The film is marvelous fun on its own terms -- I laughed all the way through it.

No movie in the last decade has succeeded in psyching out critics and audiences as fully as the powerful, rambling war epic The Thin Red Line.

There is a long and honorable tradition of broad intermarriage comedies (from the Romans to Abie's Irish Rose to La Cage aux Folles), and this one comes at least shoulder-high to the best. It has been directed by Joel Zwick in a happy, bustling style and acted with madcap ethnic relish.

As I watched American Movie, a lot of it struck me as untranscendent misery. But in hindsight it seems less hopeless.

No wonder Hawke was so hot to pass the script onto Linklater. He's superb, by the way.

If nothing else, Training Day is a gorgeous pedestal for Denzel Washington.

Has a soft windup, but along the way are some of the best-constructed slapstick sequences since "There's Something About Mary."

Even though the film is full of laughs, the jokes hover on the edge of the abyss: This is a world in which lurid colors and extravagant gestures are means of filling the void.

A dazzling, repellent exercise in which the case against men is closed before it's opened.

It's both fractured and fluid, with a helter-skelter syntax and a ceaselessly infectious backbeat. Beyond that, it's a blast.

At its best, the movie evokes that blend of thrill and terror that comes from mixing two chemicals together without being sure that an instant later you'll still be standing there in one piece.

Feels more like The Bill Clinton Story than "Primary Colors" (1998). It's a paean to naughty boys who dream of potency and become enraptured by their own scams -- a great American archetype.

A charming, hyper-energetic, and wittily self-aware action comedy about gorgeous girls.

No part of us is allowed to relax. Ever.

An aching roundelay, a triumphantly benumbed ensemble farce that mingles condescension and compassion in a manner that's disarmingly--and often upsettingly--original.

Most of all, I enjoyed the picture's subtext, which is that Smith has become so sensitized to Internet abuse -- that the cathartic climax consists of tracking down bellicose posters (all of whom turn out to be adolescent dweebs) and pummeling the crap out of them.

The German reserve and Italian extroversion are in just the right balance. The movie exists on a tantalizing border -- and I don't mean Switzerland.

Impressive and heartfelt.

Mulholland Drive isn't a "puzzle" like "Memento," in which the pieces (sort of) fit together. There are some pieces here that will never fit -- except maybe in Lynch's unconscious. And yet -- and yet -- this distinctly Hollywood nightmare makes a deeper kind of sense.

A sharp-witted, visually layered, gorgeously designed, meticulously directed piece of formula pablum.

The neat thing about Jonathan Parker's modern-day Bartleby (Outsider Pictures) is that it brings out all the vaudeville undercurrents in Melville's dark tale and turns it into a surreal tragi-sitcom for our own era.

There are a lot of stale -- and nefarious -- clichés in 8 Mile, but most of the time they're overwhelmed by the pulsing, grinding, hopped-up camerawork and the soulful star turn of Eminem.

My chief complaint is that these mutants are a little--well, vanilla. I wish the X-Men had a touch of kinkiness to go with their weird abilities.

The movie is a generic paranoid espionage fantasy, but its proportions are refreshingly correct. It moves quickly, adroitly, and without fuss.

This is very much a first feature, with all the hyperbolic, sometimes indiscriminate cinematic energy of a student film. But it's also sensational, a febrile meditation on the mathematics of existence.

Sensationally made and in patches pretty nerve-jangling.

It's no wonder young musicians say they learned to be rock stars from This Is Spinal Tap. It came to satirize and stayed -- and stays on -- to celebrate.

The first real Jackie Chan picture crafted for the American market, is a terrific piece of junk filmmaking.

A pandering, debased, generic little nothing of a movie. And I'm still trying to figure out why I loved it so inordinately.

As Nash gets closer to Crowe's own age (and level of dissipation), the performance settles down and becomes first credible and then overwhelming. This is a stupendous piece of acting.

The movie is good enough to put a chill into the late-summer air. Salva has nasty surprises in the grim, minor-key last third, during which the feeling dawns on you that sleep for the next few nights won't come easily.

When the groom's enormous procession fights its way through the hard rain and muck to the bejeweled bride, Nair's chaos downright sparkles.

Essentially a solemn, splintered meditation on lost love: a movie about personal space, in space.

