The result is a disturbing look into the so-called Wonder Years of adolescence, with convincing, award-worthy performances from each of its key players: Hunter, Wood, and Reed.

While it may be excruciating to watch a speller miss a word by a letter, it's just as exciting to watch another kid jump the hurdle.

I don't think we're going to see a better--a funnier or more genuinely heartwarming, for that matter--comedy this year.

By the end of the film, one begins to recognize specific birds, rooting for their safe returns and saddened by some of their failures.

Olivier Assayas latest effort could be mistaken for a hipper-than-thou thriller. But it isn’t--it’s in fact a difficult, challenging, and troubling art film. [October 2003, p. 19]

This is one of the year's most subtly moving films, and a strong affirmation of Coppola's substantial talent.

Perhaps the greatest, most affecting articulation of the theme Eastwood has been exploring since 1990's "White Hunter Black Heart": how violence--real violence, not movie violence--perpetrated and experienced, can erode and/or obliterate the human soul.

Although this installment is a beautiful stand-alone thang (check out how its chronology-juggling storyline creates a perfect circle, structure-wise).

I haven't been crazy about a lot of Van Sant's recent work, but what he does here is simply astonishing. [November 2003, p. 25]

Documentarian Liz Garbus masterfully turns her minimalist camera's eye on young girls institutionalized at the Waxter Juvenile Facility near Baltimore.

It's flat-out comedy all the way, head-spinningly clever (you'll be talking about a sequence set in the Louvre for weeks) and always engaging. For my money, it's the comedy of the year.

Has a warmth that’s utterly enchanting, and a tenderness that’s genuinely touching. This is a real gem.

With My Flesh and Blood, Karsh finds a worthy subject in the constant day-to-day challenges facing a truly extraordinary family.

Big Fish really is a big delight.

A phantasmagorical slab of epic entertainment that satisfies on every conceivable level.

The thrills of this movie are aesthetic ones, the creation of new, ravishing imagery (and all three of our young heroes are beautiful enough to be up to this task), the surrender to dream logic, the adoration of the silver screen.

The film feels like a natural successor to "The Wedding Singer's" strange blend of humor and humanity, a gently silly comedy that's actually romantic without making anyone sick in the process. And that just might be a first.

Steven Spielberg turns the pure adventure of Saturday afternoon serials into a solidly entertaining spectacle.

A wildly imaginative, hugely entertaining tour de force that asks big questions about life and love and fate while never ceasing to fully engage the viewer.

It really is a masterpiece--von Trier's first, as it happens.

This is a movie of head-spinning richness.

Soars gloriously into fluency and magic.

Boasts both wicked satire and a big heart, and as a result, is nothing short of brilliant.

Over the course of almost two and a half fascinating hours, they make a cogent, compelling, powerful argument, and they also make a terrific movie.

Fantastic news, true believers: Spider-Man 2 is smarter, hipper, faster, funnier, and flat-out more electrifying than the original, swinging to new summer-movie heights as the greatest comic-book adaptation yet made.

Yep, this movie is basically a yakfest, but an incredibly fluid and involving one, and if you have any kind of affinity for either of the characters, you’re bound to find the picture a kind of miracle.

Garden State gets it. Not since "The Graduate" has a movie nailed the beautiful terror of standing on the brink of adulthood with such satisfying precision.

Demme here shows off both the mastery of suspense that made "The Silence of the Lambs" a classic, and the humane understanding and appreciation of character that not just deepens but energizes this film.

Provocative, quietly erotic, deeply romantic, and slyly witty (a cameo by a giant of punk rock is funny at first sight, and funnier still when you figure out the joke it's making), Code 46 is a very effective antidote to summer blockbuster bloat.

Hero is one of the most beautiful and involving films of the year.

The result is by far the most original comedy of the year. Russell might alienate some audience members here--but it’s possible they literally won't know what they're missing.

Every performance here is wonderful, and the movie abounds in moments so true as to be cringe-worthy.

Depp and Winslet in particular are, as you might expect, immaculate. I don't think there's another actor alive who can convey the intermingling of gentleness and passion with as much precision as Depp.

Almodóvar has created a dense, audacious film in which layers of cinematic artifice lovingly camouflage (at least for a while) its characters’ dark, damaged heart.

Aquatic maintains its buoyancy throughout.

A remarkably appealing success story full of heart and humor and poignancy, with Swank as winning as she’s ever been.

In the way that water can heal and harm, this film balances moments of dreamy spirituality with the salty harshness of family disputes.

