as vaguely troubling as the morning after.

Anderson is the rare filmmaker who doesn't want to use the actress as an instrument or to exploit her independent-movie cachet. She has freed Moore to be what she hasn't been with many directors: credibly human.

This is one cinematic novella that stays with you for quite a while.

A puzzle: a hermetically sealed period piece so intensely relevant to our current state of affairs that it takes your breath away.

Even more than "Chicken Run," Were-Rabbit is a tiny plasticine masterpiece.

It infuriated me. It broke my heart. It convinced me that Caro, who's from New Zealand, is a strong, clear-voiced filmmaker

You're left with the bewilderment and joy on Kane's face as he plays the old songs, and the sense of ghosts just behind his back.

The movie's masterstroke is to avoid interviewing the usual anti-globalist suspects and let solid, hard-working middle Americans speak.

Goblet of Fire is the entry in which Rowling finally took off the gloves.

The film sends you home moved and in a tuneful mood.

Brokeback may be too polished for some people, too elegantly dispassionate in its study of choked passion.

Tommy Lee Jones makes his feature directing debut here, and the film is as weathered, subtle, and sympathetic as the actor's own face.

The director can work wonders within his celluloid universe, but when the time comes to hand us back to reality, he stumbles. With this movie, that hurts.

Writers Nicholas Stoller and Judd Apatow remake is more devilish, hitting its targets with the reckless glee required for a round of Whac-A-Mole.

Fateless looks man's inhumanity to man square in the eye and pronounces it standard operating procedure, and that may be the greater horror.

An agit-doc of unusual depth. It has a point -- that the primary business of America over the past half-century has been waging war -- and it supports that point with nuance, research, and a willingness to hear the other side of the argument.

The movie's still a wickedly droll put-on. Better yet, beneath the fun lurks a dry and weary sigh at life's refusal to match the tidiness of art.

This is a modest marvel of grace and framing that unfolds with the patience of a cloud and is driven more by wonder than pure emotion. It doesn't have the exuberance of Francois Truffaut 's "Small Change." Instead, it's that movie's antonym, yet just as wondrous.

That film remains an electrifying testament to pop music as a communal creative act.

Formally, the movie's a lasting pleasure: Reed's incisive direction; Greene's easy yet weighted dialogue; the farseeing deep-focus photography of Georges Perinal; Vincent Korda's luxuriant sets.

It’s a galling and provocative experience to viewers of any political persuasion, and a reminder to the left of how easily idealism can run amok.

It's an inside-the-park home run -- a small, lovingly overwritten comic drama about fate, failure, and primal longing. To put it in words a Sox fan would understand, the movie hurts good.

Washington hasn't been this relaxed in years. When he feels like it he can be the most charismatic star in the movies.

The arrival of closing credits feels like a trap door. The film is over, and, suddenly, we have to leave these people. The directors make no guarantee for their futures, but the strength of their filmmaking inspires you to hope for the best.

Brick is Bogart goes to high school, in other words, but that thumbnail description doesn't begin to convey the lasting pleasures of Rian Johnson's directorial debut.

The Poe-like atmosphere in Stolen is such a chilling success that when Mashberg says that Gardner would have cracked this case herself, it's impossible to imagine that she isn't out looking for those paintings right now.

The movie is hard going, not least in the sense of powerlessness it leaves in an audience that knows exactly what will happen. And yet you come out feeling that the filmmakers have done the right thing by these people, and by this day.

All the gears, in fact, are shamelessly visible, yet they lock smoothly and resonantly into place. If Akeelah and the Bee is a generic, well-oiled commercial contraption, it is the first to credibly dramatize the plight of a truly gifted, poor black child.

Another triumph of modesty from a master who deserves real, paying audiences, not just the adoration of besotted film critics.

A near-masterpiece of mood and menace, and one that deserves to be seen on the largest screen possible.

Comes on as both a rebuke to male vanity and a chic metaphor for midlife panic.

Like its stunt work, the movie is both ridiculously hyperactive and a muscular feat of absolute confidence. I don't expect to have a more adrenalizing time at the movies this summer.

Really the film is a deft first-person character study with a war zone for a background.

