Annaud presents a meticulously structured fable about the importance of family, particularly the relationship of fathers and sons, to both man and beast.

The Maverick's sequence is perhaps Giants' most viscerally exciting and poignant.

The movie is thrillingly subjective, teeming with the fullness of everyday proletarian life that one finds in the work of the directors who most influenced Marston in the making of this movie: Hector Babenco and the Brazilian realists, Ken Loach and Mike Leigh.

Three words of advice to those who haven't yet seen it: Run, don't walk. Composed of excerpts from hundreds of locally shot movies past and present -- from grade-A prestige pictures to unrepentant grade-Z schlock -- Los Angeles Plays Itself serves as Andersen's exhaustive but never exhausting attempt to reconcile the myriad identities of the world's moviemaking capital.

It is worthy of comparison to the lifelike, character-rich films we cherish from that era (1970s), and is certainly one of the finest films to come out this year.

Hero is an epic, evocative of another epoch and of landscapes beyond time. It's overwhelming. And yet I miss the animating anger of Zhang's early masterworks, in which penniless young lovers were oppressed by impotent old men.

Razor sharp and funny as hell, Incident at Loch Ness is the harpoon hurled into the hot-air balloon of “reality” entertainment.

Caouette lifts his story clear out of the victimized whine that bogs down so many confessional memoirs and offers the viewer instead an intimate look inside his ravaged yet loving head, at once street-smart and haloed by the naiveté of a young saint.

Quite possibly the most buoyant, exuberant film ever made on such an unpleasant topic.

A trenchant American satirist in his previous films, Payne moves in a different direction with Sideways -- one less mordant but just as pointedly observant.

For all its simplicity, however, the film is entertaining, even uplifting, with Lopez giving a stellar, confectionary performance.

The movie's strength lies in its portrayal of a many-sided genius, as manipulative as he was charming and persuasive, monomaniacal to a fault, generous and sweet yet utterly clueless about the emotional havoc he wrought in the name of science.

It's the director's most complexly ordered film to date - a labyrinth of ids, egos and alter egos waiting around blind corners - and may be the movies' most deliriously inventive narrative spiral since "Adaptation."

Testud, who learned to speak Japanese phonetically for the role, is nothing short of sublime, her expressive face morphing from tear-stained frustration to slaphappy delirium with the speed of lightning flashing across the Tokyo sky.

Like Proust's madeleine unleashing a flood of reminiscences in the narrator of his novel, Wong works the elements of his aesthetic — music, beautiful people and emotion — into a mood that so overtakes you it's nearly impossible to emerge from his films without feeling slightly drunk.

The Saint works. The reason why it occasionally soars is Kilmer, an actor who’s happiest when burying himself in eccentric characterizations, a trick he performs repeatedly here even as he fills the screen with pure movie-star dazzle.

What makes The Sea Inside such a riveting drama is that none of these relationships is sufficient to make Ramón want to go on living.

It's a strangely stirring experience that finds warmth in the coldest environment and makes each crumb of emotional comfort feel like a 10-course banquet.

A true rarity, Murderous Maids is an intelligent, moral shocker.

Payami uses an exquisitely delicate juxtaposition of long shots and close-ups, mobility and stillness, music and found sound, comedy and pathos to suggest both the longing for self-expression and communication, and its limits in a repressive society.

In its breathlessly claustrophobic way the movie is vital and passionate, and lit with a lyric beauty that washes over love scenes and violent acts alike.

Unfolds with such leisurely, terrible beauty, it takes a while to realize that what we are witnessing is the children's long slide into beggary, exacerbated by the slow torture of faint hope.

When We Were Kings is a wonderfully entertaining, at times thrilling, film. Ali is magnificent, Foreman oddly touching, and their fight, which is shown almost in total, makes for superb, nail-biting suspense--even two decades after the fact.

Ghobadi's genius seems supercharged rather than weighed down by his higher calling, and his imagery is so boilingly alive that we come away from it feeling exhilarated rather than depressed.

This fluidly paced film, with its keen observation of the confused longing for love, family and stability in an inherently unstable world, nonetheless keeps faith with the Czech genius for holding the tonal line between tragedy and the absurd.

And like all great family sagas, The Best of Youth, while tipping its hat to the painful confusion of living life forward, reels it backward to give it the thrilling significance of time and place.

A small masterpiece of tone and form.

Fiercely intelligent, terrifying and absurdly funny documentary.