Everything I've ever dreamed of in a crazy comedy. It's close to pure farce, yet its laughs are grounded in loneliness, impotence, self-loathing, and that most discomfiting of vices to dramatize: envy. The action is surreal, the emotions are violently real.

With an actor as great as Gene Hackman in the lead, a lot of scenes even breathe.

Beat by beat, Mamet turns out an immaculately staged, crisply paced, and elegantly acted movie. It's also a tad bloodless, but you can't have everything.

One of the more lyrical sci-fi action thrillers ever made, in which space and time become love slaves to the directors' witty visual fancies.

Manito is the rare little movie that gets bigger as it goes along--so big that it can hardly contain its own emotion.

Whatever this universe is, you're inside it, with your mouth open, wishing that all sporting events could be this exhilarating, that all human bodies could work this way, that all simpleminded movies could be this mindfully empty-headed.

A minor-key ghost story with major jolts.

It has been sexed up, opened out, and finished off with a disappointing bang-bang climax, but it's still good fun.

The movie got me where I live, but I think that even non-Park Slope real-estate owners will have a blast at Duplex: It's one of the most unnerving slapstick extravaganzas I've ever seen.

I reckon 90 of the movie's 106 minutes are thriller heaven. The windup, alas, isn't in the same league: Both humdrum and confusingly staged, it pales beside the volcanic climaxes of Franklin's "One False Move" (1992) and "Devil in a Blue Dress."

For all its missteps, Mystic River gets the big things right: It turns you inside out with grief, and it builds to an act of vigilante murder that is nearly impossible to endure.

A nutty, zany, wacky, unruly, spastically hilarious hodgepodge that hits at least twice as often as it misses—which is a big deal, since there are more gags per square foot of celluloid than in any film since Joe Dante's "Gremlins 2: The New Batch" (1990).

A pungently funny and heartfelt piece of wish fulfillment.

In dramatic terms, Osama couldn't be much simpler. The director is aiming for a sort of tone poem of repression, the girl robbed first of her childhood, then of her burgeoning womanhood.

A fascinatingly strange and chaotic ballet set to familiar noir motifs.

Fluid and lyrical and thoroughly transporting.

The mixture of cartoony stylization and regional realism is completely original--and a testament to the genius eye for color of the great cinematographer Roger Deakins and the designer Dennis Gassner.

For all its relative subtlety, Kill Bill, Vol. 2 remains a cartoon: Its wit is broadsword rather than rapier, and its motives are elemental. The banter is second-tier Tarantino: a cut above his imitators, but below the standard set by "Pulp Fiction" and "Jackie Brown."

It's fun to see actors doing what they do and to see them through the eyes of a director.

Fey's comic gifts mesh with Wiseman's first-hand research, and the wit becomes dazzling.

Gojira is no masterpiece, but it has the power of a masterpiece: It's the most emotionally authentic fake monster movie ever made.

Super-entertaining, super-disgusting documentary.

Living Out Loud becomes an ode to openness, to letting in everything that the world throws at you.

In Cuarón's hands, the world of Harry Potter doesn't feel like a synthetic movie theme park anymore. It's almost real, Hogwarts and all.

The bad news is that Before Sunset is not as delirious an experience as its predecessor. The good news is that it's wonderful anyway, and in ways that tell us something about our romance with "Before Sunrise."

Everything we love about biblical-movie kitsch is here, only concentrated and heightened.

The whole movie, of course, is a setting for its jewel, Catalina Sandino Moreno as Maria: With her clear, round eyes, long dark hair, and radiant transparency, she brings to mind two of the loveliest ingénues of the last quarter-century -- Meg Tilly and Jennifer Connelly.

I could quibble with the conventionally romantic ending and a couple of small but not-so-cosmetic alterations, but on the whole, this is just how I'd always imagined one of my favorite comic novels should look and sound.

If his (Zhang's) fight scenes don't fully intoxicate, though, his color and compositional rigor compensate for much. See Hero on the biggest screen you can find, and sit close enough for all that spiraling silk to tickle your nostril hairs.

A thriller that isn't kinky isn't much of a thriller. And Cellular has the best kinky phone gimmick since "Sorry, Wrong Number" (1948).

Breezy, brief, and often a howl.

Private Parts is so riotous that you almost don't remember how unfunny Stern can be on his radio show.