It's a wrenching, ennobling essay on teamwork and the hard struggle to change one's life.

Australian rocker Nick Cave talks of how discovering Cohen during his small-town youth "just changed things." Bono calls the singer "our Shelley, our Byron."

Enormously enjoyable.

A quieter, less melodramatic piece of work than last year's "Crash," and arguably a better one.

The only question his movie doesn't ask is "What do you want your next car to run on?" That's up to you.

It looks at the all-American obsession with winning and chortles darkly. You still come out of the movie wanting to give your family a hug.

A movie called Snakes on a Plane had better be one of two things: So bad it's good or so good it's great. Darned if it isn't a little bit of both.

Gosling may be the soul of Half Nelson, but Epps is the film's heart.

Heymann's film was originally a six-part series for Israeli TV. The feature he and his crew have made smoothly truncates those three hours into a rich, discretely damning 85-minute portrait of intolerance.

Kurt and Mark's trip to those hot springs is a figurative return to Eden. Anyone who's had a disillusioning reunion with a moony old friend knows what Mark discovers: They're too old to stay that innocent. None of this hit me until after the movie ended. But it hit me hard: You can't go home again.

When The Departed roars to life, as it does in so many of its scenes, you feel like nobody understands movies -- the delirious highs, the unforgiving moral depths -- as well as this man does. Welcome back, Marty.

It isn't often you get to meet the devil in all his glory, but here he is in Deliver Us From Evil, and his name is Father Oliver O'Grady.

Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck's film is a fascinating look at the intersection of commerce, celebrity, and controversy.

Volver brims with personal and cinematic allusions, but no one hungry for a well-told tale from a master storyteller is required to understand them.

A shrewdly acted, bittersweet comedy.

The Lives of Others has similarities to Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 classic "The Conversation" but with undercurrents that resound across an entire century of European political history.

A movingly acted, terrifically old-fashioned World War II picture rethought as a post-colonial rebuke.

Inland Empire may be the most aggressively surreal feature film ever released to movie theaters in this country, and it's possibly close to the movie David Lynch carries around in his head.

I don't think I've seen a mainstream movie get fatherhood so right since "Kramer vs . Kramer": the fear, the indulgence, the snappishness, the pre-occupied "uh-huhs" as a child natters about his day, the steamrolling waves of love.

Venus is rollickingly funny at times -- but there's an undercurrent of extraordinarily clear-eyed sadness.

Notes on a Scandal is a nice mug of poisoned eggnog for the holiday season -- a movie so smart and entertaining you almost don't feel its chill sicken your bones.

"Grin Without a Cat" brilliantly used montage and a wide intellectual scope to speculate about the history of war and revolution. "Grinning Cat" is a more modest achievement, but the director's wisdom remains robust.

Seesawing between despair and soul-affirming inspiration, God Grew Tired of Us is a documentary to make you proud of what America offers to the rest of the world and worried that it can't keep its promises.

A parody of and winking homage to the history of Thai melodrama, Wisit Sasanatieng's uproarious filmmaking debut exuberantly combines pop and kitsch with a wholesome belief in the thrills of bad art.

Mafioso is the missing link in the mob movie arc.

A rousing, sometimes funny, frequently depressing documentary.

A compelling and eerily effective little drama.

Mostly, though, it's "Godzilla" with a severe case of Murphy's Law, and it is never less than bizarrely delightful.

The Namesake has a deep, alluvial poetry to it, like a mighty river reaching the sea. It's mysterious and ordinary, insightful and banal, rambling and precise, and it is altogether unexpected.

The most startling achievement of The Last Emperor is that it accomplishes what seems to have eluded Bertolucci for some time. He has found the small in the large and, in many ways, he has created what many thought impossible -- an intimate epic. [18 Dec 1987, p.95]

Even when its wires are showing, the movie's soul is always evident.

As funny as it is sharp.

Black Book takes the conventions of the WWII epic -- the prison breaks, the interrogation scenes -- and undermines them with craft and muscle and the ripe lack of restraint we've come to expect from this director.

Tarantino and Rodriguez want you to cover your eyes in disbelief and get the unholy giggles at the same time. You do, but in two very different ways, and that's the movie's strength.

