Resonates with intelligence and a poignancy made more sorrowful by what happened to all of us, but especially to New Yorkers, on that terrible day.

It's one of the small, pitch-perfect treasures of the movie year.

One of the best things about Nolan as a director is that he’s not self-conscious. His movies unfold and fold in on themselves without the strain of labor or flash. But that lack of self-consciousness is also Nolan’s downside.

For folks like me, who missed "Firefly," the short-lived TV show on which the movie's based, watching Serenity is like showing up for a big lecture course at the end of the semester. And yet, after an hour of intense disorientation, the movie's arch sarcasm becomes oddly entertaining.

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

The Last King of Scotland joins the ranks of nightmarish innocents-abroad movies, from "Midnight Express" to "Hostel," where the disillusioned hero fights to return to civility.

After Innocence isn't bravura filmmaking, and it doesn't have to be -- this is one of those documentaries where the subject is compelling enough to do the legwork.

Tomboy is as visually beautiful as its 10-year-old heroine is defiantly plain.

It's a bizarre, provocative story and a moving one, but it doesn't access the richer levels and themes of the film the publicity campaign obviously wants you to think of: 2006's "The Lives of Others."

The Orphanage gets by on mood and a mournfulness that's not easily soothed. Sadness and loss, it says, are the threads connecting the spirit world and our own, and women, who bring life into the world, understand that far better than men ever will.

It's slick, sleek, and stylish, and if it doesn't quite redefine cool, it certainly offers a snazzy update.

The film is depressive, slow, darkly funny, unyielding in its formal rigor, and unsettlingly beautiful. It's obviously not for everyone, but only because not everyone can meet its stare.

Unearths the expected footage from the crypt -- including a hilarious live video of the band arguing onstage over what to play next. The anecdotes are pungent and revelatory.

Primarily a one-man show for Darroussin, and the actor, a longtime pro in the French film industry, comes through with a scarifyingly believable portrayal.

Adults should find its simmering drama at least as compelling as teens will, even if parental figures are only slightly more present here than in a " Peanuts" comic strip.

Bully contains some moments of real alarm and, in the school bus, one nightmarish motif.

Even at the movie's most ridiculous (and Mongol is not without its ridiculous moments), this is a picture you laugh with more than laugh at.

Zooey Deschanel shows off her singing on a couple of generically pleasant soundtrack ditties.

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.

You really don't need to borrow someone else's kids to ponder and enjoy what Millions has to offer.

Intoxicating fun.

Titanic is a big-budget spectacle and director Cameron brings it off with high-tech bravura, placing us aboard the ship in real time.

It isn't often that lives of quiet desperation are served up with such pearly restraint.

This engaging ensemble comedy that could have been called ''Father Doesn't Know Best.''

More than anything else, Oldboy recalls Alfred Hitchcock with all restraint tossed to the wind, or Hitchcock's most obsessed devotee, Brian De Palma, at his most nastily inspired.

The end result's a muddle and a good argument for why actors shouldn't direct themselves first time out. Farmiga's a generous and observant performer, but she lacks a shaping hand, not to mention the ruthlessness that's probably a necessity for any director.

It's so hypnotically breathtaking, you don't realize you're not breathing. By the final shot, you don't realize you're crying either, but there go the tears.

"This was the Rosa Parks moment,'' another participant says, "the time that gay people stood up and said, 'No.' ''

A pretty decent crime drama - not a patch on the best parts of his directorial debut, 2007's "Gone Baby Gone,'' but it's moody and grim and engrossing if you approach it with the right expectations.

In Darkness is a disaster movie, and the disaster is the Holocaust. In the space between the two halves of that sentence, you have what works about the film and what's a little creepy.

It is an honest, dumbstruck, not particularly deep demonstration of how insanely difficult it is to make a movie, any movie, no matter how blithe the end result may appear on screen.

Frears makes every note count for a lot in this beautifully gauged microcosm of big emotions expressed in small gestures.