I laughed all the way through Team America: Scene by scene, it's uproarious.

The downside to all this stylishness: that A Very Long Engagement is Amélie Goes to War.

But Cate Blanchett ... ahhhh. She doesn't impersonate Katharine Hepburn, she channels her.

As for Bardem: How can I do him justice? He is normally the most robustly physical of actors, with a plummy voice and an insolent sensuality. To see him immobile, ashen, his hair gone, de-bodyized: It's agonizing.

Cheadle is extraordinary.

The Woodsman should be pretty intolerable, but the writing-line by line-is heartfelt and probing, the direction gives the actors room to stretch out, and the performances are miraculous.

This Merchant of Venice comes roaring to life--when it stops, in effect, apologizing for its terrible anti-Semitic worldview and just gives itself over to some of the most furious courtroom drama ever written.

Unexpectedly delectable.

A truly unformulaic comedy of lust and greed, a farce that seems to write itself, slap-happily, as it goes along.

Somehow, Assisted Living jells. Maggie Riley is astoundingly convincing, and she and Bonsignore's Todd have an unforced chemistry that catches you off guard.

Isn't as campy or as unhinged as the delightful Bailey and Barbato Tammy Faye Baker documentary, "The Eyes of Tammy Faye"; it's more like your standard HBO documentary (and HBO co-produced). But it's extremely entertaining.

It thaws the soul.

Obviously, this sort of taboo-flouting imagery isn't for everyone, but Park's vision is all of a piece.

The documentary cannot be called muckraking, as the muck has already been well-raked, but Gibney's recounting has a touch of playful sadism that I quite enjoyed.

hilarious, sometimes rueful, and strangely hip documentary.

Because of its convolutions, Howl's Moving Castle isn't quite as transporting as "Spirited Away." But it's a moving bridge between his lyrical fancies and his outrage. Miyazaki is like a soulful cartographer of the soul, mapping our inner landscape, leaving us bedazzled.

Admirable and wondrously strange--as well as gorgeous, funny, dreamlike, mesmerizing, squirmy, and occasionally annoying.

Salles brings an explorer's eye and breathless curiosity to this fetid milieu, and he gets the most brilliant performances imaginable for this sort of movie.

The script by Steve Faber and Bob Fisher is one of those high-speed, ping-pong-banter marvels in which you're still laughing from the last great line when you're hit by the next.

Wholly unnecessary but highly enjoyable.

An extraordinarily potent brew.

There is a special kind of pleasure in hearing jokes that have no redeeming social value. I'd like to think that this IS their social value-an invitation to free the mind.

It's rich, but slow, and children younger than eight (like mine) might get restless. But this big kid was lost in admiration.

Makes for quite an emotional roller-coaster ride. You don't know whether to celebrate or mock, to laugh or weep.

A minimalist exercise in maximalist suspense.

A gratifyingly slick and fast-moving Flemish thriller, directed by Erik Van Looy, with superb acting.

A passionate and rousing piece of filmmaking--a civics lesson with the punch of a good melodrama.

Powerful and then some.

It has its own explosively twisted originality. It's a geyser of exhilarating tastelessness.

In spite of its standard biopic gaps and simplifications, Walk the Line gets the big things right.

Never loses sight of its mission to be as silly, bawdy, and entertaining as possible.

Return to Paradise doesn't boast many surprises. It's straight-on, morally uncomplicated. Emotionally, though, it's dense and twisty -- and smashingly potent.

The best Spike Lee movie to come along since 1992's "Malcolm X." It's also the first Spike Lee movie since "Malcolm X" to star Denzel Washington, and just as Jimmy Stewart and Alfred Hitchcock brought out the best in each other, Denzel and Spike need each other like vermouth and gin.

With a theatrical setting, a large ensemble cast, and musical numbers, Altman and his crew are in their own tailored version of heaven.

The recent film it most recalls is "You Can Count on Me" (2000), another small treasure about a fractured family that managed to be moving without troweling on the sap.

The world according to Mann is loud, dangerous, morally ambiguous, and more than a little greasy, but during the hours you spend there, there's nowhere you'd rather be.

It keeps surprising us, mainly by being consistently smarter and sadder than inspirational-teacher movies usually let themselves be.