A tart, smart, closely observed satire of the television industry.

In short, Almodovar opens some new doors to his artists here, and they respond in surprising, captivating ways. [29 Mar 1996]

Jude is a modernized version of Hardy, but a handsome, fluid and red-blooded one that has no difficulty finding correlatives to the prejudice and hatred of wit and spirit against which Hardy, in his gimlet-eyed way, so passionately attacked. [25 Oct 1996]

Unstrung Heroes, with its small, detailed brush strokes and its eye for specifics, marks Diane Keaton's directorial breakthrough. [15 Sep 1995]

Gray's haunted, obsessional riffs are absorbing theater. Because Demme had the good sense to lay back and not beat them over the head with his cameras, they're equally compelling on film. [27 Mar 1987]

The team of producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory has created another classy film of a classic novel with their stunning adaptation of E.M. Forster's Maurice. [24 Sep 1987]

It's also [Coppola's] most gloriously extravagant film since "One from the Heart." [12 Aug 1988]

This rather simple story, played with stunning conviction by Rourke and Basinger, achieves its apex through director Adrian Lyne's steamy direction. Yet, it's not nasty enough. [14 Mar 1986, p.11]

Tamblyn's surprisingly measured performance commands attention.

With a tranquil fearlessness, it goes beyond the death of memory, to see what might be found in the unexplored country beyond. The answer is both frightening and comforting: More love. Unspecified love. Universal love.

Drugstore Cowboy, Gus Van Sant's fresh, gutsy societal underbelly film, never wallows in picturesque down-and-outism, except at the end, when Dillon's character, frightened by the death of a girl he didn't like much and spooked by his own paranoiac suspicion, checks into a seedy hotel while trying to go cold turkey and not yield to the influence of a junkie priest drolly played by William Burroughs. [27 Oct 1989]

Kevin Costner's epic Wyatt Earp literally and figuratively gives you more of the legendary lawman than any of the other famous movies about him. [24 Jun 1994, p.47]

Beyond its fresh twists on the cop and romance genres, Witness is, above all, an anti-consumption film. [08 Feb 1985]

Set two years later, the sequel's the better film.

Friday is funnier and funkier than "Bad Boys," more homegrown-seeming, less manufactured. It plays like "House Party" with attitude. [26 Apr 1995]

The script is biting and timely.

The movie is a block of paper that, when Tsai's finished with it, becomes a chain of snowflakes. Loneliness doesn't often get such a gorgeously ornate tribute.

Barry Levinson's Diner is an extremely clever, slick male fantasy that takes some time to work out its mood and tone but ultimately blossoms into a moving film. [16 Apr 1982]

It's easily the best of the movies I've seen by the various "Saturday Night Live" alumni, and part of the reason it's funny and satisfying is that it doesn't strain. [09 Jun 1983]

Mad Dog and Glory is the funniest and most original studio comedy since "White Men Can't Jump." What makes it fun is its ability to find new ways to do old things. [5 Mar 1993, p.61]

What Gibson gives us is a portrait of a man behaving gracefully under several kinds of pressure, some of it shamefully unfair. It's a solid acting achievement, and his directing, which never calls attention to itself, is right on the money, too. The Man Without a Face is an affecting evocation of a man of principle who teaches a boy what's important. [25 Aug 1993, p.53]

Natural Born Killers is going to be a love-it or hate-it film. But it's an important film. Pumped up, jumped up, yet asking the right questions, [it] is more than an attention-grabber. It's a grenade pitched into the media tent. [26 Aug 1994, p.51]

Engrossingly manic version of Tracy Letts's great stage play.

Someone walking cold into a movie theater showing Paprika might be excused for thinking the screen was having a Technicolor seizure. Fans of Japanese anime and filmmaker Satoshi Kon will simply feel dazzlingly at home.

Stone's film rolls off the screen with affection and authority, even when Morrison's life enters its sodden, bummed-out finale, and Val Kilmer does an uncanny job of identifying with Morrison. [01 Mar 1991]

Director Penny Marshall's choreography encompasses emotional as well as physical ebbs and flows. Awakenings lives up to its title. [11 Jan 1991]

What keeps the film going, and helps it keep its comic tone, is the constant threat of cataclysm - and the deadpan Buster Keaton charm of the ever-responsive Pinon as he combats the giant Rube Goldberg meat-grinder that the house, in effect, is. [17 Apr 1992]

Crazy Love doesn't downplay the awfulness of what happened , but it also knows a good media circus when it sees one.

