Like this diabolically designed weapon of war, Tanovic's film is coil-sprung to explode on the unsuspecting.

To the extent that movies bear the residue of their filmmakers' autobiographies, I found The Pianist particularly compelling.

To say this bone-chilling, gut-turning feature is "The Crying Game"-meets-"In Cold Blood." But this is a film - writer/director Peirce's first - that matches those pictures in power, in surprise, and in unnerving drama.

A smart, sensuous and sensory mind trip that caroms around a universe of thought.

A mordantly funny, clear-eyed view of an extended family's mounting dysfunction in a changing society.

To be sure, there are goofy flourishes here, the in-jokey, left-field rummies that are the Brothers Coen's stock-in-trade. But this is altogether a quieter, more philosophical sort of endeavor.

Smart and novelistic and spiked with more than a bit of The Catcher in the Rye, Steers' movie is a prickly coming-of-age tale in which everybody -- but especially Culkin -- shines.

Tells Wilco's story so well that you'll leave the theater thinking the album is a work of genius.

Exhilarating, alternately funny and horrific film.

A gossamer tale about a heavy subject -- a passive creature who slowly emerges as the active author of her own life.

A dynamic portrait of an artist by an artist, one as wry, audacious and erotically charged as its flamboyant subject.

Odd, and awkward in places, but its lyricism and power stay with you.

Tully is at turns heartbreaking and heart-stirring. And it's from the heartland, so I guess that makes perfect sense.

A super-taut and superbly acted three-character piece.

What's most refreshing about Real Women Have Curves is its unforced comedy-drama and its relaxed, natural-seeming actors.

The Road Home takes a path few movies choose to travel these days, but it's a very affecting journey.

It's a beautiful, grim tale.

Charming is such an overused, film critic-y designation, but The Way Home is that, and more.

Moodysson has an uncanny eye and ear for teen speech and attitude, and is able to capture it without the usual condescension and exploitation.

This is more than a movie: It's Almodovar's design for living.

A deceptively simple movie with a deeply felt message.

Kinetic and kooky, with a climactic shoot-out at a rail station that's daring in its ridiculousness.

Visually brilliant and thought-provoking.

Macdonald's film brilliantly telescopes the '70s, an era when every physical action had its equal and opposite political reaction.

Glazer has a daring sense of story structure that ratchets up the suspense, and his sense for sardonic black comedy is unerring.

The film is a sharp, funny, touching tale.

Made in a forthright, unfancy style and utilizing a cast of born naturals, Washington Heights deftly draws parallels between father and son's complicated relationship and the tensions that pulse through this predominantly Dominican American community.

Although the pervading mood of Twin Falls Idaho - a beautifully shot, noirish thing - is one of sadness and loss, the Polishes' film is playful, too.

Filled with bleak, beautiful Hopperesque tableaus and strange characters whose lives intersect.

A postfeminist valentine to the Paleolithic days of Woman Power when dinosaurs walked Manhattan in heels with matching handbags.

Rife with dark humor, Little Otik presents a cautionary variation of the creation myth, and a warning that tampering with the natural order of things may not be such a wise idea.

You can feel the world closing in, which, I would venture, is exactly how Fassbinder wanted you to feel.

Ozon has crafted a near-perfect film, a mournful, moving kind of cinema poetry.

Add Mostly Martha to the list of great mouth-watering food flicks - "Eat Drink Man Woman," "Big Night," "Babette's Feast" -- but don't stop there. Add it to another list: movies that get at the heart of what family, and love, is all about.

Isn't like the classic Japanese drama "Rashomon," which suggested that one person's perspective of an event gave him a different truth from the person standing elsewhere.

Almodóvar has made a powerfully moving film about men who think they want to lose themselves in their women, then are startled to realize that they're the ones who have been comatose.

A film full of a sense of impending danger, betrayal, seduction and destruction. Quite simply, it's great stuff.