It's an exquisitely crafted period picture that keeps promising more and more as it goes along--smarter ideas, richer themes, spookier plot twists--and keeps delivering on every promise, right up until the rug-pulling and overly hasty final sequence.

Peter O'Toole is magisterial, blustering and sublime: His half-deaf duke still has a touch of Lawrence of Arabia's showstopping power.

The movie is both clever and ruthless at exposing the ratings board's inconsistencies and hypocrisy.

The final minute of the movie is one of the most bleak, and moving, endings I've seen in years.

To me, the movie feels like a small but ingeniously crafted gift.

All of the actors, most notably Winslet, are superb, but the movie belongs to Jackie Earle Haley, a former child actor.

The Prestige is utterly without pretense. It doesn't want to explore epistemological questions about the nature of perception and memory; it just wants to mess with our heads. And as a wily, slightly sadistic chess game of a movie, it succeeds quite nicely.

Babel has great expectations for itself: It wants to be a movie about big ideas and big emotions at the same time. Aided by gorgeous locations and classy trappings (cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto, theme music by Gustavo Santaolalla), it succeeds for the most part.

Martin Campbell (who also directed Pierce Brosnan's first outing as Bond in "Goldeneye"), has chosen to give us a Bond who's both metaphorically and literally stripped bare. Let me take this opportunity to thank him for both.

The performances are so passionate and the characters (even minor ones) so deftly sketched that it's impossible not to get swept up. You watch the battle scenes from behind your hands, just praying that these guys make it.

Written and directed by Wisit Sasanatieng, a commercial director making his first feature film, Tears of the Black Tiger is a technical and aesthetic marvel.

The Italian is an aesthetic gem, but a moral muddle.

To undertake a thriller of this length and scope with no prospect of a morally satisfying resolution, Fincher must have been a little nuts himself. We'll see whether audiences used to the tidy one-hour cases on "CSI" and "Law & Order" will follow him down Zodiac's murky, twisted, and ultimately dead-end street. It may not sound like it from that description, but it's a hell of a ride.

The TV Set is a little wonder of a movie, as smart and sad and true as any comedy I've seen this year.

Really, do we need another dumb action movie to remind us how dumb action movies are?...Yes. We absolutely do.

The first hour of this lean, mean, 95-minute scream machine is so tasty that it redeems the predictable conclusion.

It's one of those zeitgeist-tapping romantic comedies that feels like a generational marker, a "Tootsie" or "The Graduate" for the 21st century.

In moments--the early moments--Sunshine can feel like a new genre classic, albeit one heavily in debt to its predecessors.

Nearly all of the show's minor supporting characters--Moe Szyslak, Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel, Hans Moleman--get to make at least an appearance, though it would have been nice to see larger speaking roles for favorites like Apu and Mr. Smithers.

The great strength of Michael Clayton is that it's no "Erin Brockovich." Rather than a populist tale of class-action triumph, the movie is a grim vision of legal and ethical compromise at the top.

Burton's overall restraint is a welcome surprise. Shorn of his usual camp trappings, the director evokes a sadness beneath every uneasy smile he draws from the audience.

It's a delicate parable, droll rather than funny, wise rather than smart. Eran Kolirin, debuting as a writer-director, has the deadpan sparseness of the Finnish Aki Kaurismaki, but his vision is gentler, less bleak; at moments, the movie is almost sentimental, but the performances save it every time.

When it's idling in neutral, and we're watching Stark putter in his workshop or seduce unsuspecting journalists, Iron Man abounds in that rarest of superpowers: charm.

The feature debut of young Norwegian director Joachim Trier, is as crisp and cool as a swig of Champagne.

Wall-E is an improbable delight, a G-rated crowd-pleaser.

Man on Wire brings back a time when the towers were still symbols of aspiration and possibility.

Hathaway transcends her usual complacency in this role and resists the temptation of using Kym's (and her own) wounded-bird appeal to let the character off the hook.

A stylish, ingeniously constructed bit of hokum, a sparkling trinket of a movie that's as implausible as it is irresistible.

One of the strengths of Cadillac Records, written and directed by Darnell Martin, is that it's a movie about music by someone who genuinely seems to enjoy listening to music.

Despite the movie's many flaws, the two leads' genuine rapport is enough to give the audience a solid contact high.