What sets Tequila Sunrise apart is its layering, its existential dimension. The characters played by Gibson and Russell have been sanded down by a kind of fatalism we normally associate with characters in French gangster movies. There's more than one facet to them. They're entertaining. And urgent. Even when they're just going through routine genre moves, they put laid-back spin on them. [2 Dec 1988, p.29]

Funny, gritty, filled with surprising stabs of feeling, Parenthood is a stretch for Ron Howard, its director. This new adult comedy has the generosity of "Cocoon" and "Splash," but it takes Howard into deeper, darker, messier territory. [2 Aug 1989, p.57]

One of the things that make [Branagh's] Henry V so thrilling is his audacity in trying to turn it into an antiwar play - a view that would have astounded Shakespeare. Astonishingly, he pretty much brings it off, emerging with steadily growing power as the young king who isn't afraid to bloody his hands. [15 Dec 1989]

For all its pessimism, the movie prompts a viewer to search his or her own memories for actions rather than reactions, and to mull over the differences between the two. It's a dark little ride, but at the end the lights hesitantly flicker back on.

Big is an example of what has become rare in Hollywood -- a self-confident comedy that transforms an old gimmick into a new, vivid experience. It's as funny for the kids as it is for adults and, for that reason alone, can't be recommended too highly. [3 Jun 1988, p.33]

The Pillow Book is Peter Greenaway's most stunning and accessible film since "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover." Dense, gorgeous and inexorable - once you give yourself over to its logic - it's a boldly erotic explosion of Asian chic, taken to places no film has gone before. [20 Jun 1997]

This is music to gorge on, raw ethnic survival in the form of sound.

The Neverending Story, Wolfgang Petersen's sophisticated fantasy film, is so wonderfully appropriate to children that it seems to have been made by kids. But there is enough artistic merit in the tale to enchant adults equally. [20 Jul 1984, p.1]

It's a celebration of free expression that treats youth like a fierce and beautiful animal, and never attempts to tame it. In Pump Up the Volume, the "why-bother" generation finds a voice, and begins to bother. [22 Aug 1990, p.47]

Pascale Ferran's Lady Chatterley is sensual in escalating degrees of heat, but the film's eroticism, which is substantial, is laid on with a caress. The movie's a slow-motion swoon back into Eden -- a nature documentary about humans -- and it's hypnotic.

Sicko is Moore's best, most focused movie to date -- much more persuasive than the enraged and self-righteous "Fahrenheit 9/11."

All the voice work here is excellent, especially Oswalt's. He sounds like Paul Giamatti but with a greater capacity for confidence.

The question remains: Why would Herzog want to dramatize what he has already captured as nonfiction? To better control the material, I think, and to bring it in line with his own obsessions.

If you look fast, you'll see Waters himself in a cameo (as a flasher; what else?), proof the new film is in touch with its dyed roots.

If their movie doesn't float your boat as a work of science-fiction, action, philosophy, heliocentrism, or staggering visual spectacle (although, it really should), then it certainly succeeds as a parable for cinematic ambition.

Brilliantly, the movie becomes a double coming-of-age story. The parents' political awakening parallels their daughter's.

The movies are smart -- smarter than you, but not in an off-putting way. Their basic appeal, especially this new one, is that Matt Damon’s killing machine, Jason Bourne, is the cleverest man on earth. And we thrill to his sense of superiority.

Too often the movies view the problems of Africa through Western eyes, but "Devil" turns that weakness to a literal strength, because Steidle could do nothing in his position except take photographs.

The word bears repeating, so everyone from Andrew Weil to Stephen Hawking to Mikhail Gorbachev is here to speak the still-inconvenient truth. The filmmaking, however, is far more relentless than in that Oscar-winning Al Gore slide show.

A portrait of two different men whose compulsion for Donkey Kong is hilarious.

