The movie is church via the planetarium. It's as if Malick set out to paint the Sistine Chapel and settled for a dome at the Museum of Natural History.

There's nothing out there remotely like Meek's Cutoff, for which some viewers may be thankful. The ending seems calculated to drive the literal-minded screaming out of the theater and yet it's the only possible way out.

Such moral outrage, apart from the artistry in which it is embedded, tells us that the forces of change are stirring in Iran.

Riveting tale of family dynamics packed with as much drama, conflict, and poignancy as the best feature film.

What an amazing presence Gorintin has. Never mind her hunched back and white hair, she's no crone. She makes Eka needy for happiness but susceptible to heartbreak. It's a great performance, full of both joy and the quiet, disappointing parts of being alive that come with knowing change is part of life.

The movie observes the general misery of needing serious medical treatment and the particular awfulness of needing medical treatment you can't pay for.

The film has sprung from the mind of the Frenchman Leos Carax and ought to be seen to be believed, on the largest screen you can find, and probably sober, too, since it becomes its own narcotic.

With at least nine primary characters and running two and a half hours, it's a big, fat novel of a movie - a domestic epic that fuses bitterness and forgiveness in completely satisfying ways.

It's so simple, so obvious - and a revelation.

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.

This is an extraordinary artistic breakthrough from a Mexican director who was already fearlessly good to begin with.

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.

It seems more a geek show than a slab of marketing wizardry.

It's a quiet little gag homage both to Boris Karloff and to the set up of shelf-loads of pulp novels and films noir. And Peltola, with his flat, serious face and damp, oil-black hair, happens to look, at times, like Richard Widmark and Kirk Douglas.

Moonrise Kingdom is Anderson's seventh movie, and it's the first since "Rushmore" that works from the opening shot to the final image.

Filled with affection and verve and will do very nicely until the next shipment of Latin jazz comes along.

In his masterful and haunting documentary Up the Yangtze, Yung Chang shows the old China drowning helplessly under the weight of the new.

Haunting, powerfully acted, penetratingly written, it's about people coming home -- and not coming home -- to their marriages.

What Moreau does with this role is as inscrutably moving as anything Séraphine Louis painted.

No matter their wealth or social status, these people share disappointments and elations and a sense that life, in the end, may be what life is about.

Broadcast News grows in your memory. It recalls an era when movies were made by, for and with three-dimensional characters you cared about. Let's hope it doesn't take James L. Brooks another four years to make another one. We can't wait that long. [25 Dec 1987, p.53]

By nearly every measure, Milk is a beautifully made, far less conventional movie biography than most.

From beginning to end, it bristles with ironies in classic Eastern European absurdist style.

An epic film in every respect.

This is a love letter from one auteur to another that doesn't feel like a term paper. Instead, Far From Heaven is an honest-to-God drama with resonance all its own.

War Witch deals with a reality so horrific that the film’s touches of magical realism are welcome, even necessary — the only way to retain one’s bearings and sanity in a world without signposts.

This is at bottom a pulp thriller that strains -- sometimes pretentiously, at other times with gutter magnificence -- to reach the level of basic human truths.

Not only does the movie look like it's set somewhere, it feels, cinematically, to have arrived from someplace - early John Cassavetes, the French New Wave, Eastern Europe.

The movie unfolds like something out of E.M. Forster, but Assayas isn't all that interested in family dynamics. Instead, he's made a chronicle of how the children will handle the sale of the house and its treasures.

The surface of Oslo, August 31st is as cool and crystalline as a Scandinavian lake, but at its core is a benevolence for the life we all share and tears for the man who can no longer share in it.

With Looper, Johnson proves he can finesse the most complicated notions and visual setups his mind can imagine. It's the simple things that still elude him.

A watchful, winding-down tragedy of a movie that delivers what it promises. As commentary, it's grim. As filmmaking, it's a powerfully disturbing odyssey through the Bucharest health care system.

Medea works on von Trier's own imagistic terms. There are shots and sequences in this movie that feel unique.

Suggests a summit meeting between ''The Princess Bride'' and ''Bridget Jones's Diary,'' it has a decided charm of its own.