2012 isn't a bad movie that, out of sheer boredom, you might snicker at once or twice; it's a two-and-a-half hour laugh riot that plays on our expectations of the genre by anticipating and exceeding them.

The richly multilayered picture tends to have a gently immersive effect, akin to a stroll through the world's most expensive diorama.

The most remarkable thing Sugar does is give American viewers a sense of how our country must seem to a newly arrived immigrant, without caricaturing or condescending to either guest or host.

The director, Sacha Gervasi, is a fan first and a documentarian second. If Anvil! has a flaw, it's that it's too enthusiastic, a reverently uncritical valentine to the director's adolescent heroes.

Julie & Julia makes deboning a duck a feminist act and cooking a great meal a creative triumph. The stakes may not be as high as the kill-or-be-killed suspense of a summer action movie, but the sauces are way tastier.

These down moments are fleeting, drowned out by the joyous din of zombie slaying and a scattering of subtler touches, such as Woody Harrelson's shotgun-savant Tallahassee painting a "3" on the side of his various commandeered vehicles, presumably a tribute to NASCAR legend Dale Earnhardt.

Represents a course-correction for Disney's multibillion-dollar princess franchise: It attempts to celebrate the virtues of hard work and pluck, even if the movie itself can feel at times like a lesson rather than an enchantment.

Something between a love story and a religious morality tale. The hauntingly ambiguous last scene, in which Lorna finds a place of temporary respite from the economic forces that have determined so much of her life, may be the saddest happy ending I've ever seen.

Edel's clear-eyed and exhaustively researched account is unique in its refusal to either romanticize or villainize the terrorists. It's a study in the seductive appeal, and inevitable failure, of the attempt to bomb one's way to a better world.

Mopey, draggy, and absurdly self-important, the movie nonetheless twangs at some resonant affective chord. This viewer, at least, was catapulted back to that moment of adolescence when being mopey, draggy, and absurdly self-important felt like a passionate act of liberation.

A wicked black comedy with unexpected emotional resonance, one of the most purely pleasurable movies of the year so far.

Extract seems destined to do minor business at the box office but achieve a kind of immortality as a cult DVD, to be quoted from at parties and passed around to friends. Which may be just fine by its creator--as Beavis and Butt-head have taught us, snickering with your friends in front of the television can is one of life's great joys.

As she's being put through her Oxford-prep paces, Jenny complains about "ticking off boxes," and at times, this film seems to be doing just that: coming-of-age drama, check. Youthful illusions shattered, check. But as with first love, so with the movies: The right girl makes it all worthwhile.

Oddly enough, it's when the action of Ong Bak 2 stops that this funkadelic freakshow shines. The screen is stuffed with a gallery of grotesques, some of Thailand's best character actors, who spend their time bleeding, bellowing, and slurping up eyeballs.

Fish Tank manages to be about exploitation without being exploitative. For my money--and without opening up the "Precious" debate again--it's by far the better movie.

An old-fashioned movie-movie, the kind that's substantial enough to go out to dinner after and discuss all the way through dessert.

Its visual splendor more than makes up for its intellectual poverty.

With a woman-with THIS woman-all the invincible-spy clichés feel fresh and fun again.

A package of cinematic Pop Rocks, a neon-hued, defiantly non-nutritive confection that nonetheless makes you laugh at its sheer bold novelty.

Soul Kitchen is sprawling, undisciplined, raucous, occasionally crass-and so full of life you forgive it everything.

If you're willing to let go of your Hollywood-bred expectations for a movie of this type-spectacular action set pieces, constant pulse-pounding music, a killing every 15 minutes-The American is a great pleasure to watch, an astringent antidote to the loud, frantic action movies that have been clogging our veins all summer.

The Social Network wants to be a social satire, a miniaturist comedy of manners, and a Greek tragedy; it bites off a lot, at times more than it can chew. But even the unmasticated morsels are pretty tasty.

This installment is all about the grown-up kids. The three young leads - especially Emma Watson, who can do more with a still face than any actress her age - are all terrific

The very existence of Four Lions is an act of audacity; the fact that it's also smart, humane, and frequently hilarious is nothing short of a miracle.

Feels fresh and satisfying. Maybe it's the presence of Jason Statham, the British action star who has a physicality like no other actor out there right now.