With 2001, Stanley Kubrick proved that a sci-fi movie could be philosophical rather than pulpy, profound rather than pedantic.

Delivers a polished and well-researched look at America 's largest corporate bankruptcy with a laser-sharp focus on the personalities, practices, and fates of the top executives behind the Enron meltdown.

Brothers takes a scenario as old as Genesis – two jealous siblings spar over the affections of the same woman – and renders it fresh and immediate, by virtue of the warm, almost maternal, generosity director Susanne Bier shows her characters.

The film succeeds on the strength of the four actresses, first and foremost America Ferrera, who beautifully essays the role of narrator Carmen.

The plot is pretty convoluted, but Miyazaki has a very good handle on it and lavishes his customary heart, humor, and inventiveness on every situation he depicts.

Every so often, a movie blindsides you, leaving you feeling different, enlightened, possibly even improved. Me and You and Everyone We Know is such a movie.

This is as wonderfully realized an observation of female affinity as 1999’s great "The Dreamlife of Angels."

Land of the Dead is Romero's long-awaited masterpiece, a slyly suspenseful and droll thrill-ride that expounds on both the highbrow and the chewed-off-brow concepts of his previous trilogy, then flippantly dismisses the cheap scare tactics of the control-pad generation's gimmicky genre knockoffs.

I'm glad that 2046 is different from "Mood" even while being strangely of a piece with it. Like "Mood," it’s a movie of utter wonder and ravishment. But the key here is different.

Herzog not only tells an incredible story but implies a dark metaphysic of the natural world that makes this film unsettlingly larger than its human subject.

A superb effort by a first-rank director, and manna from heaven for Cheung fans.

It's a rare film that can be convincingly tender, bitterly funny, and ruthlessly cutting over the course of fewer than 90 minutes. The Squid and the Whale not only manages this, it also contains moments that sock you with all three qualities at the same time.

This is more than just the best animated comedy of the year--it's the best comedy of the year, period.

Newell puts his own stamp on the franchise and delivers the best Potter movie yet filmed.

Playful, poetic, shocking, saddening, and ultimately gratifyingly and honestly big-hearted.

Lee and company handle the particulars of the tale with the requisite meticulousness and exquisite taste that marks all the director's films.

Three Burials is beautiful, authentic and brutally observant of human nature. With real Tex-Mex backdrops instead of the usual Monument Valley vistas and characters too complex to withstand simple white-hat/black-hat reductionism, Three Burials is a visionary portrait of the New West. This is the terrain of Eastwood and Peckinpah, saddled with the concerns of 21st-century life.

This lengthy, nuance-filled story about how eye-for-an-eye stuff differs from theory to practice is one of the most considered, thoughtful, and involving movies of its kind.

Scene for radiant scene, shot for nary a wasted shot, The New World is the most artfully sculpted film in American cinema this year.

A compelling, rousing and at times strangely moving entertainment.

For all its seeming simplicity, this is an emotionally and intellectually complex film that holds the viewer in a grip as tight as any classic thriller you can name.

Never anything less than wholly engrossing. There's a lot of humor to be found here (primarily of the dark comedy variety) and the cumulative impact of Lazarescu's journey through the Bucharest medical system is quite powerful.

Composed of relatively few events and scenes, it's often excruciatingly tense and never less than heartbreakingly human. And as much as I admire "Munich," Shadows leaves Spielberg's film in the dust in the moral-ambiguity department. Never before seen in the States, it's already on my year's ten-best list. (April 2006 Premiere)

The most impressive thing about the film's technical wizardry is, finally, how unimpressive it is. One doesn't leave the movie with a mind blown by visual bedazzlement but with a soul shattered by the profound sense of tragedy Linklater and company so beautifully put across.

This film, a raw howl of outrage and pain, is proudly one-sided, allowing a generation of wounded men and women to scream their betrayal.

A triumphant revisiting of territory in which Scorsese is an unchallenged master -- the crime drama.

How 49 Up differs from its precursors for the better is that it's the first to have its participants interact with Apted the filmmaker, no longer a one-sided interviewer.

As it happens, each one of these tales is also a love story, and The Fountain is Aronofsky’s profession of faith concerning love’s place in the idea of eternity. It’s a movie that’s as deeply felt as it is imagined.

Inland Empire is interchangably terrifying, maddening, shockingly hilarious and perversely exciting, and that's just to those who end up disliking it.

Letters from Iwo Jima isn't just the film that Eastwood wanted to make, but one that the film's producer Steven Spielberg had tried to make twice with "Empire of the Sun" and "Saving Private Ryan."