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.

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.

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

This is the most significant feature about poor black life since Charles Burnett's 1977 "Killer of Sheep."

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 big, dark juggernaut of a movie about a big, dark juggernaut of a subject.

I can't think of another movie this year that made me laugh or weep harder for the whole lumpy business of being - the compromises and connections that get us through the day and somehow add up to entire lives.

Compact, nasty, and altogether wonderful, a tale of brotherly greed and New York comeuppance that shows an old dog dusting off old tricks using new technology.

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.

The movie they've assembled is in the vein of 1973's "Wattstax," but it's much more than a concert documentary. It's a jubilant, civic-minded lollapalooza.

What you're not prepared for in Marziyeh Meshkini's astonishing debut film is the way its central image instantly leaps into the pantheon of world cinema with a rightness and an urgency that glue your eyes to the screen.

The key to why the new ''American'' is so good and so true, though, is Brendan Fraser as the title character.

These people may be really, really dangerous, but they're also really, really polite.

Longley takes us through that country without a map; he's an artful, optimistic empiricist who believes what we see matters infinitely more than what we're told.

The Oceanic Preservation Society doesn't change the world so much as call attention to something so very wrong with it. And in doing so, The Cove culminates with an image of political agitation that might be one of the most oddly effective public service announcements you'll see.

Guy Maddin is a scholar, poet, prankster, and ferociously devoted classicist who likes to resurrect dead cinemas and deader directors and make them vital all over again.

The best thing about Together, apart from the way some of its characters grow on you even as others put you off, is the way it snatches idealism back from the brink of life-smothering orthodoxy.

Wiseman has made several films about both disability and dance, but this new one might be his most hypnotic, rhythmically assembled observation of corporeal expression.

The music is terrific, as it should be in a movie where T Bone Burnett wrote the songs with Stephen Bruton.

With its beautifully crafted starburst of colors and themes spanning its requisite Victorian gravity, A Little Princess is a beguiling little supernova of a movie I can't imagine anyone not loving. [19 May 1995, p.64]

In the end, Fighter, despite its newsreel footage, is less a document of wartime experience than of the mentality one needs to maintain in order to be a fighter.

Like no movie before it, Adaptation risks everything -- its cool, its credibility, its very soul -- to expose the horror of making art for the business of entertainment.

An entertainment to be not just seen but absorbed on a molecular level; it's as close to a full-body experience as we'll get until they invent the holo-suits. Cameron aims for sheer wonderment, and he delivers.

Takes one man, his children, their spouses and babies, his ex-wife, his girlfriend, her daughter, and his friends and turns it all into a masterpiece about the strange power of food - to heal, unite, exasperate.

Engrossing, smartly made documentary.

As a ranking cabinet minister in the brutally funny political satire In the Loop, actor Peter Capaldi unfurls dazzling verbal ribbons of the foulest language imaginable, thunderbolts of vulgarity that carry the force of precision carpet-bombing.

By forgoing actual human beings, the director has made his most charming, least annoyingly fey film - a thing of lovely comic wisdom.

Varda's charmingly eccentric amble, wise in its seeming waywardness.

As bloody as any recent film. But it's shot through with a harsh, stony humor that's invigorating enough to be regarded as a slap back at death.

Osama works simply as the story of one unlucky young girl.

In the pop high it delivers, this is the greatest prequel ever made.

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 ''R'' rating is understandable, but absurd. This is a family film in the most complicated and, ultimately, most cheering sense.

There's a quiet metaphor here: How do you teach children without touching them - their minds, their souls, their sensitivities?

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

An engrossing and enraging drama of one chimpanzee and his life's journey across a landscape of human folly.

The movie’s not all glorious noise.

Raimi seems more comfortable being his outlandishly jokey, B-movie self, letting entire sequences play on the line between carefree schlock and Hollywood blockbusting.

Slight but fascinating.

Where Pina excels - where it resembles no previous dance film - is in the staging of several of Bausch's signature works for Wenders's cameras.

You probably won't see a better directorial debut this year than David Michôd's Animal Kingdom.

