One of the funniest, most intelligent, most original films.

This happens in 1961, when 16-year-old girls were a great deal less knowing than they are now. Yet the movie isn't shabby or painful, but romantic and wonderfully entertaining.

Each character in this movie is given the dramatic opportunity to look inside himself, to question his own motives as well as the motives of others, and to try to improve his own ways of dealing with a troubled situation. Two of the characters do learn how to adjust; the third doesn't. It's not often we get characters who face those kinds of challenges on the screen, nor directors who seek them out. Ordinary People is an intelligent, perceptive, and deeply moving film.

I enjoyed the film's look and feel, the perfectly modulated performances, and the whole tawdry world of spy and counterspy, which must be among the world's most dispiriting occupations. But I became increasingly aware that I didn't always follow all the allusions and connections. On that level, "Tinker Tailor" didn't work for me.

The film is beautifully well-mounted. The locations, the sets, the costumes, everything conspire to re-create the Rome of that time. It provides a counterpoint to the usual caricature of Mussolini. They say that behind every great man there stands a great woman. In Mussolini's case, his treatment of her was a rehearsal for how he would treat Italy.

Rotates its story through satire, comedy, suspense and violence, until it emerges as one of the best films I've ever seen.

About Schmidt is billed as a comedy. It is funny to the degree that Nicholson is funny playing Schmidt, and funny in terms of some of his adventures, but at bottom it is tragic.

King of the Hill could have been a family picture, or a heartwarming TV docudrama, or a comedy. Soderbergh must have seen more deeply into the Hotchner memoir, however, because his movie is not simply about what happens to the kid. It's about how the kid learns and grows through his experiences.

A movie that is not only ingenious and entertaining, but liberating, because we can sense the story isn't going to be twisted into conformity with some stupid formula.

There's some kind of pulse of sincerity beating below the glittering surface, and it may come from Mitchell's own life story.

The film concludes not with a "surprise ending" but with a series of shots that brilliantly summarize all that has gone before. This is masterful filmmaking.

Shines with a kind of inspired madness.

Not just a cute romp but an involving story that has something to say.

This is one of the year's best films, a certain best picture nominee.

The point is that for the soldiers, it's a dead zone, life on hold, a cheerless existence. And this plain-spoken old woman reminds them of a lifetime they are missing.

The most ingenious device in the story is the way Chow and Su play-act imaginary scenes between their cheating spouses.

Max is played by Jean Gabin, named "the actor of the century" in a French poll, in Jacques Becker's Touchez Pas au Grisbi, a 1954 French crime film that uncannily points the way toward Jean-Pierre Melville's great "Bob Le Flambeur" the following year.

The first film to build on the enormously influential "Pulp Fiction" instead of simply mimicking it. It has the games with time, the low-life dialogue, the absurd violent situations, but it also has its own texture.

There is the sense they're fighting for each other more than for ideology.

The only other film I've seen with this boldness of vision is Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," and it lacked Malick's fierce evocation of human feeling.

I can't single out a performance. This is a superb ensemble, conveying hat joy actors feel when hey know they're good in good material. This is not a traditional feature, but it's one of Spike Lee's best films.

Meek's Cutoff is more an experience than a story. It has personality conflicts, but isn't about them. The suspicions and angers of the group are essentially irrelevant to their overwhelming reality. Reichardt has the courage to establish that.

The Circle is all the more depressing when we consider that Iran is relatively liberal compared to, say, Afghanistan under the Taliban.

Halloween is an absolutely merciless thriller...I would compare it to "Psycho."

Tells a story of conventional melodrama, and makes it extraordinary because of the acting.

Here is a film that is exasperating, frustrating, anarchic and in a constant state of renewal. It's not tame. Some audience members are going to grow very restless. My notion is, few will be bored.

There is pain, humor, irony and sweetness in the character, and a voice and manner so distinctive, he is the most memorable movie character I've seen in a long time.

For long stretches A Christmas Tale seems to be going nowhere in particular and using a lot of dialogue to do so. These are not boring stretches. The movie is 151 minutes long and doesn't feel especially lengthy. The actors are individually good. They work together to feel like a family.