Bujalski takes a sledgehammer to the carefully ordered surfaces and dramatic conventions of narrative cinema, favoring instead an unpredictability in which the crosscurrents of quotidian life collide on the screen in a series of brilliantly alive patterns.

Lucas is a major figure, and Revenge of the Sith may be some kind of historic achievement -- the first movie in which it is fully impossible to tell where flesh ends and digital paint begins.

Though it includes plenty of footage from those terrible days, this wonderful, devastating documentary is as much Dallaire's story as it is the story of a whole continent abandoned by a cynical world.

The story is as wonderful in the showing as it is in the telling, by an African griot (oral historian) who stirs our tragicomic passage from birth to death, into a simple clay pot.

Another soulful gem from the peerless Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki.

Thrilling documentary.

The comic, tragic and monumentally beautiful new film by writer-director Jia Zhangke (Platform).

A great sports drama first and a heart-wrenching triumph-over-adversity weepie almost never.

Scaled like an epic but possessing the narrative simplicity of a fable, The Warrior unfolds over a brisk 85 minutes of screen time, keeping dialogue to a minimum as it celebrates the power of stories told through handcrafted, CGI-free images.

It's a romantic comedy in which both the romance and the comedy are turned to such muted levels that any lower would require closed captioning.

A drama of uncommon beauty and emotional resonance.

Breakdown recalls so many good movies, in such unpredictable order, that by the end it simply stands on its own, a solid, logical, edge-of-the-seat sluiceway of escape and pursuit.

It's an unconscionably funny sex farce that, by its end, turns into a tender and honest romance, an acute portrait of loneliness and, believe it or not, a musical. This is a movie Blake Edwards might have made.

Almereyda has crafted an uncannily revealing portrait of a major American artist at work, all the more remarkable for the deceptive casualness with which it unfolds, as if Almereyda had just shown up.

Cronenberg holds up a mirror, but he leaves it up to us to recoil at what we see.

The triumph of Capote is that it both grants and shares with him that twisted brew of obsessive identification and monstrous detachment that is the fertile burden of the artist.

The meat of the film is their wittily edited interviews with company members, now in their 80s and 90s and scattered around the world, many of them still active as teachers and consultants.

The result is a glorious low-tech pleasure that may be the most lyrical, phantasmagoric boys' adventure story since Joe Dante's Explorers.

Brokeback Mountain is at once the gayest and the least gay Hollywood film I've seen, which is another way of saying that Lee has a knack for culling universality from the most specific identities.

By staying focused on the children -- frightened evacuees from the London Blitz whose parallel war in Narnia both taps into and finally quiets their unspoken terrors -- Adamson keeps faith with the humanity of Lewsis' tale.

Since premiering on the festival circuit in 2002, this small masterpiece has been one of the best films around not to secure a proper theatrical release, and while one week on a single L.A. screen at the height of the crowded holiday season may not exactly qualify as proper, it's nevertheless a joyous happening.

Like "The Pianist," Fateless painstakingly builds up the reality of what it is like to be drawn into a perfectly arbitrary hell you can neither comprehend nor rationalize.

By not even attempting to follow Sterne to the letter, Winterbottom and Boyce have triumphantly captured his impish creative spirit.

Jonathan Demme's superb film of Neil Young's 2005 performance at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium is as fervent a musical homage as was Demme's bubbly tribute to the Talking Heads, Stop Making Sense (1984).

This is classical activist filmmaking of the first order, a movie with the power to turn hearts, change minds and, just maybe, right the wayward course of an entire city.

I urge you to see the ineffably beautiful Three Times however you can, lest you go on thinking that Hou's greatness is merely the supposition of obscurantist critics intent on reserving their highest praise for those films that nobody else can actually see.

Sketches was produced for PBS's American Masters series, but it's in theaters now and deserves to be seen on the largest possible screen.

The Puffy Chair is the funniest, saddest and most emotionally honest "romantic comedy" to come along in years, even if I've yet to encounter many over the age of about 35 who like the film, or even get it.

A raucously entertaining slice of slapstick dressed up as domestic satire.

Snakes was the most exuberantly trashy delight of this summer movie season or last.

At a time when most American movies, studio made or "independent," seem ever more divorced from anything approximating actual life experience, Half Nelson is so sobering and searingly truthful that watching it feels like being tossed from a calm beach into a raging current.

From its riveting opening to its gripping conclusion, . . . So Goes the Nation is arguably the most intelligent, kinetic analysis of the modern election process since "The War Room."