Through a fluke of release-schedule timing, it arrives as the anti-“Inglourious Basterds’’ - a story about heroic Nazi-killers in which heroism itself sinks under bewildering crosscurrents of motive and uncertainty.

What Herzog almost accidentally captures in his viewfinder is profound and unsettling: an entire American underclass where at least some prison time is the norm and where only luck and the grace of God keep a person from either wrong end of the shotgun.

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 like an After-School Special version of "Pan's Labyrinth ," and I actually mean that as a compliment.

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

“Happy” isn’t meant ironically. Herzog, who narrates, clearly loves, and envies, the trappers’ elemental existence and connection to nature.

Engrossing and eye-opening in several respects and even, when you least expect it, humorous.

Warm, wry, endearing.

(Washington's is) an astonishing performance, partly because it's so devoid of histrionics, and it has Oscar nomination written all over it.

Bell is utterly persuasive as the boy literally yearning to leap beyond the oppressively apparent confines of his world.

Rat may be lightweight, but it's never cheesy.

A shrewdly acted, bittersweet comedy.

I almost wish A Mighty Heart were about the Captain, and I'd bet director Michael Winterbottom does, too. The character contains all the contradictory impulses of this region of the world that the West tries and miserably fails to boil down to black and white.

Finds DreamWorks Animation looking to Viking territory for its next Shrek-sturdy comedy tentpole. By Odin, they make it work.

Zeiger's movie is a timely salute to the risky and brave men and women who had the temerity not only to think for themselves but to speak their minds.

It's rare that a crime movie achieves such emotional complexity, but this one is smartly layered.

Freeman portrays Mandela not as a saint but as a man who knows he has the political freedom of being seen as one; it’s a majestically two-dimensional performance with glimpses of a third dimension peeking through.

It's foreign, it's inspiring, it has an adorably resourceful kid; it depicts grinding misery in a land far from West Newton, and it holds out the possibility of clambering over all that misery to attain your dream.

The film's a minuet fetishistically repeated until either the audience or the lovers go crazy. I'd say it was a tie.

The storytelling here is at times as awkward as its hero, and since it is a Gray film Two Lovers takes itself dreadfully seriously. Yet it's one of the few movies I've seen recently that improves on a second viewing, in part because Phoenix does such remarkably subtle work.

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

Neil Young Journeys is easily the least of the three documentaries director Jonathan Demme has made with the legendary rocker; but in its shaggy, eccentric way, it may be the truest.

A Matter of Taste, French director Bernard Rapp's polished second film, swims in lies, ones that sate at first, but soon intoxicate, seduce, and drown.

While no individual plot strand is vividly compelling, their interplay makes for a hearty and humanistic mix, carried by the performances.

You won't see a more humane and delicately moving riff this year on the theme of getting clean.

One of the most compelling films the Holocaust has yet produced.

If you've seen the Beatles documentary "Let It Be," you know what four men who are heartily sick of one another look like, and in 2001, Metallica had been recording twice as long as the Fab Four.

I'm still not sure what "source code" means here. I suspect the actors, the director, and the screenwriter haven't a clue either. But the thing keeps you watching.

The images in The Song of Sparrows have a poetic grace that's to be desired in storytelling. You feel Majidi's hand much more than you do God's.

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

Barrels along on a diverting enough sugar high, but in the hangover that follows you may wonder where the wonder was.

The film is actually a major artistic breakthrough for Araki, a onetime bad boy of independent filmmaking. Its psychological intelligence, attention to emotional currents, and humanity are surprises.

Referencing the popular song, the movie's title reminds us that "the fruit of the poor lemon is impossible to eat." That, in a rind, is Riklis's deeply frustrated view of his country's stalemate, but you can only take a metaphor so far before it falters in the face of endless geopolitical complexity.

A compelling and eerily effective little drama.

The film's most remarkable achievement, in this culture of clamor, simply may be its decision to keep the volume down, drawing us in as opposed to pummeling us, as most films do.