Fukunaga's vision of Jane Eyre is refreshingly un-Gothic. Though all the story elements are in place for a thunder-on-the-moors-style gloomfest (and though there are, in fact, several thunderstorms on moors), this film is low on Romantic atmospherics and flooded with natural light.

Certified Copy isn't the masterpiece that "Close-Up" was, but it lures the viewer into a comparably labyrinthine thicket of fakeouts, doubles, and assumed identities. If you like movies that induce a pleasurable state of vertigo, this is one of the great discoveries of the year.

The Bill Cunningham captured here is a puckish, eightysomething man with electric energy and a wish to devour all of New York through his camera lens.

This is a grippingly original work, with gorgeous cinematography by Christopher Blauvelt, and the first hour or more achieves something like greatness.

Craven guides us expertly down a series of blind, bloody alleys, a journey that's more pleasurable than frustrating. On account of his steady hand, the last act is as good as could be expected: skillfully conceived and entertaining in its preposterousness.

Submarine isn't a perfect film, but it's a terrific first one.

Like "Anvil!," Sacha Gervasi's 2008 documentary about two lovable, bickering metalheads, Beats, Rhymes & Life is a music documentary with a buddy-movie heart.

It's always hard to predict how a work of art will age over time, but I have the feeling that, like its three young leads, the Harry Potter series will turn out just fine.

Tabloid is the perfect movie for that night when you can't decide whether to see something low- or highbrow. It's seamlessly and satisfyingly both.

Captain America isn't a masterpiece, but it's a solidly crafted, elegant adventure movie that held my attention from start to finish and sent me out into the street energized instead of enervated.

Whereas the original was a work of speculative science fiction - a chin-stroking fable about evolution in the nuclear age - this revisiting of the Planet of the Apes myth is an animal-rights manifesto disguised as a prison-break movie.

If Contagion is a "horror movie," as Soderbergh has described it, then you can think of it as the most believable zombie movie ever made.

Though both highly stylized and highly stylish, Drive isn't hurting for substance. It has rich, complex characters and a storyline that's both emotionally engaging and almost sickeningly suspenseful.

It's to the director's credit, and Pitt's, that Moneyball is anything but bloodless - in its own quiet, unspectacular way, this movie courses with life.

With its restricted one-night timeframe and a setting that rarely expands beyond the walls of the firm, Margin Call can feel like a dramatized version of those ubiquitous 2008 news photos of white men staring in horror at numbers on a screen. But in its best moments, this film reminds us that every one of those pictures contained its own story of compromise, corruption, and ruin.

Certainly the most genteel film Cronenberg has ever made, with period costumes worthy of Merchant/Ivory, no gore, and very little physical violence. But A Dangerous Method doesn't feel like a wimp-out or a sell-out at all. It's a fiercely thoughtful film, a movie of ideas that understands how powerful ideas can be.

Like Statler and Waldorf, older viewers may kvetch and cavil about the details, but when that red velvet curtain goes up, we wouldn't give up our balcony seats for the world.

Young Adult doesn't fully work, but it's still one of the year's most memorable movies.

The film's best moments are the quiet ones in which Oldman's ironically named Smiley provides the story with its wise, unsmiling soul.

Should you see Mission: Impossible-Ghost Protocol? By all means, and in the big, big, biggest theater you can find.

It finds a way to make the play's rich, dense literary language (just before the climactic battle, one character accuses another of "breaking his oath and resolution like/A twist of rotten silk") sound as terse and urgent as the dialogue in a tightly plotted action thriller.

I pretty much loved this movie from start to finish - risible implausibilities, insufficiently explained premise and all. An admirably spare survival thriller, The Grey (nice title!) abounds in qualities that are rare in movies of its type. It's quiet, contemplative, and almost haiku-like in its simplicity.

The ultimate praise given to sports movies is always, "Even if you don't care about sport X, you'll care about these characters," and that's certainly true of Undefeated (I don't, and I did).

It's particularly exciting to get to see an inventive underground work like This Is Not a Film in the wake of Iran's first-ever Oscar win for Asghar Farhadi's great film "A Separation." It's becoming clear that the blossoming of Iranian cinema, which has been going on now for at least 20 years, is too strong a force for the government censors to contain.

Though its story may sound formulaic on paper, please take my word for it: Monsieur Lazhar, written and directed by Philippe Falardeau, is a sharply intelligent, deeply sad, and not remotely sappy film about both teaching and collective grief.

