The Best of Youth doesn't have a boring millisecond. It isn't an art film, with longueurs; it's a mini-series with the sweep of a classic novel, with tons of plot.

As the ghouls evolve toward humanity and the humans toward ghouldom, we can appreciate Romero for using horror to show us How We Live Now, and How We're Living Dead now, too.

Remarkable.

It's the human struggle that makes this a sci-fi masterpiece.

Audiard's take is fevered, immediate, and hopeful--a story of a man recovering his soul. The most intense and compelling sections of The Beat are almost word for word from "Fingers" (albeit translated into French), but this beat changes everything.

This is a dazzling movie, yet some people (not kids, but maybe their parents) will be put off by its Grand Guignol ghoulishness.

It's hugely entertaining, it's spectacularly acted, and it pricks you in all kinds of places. Maybe the best thing is to see it and let it bug you, too.

The ending is madly unsatisfying--yet dead perfect. This is a remarkable film.

Is Fiennes miscast? Perhaps. He's a high-strung, somewhat clammy actor--not the first to spring to mind for this warmly self-effacing plodder. But he's remarkably fine.

Face/Off is such a blast that at times I forgot I was watching a John Woo movie.

The movie is so Burtonesque that it verges on self-parody--but it's fun and stunningly beautiful anyway.

Hoffman goes beyond the surface mannerisms and diction. He disappears into Capote.

This Pride & Prejudice (ampersand and all) a joy to behold.

An entertaining, emotional, and surprisingly intimate movie--an epic saga of fauns and talking (Cockney) beavers and evil sorceresses and triumphal resurrections and massive, sweeping battles that nonetheless feels … small.

A spectacular three-hankie tragic love story--sometimes dumb and often clunky and always pretty cornball, but just about irresistible.

Who's this movie for, again? No matter: It's impossible to find more joy in the dark at the moment.

Wrenching new documentary about returning veterans, may not single-handedly reverse the trend of ignoring Iraq docs in theatrical release, but it should.

Helen Mirren is a goddess of an actress, and her Queen Elizabeth is maddening, hilarious, and deeply human, galumphing around the Balmoral estate in a tartan raincoat and waders as the Britain she thought she knew crumbles around her.

It may be the most visually imaginative Shakespeare film since Akira Kurosawa's "Ran", and certainly one of the more operatic Hollywood creations of recent years.

Not one of your pass-the-popcorn date movies. It's a howl of rage.

Penélope Cruz, who's been so painful to watch in English-language roles over the past few years, reminds us that she really can act; she just can't act speaking phonetic dialogue. In her native language she's witty, wry, and elegant.

For all its flaws, Dreamgirls is what this holiday season needs. It's a big, fat, luscious movie in which no one is tortured, murdered, or mutilated (honestly, how many recent films can you say that about?).

The movie pops up out of nowhere, grabs you in its big, messy tentacles, and drags you down into murky depths, where social satire coexists with slapstick, and B-movie clichés mutate into complex metaphors.

Seeing Killer of Sheep is an experience as simple and indelible as watching Bresson's "Pickpocket" or De Sica's "Bicycle Thieves" for the first time. Despite its aesthetic debt to European art cinema, Burnett's film is quintessentially American in its tone and subject matter. If there's any modern-day equivalent for the movie's matter-of-fact gaze on the ravages of urban poverty, it's the HBO series "The Wire."

You don't need to be an exploitation fanboy to appreciate the energy, imagination, and spirit with which Rodriguez and Tarantino pay homage to the cheapo cinema they love.

Though the movie's at least 20 minutes too long, it's deeply satisfying, full of old-school buddy banter and the kind of action sequences that make you burst out laughing at their sheer audacity.

David Cronenberg's elegant treatise on the metaphysics of violence.

Lust, Caution is both a cannily constructed spy thriller and a grim kind of love story, but it harbors no illusions about the transformative potential of either revolutionary violence or sexual passion.