A masterpiece, but of a unique kind... A gorgeously filmed, supremely well-acted, intricately written film noir about now.

It's a long time since I've heard a press screening audience applaud a foreign film, but then it's a long time since a French movie has been as funny as The Dinner Game.

You don't need to have seen a lot of art films to love The Diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky. All it takes is compassionate curiosity and perhaps some lingering memory of the world as a child experiences it.

Cinema Paradiso converts you to the credo that art can indeed be holy.

May be less than the sum of its parts, but its parts are more impressive than most other wholes around.

Legs flashing and eyes smouldering and brain scintillating, Fiorentino serves up each facet with venomous glee - it's a performance that mixes a main course of Bette Davis with a side order of La Femme Nikita, and it's mesmerizing.

Great art is both immediately accessible and eternally elusive, having at its centre a powerful simplicity that speaks to anyone who cares to listen, that rewards every interpretation while embracing none. The Piano is great art.

It comes eerily close to duplicating the experience of reading while, at the same time, remaining very much a motion picture. That's a rare, perhaps even unprecedented, achievement.

It's one modern film worthy of being called a contemporary classic.

A classic... Edward Scissorhands is a sharp salute to the oddball in all of us.

David Cronenberg's gelid masterpiece.

Simultaneously a tough, haunting, lyrical, hopeful film, and the tears it wants us to shed are an alloy of sorrow and joy - cleansing tears, the kind that alter the rules and dignify the game.

Eyes Wide Shut still towers above most of the movies out there, immersing the viewer in a web of emotional complexity, at once raw and personal and, at times, theatrically overcooked.

In short, Batman is terrific - funny, smart and sensitive too, the perfect cinematic date.

No so-called serious gangster film has ever been more fun, or less dangerous, or more intrinsically feminist, than GoodFellas. Even "I Married the Mob" was scarier.

At best, Leaving Las Vegas is pure alchemy -- it makes of flawed humanity a hymn, and of forlorn hope a beacon.

This is the master at the top of his form, his erratic genius harnessed and everything clicking, everything flowing, a fresh creation from a mature artist.

Pulp Fiction is at least three movies rolled into one, and they're all scintillating.

Easily among the top 10 films made last year.

May be the best war movie ever made...Different is Kubrick's artistry and control, and his almost perverse, but philosophically progressive, refusal to impart to chaos a coherent narrative contour.

A great movie... A pop epiphany, marking that commercially creative point where the power of Hollywood meets the purity of myth.

British humour at its eclectic best, a deliciously heady mix of dry wit and ribald farce.

There's a giddy, absurd charm to the story, in which the strange setting only enhances the comfortable familiarity of the narrative and characters.

Take nothing seriously - not the action, not the gore, not the plot, not the theme. Instead, view Desperado as it's meant to be seen - a comedy - and you're in for an unalloyed treat; heck, you're in for one of the funniest flicks of the year.

The best thriller of 2003 was made in 1979.

It is superbly executed and, for all its pitilessness, it's an intelligent dramatization of the impact that consumerist values have had on the psyche of the North American middle class at the end of the 20th century.

If nothing else can be said of Dogville, it's a film that is like nothing else.

The best Canadian beer movie since "Strange Brew," and the best 1930s musical of the year, The Saddest Music in the World is the kind of exhaustingly delirious film that only Winnipeg director Guy Maddin could make.

Before Sunrise is a film that first startles you with its simplicity, then bowls you over with its complexity.

A fantastic film.

This remarkable analysis of a decade when American society lost its moral compass is both brutally honest and lyrically compassionate.

Once in a rare while a film comes along that is boldly original, communicates an important idea in an elegantly simple fashion and happens to be highly entertaining. Such is the case with Moolaadé.

It is a work of great beauty that rewards continued visits.

A great film about a good man.

A lean, stripped-down and unapologetically cinematic take on Shakespeare's work, an adaptation designed at each turn to diminish the mechanics of the comedy and to explore the depths of the pathos.

Poised, delicate, powerful, hovering between poignancy and pealing laughter, it is a feast formed by skill and serendipity.

Estimates of the movie's costs range between $35-and $70-million; whatever the price, it was not too much to pay. As gods go, Superman is one of the godliest; his movie is one of the best.