An exhilarating tale of magic, machines, memories, and dreams, Martin Scorsese pulls off the neatest trick of all. He marshals the marvels of modern movie technology - up to and including the dreaded 3-D - to create a love letter to the earliest of movies and, by extension, to every movie from then to now.

It's Cronenberg's finest film, it's star Ralph Fiennes's riskiest role, it's a tour de force for actress Miranda Richardson.

What's most unusual about the original 24 years later, though, is its elegant minimalism.

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

Working with his brother Ivan, Sam Raimi is laughing with us - and often louder than we are.

The verb in the title of The Day He Arrives doesn't refer so much to a traveler reaching a destination as to a man finding himself - or hoping to.

The attitude of many “UP” fans hovers between voyeurism and concern, between cherishing these people as distant friends and as extensions of ourselves. They’re canaries in the coal mine of human existence.

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

At its best, Up in the Air invents new realms for old Hollywood sophistication.

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.

The result is insanely good, and the best time I've had at the movies in ages.

The film is startlingly even-handed.

Maurice Bénichou does the most heartbreaking work in the movie, playing a friend of Georges's. It's a character and a performance I'll have a tough time getting out of my dreams.

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.

There's something touching about the way Goldfinger obeys his moral compass. He doesn't seem at all happy with that luxury. It's a burden by a more extravagant name.

Blistering and brilliant work.

Terrifically compelling and, more than that, unexpectedly moving.

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]

The film is so immersed in Roberts's life that it becomes easy to think that most of what the camera sees is also from her perspective. It's actually too seamless.

Sweeney Todd comes as close to raging at normalcy as Burton has dared. It's no coincidence that the rage is borrowed from a greater artist.

An invigoratingly mordant comedy that proves that Alexander Payne's rambunctious debut, "Citizen Ruth," was no fluke.

The directors and distributors can't rely on us. They should be implored to watch their movies in the same theaters we do. It's the only way for them to understand that a crime is being committed.

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

May bring Goldsworthy's art closer than anything else to ''permanence'' in any traditional sense.

It’s much too easy to call Ajami an Arab-Israeli “Crash,’’ but it’s a pretty good place to start.

The scene appalls but doesn't offend; it's a "Worst-Case-Scenario Survival Handbook'' nightmare that resonates on the metaphysical level.

Once the final character has put the last puzzle piece in place, courtesy of an epic explanation, a kind of relief sets in: Someone just needed to spell it all out. It does not entirely help.

A handcrafted jewel of a movie, The Illusionist understands the illusions that sustain us in youth and that we have to let slip in the end. It's the rare work of art that cherishes both the magic and the trick.

A mystery, a melodrama, a prison film, and a love story, Incendies is foremost a scream of rage at a society destroyed by religion and by men.

Rachel Weisz has become an exquisite camera artist. In a single shot, she can open up a whole movie. The Deep Blue Sea has a scene like that.

Entertaining and enraging.

Essentially a dramatic reenactment of a generation's coping strategies.

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

A predictable conspiracy thriller that somehow ends up diminishing the real urgency of the West's humanitarian disconnect from Africa. If it sends audiences home to log on to the Amnesty International website, terrific -- but that still doesn't make it a very good movie.

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]

In its unhurried fashion, Sugar can take its place with the best baseball movies. Where most focus on the grand slam, this one's about the life that surrounds the game and everything that comes after.

The historical scope of this story, as well as Loach's interest in absolute fairness, seems to have drained some of the life from its telling.

Jane Austen's novel has been rejiggered into a jaunty romantic comedy that leaves us as incandescently happy as its characters.

An upsetting landmark. Don't take the children.

If it were any more real - if it were Imax, say -- the audience would be molting.

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

Utterly adorable.

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.

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.

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

What on earth is The Trip, besides hugely enjoyable?

[Cuaron]'s a visionary and crafty storyteller who rewards your patience, not with twists in the plot, though the movie has its share, but with pure feeling. Deploying wit, grace, and artistry, he's whisked a kid flick into adolescence.

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.

A bizarre film.

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

You can see her (Binoche) effect on Kiarostami's filmmaking: She brings out something new in him, too.