This is the kind of unusual but involving picture that's ripe for a Hollywood remake - but while you're waiting for the Sandra Bullock-Ethan Hawke edition (it's a good post-movie game: coming up with your own casting ideas), Read My Lips is well worth checking out.

The film's recurring image is that of a butterfly fluttering around a flower, a lovely symbol of the reader drawn to a novel's nectar.

An epic docudrama - electric and raw.

Enchanted and thrilling film.

A dour-faced but sublime comedy about the kindness of strangers -- and about the strangeness of people who find themselves in oddball moments of grace.

Cholodenko takes us inside a bohemian hive where everyone buzzes around the Queen Bee. McDormand is superb. Likewise Bale and Nivola.

A human-scale comedy that reaches across generations to tickle, connect and embrace.

I love this movie, and I love the pride, spirit and sportsmanship of the kids who represent the best of American pluck and luck.

In the end, what the movie is about: time and life, and what we do with them, and what we regret that we didn't do.

An unnerving and astonishing thriller.

So jaw-droppingly out there, so bracingly bizarre, and, much of the time, so fall-over-funny that even its flaws don't matter. Easily the oddest movie of the year, it is also one of the best.

It's “The Wizard of Oz” with a viral infection.

It's a testament to Cage's canny performance and Jonze's seamless use of special effects that you believe Charlie and Donald are two entirely different people.

With its mix of Lewis Carroll and William Gibson; Japanese anime and Chinese chopsocky; mythological allusions, and machine-made illusion, offers a couple of hours of escapist fun.

Bielinsky's movie builds like a poker game in which the players, having invested everything, cannot afford to fold.

Pure, undiluted joy.

A love song to the new Europe (Klapisch's original title: Euro Pudding) and a snapshot of a polyglot gang on the cusp of kind-of-reckless youth and responsibility-burdened adulthood.

A heady stew of psychological disorders and classic tragedies, borrowing from Shakespeare, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and the Greeks.

There's a loneliness at the heart of this world, and Ghost World, that's really touching -- and a bit scary, too.

A feverish melodrama about an idealist who, in following his heart and his bishop's orders, leads himself into temptation and his parish into hypocrisy.

Terrifically satisfying film.

The rhythms of Whale Rider are hypnotic as the ebb tide, haunting as the song of the humpback sea mammal, bracing as the ocean spray. It's a movie that rewards the patient viewer.

Has a dreamy ominousness about it, and a sorrowfulness that speaks to the artificial intimacies of cellular communication, digital images and dial-up porn.

Assembles varied and remarkable digital video, archival footage, photographs, interviews and personal reflections and academics' perspectives to convey the scope and history of the Tibetan story.

It's the old cliche, but (like most cliches) it's true: It's impossible to imagine this picture without this actor.

So incrementally does Eastwood's film build toward what seems like an inevitable resolution that when it concludes, you're sucker-punched. You haven't been watching a police procedural, but a Greek tragedy. You haven't been watching a drama about the catharsis of vigilantism, but sitting vigil for a community diminished, and permanently damaged, by violence.

An intimate epic of infinite grace.

Where Denys Arcand's delightful 1986 comedy "The Decline of the American Empire" celebrated the good life, his profoundly funny sequel The Barbarian Invasions heartily toasts the good death.

Wondrously emotional film, one that sneakily dismantles your defenses and purges grief you didn't realize you had.

The Cooler is small-scale moviemaking about small-scale lives. But it's big in all the right ways.

Tender but never sappy, Monsieur Ibrahim brings two people of vastly different age and background together in ways that are touching, and telling. It's a small, glowing gem.

McNamara, a robust conversationalist, is so lively that he bursts out of what is essentially a talking-head documentary.

Plays with cultural stereotypes, and upends them as well. The picture starts as one thing and turns, dramatically, movingly, into something else.

It's a feminist nightmare, the world brought to life -- in hard-hitting documentary style.

Touching the Void is, indeed, about living, but not the exhilarating kind. It's about survival -- raw, real, by force of will.

Proves that the most local story is sometimes the most universal, the simplest tale sometimes the most complex.