The thoughtful and leisurely paced Marley is an exemplary music documentary in almost every way - but the area in which it falls short is an important one. Like a surprisingly large number of films about musicians (whether biopic or documentary), this one is curiously resistant to letting the audience hear its subject's songs in their entirety.

Moonrise Kingdom is fun: a gorgeously shot, ingeniously crafted, über-Andersonian bonbon that, even in its most irritatingly whimsical moments, remains an effective deliverer of cinematic pleasure.

This elegantly hand-drawn caper doesn't have a lot to it - a little girl and her cat help break up a Parisian crime ring, un point c'est tout. But it moves to a different rhythm than the animated spectacles we're used to - it's sparer, less hectic, less cute - and the difference feels welcome and refreshing.

It's a rollicking children's entertainment, gorgeously animated and wittily cast, and also an unusually astute exploration of the complex bond between mothers and daughters, a relationship that's often either elided or sentimentalized in children's literature and film.

Compliance examines, among other things, how misplaced faith in authority can lead to abuse on a systemic scale. It's a deeply moral movie about the failure of morality, as grueling to watch as it is necessary.

The Master is above all a love story between Joaquin Phoenix's damaged WWII vet, Freddie Quell, and Philip Seymour Hoffmann's charismatic charlatan, Lancaster Dodd. And that relationship is powerful and funny and twisted and strange enough that maybe that's all the movie needs to be about.

This frank, funny, tender film both asks and receives more from its sex scenes than any movie I've seen in a long time.

Holy Motors, a movie that's beyond weird, and beyond beautiful.

In the quietly devastating Amour, Haneke's cool, dispassionate gaze feels, for the first time, something like love.

Lincoln does sometimes get a little sappy around the edges. Though his project here is clearly one of conscious self-restraint, Spielberg can't resist the occasional opportunity for patriotic tear-jerking, usually signaled by a swell of John Williams' symphonic score. But in between, there are long stretches that are as quiet, contemplative, and austere as anything Spielberg has ever done.

A gleefully crummy buddy comedy that uses horror-movie conventions as catapults to hurl the audience down one "whoa, dude!" narrative wormhole after another.

Happy People's images of the Taiga, while often breathtaking, come from the standard visual language of nature documentary: in between interviews with villagers, cutaways to icicles hanging from branches or dawn breaking over an expanse of snow. It's Herzog's inventive use of voice-over that elevates the film above an extremely well-researched episode of "Nature."

Like Someone in Love is a movie that never quite lets you through to the other side of the glass, but it’s dazzling to watch whatever drifts by on the surface.

Based on a horrifying real-life case that took place in the Moldavia region of Romania in 2005, Beyond the Hills can be seen as both a critique of patriarchal religious systems and an allegory about the tension between secularism and faith (as well as a precisely and painfully observed portrait of one particular friendship).

Because I'm a sucker--I was entertained...The script is good at making you think that it has better cards than it really does. And the actors constitute a royal flush--OK, OK, enough with the poker metaphors.

Its structure is repetitive, but each scene begins with a joyous blast of comic energy...A hoot.

Once the premise had been established and the leads began to interact, I stopped totting up the inanities and had a good time.

Fitfully haunting and impressive: a little less loitery and opaque and it might have been a classic.

It's square, stiff, and in places cheesy; it's also authentically harrowing -- and blood-showered, blood-drowned.

Smoothly narrated and is packed with some wonderful quirks. Nonetheless, it could have taken more to heart the lovely paradox it reserves for Jessica: that we most become ourselves in our capacity to surprise ourselves.

At his best (Woo)'s too promiscuous with the slow motion; and once those doves start fluttering in he enters a new dimension in self-parody.

Groove offers the most wholesome vision of orgiastic oneness imaginable -- it's a raver's version of "The Love Boat."

Quite likable -- even sometimes, with the squeezable Zellweger its principal object, lovable.

It's only fitting that we emerge from Series 7 feeling both entertained and implicated.

Faithless is almost entirely insight-free. Bergman gives no indication that he understands the link between his alter ego's "retroactive jealousy" and compulsive womanizing.

I fear that the cozy domestic ending will leave audiences disappointed, convinced that they've seen something smaller and less momentous than they have.