The film's unhurried pace is actually one of its strengths. Entirely appropriately, the tale unfolds like a lazy summer afternoon and concludes with the crisp clarity of a fall dawn. That's not just a farm movie, that's life.

A damn-near great end-of-the-world zombie movie, terrifying on the basic heebie-jeebie level, respectful toward its B-movie forebears, and all the more unnerving for coming out in this fretful era of SARS and germ warfare.

Best taken as a dazzling showcase for Collette, an actress who fits none of Hollywood's ideas of glamour or artistry, yet who grows like a beautiful outback weed with each new role she takes.

The movie trades the paranoia of modern omni-cam culture for a tighter, more personal drama, and while it sticks with you, you feel the missed opportunity like a phantom leg.

One such paradox, which Into the Wild doesn't note, is that those who flee civilization more often than not bring it with them. The bus in which Christopher McCandless died is now a tourist destination.

There's conspiracy here, as there is in all of Dick's books, and it wraps the film up with a moving but somewhat neat bowtie.

A chillingly effective documentary.

An almost fetishistic re-creation of a horror-suspense movie from around 1978.

Even at 148 minutes (and viewed twice!), you still feel as if you’re watching the longest coming attraction ever for a John Woo movie.

Bird also really punches up the ensemble playing. I imagine one of the upsides of being the director of nonhuman beings is that you're trained to respond to characters as much as stars.

Jensen's charming film, is perhaps one of the first in which the actors are credited not by the size of their salaries and egos, but by their vocal ranges.

Can't outrun its very visible limits.

This is a deeper film, delving into the twisted motives that rule lives, the lethal cycles that shackle progress, and, ultimately, the courage it takes to choose life.

Charming and, compared with most Hollywood films like it, refreshing.

A quirky, welcome addition to Disney's cavalcade of animated stars.

Demonstrates an idiosyncratic human touch. Kon is unafraid of the unseemly and unsightly. People are captured as they really might be.

The leads save it, particularly Cotillard, who once again subverts her own glamour with ferocious lack of ego. The movie itself only occasionally matches her intensity.

Awash in strangeness, a poem that details what it's like to be 13 at the end of a millennium.

Sweet, indulgent, and surprisingly soft in the center; the most minor entry in the brainiac-doc genre to date, it's nevertheless a perfectly entertaining hour and a half for crossword adepts.

All Abrams wants to do is give us a great ride while holding firm to our longstanding emotional investment in these characters.

Kim is a hard director to pin down. This is the first time the inconsistency has spilled onto the screen, though.

The strangest thing about Todd Haynes's new movie isn't that he cast six actors to play the various faces and phases of Bob Dylan. It's that he needed only six.

Valli's touch as an artist is too light, and his dramatic sense too timid, to make the film much more than a collection of pretty pictures.

Lacks the requisite sense of dread.

The film does not offer an optimistic view of relationships.

The way Greengrass lets you feel the violence is impressive. Most movie heroes punch through armies without scraping their knuckles, but Bourne's a believable wreck by midpoint.

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

Arbitrage is a breezy watch, with good performances that don't cut very deep and an eye for décor but little interest in what it's decorating. What's missing, really, is outrage, or a sense of the 99 percent.

The movie has more style than depth and it's sometimes in danger of confusing the two.

Breillat’s film can seem at times like a far less opaque version of another story set in the 17th century about sex and power: Peter Greenaway’s “The Draughtman’s Contract.’’

The voice actors are also excellent, especially Michael-Leon Wooley as a bouncy trumpet-playing alligator and Jim Cummings as a lovelorn Cajun firefly.

A rousing, sometimes funny, frequently depressing documentary.

While it insists that everyday lives in Araya are full of drudgery and toil, the film fails to produce a single ugly image.

A heart-rending account of people trying to dodge the hurdles that politics puts in front of them. By the end of this humanist epic, some are ennobled by their struggle. Most are exhausted.

The film spends its first half explaining the song -- famously and vividly about the cycle of Southern lynching. Its better second half-hour unmasks its composer as a compassionate Jewish guy from the Bronx.