These astronauts are still alive, but as long as mankind survives, their journeys will be seen as the turning point -- to what, it is still to be seen.

(1) Shot for shot, Maddin can be as surprising and delightful as any filmmaker has ever been, and (2) he is an acquired taste, but please, sir, may I have some more?

A crisp, smart, cynical film about dishonor among thieves.

The performances are crucial, because all of these characters have so completely internalized their world that they make it palpable, and themselves utterly convincing.

Revanche involves a rare coming together of a male's criminal nature and a female's deep needs, entwined with a first-rate thriller. It is also perceptive in observing characters, including a proud old man. Rare is the thriller that is more about the reasons of people instead of the needs of the plot.

A very funny, sometimes very sad documentary.

At the end of The Man Without a Past, I felt a deep but indefinable contentment. I'd seen a comedy that found its humor in the paradoxes of existence, in the way that things may work out strangely, but they do work out.

Yes, we know these events are less than likely, and the film's entire world is fantastical. But what happens in a fantasy can be more involving than what happens in life, and thank goodness for that.

This description no doubt makes the film seem like some kind of gimmicky puzzle. What's surprising is how easy it is to follow the plot, and how the coincidences don't get in the way.

It "explains" nothing but feels everything. It reminds me of two other films: Bresson's "Mouchette," about a poor girl victimized by a village, and Karen Gehre's "Begging Naked," shown at Ebertfest this year, about a woman whose art is prized even as she lives in Central Park.

I am not British, was born 14 years before the subjects, and yet by now identify intensely with them, because some kinds of human experience -- teenage, work, marriage, illness are universal. You could make this series in any society.

Broadcast News has a lot of interesting things to say about television. But the thing it does best is look into a certain kind of personality and a certain kind of relationship.

Sean Penn never tries to show Harvey Milk as a hero, and never needs to. He shows him as an ordinary man, kind, funny, flawed, shrewd, idealistic, yearning for a better world.

The whole movie is quiet, introspective, thoughtful.

It's a bleakly funny parable that could be titled "Between Enemy Lines."

An enormously entertaining movie, like nothing we've ever seen before, and yet completely familiar.

Julianne Moore, Dennis Quaid and Dennis Haysbert are called on to play characters whose instincts are wholly different from their own. By succeeding, they make their characters real, instead of stereotypes.

A movie like this touches everyday life in a way that we can recognize as if Turkey were Peoria. I can imagine a similar film being made in America, although Americans might talk more.

To see strong acting like this is exhilarating. In a time of flashy directors who slice and dice their films in a dizzy editing rhythm, it is important to remember that films can look and listen and attentively sympathize with their characters. Directors grow great by subtracting, not adding, and Eastwood does nothing for show, everything for effect.

The actors all find the correct notes. It is a French film, and so they are allowed to be adult and intelligent.

Oslo, August 31st is quietly, profoundly, one of the most observant and sympathetic films I've seen.

This film leads to a startling conclusion that wipes out the story's paradoxes so neatly it's as if it never happened. You have to grin at the ingenuity of Johnson's screenplay.

Like "United 93" and the work of the Dardenne brothers, it lives entirely in the moment, seeing what happens as it happens, drawing no conclusions, making no speeches, creating no artificial dramatic conflicts, just showing people living one moment after another, as they must.

This is not your average family cartoon. Shrek is jolly and wicked, filled with sly in-jokes and yet somehow possessing a heart.

A film that unfolds like a court case in which all of the testimony sounds like the simple truth, and none of it agrees.

The movie does a harrowing job of showing how, and why, a man might be made to confess to a bombing he didn't commit.

Ballast inexorably grows and deepens and gathers power and absorbs us. I always say I hardly ever cry at sad films, but I sometimes do, just a little, at films about good people.

It is refreshing to see Cruz acting in the culture and language that is her own. As it did with Sophia Loren in the 1950s, Hollywood has tried to force Cruz into a series of show-biz categories, when she is obviously most at home playing a woman like the ones she knew, grew up with, could have become.