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.

Footnote culminates with stirring gravity that you wish Cedar had the confidence - in himself, his material, and us - to sustain. Both Uriel's dilemma and his father's are unenviable, even as you understand the deep guilt, sense of conflict, and hubris this mix-up provokes.

It's an outstanding, warts-and-all look at reggae legend Bob Marley.

The ends remain loose in The White Ribbon.’ But that lack of closure is thrilling. Haneke lays his movie and its mysteries at our feet, leaving us to ask, “What in tarnation?’’

You walk out amazed and refreshed by the way it kicks the assumptions out from under the genre.

As sagas of endurance in the face of ridiculous odds go, this story is up there with Shackleton and ''Into Thin Air.''

Smartly filmed (aside from a few distracting editing fripperies), but it's so dazzled by its subject and saddened by his martyrdom that it never moves past the heroic politics of dissent.

The movie's few false notes come from Lumet's script, which can be overly explanatory. Because Demme is opting for present-tense realism, the characters are forced to fill us in on who did what when to whom, why, and how.

The achievement of this movie is that Kaurismäki manages the seemingly impossible task of making a farce about farces. In other words, this is a very good movie in quotation marks and a very good movie.

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

At its most interesting, the movie offers us the sight of people desperately embracing faith in the hopes it will pull them through.

An inventive, propulsive office thriller.

Doesn't derive its power from the turning wheels of plot suspense but from the simple act of looking and not blinking.

Filmed with a cold, poetic beauty, The Return slowly strips away motivation until it arrives at a place of myth both private and oddly universal.

You come away impressed, oppressed, provoked, and beaten down, holding on to Ledger's squirrelly incandescence as a beacon in the darkness.

Burma VJ’ retorts that eyes and ears are everywhere in our ever-tightening global communications mesh. Voices, too, and they get heard. The generals and the ayatollahs have every right to be scared.

There's a restraint to Mademoiselle Chambon that's more English than French. Emotions get repressed more often than expressed.

Mysteries of Lisbon brings us far inside oil-on-canvas in a way that isn't imitative. It's simply, magically a moving picture, what a movie in the 1800s would look like.

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.

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]

Intriguing, arresting, delightfully refusing to be pigeonholed.

It's spookily touching to see this massed group of former rock gods gathered to honor one of their fallen. Bald spots and graying shags predominate; the giant velvet lapels of 1969 have given way to sensible sport coats; the granny glasses are for real.

The anti-"Kill Bill." This is an old man's movie in all the good ways: gentle, humanistic, rich with observation, quietly aware of all that can't be solved by the sword.

Eerily tragic and chillingly hard to come to terms with.

It's a thriller that refuses to thrill. It taunts us with resolution and mysteries, then slaps our hand for reaching out for a conclusion.

It’s rooted in observed reality and idiosyncratic individuals. It’s possible, Silva is saying, to live among people and still be terribly, crushingly isolated.

This is a warts 'n' all portrayal - there's no dodging the feelings of both disgust and amusement.

The magic of their perfectly shaded performances is that you always have to wonder ... Is she really that bad?

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.

Grueling yet ultimately exhilarating.

Mao had it wrong; in ''Revolution,'' political power comes out of the barrel of a TV tube.

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.

It's flawed, but it's also rich. And how many films make you feel that you and the filmmaker are following the course of a dream?

Full of redeeming throwaways.

Hooper, the director, doesn’t include lots of amazing football sequences to upstage his star. He just moves everyone out of Sheen’s way. It’s about time.

It's one of the great sister movies and one of the great performance movies. [26 Jan 1996]

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

The secret here is that the movie is rather tasteless. It has the high, slightly nauseating stink of perfume on garbage.

All the movie's good style goes to waste on a not terribly compelling conceit and loosely sketched characters.

The opening 15 minutes of Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World are so well crafted that they restore your faith in commercial cinema.

A visually overwhelming labor of love, a hand-drawn medieval adventure tale that seeks and finds cosmic connections.

So there's a hole at the center of "Pete Seeger" that the movie fills with loving remembrances, testimonials, and new interview footage of the singer at his hand-built cabin in upstate New York.