Both actors are among the best, most intuitively creative we have, and whatever transpires offscreen in Crowe’s case, onscreen they only serve their characters. Neither man showboats here, and it’s a thrill to watch them work.

This is the first time, though, his (Mortensen)performance seemed so much bigger than the film surrounding it. That he manages the feat with so few wasted gestures puts him in line with the greats.

After 152 epic minutes, ‘Lake of Fire’ comes down to this: If you’re not living this woman’s life, maybe you shouldn’t tell her what to do.

Michael Clayton is about the gap between predatory professionalism and the sins of real life - about how those sins can corrode the hardest business suit of armor.

The joke's on us, it turns out; as a director, Affleck has come through with a sharp, morally ambiguous piece of pulp crackerjack.

When a movie about a guy who orders a sex doll off the Internet can turn vice into virtue, something miraculous has occurred. Lars and the Real Girl achieves that kind of miracle.

Outrageous controversialist meets brilliant attorney, and fact intertwines with fiction.

The triumph of this fond, uncontainable documentary is that it lets you hear that voice again loud and clear.

This War/Dance is among the most affecting films I've seen all year; it cuts to the core of being and gives individual faces to sorrow and to hope.

Smartly written and beautifully played, The Savages is about that point in life where you look around and realize that where you are is probably as far as you're going to get. In spite of this, the movie's a comedy, dry and humane.

He even calls the majestic view from one of the hospital landings his Cinecittà, after the legendary Italian film studio. The movie is a Cinecittà of the mind.

That smart, hip, human comedy you've been waiting for all year.

Thorough and sadly engrossing documentary.

They're both tales of growing up in the shadow of Islamic fundamentalism, but Persepolis is everything "The Kite Runner" is not. It's a personal memoir rather than fiction, coolly observant instead of melodramatic, female rather than male in sensibility and sense of humor - it has a sense of humor.

The film quickly becomes one of the most powerful, carefully researched investigations of the moral-legal side effects of current American military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. It's terrifying in a way that sneaks up on you.

They may not be as cool as Bono's fly shades, but the plastic yellow glasses required for viewing U23D supply an amazing fly-on-the-amp view of the Irish rockers in their natural habitat.

It's a small, profoundly satisfying movie that keeps echoing long after it's over.

This is the epidemic from love's point of view, a story as much about how the disease can ravage the heart as it does the body. It is also Téchiné's best film since 1998's superb "Alice et Martin," and 1994's even better "Wild Reeds."

It's refreshing to see Gondry's moviemaking still possessed by the community spirit he caught a few years ago with "Dave Chappelle's Block Party."

Some movies rest on an actor's face, and The Counterfeiters has a great one.

Horror movie Rule #1: The only way to kill a zombie is to shoot it in the brain. George Romero himself laid this maxim down with his first film, the endlessly influential 1968 gutter classic "Night of the Living Dead." Forty years later, with George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead, the venerable filmmaker has done something almost as startling: He has put brains back into the zombie genre.

Everything about Chop Shop is modest - the movie's scale, the characters' ambitions. Another director might have tried to nudge the film's grim detours toward tragedy. And that might have worked, too. But Bahrani is a refreshingly deceptive director in that sense.

The result is Grade-A agitpop, a mixture of archival footage and cheeky, creative animated reconstruction that's funny and frightening in equal measure.

Alexandra is a pleasure to watch, but it's also one of those lovely, unclassifiable movies that flourishes better with repeated or prolonged exposures.

The subject is the privileged state of childhood itself - how we're all lucky to have had it and how it so easily floats away from our grasp.

Shine a Light did something I didn't think was possible. It got me caring about the Rolling Stones again.

To say the least, the film is awkward, like a piece of badly assembled Ikea furniture. Still, editor Bernadine Colish weaves together all that C-SPAN footage into a disturbing procedural indictment. Legislators use the same language - often the president's - to justify the rush to war. The repetition is comical until it's scary: They're parroting.

Sloppily made at times and it comes close to wearing out its welcome, but you can't blame Walker for not wanting to let his subjects go. And as the movie progresses, a viewer begins to understand why: These people are literally singing for their lives.

This is a film of our times - paranoid, heartbroken, disillusioned - and the rare recent American movie whose characters react the way actual people might.