The result is a genre picture that transcends the genre, that gleefully embraces four qualities alien to the bulk of its noisy brethren: (1) thematic texture; (2) kinetic grace; (3) visuals that toy with the mind even while dazzling the eye; and (3) performers who are permitted to act like something other than human wicks for the pyrotechnical bombast.

Delicate, intelligent and honest.

But Turteltaub surprises us. He has the kind of unerring comic touch - easily able to carry his audience from smart dialogue to heart-tugging emotion to something awfully close to slapstick - that should serve the movie world well.

The picture goes exactly where the prose does, enticing all of us, kids and adults and atheists and believers alike, down below the brittle surface of our cold logic and into a richer world of imaginative wonder.

Director James Cameron always works on a mega- canvas, yet he's brought off something unique here.

Consequently, Ephron is forced to shape and integrate the twin halves of the picture, and she does a splendid job - the intercutting is always fluid and never mechanical. Better yet, the script keeps surprising us, setting up stock situations and then pulling away from a stock treatment.

Free Willy (for some strange reason, that tiny imperative just gives me the giggles) is a family picture that stays safely within the haven of a cozy formula, yet does a whole lot of inventive work in the process.

Few directors working today make films with the grace and magisterial power of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's best work.

Powered by a Scottish writer, a Scottish director, and the rugged beauty of the Scottish Highlands, this is clearly a labour of love, and the passion gets right up on the screen.

Dreamgirls is one of the best movie musicals in memory.

Children of Men is a nativity story for the ages, this or any other.

This is like no movie you've seen before, a haunting mixture of horror, history and fantasy that works simultaneously on every level.

The exceptional story of a low-level diplomat who had a 20-year affair with a man he thought was a woman, is, in Cronenberg's hands, turned into a beguiling masterpiece on the question of self-deception. [01 Oct 1993]

Kramer vs. Kramer is one of the most sensitive and least judgmental film about relationships ever made in the United States.... One of the important films. [15 Dec 1979]

Terms of Endearment is the rare commercial picture that sets audiences to laughing hysterically and crying unashamedly, sometimes within consecutive seconds, and then shoos them out of the theatre in contented emotional exhaustion. [23 Nov 1983]

Delightfully inventive, consistently funny, clever but not slick, brisk yet never antic, Quick Change is the perfect cinematic date - a summer film for all seasons, the kind of sharp-edged picture that gives lightweight a good name. [14 Jul 1990, p.C3]

Kurt Russell has never seemed more clever, Mel Gibson more vulnerable nor Michelle Pfeiffer more goddess-like. Once upon a time, before the pictures got small and the hills were obscured by smog, the Hollywood sign read: "Hollywoodland." That was back when Tequila Sunrise, an intelligent, escapist epic for adults, wouldn't have seemed the anomaly it seems today. [2 Dec 1988, p.C1]

The relationship between man and beast develops slowly and mystically - the island interlude, utterly without dialogue, lasts 50 minutes, and is one of the most sustained, lyrical, rapturous sequences in the history of motion pictures, a visual symphony whose beauty cannot be oversold. [15 Mar 1980]

This is an exhilarating picture, the kind that strips away smug complacencies and exposes raw nerves to a bright light. [14 Sep 1990, p.C4]

The Coen brothers adaptation is impeccable, a perfect mirror of McCarthy's prose – sparse, suspenseful, probing and profoundly disturbing.

The adjective “inspirational” doesn't do justice to the quality of Schnabel's film.

Mixing Chaplinesque delicacy with the architectural grandeur of a Stanley Kubrick film, director Andrew Stanton recycles film history and makes something fresh and accessible from it without pandering to a young audience.

A miraculous, American-made Hindi film that is every bit as tranquil as the blue-green reservoir that serves as its abiding metaphor.

Intriguing, disturbing, uplifting evocation. In fact, to watch this film is to engage in participatory art -- for better and for worse, through sickness and in health, we're drawn deeply in.

As refreshing as it is to find a movie that leaves you smiling, it's something much rarer to discover a film that makes you think about what a commitment to happiness really means.

The story may stretch credibility until it's ready to pop its seams, but Patel conveys the simple confidence of a prodigy who has learned everything important in life, except how to lie.