Seattle filmmaker James Longley's poetic essay on the plight of ordinary Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds trapped in a war simultaneously waged over their heads and in their faces stands head and shoulders above an overcrowded field of documentaries about the Iraq war.

What's appealing about Bond is precisely its unhip classicism -- its promise of clean, crisp excitement delivered without the interference of whiplash-inducing camera pyrotechnics, attention-deficient editing patterns, gratuitous color tinting and/or ear-splitting rock ballads.

Like two of the year's other standout American films, Kelly Reichardt's "Old Joy" and Ryan Fleck's "Half Nelson," it's a movie of ideas in which the ideas flow effortlessly out of the material instead of being plastered on top with a heavy cement roller (as in "Crash," "Babel" and "Little Children").

It is Lynch's most experimental endeavor in the 30 years since "Eraserhead," that it will do nothing to draw new fans to the director's work and that, after two viewings, I cannot wait to see it again.

Venus may be a leering male fantasy, but it is also, improbably but persuasively, a love story as tender as it is transgressive. It's a wry celebration of the tyranny of beauty, and the tragicomic way in which desire outruns the betrayals of dying flesh.

One of the year's most imaginative and uniquely exciting pieces of cinema.

Zodiac may be the perfect meeting of filmmaker and subject ­-- an obsessive's portrait of obsession that is, finally, a monument to irresolution.

For most of its running time, it's an enjoyably unpretentious celebration of the guilty pleasure we can take from a stupid-as-all-get-out car chase or from watching things blow up real good. Then, in its final half hour, Wright and Pegg ratchet up the absurdity tenfold and enter the realm of the sublime.

Outside of "Grindhouse," it may be the most bang for your buck to be had in a Los Angeles movie theater this season.

The supreme achievement of this lovely film — all three rhythmic, leisurely hours of it -- is that what borders on faintly fascistic body worship in the novel instead feels as perfectly natural to us as it does to the lovers. Lawrence would kvell.

This superb debut feature by Korean-American director So Yong Kim seems to be constructed entirely of the ineffable and intangible, those fleeting moments that most movies treat as throwaways.

A 90-minute, years-in-the-making comic wind-up machine that begins by mocking its own audience for paying good money to see what it can watch at home for free and proceeds from there through the most wickedly funny arsenal of assaults on big government, organized religion and corporate America this side of "Borat."

The result is a film marked by eruptions of brutal violence, but also passages of extraordinary tenderness.

Superb documentary.

The Last Winter won’t win many fans among those who place the saving of union jobs above the repairing of the ozone layer. But this is a horror movie with many inconvenient truths to tell about the ways in which we are willingly destroying our planet.

This loving throwback to the paranoid thrillers of the ’70s is a beauty.

It’s the sort of buoyant, all-ages entertainment that Hollywood has been laboring to revive in recent years (most recently with Hairspray) but hasn’t managed to get right until now, and the glue holding it all together is the incomparable Adams (an Oscar nominee for 2005’s Junebug), who gives the kind of blissful screwball performance that seemed to go out of fashion after "I Love Lucy" left the airwaves.

Personally, I wouldn’t take a toddler (unless he was the son of Tarantino) to this intermittently, legitimately terrifying tale of a boy and his Loch Ness monster. But everyone else should blow off "Alvin and the Chipmunks" and show up for the best kiddie picture of the season -- and, along with "Ratatouille," of the year.

Honeydripper is classic Sayles cinema: an insightful sketch of assorted common folk whose criss-crossing dreams and agendas unfold against larger, more powerful (and sometimes crushing) sociopolitical and cultural forces.

Tim Burton has taken a hallowed classic of the modern musical theater, hemmed in the narrative from well over two hours to well under, cast confessed nonsingers in the principal roles, and somehow managed to make something magical out of it

In most horror movies, it's a given that we should root for the heroes to make it out alive, but Diary of the Dead isn't nearly so certain, and so it terrifies us all the more.

Up emerges as a gentle hymn to adventure of both the soaring, storybook variety and the smaller, less obvious kind -- the perilous, unpredictable and richly rewarding journey of ordinary, everyday life.

Zooming back and forth between London and D.C., In the Loop hasn't any real plot -- it plays like a rather brilliant Brit-com stretched over 100 minutes, a collection of anecdotes and incidents.

All this helps to shape Pálfi’s crudely bombastic but impressive philosophical view of the body as landscape and art, a source of personal discovery, wonder and annihilation.

It is funny, sad and beautiful. And it's right on time.

