He’s (González Iñárritu) conjured up a dark, brutal vision of urban life that sticks to your skin like soot.

The rage and sadness behind this film -- the first from Afghanistan since the Taliban's fall -- is matched by its artistry.

Amazingly, it's not all the visual splendor or killer action sequences that elevate Spider-Man 2 above its predecessor and almost every superhero movie that has come before.

Leon Gast's remarkable film -- which is intercut with terrific recent interviews with eyewitnesses Norman Mailer and George Plimpton -- is about much more than one stupendous fight.

A delightful surprise... Jewison does his best work in decades. [21 Dec 1987]

The superbly acted Spider is muted in comparison: it’s a quiet nightmare, painted in hospital greens and rust browns.

There hasn't been a studio movie as unapologetically adult, sophisticated, and nuanced as Up in the Air in some time.

It has a surprising charm.

The masterful Duvall skillfully illuminates the paradoxes of a very complex man; he also elicits honest performances from his cast. The zealous churchgoers seem more like real people than actors.

A piece of spectacular silliness, but that's not meant with disrespect. The key word is spectacular.

This brilliantly disturbing movie is constructed with surgical precision. Haneke lets no one off the hook least of all the viewer.

An extraordinary documentary.

Depp is such a soulful presence he gives you a glimpse of this maniac's pain and pathos. Bonham Carter is extraordinary. She reinvents Mrs. Lovett from the inside out.

Artfully ambivalent, Danny Boyle's film, twists with a junkie's logic. It does not preach; it wallows in the pain and, more daringly, in the pleasure.

Director Payne, who adapted Tom Perrotta's novel with Jim Taylor, has an authentically dire view of human behavior, which he expresses in crisp, edgy and sometimes startlingly raunchy style.

A heartbreaking comedy that is simultaneously funny and sad, raunchy and sweet, funky and elegiac. These fresh, unexpected juxtapositions are a specialty of the writer Hanif Kureishi ("My Beautiful Laundrette"), a sworn enemy of cliché.

Anyone who cares about ravishing filmmaking, superb acting and movies willing to dive into the mystery of unconditional love will leave this dark romance both shaken and invigorated.

Loach hurls us into the fracas, circa 1920, and creates such a vivid sense of the nuts and bolts of guerilla war you almost forget you are watching a period piece. Unlike the epic sweep of Neil Jordan's "Billy Collins," which spoke in a syntax closer to Hollywood's, "The Wind" doesn't paint over its political arguments with a patina of nostalgia.

Face/Off is a summer movie extraordinaire: violent, imaginative, crazily funny and, oddly moving. Hollywood has finally wised up and let Hong Kong auteur John Woo strut his stuff in all its undiluted, over-the-top glory.

Indoors, it's Jane Austen. Outdoors, this red-blooded, exuberantly romantic version of Pride and Prejudice plays more like Emily Brontë. Purists may object, but most will find this love story irresistible.

It's a bravura, all-stops-out, inexhaustibly inventive performance. I don't know how much was improvised, and how much comes from White's sharp screenplay, but Black may never again get a part that displays his mad-dog comic ferocity to such brilliant effect. He, and the movie, kick ass.

Exuberantly theatrical yet every inch a movie, and some numbers ("The Cell Block Tango") are so entertaining you might want to applaud.

There are times when you wish the movie was a mini-series. This is meant both as a tribute, for the Ganguli family is so engaging you'd be happy spending much more time with them, and an acknowledgment that a tale this expansive doesn't always fit comfortably within the constraints of a feature-length frame.

The result is a film that's really moving--and really moves.

A meticulous, spellbinding, provocative depiction of the final days of the Third Reich.

Let the Right One In unfolds with quiet, masterly assurance.

Blackly funny, unafraid to shift emotional gears from farce to horror, peppered with spectacular action.

By the end of this white-knuckle movie, you stand in awe at the depth of man's will to survive. Touching the Void leaves you emotionally and physically spent, and grateful it was only a movie, not a mountain, you had to endure.