Hunger -- the disturbing, provocative, brilliant feature debut from British director Steve McQueen -- does for modern film what Caravaggio did to Renaissance painting.

This is where the movie excels. In the classic neo-realist tradition, it's scant in plot yet rich in mood and character, offering us a revealing hint here, a poignant glimpse there, with each revelation filtered through Michelle Williams's superbly muted performance, all the more moving for being so restrained.

An unforgettable portrayal of the unglamorous gangster life, which is often short and never sweet.

There's no redemption here. Indeed, if anything is redemptive about Katyn , it's the fact of the film itself.

Turns out to be one of the most compelling, finely orchestrated and oddly enchanting films of the year so far.

Thrilling and beautifully crafted.

At heart, though, every moviegoer can recognize a love story, no matter how unusual the context.

Funny, fascinating, utterly unclassifiable film.

An uncommonly tender and observant documentary on the phenomenon that is "A Chorus Line."

A little bit of "Crime and Punishment" and a whole lot of "The Postman Always Rings Twice," Revanche, the Austrian candidate for last year's Best Foreign Language Film, is a surprisingly unruffled tale of love, thievery, murder and revenge.

It is filmmaker Assayas who is the star here. France's most important contemporary director has created a work of almost magisterial calm.

There's something about this story, and this war, that brings out the stripped-down conceptual artist in her (Bigelow): Against blank canvases of desert sand and rubble, explosive wires are linked to nerve ends, and everything that matters depends on the twitch of a muscle or a finger on a button.

This is a lovely, quirky and not a little poignant film from Agnès Varda.

Hornby is a fine craftsman and his dialogue sparkles, though occasionally the scenes are too calculated.

Even in a season of apocalyptic films, these facts are really, really scary.

"The Hurt Locker" may be getting all the attention and awards but The Messenger is at least as good and perhaps, given its delicate handling of a sensitive subject, even better.

A simultaneously realistic and absurdist examination of police work.

One caveat: At the risk of sounding sexist, let me say A Prophet is an unreservedly male film. Female characters are few and far between, and when they do appear, they pretty much fall into either one of two categories – les mamans ou les putains.

An impressionistic work that is perfectly in tune with its subject’s hallucinatory music.

The wonder is that the film balances its many genres, from the thorns of murder to the bloom of romance to the thickets of politics, with such easy grace.

Dive into a masterpiece.

Observant and funny and thoughtful too, powered exclusively by vérité footage without a word of narration, Babies is William Blake’s Infant Joy brought to rich cinematic life.

The effect is Chaplinesque if Chaplin had the latest in gadgetry, because the entire picture is also shot in 3-D that, for once, puts all 3 of the Ds to imaginative use.

A preening terrorist for the Me generation, his primary drive was vanity and his main professional asset an absence of empathy.

They really pulled out all the stops on this one.

Extracting big drama out of small events is Mike Leigh's forte, and with his latest little masterpiece, Another Year, the English director pushes himself to the extreme.

One of the most irresistible films of the year so far.

This outing not only doesn't disappoint; it surpasses high expectations. This is a terrific, smartly designed adolescent adventure, visually rich, narratively satisfying, and bound to resonate for years to come.

Detective Dee is the action flick of the year, a two-hour epic that blows the "Pirates of the Caribbean" to the Bermuda Triangle.

What elevates Foy's impressive first feature (he also served as editor and composer of the dark, whimsical score) above, say, your average "unsolved mystery" TV episode, is the emotional connection he gradually builds between Duerr and the elusive creator of the Toynbee tiles.

The most gripping war movie you'll see this year, We Were Here tells first-hand the story of how AIDS attacked San Francisco, killing more than 15,000. Whole peer groups were happy, healthy, and then dead in months.

The story of a man afflicted with fearful visions, Take Shelter is a film that's hitting the right apocalyptic trumpet call at the right time.

Le Havre, offers the director's usual humour, pitch-perfect acting and compassionate message, with a Gallic twist that should win new converts.

Chandor's shrewdest bit of business is figuring out how to make an A-list movie with a $3.5-million budget. Solution: buy low, sell high. Hire last decade's A-list – Spacey, Irons and Demi Moore – and give them their best parts in years.

Heartwarming, tragic and, at times, hilariously funny drama.