It plays like Scorsese's ``After Hours,'' but for higher stakes.

After an hour of biting charm, Something Wild turns into something else. In a twist that turns the movie into a silly story of violence, Demme surrenders his style to a stupid plot. [7 Nov 1986]

A description of Davis’s post-trial life would have been welcome. Twice Communist Party candidate for vice president, she now teaches at the University of California at Santa Cruz. That raises one more question. Santa Cruz is less than a hundred miles away from San Rafael. How many lifetimes away does it feel like?

Dogtooth is slightly less self-congratulatory than the average Dogme movie, a few of which belong to Lars von Trier. This feels, instead, more like an extreme summer at a Dadaist acting camp.

Poised at the midway point between an ultraviolent video game and a neo-classic dance musical. As midnight-movie mash-ups go, it's pretty amazing.

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

Entertaining.

Distress of Parents is a real pleasure.

An earnest, extremely grueling, prodigiously crafted true-life drama that takes one of the worst natural disasters in recorded history and reduces it to a bad day at Club Med.

The gusto in the flying bullets, the fleeing lovers, and the flowing music will make you want to hang around until the party is over.

A straight-up drama and thus the only film in "The Trilogy" not forced into a genre straitjacket -- suspense thriller ("On the Run") or farce ("An Amazing Couple") -- "Life" is also the finest of the three. This isn't a coincidence.

Gathers a sort of darkness as it comes to its oblique conclusion.

Watching it is like being lost in somebody's richly moody campfire story -- it's so good, in fact, that only once it's over do you realize you've been holding your marshmallows too close to the flame.

I don't usually make recommendations of this kind, but if you or your kids have gone to a burger joint in the last few weeks, you really do need to see this movie.

There is no plot in Pen-ek Ratanaruang's exceedingly mellow situation comedy, and that's preferred, frankly.

This is a well-made film that will seem revelatory to moviegoers unfamiliar with the huge, worldwide gaming culture. They’re going to be pretty hard to find, however.

Cantet does something that educated, upscale audiences may find exasperating in the extreme: He takes a tinderbox of racial and sexual exploitation, pours gasoline all over it, and refuses to light the match.

This intriguing story, like many tales of mid-20th-century American art, is fueled by testosterone.

Three quarters of Cold Mountain consist of some of the most masterful and absorbing filmmaking of the year. The final quarter is Hollywood business as usual.

Kung Fu Panda goes nowhere surprising even as its images unscroll handsomely before our eyes. The sound could go out in the theater, and you wouldn't ask for your money back.

The British actor Christian McKay resurrects the young Welles as a magnificent mountain of talent, ego, and unsliced ham. He, and he alone, is reason enough to see this movie. The problem is the “Me’’ - Zac Efron.

When it's not opting for whimsy, Rocket Science makes you cringe, which is what's good about it.

The movie could also teach something to the makers of "Pirates of the Caribbean" about delivering a story quirky enough to actually stick with you.

Offers yet another example of how a lot of what we consume is produced at somebody else's expense. In this case, it's sugar.

For a few years, Veit Harlan must have felt he was the right filmmaker at the right place at the right time. Did he ever stop to think that his luck also meant the doom of millions? Moeller’s documentary can’t supply an answer. It does, however, make the rest of us wonder.

A poignant, all-too-common tale of casual abuse in a workplace that is candidly labeled "better than most."

Marston's a miniaturist even when The Forgiveness of Blood calls out for larger gestures, and you occasionally sense a more bruising, compelling movie lurking behind this one.

As ponderous and overwrought as a film hogged by a couple of young hipsters named Roméo and Juliette can be.

Full of elegance but hampered by lack of depth.

Wrestling gets in America's face and Blaustein gets in wrestling's face. It's a fascinating tango.

Mother's peace crusade ennobles Irish Town.

Plays like a dislocated version of ''Death in Venice,'' but in a dryer, higher climate that features exponentially more firepower.

In style and story line, the film is daring in its simplicity.

A sweet screenful of quirky chaos.

Space Cowboys does achieve liftoff.

Superior and original filmmaking. You won't be able to take your eyes off it.

At its most effective, the movie is a chastening, sobering, and thorough work of film journalism, however shortsighted.

Of all the "Liaisons" adaptations, this may be the most sentimental.

Mostly Election tracks the shifting of power among men for whom power is all that matters, no matter how much lip service they pay to loyalty. The final sequence is a shocker but it's also completely logical.

It’s one of the richer movies you’re likely to see about average Arabs in America.

The movie wins you over through crack comic timing and an awareness that the point of driving isn't how fast you get there but what you see on the way.

What Zombieland’ has instead - in spades - is deliciously weary end-of-the-world banter.

A triumph of gentility that earns its moments of pathos.

Miller is certainly faithful to the spirit of Rendell's psychologically probing, class-dissecting novels, even if his probing doesn't go nearly as deep and his storytelling isn't as compelling.

More than a predictable self-discovery yarn about the caterpillar that turns into a beautiful butterfly.

Promises minor pleasures and delivers them. In the process, it's gracious enough to kick in a few extras: a nifty central gimmick, a self-effacing lead performance, and a big slice of ham from supporting actor Jeff Daniels .

Glawogger has the good sense mostly to stay out of the way and let the material speak for itself.

The Korean documentary Planet of Snail is spare and unemphatic - too much so - with an abiding sweetness of spirit.

It's a worst-case-scenario of bachelor party morning-after, and it is howlingly funny.

It's intriguing. To be honest, though, there is less to it all than meets the eye.

Roberts and Erin Brockovich have Oscar contender written all over them.

Raimi crafted a complicated hero who is a welcome relief from the usual two-dimensional offerings. That said, we could use some moxie in the sequel.

Robert Altman's gossamer, tension-free meditation on the ballet life, never quite recovers from a performance scene that arrives about 20 minutes in.

He (Ray) was, a more complicated man than this film, or perhaps any film, dares allow. Foxx is not at fault here.

A lot of the problem is that the picture's protagonist is both naive and foul.

Thompson - his brilliance, his self-destruction, and the ground he broke - is always at the center, but the film occasionally loses its focus.

A lot of the credit for what's right with 'The 40-Year-Old Virgin goes to the screenplay, which Carell and Apatow wrote. They like these characters and, when it matters, they dare to give them feelings, none truer than Andy's.

Poppy Hill doubtless plays most strongly to Japanese audiences — especially the musical score made up of old-timey jazz and early-’60s pop that sounds like corn syrup to Western ears — but its central conflict is gentle, unyielding, and universal. Which is to say that it turns out to be a Hayao Miyazaki movie after all.

A Royal Affair is tosh but it's ripely entertaining tosh, with emotions as flamboyant as the window treatments. There is nothing like a Dane.

It takes a special first-time director to stick her neck out, personally as well as professionally. As much as anything else, The Cats of Mirikitani is a testament to good breeding.

Ostensibly a road-trip farce, Chair really depicts the highway to man-child hell: The laughs come from the gulf between how mature the characters think they're being and what emotional toddlers they are.

Films that achieve the dimension of seraphic embrace achieved by 'Innocence, as it explores a return to first love, are the rarest of the rare.

Snazzy visuals, of which she (Moss) is one, carry The Matrix past its klutzy script.

Shattered Glass, with its dumb title, is smart about good vs. evil. Incidentally, the good is Lane, who now works at The Washington Post and was a consultant on this picture.

If Millennium Mambo is the only chance to see Hou Hsaio-hsien's work at a movie theater, you'd better take it.

As charming as Dunn's kid-in-a-candy-store exploration is at times, it's apparent that his ''anthropological" take on the scene isn't much more than the love letter he always dreamed of writing to his headbanging pals.

War of the Worlds pushes some of the right buttons and enough of the wrong ones to make you wish that Spielberg would move on from aliens already and use his unparalleled talents to focus once more on earth.

The film's slick and entertaining, an obvious must-see for musical hounds.

The movie's a must for baseball fans in general and Red Sox fans in particular - if nothing else, it will help remove the battery-acid taste of the season now stumbling to a close.

Thirst is deliriously bonkers and keeps getting more so; you watch it holding your breath, waiting to see where Park will zigzag next.

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.

It's an imperfect but ambitious film willing to confront an enormous, complex period in this country.

"Pulp Fiction" wannabes don't get much slicker or edgier than Go.

Its seriousness is welcome. It's also a burden the film can't completely surmount.

It's the videotaped equivalent of a primary research data dump. But to quote Bette Davis by way of Edward Albee: What a dump.

Rohmer's style saps the film of the drama that flows directly from the subject matter.

It's one of the great movies on the vicissitudes of love, commitment, and attraction.

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

Director Steven Soderbergh is working very near the top of his game here, and if Magic Mike tells an old, old story about a young man, his talent, his rise, and his fall - see everything from "Saturday Night Fever" to "Boogie Nights" - he brings the confidence of a born filmmaker and a cast that's sharper than their characters and ready to play.

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 balances nicely on the edge of meta-horror, with characters breaking free of their assigned roles (in more ways than one) and monkey-wrenching the very urban legend they're dying to get out of.

By the end, Mesrine: Public Enemy #1 has turned nearly as flabby as its aging antihero.

The movie's overlong and there are lumps in the batter, but this is a ''Charlie" that the author would recognize as upholding his playfully dyspeptic tradition.

It's crisp entertainment even as plot absurdities gum up the works.

At its core, Quinceañera, a modest but remarkably poignant comedy, is the story of a neighborhood.

You can count on the fingers of one hand the number of works in any given year to which one is moved to apply the word ''masterpiece.'' Raul Ruiz's Time Regained is one of them.

Moore's roving essay feels even more urgent now than it did when the jury had to make up an award to honor it at the Cannes film festival in May.

In ''Trials,'' Hitchens is almost endearing, stalking Kissinger from one event to the next like a bleary-eyed Michael Moore.

A deep, exhaustive, and moving piece of do-it-yourself detective work.

Grueling, heavy-handed, and surprisingly insight-free. For once, a gaggle of Leigh characters hasn't jelled beyond the level of its cast's conceits.

Dancing on the edge of dullness, ''Girl'' is continually saved by the look of things: the hush of an atelier in midafternoon, dust-motes swirling in a sunbeam, pigment blooming under mortar and pestle. Impatience is forestalled, time and again, by rapture.

Shut Up is intentionally slapdash, with jumbly hand-held cameras and random bursts of feedback. But there's a beguiling sense of quiet to it, too.

An endlessly fascinating movie. If only it were a good one.

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.

Small, sharply written, incisive comedy examines, with smarts and style and sexiness, the very nature of modern romance - gay, straight, and in between.

In the end, Seabiscuit gets right the things that matter.

A structural mess that turns contrived just when it should be hitting home.

Dreamlike and the slightest bit precious, the film is a beautiful, over-cultivated hothouse flower.

This Earth doesn't really have anything new to say, but it does present some newly entertaining ways of saying it.

After all the mesmerizingly illicit buildup, the film’s willful lack of a payoff is almost as strange as one of those essays.

A generally thrilling entertainment that's not quite the grand slam you want it to be.

The movie is about hope and courage and fortitude. It's about beating the odds and defying expectations. But Lucy Walker's movie is also about whether the trip was a good idea in the first place. The answer is compellingly complicated.

There’s a lot of Michael Moore’s ambulatory spirit in this film, which the comedian Jeff Stinson directed. There’s also a lot of the damning comedic commentary that made Rock’s old HBO series so urgent.

ParaNorman is supposedly for kids, but it's really aimed at their snarky older brothers, and it illustrates the limits of the new family creepshows.

In more ways than one, Mark Wexler gets the release he's seeking.

So forget about taking anyone under 12. But if you want to see what a benign demon looks like when he's eating nachos and unwinding to Al Green, this is the movie for you.