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

What sustains the film is its tone of almost hallucinatory foreboding. White Material isn't about the calm before the storm but the seconds before the deluge.

Mercifully, The Station Agent is not about how these misfits heal one another -- they're not that miserable, for one thing. It's about the unlikely ways proximity, need, and coincidence create friendships.

Few, if any, films this year will approach, let alone equal, Autumn Tale in its subtle sparkle.

As demonstrated in his previous film, a plangent snapshot of subsistence called "Waiting for Happiness," Sissako is a poet, and the filmmaking in this new picture is stuff of a deserving laureate.

The movie is foggy with reverence and uncertainty. This is the passive work of a man nervous to touch the third rail of his parents' discontent.

Bright Star is a thing of beauty and a joy for a movie season that needs it.

This is also the first of Martel’s films to build in a direction other than up. The film’s lateral movement continues a kind of class commentary.

One of the truest, most beautiful movies ever made about two strangers.

Il Divo is showboat moviemaking, but the opulence is of a piece with the film's damning assessment of the durable Italian elder statesman Giulio Andreotti.

Fish Tank should be seen for what it does well and for what it hints may come, if Andrea Arnold and her audiences are lucky.

Obviously, it wasn't the plot that has given Little Shop such a long life. In the case of this film, it's the music, the sets and the comic sketches that make this remake mostly successful. [19 Dec 1986, p.77]

No is a comedy, but of a dangerous sort. Its eyes are open and the laughs tend to stick in your throat.

Nathaniel fares well with his father's fellow masters, although Frank Gehry seems evasive.

It's to the "Lethal Weapon" movies what left-hand driving on a country lane is to a freeway chase: pokey, more than a little daft, but with a bloody surprise around every hedge.

The usual emphasis in a detective film is upended so that procedure, thrillingly, is more important than action. In its own way, this is one of the most intense cop movies you'll see.

It's delicately made, yet forceful in its delicacy.

The movie Quentin Tarantino has written and directed is corkscrewed, inside-out, upside-down, simultaneously clear-eyed and completely out of its mind.

These are truly tedious stakes for an action movie. The franchise isn't worried about world safety. It's fretting over whether to start wearing Depends.

Wattstax is a disorienting and ironic moviegoing experience. It's a film about the curative powers of rhythm-and-blues music that sets out to frustrate your sense of rhythm in its insistence on the blues.

Still: The Hours is a book about people writing, reading, and living another book, and that literariness makes the movie resist itself.

This is a movie about the marriage between sound and image, and the sound is wearing the pants in the relationship.

As loving and welcome as Chris & Don is, it's not well enough conceived to create equilibrium among its many parts.

The Wrestler is a character study, no more and no less, yet it's open-ended enough to function as many things.

Driving Miss Daisy, about the deepening relationship between a Jewish matron in Atlanta and her black chauffeur, is a luminous joy of a film, heartbreakingly delicate, effortlessly able through indirection to invoke the civil rights era without ever once slipping into portentous pronouncements. [12 Jan. 1990, p.35]

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

Dennis's film attempts something few documentaries have: to inhabit the psyche of its subject.

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.

We're in a golden age of comedy, and one of the reasons is Margaret Cho.

It's not so much a remake as it is a loving re-creation of the 1933 original on extra-strength steroids, with a side order of Botox. You've seen it all before but most assuredly never like this.

If you miss the old cliches, consider whether, after 21 Bond films and countless parodies, your response is simply Pavlovian.

A sweet-natured trifle, as flavorful and as thin as a crepe.

The situation is comic and yet quite serious, as are the ways in which language is used.

The best that can be said of the men in Coline Serreau's Chaos is that some of them are pimps.

This is the first beautiful performance in the year's first great movie.

The mother-child dynamic here is the fraught stuff of any worthy melodrama.

A strange and very beautiful documentary about the gray area between obsession and art.

The last time I felt the sort of outrageously kinetic action-movie high District 9 delivers, it was 1981 and George Miller, Mel Gibson, and "Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior" had just come roaring out of Australia.

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

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.