In Standard Operating Procedure, Errol Morris does something inconceivable and, at first glance, ill-advised. He gives the US soldiers of Abu Ghraib back their humanity.

In many ways, Son of Rambow plays like a pint-size, even cheekier version of the recent Michel Gondry film "Be Kind Rewind." Both are stories about people making movies not because it's their job but because doing so brings a vast sense of play into their lives.

Reprise is exceptionally smart about the crushing expectations brought to the table by those who love us.

Does Antarctica attract dreamers or create them? It's a thread that runs throughout the film.

Maddin's Winnipeg is a rich, funky, funny stew of fears and desires, of mangled civic chronology mashed up with hothouse private emotions. This is a secret history, and it's a wonder.

The movie takes the ABBA jukebox musical that ate London, and is still eating Broadway, and turns it into a surprisingly sensuous experience.

Does what too many independent American movies only pretend to do: Takes you to an unnoticed corner of our country and shows what it's like to actually live there.

Deeper, darker currents move through Momma's Man, eddying around fears of letting go on both sides of the generational divide.

Like Anderson, many directors claim to value local color, but few have gone as far, or achieved such impressive results, as has Chris Smith in The Pool.

Happy-Go-Lucky isn't one of Leigh's epic social canvases like "Secrets & Lies" or even "Topsy-Turvy"; rather, it's an edgy character study whose message only gradually emerges.

Grueling yet ultimately exhilarating.

The beauty of Let the Right One In resides in the way the horror remains grounded in a tragic kind of love.

I can't pretend to know fully what Charlie Kaufman is up to in Synecdoche, New York, with all the doubled characters, dreamy reenactments, comical minutiae, and personal unhappiness. But I got a great deal of pleasure out of watching him mount his fantasia about an artist suffering not simply for his art, but because of it.

Self-consciously poetic and shot within a luscious inch of its life, the film's also an engrossing heartbreaker: a family saga that spans continents, political administrations, and decades of travail to arrive at a harder, wiser place.

So what is Hunger? Unexpectedly, a visually ravishing tour of hell and a meditation on freedom that at best is wordlessly profound and at worst interestingly obscure.

Wendy Carroll is a character we rarely see in movies anymore, a woman left alone with her thoughts. That a moviegoer would care what she's thinking testifies to the power in Williams's brand of solitude.

The labor applied to Che is apparent, but it would be wrong to characterize the movie as laborious the way it was in, say, 2006's "The Good German," where Soderbergh took great pains to re-create 1940s Hollywood wartime glamour.

Waltz With Bashir not only breathes but it howls - and sobs and curses and croons and, in the end, when sound proves useless in the face of calamity, falls into awful silence.

Merry, filthy, unstoppably hormonal, Serbis feels very much like the sort of movie that happens when no one is minding the store.

Fighting has real grit and excellent acting. In other words, there is gold in that dirt.

A history lesson for a country and a people forced to forget at gunpoint.

Quiet, observant, and intensely moving whenever Heiskanen is on screen, and it has a valedictory sweep that feels like a summing up.

It sounds like the old unstoppable-force-meets-immovable-object trick. Ramin Bahrani's Goodbye Solo has the trappings of such a story, but, mercifully, none of the follow-through.

In the tradition of ethnographic dramas from "Nanook of the North" to "The Fast Runner," Tulpan drops us in the middle of a godforsaken nowhere and marvels at the people who live there.

Anvil! is one of the sweetest, funniest films I've seen this year. Also the loudest and most foulmouthed.

The decadence is obvious. But true to the Valentino prerogative, it's beautiful - sad, too: a dream life moving into the unknown.

Feels both masterful and hesitant - it’s the work of a born filmmaker who’s still not quite sure what she wants to say.

Terrifically compelling and, more than that, unexpectedly moving.

Revanche was a foreign-language Oscar nominee this year, and it's a better movie than most of the films in the main race. The word "revanche" means "revenge" in German, but "waiting" would have been just as good.

O'Horten is a precise, deadpan drama of slapstick existentialism - a Bent Hamer movie, in other words.

Fair warning: I had to see The Girlfriend Experience twice before its pieces settled into coherent shape.