It is the more satisfying of the two installments - less over-the-top, arterial-gushing violence and more investigation into character, motives, back-story.

It's the stuff of soap opera, infused with a nonchalant, David Lynch-like surrealism and a nutball Canadian humor. Beer - because of the baroness, and because this is Canada - flows freely.

A movie every American should see, although parts of it are close to unwatchable - notably an operating room sequence in which a pair of surgeons performs a gastric bypass, or "obesity surgery," as they like to call it, on a dangerously overweight patient.

Shrek 2 is a dream, a sequel as exhilarating and riotously funny as 2001's top-grossing original.

While it's too slight a movie for overpraise, there are such a serenity of vision and clarity of purpose to these characters that we easily are caught up in the boys' struggle to reunite mother and child.

A boisterous and improbably entertaining action comedy.

For those dazed and dazzled by surf anarchists Noll and Clark, Hamilton comes off as the sport's technocrat, but he boldly goes where no surfer has gone before.

A thinker and an educator, Zinn has led a life of commitment and compassion, and the film offers a loving tribute.

Its stars - especially the photogenic Leung and Cheung, fresh from Wong Kar Wai's jazzy romance In the Mood for Love - are wonderfully charismatic. And wonderfully athletic.

A triumph for its director and its star.

The film's save-the-world scenario may be the stuff of crusty cliff-hangers, its imagery may be borrowed, and its jaunty dialogue anything but deep, but there's something exhilarating going on here. It's darn sublime.

The imagery is uniquely that of Oshii, who deserves a place in the pantheon of visual artists.

A steady, soulful film experience. It's got poetry to it - the poetry of humanity.

A smart, sharp, stirring adaptation of the H.G. Bissinger best-seller.

An ingenious blend of sci-fi and mystery.

It does a masterful job of capturing a specific time and place while reminding us how timeless the abortion dialogue is.

A masterful epic charting love's labyrinths.

Amelie is utterly charming. And so, too, is the film.

Like the old and creaky Belafonte, the film itself seems forever on the brink of drifting away. But it's the kind of drifting that's nothing but enjoyable. In fact, it's beyond enjoyable - heading into waters full of whimsy, mystery and odd, psychedelic fish.

A pepperpot bubbling with pungent insights and sharp wit, Spanglish is about how people, like cultures, are more alike than not.

It shows how the energy, and innocence, of children can be found - and fostered - in even the bleakest spots on earth.

A gut-punch of a drama.

Collins and Pacino plumb the depths of acting, of Shakespeare, of the difference between law and justice.

A spirited, smart-alecky look at the ongoing conflict between a government that wants to eliminate pot and a public that wants to smoke it.

Almereyda's smart, streamlined adaptation is full of such neat little ironies.

While its careful pace and seemingly opaque story may not satisfy every moviegoer's appetite, the film's final scene is soaringly, transparently moving.

A romantic comedy for anyone in love with the movies, and anyone, for that matter, who's in love.

Offers a sometimes lyrical, sometimes gut-turning portrait of war seen through the eyes of children.

A bruising, dark comedy.

Leaves you feeling rich - and richly satisfied.

Brothers is about how people change, how they can rise to an occasion, or sink to one. It's a tale of love and allegiance, of truth and the cruelties that men can bring to bear on one another.

Things get a little tricky by the end, but it's the sort of trickery that's immensely satisfying.

Thoroughly engaging.

Paolo Virzi's film looks at school as the microcosm of society and at fathers too self-absorbed to be there for their daughters. He combines the themes played in "Mean Girls" and "Look at Me" and makes them vibrant.

Although Me and You and Everyone We Know requires patience on the part of the viewer - to get past the faux naivete of its grown-up characters, to get past its deadpan arty tone - Miranda July's feature debut is worth the time.

An exquisite exploration into the realms of seduction, obsession, deception and disillusionment.

Beautifully shot, in long, fluid takes, The Beat That My Heart Skipped is that rare thing: a remake that improves on its source.

A taut, tricky thriller.