Almayer's Folly is lush and dreamy (if not quite dreamlike), but it never feels unanchored or given to pointless meandering. However hypnotic it at times becomes, this is a sober(ing) endeavor that never strays far from its post-colonial backdrop.

Though it was made before "Run Lola Run," feels like the work of a more seasoned heart and mind.

Kane believes in happy endings, but he makes his characters earn theirs, as each couple is forced, ever so subtly, to face its own inner nonsense. The filmmaker has divine actors at his disposal.

Penn's own gifts as an actor seem, in turn, to bring out the best in Nicholson, as well as the rest of the cast.

So gently told, so deceptively simple a story, that its considerable emotional power sneaks up on you.

Deft, funny and intelligently scary.

It's a sweet chamber piece, beautifully played.

Cox's own directorial style is innocent, in the sense of being original without ever straining for effect.

Proves too sincere to exploit its subjects and too honest to manipulate its audience.

Although much has and will be made of the film's sexual explicitness -- and, yes, it is a bit -- this less-than-perfect but deeply felt film is finally most daring for its hard-core insistence on our need for connection.

When she unabashedly puts herself in the same category as Richard Pryor (the master of identity politics and cultural reportage), it's not just presumptuous posturing on her part. She's earned her place there.

The fun is in getting there, and in the mechanics, charted by writer-director Francis Veber.

Despite its flaws, Arlington Road romps home as an absorbing, unpredictable thriller.

A sexy, hugely enjoyable romp, hedged with lyrical grace notes and intimate detail.

These women are smart, funny and wonderfully real, traits that one might safely attribute to Westfeldt and Juergensen, who also wrote the screenplay.

Khouri manages, with terrific flair, to keep the extremes of screwball farce and blood-curdling family intensity on one continuum -- not only through the strength of the performances (including one from James Garner, who, as Sida's dad, gets the best one-liners) but in the ways they match across time.

Dizdar maintains a knife-edged balance in tone throughout the film

The film may be rife with emotional declarations, but rather than the studied sentiments of news anchors and politicians, these ruminations have the quotidian ring of real people struggling with a standard vocabulary to describe something unthinkably new.

To see the film in this meticulously restored and remixed version is like watching it for the first time, so clear is the sound, so vivid the sights.

Ali boasts a whole tribe of outstanding secondary performances, of which Jon Voight's Cosell, in an outrageous rug and several tons of pasty-face makeup, is easily the funniest.

Every car chase, every plane crash, every potential drop off a cliff is a masterpiece of grace and surprise.

Any movie offering a Muzak version of the Ramones' "Blitzkrieg Bop"warrants an immediate and unqualified recommendation.

On the strength of such skillful pacing, and the pair's beautifully modulated performances (Leary's never been so warm or vulnerable), the film builds almost imperceptibly to a climax that's as moving as it is startling.

The film is not a biopic or a portrait of a famous marriage so much as it is an imaginative essay on what made a union between two radically different people work as well as it did.

Bessed with a gleamingly polished, very funny script.

It's a fresh installment in what appears to be a self-perpetuating sitcom of British life.

A fetchingly improbable match of material and directors.

Most of the movie is observant and level-headed, a tip of the hat to ordinary schlubs entangled in vast events, people who would otherwise be background victims in a conventional historical drama.

It's a testimony to the integrity and poignancy of Tammy Faye herself that she comes off as a cool, even complex, woman.

It's the dialogue -- wisecracking and wistful in equal measure -- that plays out the tyrannical illogic of romantic attraction, and so endears us to this ensemble of bruised souls that when, as in life, not everyone gets what they have come to deserve, it feels, as in life, like an injustice.

Designed neither to warm your heart nor shelter you in the comfort of liberal guilt, the movie does what so many style-conscious, "subjective" documentaries have long forgotten how to do. It shows you a world, and stays the hell out of it.

Equal parts big-house B-feature, hammer-down road movie, post-feminist consciousness-raiser and rock & roll pipe dream.

The movie's a beauty.

A tight blend of self-awareness, humor and fear.

Tenderhearted Staten Island Christmas comedy.

A sharp, upbeat, well-wrought meditation on love and race that kicks the new year in movies off to a terrific start.

It's both surreal -- and wholly accessible.

McTeer's performance -- one of the best you'll see this year -- makes you realize anew how rare it is to see a female character this complex in American film.

You begin to wonder whether a story is ever going to show up. When it does, it's worth the wait for a long and well-turned set piece coordinating the heist, and two lovely flips in the plot.