This intense film, a mix of horror, fantasy, and history that convinces on all those levels and mixes them up with dizzying brio, is a searing cinematic experience, a beautiful, terrifying vision from writer-director Guillermo del Toro.

Burnett creates an insistently poetic, devastatingly ironic world and work.

Black Book is Verhoeven's best film since "RoboCop": audacious, smart, shamelessly entertaining.

It's the stuff of not quite dreams, and it's rendered with such accuracy and hilarity that I am tempted to call Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters the most successful full-on surrealist film since Bunuel and Dali's 1930 "L'Age d'Or."

Resnais employs all the tools of studio-bound moviemaking, silent-era to post-modern, in a way that is not only is consistently dazzling in a purely visual sense, but contains an empathy that lifts the picture to tragic heights even at those points at which it seems practically weightless.

With its use of aggressively cheerful hues that are equal parts Technicolor and Tim Burton Candyland, Fido is a "boy and his dog" movie thrown into a horror movie blender. This is perfectly realized in a jaw-droppingly funny "Timmy's trapped in the well" sequence that almost seems like it could have been made in the 50s had George Romero ever worked on "Lassie."

The slapstick-comic set pieces involving Remy and Linguini's cooking struggles might solicit the admiration of Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati.

One of Cronenberg's subtlest, most insinuating pictures, and one of the highlights of the year so far.

A picture that certain Brits and connoisseurs of British colloquial English might call "a grower" … more moving and funny the more I think about it.

It's also that he's really, honest-to-God, got one of those movie faces that doesn't even come along once every generation. It's astonishing.

As stomach-churning a suspense exercise as the cinema has seen since the salad days of Hitchcock.

Every performer in the international cast -- Seigner, de Bankole, von Sydow (magnificent as Bauby's father), and the late Jean-Pierre Cassel to name but a few -- completely disappears into each of their roles, which I think is as much a testament to Schnabel's talents as to theirs.

While avoiding specious bromides about universality, Persepolis insists on communicating with its audience, and insists that communication and empathy are the keys to our survival.

There Will Be Blood is, in fact, not a historical saga; rather, it's an absurdist, blackly comic horror film with a very idiosyncratic satanic figure at its core.

The result is one of the odder and, certainly the most compelling of the short stream of Broadway-to-Hollywood transplants of recent years. The interweaving of the music and the visuals casts an unusual, restive spell of delight and unease.

A remarkably engrossing and thoughtful picture, beautifully rendered in an artful mode of realism.

The first masterpiece of 2008 -- at least by American release date standards -- the latest film from master French director Jacques Rivette is a masterful, multilayered, sometimes enigmatic work of dark irony, an assured tragicomedy of manners and more.

A giddy kick-out-the-jams entertainment. Diary takes a tack that's not exactly new, but is new to Romero, and as one might expect, the director brings a sharp and uncompromising new perspective to it.

This is not a children's picture, although it touches on the imaginative powers and emotional resilience of children. It's another slice of Hou's distinctly poetic realism, and as such, also a kind of tribute to Paris -- the Paris of both today and of the older film.

Quantum, thanks to a deft blend of exotic escapism and bare-bones modernism, is more than strong enough to be judged on its own. In fact, it's the perfect Bond film.

The whole thing works, especially for the non-comic audience. Plus, the music is perfect, especially the opening montage set to Bob Dylan's, "The Times They Are a-Changin."

To call Towelhead exploitative is to miss the point. What made Towelhead the novel so extraordinary was the honesty in Jasira's adolescent narrative voice, the genuine way she misguidedly, but honestly, conflates the sexual attention she receives with the parental affection she really needs. With the film, Ball, though he drops the book's first person narration, is faithful to that voice.

A totally mesmerizing battle of the wills between the occasionally charming yet wily Nixon and the increasingly desperate Frost.

Masterfully put together.

Winslet deserves an Oscar for her amazing performance.

Naturally, Pitt and Blanchett are outstanding. Fincher's meticulous attention to detail is unerring, down to the light fixtures.

Rourke is getting tons of press and award nominations, but Marisa Tomei kicks ass too. Not only does the one-time Oscar winner look amazing and perform her own pole tricks, but she effectively humanizes what could be just another naked chick in a movie.

This is a smart script. There is a wealth of twists, but none of them have to beat you over the head.

This is a movie where you WANT to stick around for the credits. The beauty is that you are totally set up for it, and you don't mind one bit. That final sequence ties the movie together in an awesome fashion.

Much like the actual summer (the season, not the character), we never wanted it to end.

This is, simply put, one of the most beautiful movies you’ll ever see.