What begins as Lafcadia's journey into the heart of darkness ends as his pilgrimage into the light. Stunning.

A funny, sad and absolutely lovely film.

Brilliantly detailed, richly painted portrait.

Clean, director Olivier Assayas' spellbinding study of a junkie trying to get her life in order so she can reclaim custody of her child, avoids the pitfalls, brilliantly.

A cracking police procedural from Belgian director Erik van Looy, has a jaw-dropping premise so smartly executed that if this movie weren't in Flemish I'd swear that Michael Mann had directed it.

Easily the best stop-motion animated necrophiliac musical romantic comedy of all time. It is also just simply, wonderful: a morbid, merry tale of true love that dazzles the eyes and delights the soul.

Quiet, quirky gem.

Cronenberg's movie is eerily compelling and darkly humorous. And chilling - to the bone.

Miller and Futterman tell their story with plain, uninflected film language, permitting the ambiguities to surface. Theirs is not the anti-capital-punishment tract of Richard Brooks' excellent 1967 film "In Cold Blood." It is a story about an accomplice to crime who lived to tell the story.

Insightful, funny-sad memoir of divorce, intellectual style and emotional rebirth.

Urgent and stunning movie.

What gives North Country urgency is that it's about how a man comes to understand that it's bad for him and for his community to deny his daughter privileges and prerogatives he'd grant his son.

In refusing to pigeonhole its characters, Nine Lives is less like those L.A. road-rage melodramas "Short Cuts" and "Crash" than those all-of-us-are-interconnected dramas "Amores Perros" and "21 Grams."

A quiet, glistening love story - or not-quite-love story - adapted from Martin's novella of the same name, Shopgirl is such an atypical Hollywood affair that it's almost startling.

Does what the best movies can do: take viewers to what might be unfamiliar places, into a culture with unique customs and traditions, and show, through drama and comedy, how the fundamental truths of the human experience need no translation.

In the end, this earnest, inquisitive film leaves the viewer longing for some sanity, and some hope, in a world that appears to be seriously lacking in both.

Whatever number it is chronologically on the P&P parade, Wright's film ranks first in verve. Quite simply, it is the essential P&P.

It's a celebration of the good times and bad times shared by a man and woman who found each other in the middle of some historic craziness, and it rocks.

While Gyllenhaal has playful puppy eyes and energy, his performance as Jack is a blur of mustaches, sideburns and spurs that never achieves the weight of Ledger's.

The $200 million result is an irresistibly entertaining, if grandiose, saga of doomed love and directorial hubris.

If Munich raises disturbing issues about Jewish-Arab relations, past and present - and how can it not? - it is also an absolutely riveting tale of the hunt and the hunted.

Not since Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" and Malick's own "Days of Heaven" has a movie been both so breathtakingly beautiful and so narratively abstract.

Whether or not Street Fight wins the Academy Award Sunday night, Curry's picture is must-see fare for any and every observer of the curious world of American politics.

Funny stuff.

L'Enfant begins with the birth of a child, but its real concern is the moral rebirth of a man.

There are frightening moments, as when he attacks an elderly woman he thinks is possessed by devils. And revelatory, heartbreaking ones, which can make you think that maybe he is a genius, after all.

Holofcener writes with an ear for the rhythms and ridiculousness of real life, and her cast - to a man, and woman - embraces her words with subtlety and certitude. Friends With Money is gimmickless, and great.

A riveting documentary.

Mountain Patrol is breathtakingly beautiful, breathtakingly brutal and simply breathtaking.

By recording this all too commonplace and dehumanizing process, Puiu's film shows the sick old man and the strangers who deal with him to be all too human - extraordinarily so.

Lady Vengeance is not for everyone. The violence, while less over-the-top and orgiastic than Park's two previous installments, is still hard and crackling. The sex is grim and graphic. And deadpan nihilism permeates the air.

The Proposition, a beautiful, bloody meditation on justice, family, and the trap of retribution, is in every respect an artful addition to the canon of six-shooter morality tales.

May strain credulity, but it still leaves a memorable mark.

A disarming, funny and animated Al Gore, once a robot among presidential candidates, proves himself a rock star among environmental activists.

An intriguing study of identity, marriage and, perhaps, madness.

Must-see stuff.

A spectacularly satisfying reworking of the legend of Kal-El.

Boasts another formidable and fine-tuned performance from the great Charlotte Rampling.

Easily the best computer-animated feature to come from Hollywood in a long while, Monster House is also one of the weirdest. A creepy-crawly, freak-show Halloween yarn.

The script by Andrea Berloff is stunning in its simplicity and aching details.

13 Tzameti is cut from the same cloth as the humans-hunted-for-sport classic "The Most Dangerous Game" - and from that early talkie's many subsequent remakes and rip-offs, including John Woo's "Hard Target."

Sensual, dreamlike, both intimate and epic, The House of Sand is a cinematic tour de force.

The less said about the twists and turns The Illusionist takes, the better. Suffice to say, Eisenheim's masterful deceptions do not stop when he exits the stage.

It's a movie with a pulse. Sometimes, it flies off the chart.

A gorgeous confection, packed with gargantuan gowns and pornographic displays of pastrystuffs, Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette is also a sharp, smart look at the isolation, ennui and supercilious affairs of the rich, famous and famously pampered.

Baron Cohen brings scary conviction to the performance.

Funny as it is fierce, breathtaking as it is life-affirming.

Stranger Than Fiction is slicker than Kaufman's work - and Forster's direction is certainly more studio-ish than Kaufman collaborators Spike Jonze's or Michel Gondry's. But it's a clever idea, and you feel a little smarter watching the thing unfurl.

Vibrates with exuberance and erudition.

The heart of the matter - and the viscera - is the action, and one man's determination to survive. Apocalypto is primal.

Bill Condon's screen adaptation of the 1981 Broadway sensation is, if possible, as dazzling and energizing as its source.

The Painted Veil is rich with history and heartbreak. It's stirring stuff.

The relationship between Chris and his diminutive namesake is at the core of the film - the determination to be there for his son, no matter what; the mentoring, the pair's goofy, lovely banter. And Smith and his bright-eyed boy pull it off brilliantly.

The great thing about Venus - apart from its sharp eye for the daily routines and drab details of senior citizenry in a buzzing metropolis - is that it isn't soppy, or sentimental.

A chase movie, a spy movie, a futuristic thriller full of colorfully bizarre characters and deftly choreographed stunt work, Children of Men works on multiple levels - as action and allegory.

Never mind Hollywood's big-star, big-budget hand-wringing about Africa - Bamako is the real thing.

This beautiful, unfolding film is an antidote to the high-velocity, maximum-volume world most of us find ourselves immersed in, offering a glimpse into a rigorously spiritual alternative. Its calmness, its reflection, is full of allure.

Zodiac is a reproach both to those dedicated to unscrambling "The Da Vinci Code" and to those hooked on forensic crime shows where all the evidence leads to a tidy conclusion. That Zodiac's manhunt is inconclusive makes it all the more haunting.

Cats is many things: a film diary of an odd-couple relationship, a profile of a forgotten man who slowly reconstructs his past, and the transcendently moving account of a man on the margins who gets reintegrated into society.

A wonderful, witty mix of horror and social satire, The Host takes its simple, time-tested premise - menacing creature terrorizes the populace - and runs with it.

It's a tearjerker, sometimes, and sweetly funny at other moments. It's near perfect.

Gripping, powerful, heart-breaking.

Exhilarating, exuberant and drolly funny.

Simply put, it's terrific.

Bier primes us for a catfight, but she gives something tastier: a feast of reconciliation and love.

The Hoax makes the fakery of disgraced writers Jayson Blair, James Frey and Stephen Glass seem puny by comparison. Irving was the grand master, and Gere's portrait and Hallström's movie suggest why: He almost bought his own story, believed his own outrageous pack of lies.

A heartbreaking elegy to mature love that honors the lovers and the long, neurodegenerative tango that is their last.