The effect is so riveting, and the cameras so psychologically penetrating, you may be left breathless -- but satisfied.

Enigmas make Panic involving, and suspenseful.

Remarkable energy and wit, and is probably the most purely enjoyable entry in Kaufman's suboeuvre of literary excursions.

The film's intimate camera work and searing performances pull us deep into the girls' confusion and pain as they struggle tragically to comprehend the chasm of knowledge that's opened between them.

Moll ratchets his suspense with impressive mastery, wringing a maximum of excruciating terror out of the humblest everyday materials.

This is a dream cast who practically sing screenwriter Keith Reddin's funny, literate dialogue.

A labor of love -- a swan song repaying a lifetime of happy debts to the theater, by grace of two terrific performances.

Sabu takes an already wildly original concept and launches it toward brilliance.

Nearly three and a half hours in length, but owing to its freedom of movement, the film feels weightless.

It's Walken who's most impressive.

Indeed, one of the nicest things about this jewel of a film is that there isn't much of a story at all -- just a handful of delicately drawn characters moving through life that is at once familiar and yet slightly elevated by a director who loves the good in people more than the bad.

Comes as close as perhaps any film has gotten to approximating the inner life of an artist.

It's (Stuart's) utter believability that lets us follow him into the ecstasy of absurdity that is the rest of the film.

What makes Sunshine unique, what rewards a first viewing and lives in the mind long thereafter, is that Szabo has attempted to place Judaism and Christianity on a continuum that is both historically truthful and highly personal.

Startup.com goes from being a mildly interesting true story to a ripping good train wreck in the making.

Skirting overt politics, Waddington opts instead for a subtle portrait of emotions, and a story that's told through glances, languorous pacing and breathtaking landscapes.

Mitchell -- gives a harrowing, beautifully conceived performance, the depth and arc of which can't be fully appreciated until the film's final scene.

Frances Reid and Deborah Hoffman's heart-stopping, Oscar-nominated documentary about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is narrow in focus, but broad in its reach for insight into the power of public drama.

The film is beautifully shot and filled with fine performances.

What makes this straightforward film so incredibly moving is that it keeps its scathing political commentary firmly rooted in everyday struggle.

Made may look like a Wong Kar-Wai movie -- the cinematographer, Chris Doyle, has brought to the film the dark, rich romanticism of the movies he's shot for the Hong Kong prodigy -- but the sensibility is Woody Allen, only sweeter.

Bergman's collaboration with Ullmann began when he directed her in "Persona" (1966). Here, with the roles nearly reversed, she shows herself as great an interpreter behind the camera.

The film is at once breathtaking and ridiculous, and it's the tension between these two extremes, as well as Carax's own intoxicating style, that makes it essential viewing.

A central work in the new, boldly politicized Iranian cinema.

Leaves you with a bland message -- titillation may get your wicky-wack going but love and partnership stay the course -- but the way it gets you there is divine.

Buena Vista avoids literal politics, as if all that is beside this film's point.

How refreshing it is to see a studio picture where plot development is revealed not so much by grandiose action as by the small, interior shifts that are witnessed through a character's eyes.

Unlike most documentaries about arty types, John Walter's wonderfully capricious, wittily edited film about Johnson seeks to make precise all the different ways in which the artist managed to remain opaque.

I was astonished to find myself weeping copiously over von Trier's latest, which is another parable of monomaniacal sainthood.

The Messenger may be a caricature of theology, but then Besson is a cartoonist of genius.

A haunting tale of the physical survival and emotional confusion of children who were simultaneously required to build a new life and hold fast to the memory of an old one, in the hope of resuming it after the war.

Those who hang in for the long haul are rewarded with a sexy, moving love story.

The elegant gambol through ideas, combined with Gordon's clear love of luminous motion -- literally -- is a welcome treat.

Performances that are natural yet weighted with history and frequently heart-wrenching.

Baldwin's perfectly impacted performance as a tough-love provider (the actor gets some of the best lines in the movie).

Succeeds in articulating the fluid values and constituent parts of the "culture" even as that culture's subjects are at best mildly articulate.

Dark, wickedly funny tale.

What makes the film compelling is the filmmakers' ability to blend a studied (occasionally academic) dissection of cultural and sexual decadence with a potboiler plot.

A surprisingly affecting mood piece.

A kind of folktale, rooted in poignant personal experience.

Kawajiri's doom-laden action epic is a heady brew indeed.

The Sex Pistols themselves were bloody magnificent.