The interesting thing is that Hiller has saved the movie without substantially changing anything in the book.

Power to absorb, entertain and anger.

It has been a good long while since I have felt the presence of Evil so manifestly demonstrated as in the first appearance of Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs.

Like a flowering of talent that has been waiting so long to be celebrated. It is also one of the most touching and moving of the year's films.

What happens is that we get vested in the lives of these characters. That's rare in a lot of movies.

A superb crime melodrama.

This is Mike Leigh's funniest film since "Life Is Sweet" (1991). Of course he hasn't ever made a completely funny film, and Happy-Go-Lucky has scenes that are not funny, not at all.

As for the movie, I've seen better comedy films and better concert films. It noodles around too much and gets distracted from the music. Michel Gondry, who directed, makes good fiction films but is not an instinctive documentarian and forgets that even a fly on the wall should occasionally find some peanut butter. As the record of a state of mind, however, the film is uncanny.

One of the strengths of this film is that it never pauses to explain.

It is a film with a political point of view, but often its characters lose sight of that, in their fascination with each other and with the girl.

A visual poem of extraordinary beauty.

An enjoyable film, and yet it left me somehow unsatisfied...there is too much contrivance in the way [Austen] dispatches her men to London when she is done with them.

There are many documentaries angry about the human destruction of the planetary peace. This is one of the very best -- a certain Oscar nominee.

The film is poetic and erotic, creepy and melodramatic, overwrought and sometimes mocking, as if F. W. Murnau's "Nosferatu" (1922) had a long-lost musical version.

It may be that Together only wants to remember a time. That it does with gentle, observant humor. If it has a message, it is that ideas imposed on human nature may be able to shape lives for a while, but in the long run, we drift back toward more conventional choices.

Jeff Bridges is a virtual certainty to win his first Oscar, after four nominations.

Cuaron's version of magic realism consists of seeing incredibly fanciful sets and situations in precise detail, and Johnson has provided him with the freedom and logistical support to create such places as the street where Miss Minchin's school looms so impressively.

In this movie the war is not quite over. For those who survived it, maybe it will never be.

What a bewilderingly brilliant and entertaining movie this is.

Once again, [Cameron] has silenced the doubters by simply delivering an extraordinary film. There is still at least one man in Hollywood who knows how to spend $250 million, or was it $300 million, wisely.

But I'm making Welcome to the Dollhouse sound like some sort of grim sociological study, and in fact it's a funny, intensely entertaining film.

The Secret of the Grain never slows, always engages, may continue too long, but ends too soon. It is made of life itself.

If you have seen the masterful 2002 Brazilian film "City of God" or the 1981 film "Pixote," both about the culture of Rio's street people, then Bus 174 plays like a sad and angry real-life sequel.

These animals aren't catering to anyone in the audience. We get the feeling they're intensely leading their own lives without slowing down for ours.

The story of herself (Varda), a woman whose life has consisted of moving through the world with the tools of her trade, finding what is worth treasuring.

Amores Perros will be too much for some filmgoers, just as "Pulp Fiction" was and "Santa Sangre" certainly was, but it contains the spark of inspiration.

Brave dissenting Islamic filmmakers are risking their lives to tell the story of the persecution of women, and it is a story worth knowing, and mourning.

The movie deals with narrative housekeeping. Perhaps the next one will engage these characters in a more challenging and devious story, one more about testing their personalities than re-establishing them. In the meantime, you want space opera, you got it.

Basically what we have here is a drama, with comedy occasionally lifting the mood. The result is a surprising seriousness; this isn't the mindless romp with cute animals.

Now we have an American film with the raw power of “City of God” or “Pixote,” a film that does something unexpected, and inspired, and brave.

It's the kind of movie you know you can trust, and you give yourself over to affection for these characters who are so lovingly observed.

The movie is funny, but it's more than funny, it's exhilarating.

One of the qualities of Monsieur Lazhar is that it has no simple questions and simple answers. Its purpose is to present us with a situation, explore the people involved and show us a man who is dealing with his own deep hurts.

Not the macabre horror story the title suggests, but a sweet and visually lovely tale of love lost.

The movie suggests that humans benefitted little from Project Nim, and Nim himself not at all.

I have seen love scenes in which naked bodies thrash in sweaty passion, but I have rarely seen them more passionate than in this movie, where everyone is wrapped in layers of Victorian repression.

It's a real movie, full-blooded and smart, with qualities even for those who have no idea who Stan Lee is. It's a superhero movie for people who don't go to superhero movies, and for those who do, it's the one they've been yearning for.

It is a new documentary of a past event, recapturing the electricity generated by Muhammad Ali in his prime.

I watched the film in a sort of reverie. The dancers seemed particularly absorbed. They had performed these dances many times before, but always with Pina Bausch present. Now they were on their own, in homage.

The way Hugo deals with Melies is enchanting in itself, but the film's first half is devoted to the escapades of its young hero. In the way the film uses CGI and other techniques to create the train station and the city, the movie is breathtaking.

In its warmth and in its enchantment, as well as in its laughs, this is the best comedy in a long time.

The details of the film and of the performances are meticulously realized; there is a reward in seeing artists working so well. But the story has no entry or exit, and is cold, sad and hopeless. Afterward, I feel more admiration than gratitude.

A documentary that is beyond strange, follows two arch-enemies in their grim, long-term rivalry, which involves way more time than any human lifetime should devote to Donkey Kong.

The movie finds the right tone to present its bittersweet wisdom. It's relaxed. It's content to observe and listen.

It is a mystery, this business of life. I can't think of any under cinematic undertaking that allows us to realize that more deeply.

Up in the Air takes the trust people once had in their jobs and pulls out the rug. It is a film for this time.

A movie made with charm and wit, and unlike some family movies it does not condescend, not for a second.

Duvall's screenplay does what great screenwriting is supposed to do, and surprises us with additional observations and revelations in every scene.

Put the two parts together, and Tarantino has made a masterful saga that celebrates the martial arts genre while kidding it, loving it, and transcending it.

The strength of Leigh's film is that it is not a message picture, but a deep and true portrait of these lives.

A perplexing and disturbing film of great effect.

This is a brave, unflinching, sometimes virtually unwatchable documentary that makes such an effective case for both pro-choice and pro-life that it is impossible to determine which side the filmmaker, Tony Kaye, stands on. All you can conclude at the end is that both sides have effective advocates, but the pro-lifers also have some alarming people on their team.

Is something being hidden? No. It's more that something doesn't want to be known.

A harrowing look at institutional cruelty, perpetrated by the Catholic Church in Ireland, and justified by a perverted hysteria about sex.

A documentary with no pretense of objectivity. Here is Mike Tyson's story in his own words, and it is surprisingly persuasive.

What works best in the film is the over-all vision. Branagh is able to see himself as a king, and so we can see him as one.

Although The White Diamond is entire of itself, it earns its place among the other treasures and curiosities in Herzog's work. Here is one of the most inquisitive filmmakers alive, a man who will go to incredible lengths to film people living at the extremes.

The documentary shows outrageous behavior, none more so than when they and many others are directed to a nearby Navy base for refuge.

Helena Bonham Carter may be Burton's inamorata, but apart from that, she is perfectly cast, not as a vulgar fishwife type but as a petite beauty with dark, sad eyes and a pouting mouth and a persistent fantasy that she and the barber will someday settle by the seaside. Not bloody likely.

It uses a colorful vocabulary, it contains a lot of energy, it elevates its miserable heroes to the status of icons (in their own eyes, that is).

Alexander Payne is a director whose satire is omnidirectional. He doesn't choose an easy target and march on it. He stands in the middle of his story and attacks on all directions.

Watching this movie is like daydreaming.

The latest and one of the most harrowing films set along the religious divides in Israel.

Is the film watchable? Yes, compulsively.

Even when it's baffling, it's never boring. I've heard of airtight plots. This one is not merely airtight, but hermetically sealed.

However much it conceals the real-life events that inspired it, it lives and breathes on its own, and as an extension of the mysterious whimsy of Tati.

Most people do not choose their religions but have them forced upon themselves by birth, and the lesson of Incendies is that an accident of birth is not a reason for hatred.

The film most of all is about Hester, who stares out the window and smokes.

This is not a political documentary. It is a crime story. No matter what your politics, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room will make you mad.

You would imagine a film like this would be greeted with rapture in France, but no. The leading French film magazine, "Cahiers du Cinema," has long scorned the filmmakers of this older generation as makers of mere "quality," and interprets Tavernier's work as an attack on the New Wave generation which replaced them.

Cage and Shue make these cliches into unforgettable people.

The Mexican drug cartels have inspired countless films, but never one as final as Natalia Almada's documentary El Velador.

An astonishing film.

Like "City of God," it feels organically rooted. Like many Le Carre stories, it begins with grief and proceeds with sadness toward horror. Its closing scenes are as cynical about international politics and commerce as I can imagine. I would like to believe they are an exaggeration, but I fear they are not. This is one of the year's best films.

Ron Howard's Parenthood is a delicate balancing act between comedy and truth, a movie that contains a lot of laughter and yet is more concerned with character than punch lines.

Algenis Perez Soto plays the character so openly, so naturally, that an interesting thing happens: Baseball is only the backdrop, not the subject. This is a wonderful film.

The high-tech stuff is flawlessly done, but the intriguing elements of the movie involve the performances.

The movie is well cast from top to bottom; like many British films, it benefits from the genius of its supporting players.

Was and is a brilliant horror film, one with an archetypal ability to reach and disturb us. If I were showing The Exorcist to a friend, I would show the 1973 version without the slightest hesitation.

Jacques Perrin's Oscar-nominated Winged Migration does for birds what the 1996 documentary "Microcosmos" did for insects: It looks at them intimately, very close up, in shots that seem impossible to explain.

All I know is, it is better to be the whale than the squid. Whales inspire major novels.

If quirky, independent, grown-up outsider filmmakers set out to make a family movie, this is the kind of movie they would make. And they did.

this is a very good movie. Woody Allen is ... Woody, sublimely. Diane Keaton gives us a fresh and nicely edged New York intellectual. And Mariel Hemingway deserves some kind of special award for what's in some ways the most difficult role in the film.

The movie is a dazzling song and dance extravaganza, with just enough words to support the music and allow everyone to catch their breath between songs.

It has been said that all modern Russian literature came out of Gogol’s “Overcoat.” In the same way, all of us came out of the overcoat of this same immigrant experience.

The movie, based on the famous comic novel by Stella Gibbons, is dour, eccentric and very funny, and depends on the British gift for treating madness as good common sense.

Sands' death is shown in a tableaux of increasing bleakness. It is agonizing, yet filmed with a curious painterly purity.

What a courageous first feature this is, a film that sidesteps shopworn stereotypes and tells a quiet, firm, deeply humanist story about doing the right thing. It is a film that avoids any message or statement and simply shows us, with infinite sympathy, how the life of a completely original character can help us lead our own.

"How many bands stay together for 30 years?" asks Slash of Guns N' Roses, in a backstage interview. "You've got the Stones, the Who, U2 -- and Anvil." Yeah. And Anvil.

This is a great deal more entertaining than it sounds, in large part because the two actors are gifted mimics - Brydon the better one, although Coogan doesn't think so.

Is Prisoner of Azkaban as good as the first two films? Not quite. It doesn't have that sense of joyously leaping through a clockwork plot, and it needs to explain more than it should. But the world of Harry Potter remains delightful, amusing and sophisticated.

What a magical movie.

I don't know what vast significance Michael Clayton has (it involves deadly pollution but isn't a message movie). But I know it is just about perfect as an exercise in the genre.

Against the overarching facts of his personal magnetism and the blind loyalty of his lieutenants, the movie observes the workings of the world within the bunker. All power flowed from Hitler. He was evil, mad, ill, but long after Hitler's war was lost he continued to wage it in fantasy.

The young actors are powerful in draining roles. We care for them more than they care for themselves. Alfredson's palette is so drained of warm colors that even fresh blood is black.

For me, it is too clever by half, creating full-bodied characters but inserting them into a story that is thin soup.

This movie does not describe the America I learned about in civics class, or think of when I pledge allegiance to the flag. Yet I know I will get the usual e-mails accusing me of partisanship, bias, only telling one side, etc. What is the other side? See this movie, and you tell me.

It's one of the smartest and most merciless comedies to come along in a while. It centers on an area of fairly narrow interest, but in its study of human nature, it is deep and takes no prisoners.

Marley, an ambitious and comprehensive film, does what is probably the best possible job of documenting an important life.

The film is visually masterful. It's in black and white, of course.

Some kind of weird masterpiece...one of the best movies of the year.

The most harrowing movie about mountain climbing I have seen, or can imagine.

After his murder, Michele Montas goes on the air to insist that Jean Dominique is still alive, because his spirit lives on. But in this film Haiti seems to be a country that can kill the spirit, too.

A friend asked: "Wouldn't you love to attend a wedding like that?" In a way, I felt I had. Yes, I began to feel absorbed in the experience. A few movies can do that, can slip you out of your mind and into theirs.

This movie is as lovable as a silent comedy, which it could have been.

This isn't a coming-of-age movie so much as a movie about being of an age.

One of the pleasures of Get Shorty is watching the way the plot moves effortlessly from crime to the movies - not a long distance, since both industries are based on fear, greed, creativity and intimidation.

Not a simpleminded movie in which merely being ABLE to read lips saves the day. In this brilliant sequence, she reads his lips and that ALLOWS them to set into motion a risky chain of events based on the odds that the bad guys will respond predictably.

The movie, written and directed by Lukas Moodysson, has the directness and clarity of a documentary, but allows itself touches of tenderness and grief.

It is a Kafkaesque story, in which ominous things follow one another with a certain internal logic but make no sense at all.

"Batman" isn't a comic book anymore. Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight is a haunted film that leaps beyond its origins and becomes an engrossing tragedy. It creates characters we come to care about. That's because of the performances, because of the direction, because of the writing, and because of the superlative technical quality of the entire production.

I got a little lost while watching Mysteries of Lisbon and enjoyed the experience. It's a lavish, elegant, operatic, preposterous 19th century melodrama, with characters who change names and seemingly identities, and if you could pass a quiz on its stories within stories, you have my admiration.

Sometimes two performances come along that are so perfectly matched that no overt signals are needed to show how the characters feel about each other. That's what happens between Melissa Leo and Misty Upham in Frozen River.

Drugstore Cowboy is one of the best films in the long tradition of American outlaw road movies - a tradition that includes "Bonnie and Clyde," "Easy Rider," "Midnight Cowboy" and "Badlands."

The most important sequence in Late Marriage is a refreshingly frank sex scene involving Zaza and Judith. -- Watching this scene, we realize that most sex scenes in the movies play like auditions.

I have seen Waking Life three times now. I want to see it again -- not to master it, or even to remember it better, -- but simply to experience all of these ideas, all of this passion, the very act of trying to figure things out.

Grips the attention and is exciting and involving. I recommend it on that basis--and also because of the new information it contains.

Seibei's story is told by director Yoji Yamada in muted tones and colors, beautifully re-creating a feudal village that still retains its architecture, its customs, its ancient values, even as the economy is making its way of life obsolete.

The movie is vulgar, raunchy, ribald, and occasionally scatological. It is also the funniest comedy since Mel Brooks made "The Producers."

Nuri Bilge Ceylan, one of Turkey's best directors, has a deep understanding of human nature. He loves his characters and empathizes with them. They deserve better than to be shuttled around in a facile plot. They deserve empathy. So do we all.

I was fascinated by the face of Emmanuelle Devos, and her face is specifically why I recommend the movie.

To see this film's footage from the '70s is to see the beginning of much of pop and fashion iconography for the next two decades.

One of the year's best films for a lot of reasons, including its ability to involve the audience almost breathlessly in a story of mounting tragedy.

Isabelle Huppert has the best poker face since Buster Keaton. She faces the camera with detached regard, inviting us to imagine what she is thinking.

The actors and the characters merge and form a reality above and apart from the story, and the result is a film that takes us beyond crime and London and the Russian mafia and into the mystifying realms of human nature.

A remarkable documentary by two Irish filmmakers that is playing in theaters on its way to HBO. It is remarkable because the filmmakers, Kim Bartley and Donnacha O'Briain, had access to virtually everything that happened within the palace during the entire episode.

Seems deceptively straightforward, coming from a director with Cronenberg's quirky complexity. But think again. This is not a movie about plot, but about character.

This is a movie to surrender yourself to. If you require logic, see something else. Mulholland Drive works directly on the emotions, like music.

The edge is missing from Guest's usual style. Maybe it's because his targets are, after all, so harmless.

Avoids all sports movie cliches, even the obligatory ending where the team comes from behind.

A complex, deeply knowledgeable story about a truly lost soul and her downward spiral.

A fresh, quirky, unusually intelligent comedy.

Juan Jose Campanella is the writer-director, and here is a man who creates a complete, engrossing, lovingly crafted film. He is filled with his stories. The Secret in Their Eyes is a rebuke to formula screenplays. We grow to know the characters, and the story pays due respect to their complexities and needs.

Derek Cianfrance, the film's writer and director, observes with great exactitude the birth and decay of a relationship. This film is alive in its details.

Forms a community that eventually envelops us.

Like the work of David Lean, it achieves the epic without losing sight of the human, and to see it is to be reminded of the way great action movies can rouse and exhilarate us, can affirm life instead of simply dramatizing its destruction.

The movie has a wide appeal, with a gap in the middle. I think it will appeal to children young enough to be untutored in boredom, and to anyone old enough to be drawn in, or to appreciate the artistry.

With access to remarkable archival footage, old TV shows, home movies and the family photo album, Brown weaves together the story of the Seegers with testimony by admirers who represent his influence and legacy.

Now Wajda has brought some small measure of rest to their names, to Poland, and to history.

Part of the greatness of this film is that it not only avoids any simple answers, but it also takes us into the awkward contradictions and internal dishonesties that help us look at the mirror each day.

This is a beautiful, puzzling film. The enigmatic quality of Huppert's performance draws us in.

Yes, this is a comedy, but it's also sad, and finally it's simply a story about trying to figure out what you love to do and then trying to figure out how to do it.

Like Malick's "Days of Heaven," it is not about plot, but about memory and regret. It remembers a summer that was not a happy summer, but there will never again be a summer so intensely felt, so alive, so valuable.

Rohmer elegantly seduces us with people who have all of the alarming unpredictability of life.

One of the pleasures of Beginners is the warmth and sincerity of the major characters. There is no villain. They begin by wanting to be happier and end by succeeding.

What Campion does is seek visual beauty to match Keats' verbal beauty. There is a shot here of Fanny in a meadow of blue flowers that is so enthralling it beggars description.

This is a smart, sensitive, perceptive film, with actors well suited to the dialogue. It underlines the difficulty of making connections outside our individual boxes of time and space.

The film proceeds like a black comedy version of "The Godfather," crossed with Oliver Stone’s "Nixon."

Arnold deserves comparison with a British master director like Ken Loach.

This is the kind of movie that cults are made of, and after Little Shop finishes its first run, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see it develop into a successor to "Rocky Horror Show," as one of those movies that fans want to include in their lives.

The film becomes a sort of boxing match, getting more intense with each round, building to an exciting finish.

It is a full-bodied silent film of the sort that might have been made by the greatest directors of the 1920s, if such details as the kinky sadomasochism of this film's evil stepmother could have been slipped past the censors.