A feverishly imaginative Freudian vampire film from Guy Maddin, is like a silent-movie serial by Louis Feuillade or an improbable collaboration between writer Oscar Wilde and photographer Man Ray.

The Golden Door feels, at points, like a silent film - a silent film with CinemaScope vistas and dazzling, saturated color.

While I liked the film's aesthetics and its futurist imaginings, its most important attraction is how it engages. Some movies massage you; others tickle you. This one jacks you into cyberspace, involving you psychically and physically.

A heartbreaking story of true love.

It is not a polemic but a plea.

Remy, the little rat who stars in the big, beautiful, funny Ratatouille, isn't gross at all. In fact, he's adorable.

Bale is extraordinary, grinning like a kid, displaying wily intelligence, sinewy resolve and spirit - and a bit of craziness, too.

As Greene, Don Cheadle - explosive because you've never before seen this model of actorly restraint - is a one-man fireworks show in Talk to Me, Kasi Lemmons' rollicking, resonant portrait of the real-life ex-con who improbably became a civic icon.

A rocking, rollicking crowd-pleaser.

Lucid, concise and devastating account of what went wrong in Iraq, patiently counts those 500 ways.

At a lean - and decidedly mean - 77 minutes, the suspense-horror hybrid Them by French writer-directors David Moreau and Xavier Palud is nothing short of revelatory.

The story of Donald Crowhurst is not one of remarkable courage or remarkable endurance. But it is remarkable.

A riveting remake of a pretty terrific 1957 western about manhood, fatherhood and honor.

They are the only misstep in Penn's otherwise sure-footed journey to what he reveals as the heart of lightness.

A rich, beautifully detailed espionage thriller that captures the bygone days of Shanghai - and 1940s Hollywood noirs' romantic evocations of same - Lust, Caution is also one of those rare movie experiences: Its scenes of the trysts between Yee and Mak, from their rough-stuff first encounter to the long, tangled love-making sessions of subsequent meetings, are truly erotic.

After Clooney, who gives a sterling performance as a tarnished figure, the standout performance belongs to Wilkinson, a geyser of manic eloquence. Also quite fine are Swinton and Sydney Pollack.

Features entertainingly brainy musings from New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman, and comments from child psychologists, friends and Marla collectors.

Control doesn't claim to know the reasons Curtis killed himself. The act of suicide poses the question why, but rarely answers it, leaving the living to wonder, and to grieve. And there's certainly grief to be had in Control, but also joy. Really.

Julian Temple, the British music-documentary director who helmed the 2000 Pistols' flick "The Filth and the Fury," has done such cinematic justice to the punk humanist born John Graham Mellor, who died of a congenital heart defect in 2002.

An eerily quiet, bracingly bloody, and expertly laid-out adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel.

There's a word for women like Giselle: Supercalifragilistic. Ditto her film, Enchanted.

A loopy, surreal, beguiling collage of a film, the writer-director's meta-biopic embraces its subject.

A movie of absurdist humor, brutal realism and dementia.

The film is more than laborious eye-blinking - it's also dazzling visually, its potent imagery conjured by cinematographer Janusz Kaminski. But finally, Diving Bell is about something imperceptible: consciousness.

Like its heroine, the film's glib - and sometimes sidesplittingly funny - patter at first diverts viewers from its poignant insights. Happily, as Juno grows in experience and maturity, so does the film.

In the end, Atonement sorts truth from fiction as it delivers a shattering kick to the solar plexus.

Whatever our misfortune, The Kite Runner says, sometimes we are fortunate enough to get a second chance to make amends for a first mistake.

A triumph. Unapologetically old-school, in both the literal and metaphorical meanings of the term, Debaters overlays the story of social underdogs onto the familiar template of the stand-and-deliver saga, the staple of sports inspirationals like "Rocky," "Invincible" and "The Karate Kid."

Just a few barrels short of being a masterpiece.

In many ways, City of Men is like a Portuguese-language version of David Simon's "The Wire."