Signals the real end of the party, charting a denouement that arcs from blissful ignorance to violence and its ever-present threat to a final retreat.

Temple doesn't just highlight the contemporary relevance of Coleridge's liberated words and themes, he shows us how high they still soar.

Beautifully acted film remains deeply intelligent and always fascinating.

It's a pleasure to report that Scream 3 is an absolute riot, jammed with spicy cameos.

Martel's off-the-cuff candor and intelligent eye for the quietly telling detail charts the progressive rot not only of a family, but of an entire social class.

A smart, romantic, heartbreaking pleasure.

Rapp's creepy, ghoulishly funny and, finally, touching new film.

True to its source material, this is a movie with the dense, rich texture of a good novel.

So moving and so timely.

"Nothing happening" is everything happening between the lines, in the gap created between what is unstated onscreen and what we bring to the story ourselves.

Zhang's work is always worth watching, but this is the first of his films in which the sorrows are so heart-rending, its many comic moments so laugh-out-loud human.

Lovely.

Divided We Fall briskly, often hilariously, forbids us to wallow in the specious comfort of untainted local heroes or irredeemable villains.

Enlightenment Guaranteed is a parable of alienation and rediscovery told with such affection, insight and visual elegance, it could never be taken as preachy or stern.

A superb, instructive portrait of an artist at work.

Nunez is a master at rendering emotionally complex, ordinary folk into the kind of unassuming heroes that don't much appear in American films anymore.

Bollywood meets The Godfather.

Director John Dahl ("Red Rock West," "The Last Seduction") has a pronounced knack for snap reversals and out-of-the-blue shocks.

Twohy moves effortlessly between conventions of the sub and horror genres, with long tracking shots and masterful sound design, shock cuts and mismatched mirrors and reflections.

A fascinating, richly detailed documentary about the legendary queer collective based in San Francisco in the late '60s and early '70s.

Demme (Monument Ave.) brings a sure hand with pace and structure to the soft-at-heart script by Robert Ramsey and Matthew Stone, allowing Murphy, Lawrence and company to sit back and focus on the job at hand -- making us laugh.

It's a rare pleasure to see these senior citizens given so much screen time, droopy butts and all.

Curiously, one of the film's stranger effects is that it's more convincing as a meditation on desire and Hollywood than as a biographical exploration.

Affliction is a work of realist art rich in quotidian detail, a Grimm fairy tale about a community under siege, and a lament for a good man gone bad for nothing.

Miraculous photography.

Their discretion makes From Hell less a horror movie than a classical film noir.

Captured extraordinary performances from a cast of non-actors, as well as magnificent images of a vast landscape.

Both funny and furious -- on why black people are different from white people.

Smartly directed, grown-up film of ideas -- with a debonair script by Paul Attanasio (Donny Brasco) and Daniel Pyne.

Moving and vibrant Italian-language film.

Returning director Rob Minkoff (The Lion King) and screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin (Ghost) have done a fine job of updating White's dry wit to a new age, led in no small measure by Lane, who could probably make the IRS code book sound funny.

Leaves you reeling from the force of the humanity it captures and -- in its own gut-wrenching way -- honors.

Reynolds, working in close harmony with cinematographer Andrew Dunn (Gosford Park), brings an infectious brio and an occasional sweeping grace to the classic trappings of Dumas.

A refreshing antidote to those E! True Hollywood Story documentaries on adult-film figures like John Holmes, Savannah and Traci Lords.

Climaxes in a flood of revelations that, like so much of the film, take us where we least expect to go.

It's one of many references to the movie-wise, but a resonant one, for Glover's performance turns out to be shockingly emotional, drawn as daringly close to the bone -- within this story's limited thematic range -- as Anthony Perkins' work in Hitchcock's seminal film.

It's so playful, wicked and unseemly, by the time you realize that the actual plot of this brilliantly sordid satire hasn't started, the party is already over.

(Linney and Ruffalo) are just beautiful enough, in fact, to be in the movies and still remain convincing as authentic folk, and their performances are tremendously moving.

A resonance that is moving beyond all measure.

Eerily compelling.

Demonstrating yet again that he knows few limits as an actor, Duvall not only nails the accent, he inhabits the man's flinty, grudge-bearing contrariness with such a furious commitment that it brings out the best in the actors around him.

Cacoyannis lays on the atmosphere a bit thick with multiple repetitions of a lyrical Tchaikovsky motif underscoring unrequited love, one that is nonetheless beautifully rendered by pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy.