Rendered deeply moving by the director's peerless capacity to combine humor and compassion with honesty and despair.

Mercilessly satiric yet good-natured, this enormously entertaining slam dunk quite possibly is the most resonant Hollywood saga since the days of "Sunset Blvd." and "The Bad and the Beautiful."

This reworking of a popular Hong Kong picture pulses with energy, tangy dialogue and crackling performances from a fine cast.

Though targeted at tots, Ponyo may appeal most to jaded adults thirsty for wondrous beauty and unpackaged innocence

James captures candid counseling sessions and heated tussles with equal dynamism, but never quite earns his 164-minute running time.

Steve Guttenberg, Daniel Stern, Mickey Rourke, Kevin Bacon, Paul Reiser and Timothy Daly are terrific as the friends as are Ellen Barkin and Kathryn Dowling as the two females involved with different group members.

A consummate nail-biter that never lags, it leaves you breathless from the chase yet anxious for the next bit of mayhem or clever plot twist.

A script as fresh and distinctive as any produced in the States in recent memory.

The picture laudably adopts an intimate, personal approach to a subject -- hardworking Chinese garment workers -- that's been covered in more hectoring fashion elsewhere.

Art aficionados the world over will want to catch the pic, which PBS airs later this month; given the impact Warhol had on the world, it's a must for culture vultures.

A stunning debut that finds its dandelion-haired heroine fighting rising tides and fantastic creatures in a mythic battle against modernity.

This eloquent study of loneliness and postmodern drift likely will be received with more admiration than rapture by the helmer's followers. But Juliette Binoche's turn as a harried single mom and pic's enlivening portrait of domestic rupture make this a highly accessible Hou.

A dense, emotionally satisfying portrait of a man, a time and a place.

Destined to rank as one of the major achievements in American documentary, the "Paradise Lost" project comes to a presumed end with Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory.

A pounding, pulsating thriller that provides an almost constant adrenaline surge for nearly two hours.

A sensitive, intimate, enormously touching drama.

Surprisingly lacks a feeling of personal urgency and insight that would have made it a distinctive, even unique contribution to the considerable number of films that deal with the war in general and Holocaust in particular.

Darkly comic, vastly entertaining and utterly original.

Belzberg's unsparing camera sometimes portrays a level of cruelty that tests viewers' tolerance, but her fearless aesthetic is also a measure of the film's brilliant indictment of any society that can allow its most vulnerable to slip into oblivion.

Superbly cast drama, in which the lives and emotional arcs of six people -- four Turks and two Germans -- criss-cross through love and tragedy.

Jenkins brings a rigor, intelligence and eye for the slightly absurd to the proceedings that is instantly disarming.

Visceral, torn-from-the-memory filmmaking that packs every punch except one to the heart, Lebanon is the boldest and best of the recent mini-wave of Israeli pics ("Beaufort," "Waltz With Bashir") set during conflicts between the two countries.

Conveys enough of the stirring true-life drama recounted in Butler's other Shackleton docu to satisfy ticketbuyers who demand substance even in larger-than-life entertainment.

One of the assets of Stranger Things is its air of mystery, and the actors give the indelible impression that they have much locked away inside.

To call Lake Bell a magnetic, intelligent, blithely screwball leading lady in the Carole Lombard tradition might be selling her short. With In a World… , a rollicking laffer about the cutthroat voiceover biz in Los Angeles, she proves herself a comedy screenwriter to be reckoned with.

A raucously entertaining postmodern survey of guerrilla street art that appears to be one thing, only to fold back on itself and examine would-be filmmaker Thierry Guetta instead.

In his most accessible and spontaneous picture, ranking Iranian helmer Jafar Panahi reveals unsuspected comic gifts barely visible in his dramatic festival winners "The White Balloon," "The Circle" and "Crimson Gold."

Los Angeles may be the most photographed city in the world, but it has never have been captured with such complex layers of meaning and fascination as in Thom Andersen's remarkable Los Angeles Plays Itself.

Uproarious. Line for line, minute to minute, writer-director Judd Apatow's latest effort is more explosively funny, more frequently, than nearly any other major studio release in recent memory.

Ghobadi in this pic displays a complete command of his art as he shifts between -- and even blends -- wrenching tragedy and amusing comedy.

A vastly amusing satire of heavy metal bands.

A sublime, witty, gritty and transcendental movie reflecting one man's life journey.

An instant ancillary classic for music fan.

Carey Mulligan shines in a captivating performance.

A powerfully intimate domestic drama, Ordinary People represents the height of craftsmanship across the board.

An inventive, meaty distillation of Le Carre's 1974 novel, picture turns hero George Smiley's hunt for a mole within Blighty's MI6 into an incisive examination of Cold War ethics, rich in both contempo resonance and elegiac melancholy.

Avoiding rote inspirational notes as well as boyz-in-the-hood violence, scrupulously low-key drama nonetheless builds to a powerful impact.

It's a thrilling, at times brilliant piece of staging that never forgets the emotional pull of either the tragic personal tale or the ramifications of history.

In the darkly humorous Fargo, iconoclastic filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen manage the precarious balancing act of respecting genre conventions and simultaneously pushing them to an almost surrealistic extreme. Very funny stuff.

Curry's courage in the face of police harassment and what seems a very real threat of something worse is amazing.

Tremendous emotional force and uncompromising honesty.

Films exist for different reasons, and the indisputable raison d'etre for About Schmidt is to showcase Jack Nicholson giving a master class in the art of screen acting.

The concert film has never looked or sounded classier than Jonathan Demme's superbly crafted Neil Young: Heart of Gold.

King of the Hill has all the rich satisfactions of a fine novel.

Pacing is on the button, and the film moves inexorably, without any flat moments, toward the suspenseful, if morally indefensible, finale.

Despite some imaginative packaging too often proves a drag in more than the sartorial sense. Taking Mitchell's sketchy book far too seriously, the movie grows leaden between its terrific songs.

A beautiful, complex work that challenges viewers to mentally sift interior and exterior journeys.

This deliberately paced psychological drama builds an ever-tightening knot of tension around an excellent Michael Shannon, here playing a family man slowly driven mad by apocalyptic visions that could be paranoid, prophetic or both.

Broinowski commits the crucial error of hanging around way too long once all key questions have been answered.

As usual, Sokurov's unhurried pacing will test the patience of more fidgety viewers, although the script is more accessible than some of his recent efforts.

A rough, gritty, often scabrously humorous tribute.

Rarely has a book sprung so vividly to life, but also worked so enthrallingly in pure movie terms, as with Atonement, Brit helmer Joe Wright’s smart, dazzlingly upholstered adaptation of Ian McEwan’s celebrated 2001 novel.

Though he's sure to deny it, Alexandra is Alexander Sokurov's most directly political work for years. Featuring a performance of monumental depth by opera legend Galina Vishnevskaya, pic presents war for what it is: brutal, crushing, and ugly, and yet Sokurov doesn't lens any battles.

On almost every level, there's never quite been a monster movie like The Host. Egregiously subverting its own genre while still delivering shocks at a pure genre level, and marbled with straight-faced character humor that constantly throws the viewer off balance.

Jeanne Moreau turns in a neat bit as a moll and Dary as the inarticulate aging Romeo friend is memorable.

Reveals Soderbergh in peak form, as he endows Leonard’s postmodern yarn with a meticulously detailed mise en scene that helps each member of his terrific ensemble soar.

This often hilarious, irreverent and offbeat comedy is the most coherent young Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar has limned thus far.

But despite its remarkably intimate footage of war and loss, Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington's documentary suffers from the same problem as the ongoing U.S. drama in Afghanistan: a lack of narrative coherence.

Result is pure-grade art cinema destined primarily for the delectation of Malick partisans and adventurous arthouse-goers.

This first-rate multicamera transcript of a terrific show should delight musical fans (and many who think they aren't) as a niche broadcast item.

Working on a richer and more intricate canvas than she's previously attempted, Kelly Reichardt has pulled off a rare thing with Meek's Cutoff -- a low-budget period Western with a bracing feminist spin.

Richard Chamberlain is highly effective as a young lawyer caught up in a case of an aborigine murdered by some others in town.

The definitive screen chronicle to date of homosexual persecution under the Third Reich.

Demonstrates the impossibility of separating the private from the public dimensions of politics, and the pain involved in trying to account for behavior that cannot withstand rational examination.

Both fascinates and horrifies with its bold assertions about what it means to be a woman under a cruel, institutionalized patriarchy.

After a promising opening, Halloween becomes just another maniac-on-the-loose suspenser. However, despite the prosaic plot, director John Carpenter has timed the film's gore so that the 93-minute item is packed with enough thrills.

The film is traditionally and effectively made; it also is superbly acted.

Audaciously giving itself license to do whatever it wants, Leos Carax's narratively unhinged, beautifully shot and frequently hilarious Holy Motors coheres -- arguably, anyway -- into a vivid jaunt through the auteur's cinematic obsessions.

Marked by some powerful scenes, fine performances and colorful dialogue, this talented directorial debut by actor-writer Billy Bob Thornton has its effectiveness diluted by serious overlength and a rather monotonous, unmodulated tone.

Largely thanks to the snappy editing, short scenes and a strong cast led by a matronly Deveuve and Amalric's enjoyable perf as the black sheep of the family, A Christmas Tale never devolves into a tedious two-and-a-half hours of self-examination. But it also never goes very far, either.

The burning topic of Muslim (mis)representation in U.S. media is not well served by Michael Singh’s amateurish and ill-defined docu Valentino’s Ghost.

The excitement, majesty and extraordinary human accomplishment of the American lunar program of the '60s and early '70s is rousingly captured in In the Shadow of the Moon.

Slow as molasses but every bit as rich.

Though it may feel undernourished to the faithful, Winnipeg is an easily digestible meal, for the uninitiated and fans alike.

Picture more than delivers on the action front -- not in bang-for-your-buck spectacle but in the kind of gritty, doculike sequences that haul viewers out of their seats and alongside the main protags.

In what's essentially a six-hander, the casting is aces. All actors turn in fine, naturalistic perfs, but it would be remiss not to remark on 83-year-old Thanheiser's profoundly moving turn as the grandfather.

Enormously satisfying, superbly crafted.

Moonrise Kingdom represents a sort of non-magical Neverland -- that momentous instant when the world can seem so small and a naive crush can feel all-consuming.

Looks and sounds wonderful, and while more information about these giants of African-Latin music might have been welcome, the music's the thing.

A gloriously cinematic documentay of epic, poetic sadness.

A wonderfully acted, acutely observed psychological drama.

An extraordinary performance by vet thesp Yolande Moreau in the title role.

It doesn't make for involving drama, unless the audience is already invested in the subjects' fortunes. Thus, 49 Up will have more appeal for long-time followers than newcomers.

Enormously entertaining, Broadcast News is an inside look at the personal and professional lives of three TV journlists.

Brolin's work is superlatively expressive of the inchoate impulses roiling inside his sorry character. But good as most of the cast is, the show belongs squarely to Penn.

A gem-like, almost hypnotic, tale of an older man's obsession with a young woman.

All the meticulousness, intelligence, taste and superior This curious, cloistered piece... is continuously absorbing but lacks the emotional resonance that would have made it completely satisfying.

As a tyro auteur, Tanovich has a heavy-handed way of delineating characters and situations that makes this well-meaning film awfully familiar at times.

Neither pure masala musical nor pure masala meller, Lagaan is an involving, easily digestible hunk of pure entertainment that could be the trigger for Bollywood's long-awaited crossover to non-ethnic markets.

An accomplished marriage of elaborate style and content.

An arthouse film par excellence, a consummately made study of loneliness and frustration.

A blazing, cinematic comic book, full of virtuoso moviemaking, terrific momentum, solid performances and a compelling story.

Along with the moral lesson, Nguyen remembers to give auds some pleasures, including the exquisitely chosen soundtrack of African folk and pop music, Nicolas Bolduc's cinematography and the very artful use of sound throughout.

Somewhat haphazardly organized yet fascinatingly detailed and enriched by the candor and dignity of its shockingly deprived interview subjects.

This full-bodied adaptation of Dennis Lehane's involved and involving 2001 bestselling crime novel about old friends in Boston's working-class Irish neighborhood finds Clint Eastwood near the top of his directorial game with a cast of first-rate actors.

A surprise, a delight and a whimsical experiment.

A family ensembler of utter simplicity, Oliver Assayas' Summer Hours is a salutory (and belated) reminder that, as with his earlier "Cold Water" and "Late August, Early September," some of this writer-director's best work comes in modest packages.

In a genre infamous for loose ends, this thinking man's thriller marshals action, romance and a dose of very dark comedy toward a stunning payoff.

Picture's dour take on the dehumanizing process of medical treatment is leavened by black humor and dialogue that always rings true.

This spirited and often very funny lark accomplishes something that most films in the bygone Hollywood studio era used to do but is remarkably rare in today's world of niche markets: It offers entertainment equally to viewers from 4 to 104.

This enjoyable French pic welds together drama, melodrama and comedy.

A beautifully nuanced study in friendship and the irretrievability of the past.

Wryly comic, sometimes heartbreaking and altogether original film about a thirtysomething Angeleno who pays a visit to his aging New York parents and finds himself unwilling or unable to leave.

But the filmmakers have invigorated and enriched the story through the use of a thousand details, a strong sense of time and place, outstanding characterizations and a display of energy and cinematic flair that marks an advance on "My Left Foot."

A rock-ribbed sense of committed, personal cinema and a core belief in people being able to pull themselves out of misery supports Ballast, an extraordinary debut by editor-writer-director Lance Hammer.

Peopled with superbly drawn, attractive characters smoothly integrated into a well-turned, low-tricks plotline, Volver may rep Almodovar's most conventional piece to date, but it is also his most reflective, a subdued, sometimes intense and often comic homecoming that celebrates the pueblo and people that shaped his imagination.

It is generally successful on all artistic levels, propelled by the best-selling Erich Segal novel written from the original screenplay.

As with his previous pics about the brood, Dutch-Indonesian helmer Leonard Retel Helmrich deploys an expressionistic, quasi-soap-opera approach to produce striking results, thanks especially to use of Steadicam. But the protagonists seem to be playing to the cameras more this time round, making "Stars" a less charming effort than earlier installments.

A borderline pretentious, overly inflated picture.

A mesmerizing thriller that will grip audiences from first scene to last.

Wang has made a dramatically confident move into the mainstream on his own terms with highly congenial material.

Nearly every detail sources directly back to Kaui Hart Hemmings' sensitively crafted novel, and yet, Payne's triumph is in striking the right tone -- and knowing what to leave unsaid.

The wrenching tale has something for anyone who likes their melodrama spiked with palpable tension and genuine suspense.

Mike Leigh's mellowest work yet, and his most purely entertaining.

Competent journeyman writer-helmer Charles Sturridge ("Brideshead Revisited") and his overqualified thesp ensemble steer a steady course between dogged fidelity to Eric Knight's sentimental original novel and modern auds' need for a little humorous bite with the barking.

A heady spirit of spontaneity permeates the proceedings, suggesting the entire pic, much like the concert it documents, was conceived, planned and completed in a single burst of creative enthusiasm.

A powerful statement about the social oppression of women in today's Iran.

It's hard to walk away unaffected from this heartfelt, well-researched, feature-length documentary.

One of Caine's meatiest roles, and he handles it with power, humanity and remarkable emotional fluidity; from the opening moments, an enormous amount comes through his eyes alone.

A dazzlingly lensed, highly stylized meditation on heroism.

Crucially for such an elaborately dressed production, the characters all come thoroughly alive with their ready wits and pulsing emotions, overcoming the two-century gap with seeming effortlessness.

As beautiful as it is unrevealing, James Longley's Iraq in Fragments rests on a debatable but firm premise -- that the embattled country is irrevocably separated by its three dominant groups, Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds -- but brings back nothing journalistically substantial from the war front .

Eco-activist documentaries don't get much more compelling than The Cove, an impassioned piece of advocacy filmmaking that follows "Flipper" trainer-turned-marine crusader Richard O'Barry in his efforts to end dolphin slaughter in Taiji, Japan.

If John Cassavetes had directed a script by Eric Rohmer, the result might have looked and sounded like Mutual Appreciation.

Though it sounds like an offbeat idea even for horror fans, the tech work is so well done that it could disarm unwary buffs attracted by the campy title.

Exquisitely made love story.

Ever-youthful in his looks and energy, Bridges now stands as one of Hollywood's great old pros, incapable of making a false move.

An astonishing work of studio artifice, A Little Princess is that rarest of creations, a children's film that plays equally well to kids and adults.

A powerful, heartfelt and funny documentary that serves as a respectful nod to the aging generation of WWII survivors.

All but stealing the film is Cooper, who seizes a rare opportunity as an extroverted, rather than buttoned-up, character to bust loose like an uncaged alligator.

Avatar is all-enveloping and transporting, with Cameron & Co.'s years of R&D paying off with a film that, as his work has done before, raises the technical bar and throws down a challenge for the many other filmmakers toiling in the sci-fi/fantasy realm.

Though lacking the sensationalistic elements of a movie like "Kids", Dollhouse offers unflinching realism, meticulous attention to detail and deliciously wicked humor as it explores the growing pains of a misfit.

An overlong, dramatically unbalanced picture whose emotional wallop gets somewhat diffused.

A tense documentary with multiple layers of meaning.

Intelligent political satire this expertly acted is nothing to sneeze at.

The film's style, paradoxically both precious and rough-hewn, positions this as the season's defiantly anti-CGI toon, and its retro charms will likely appeal more strongly to grown-ups than to moppets; it's a picture for people who would rather drive a 1953 Jaguar XK 120 than a new one.

He (Gonzalez Inarritu) handles a complex plot with clarity and precision while keeping audience members on the edge of their seats.

Apart from its historical interest, this tragic tale of religious extremism and misogyny is a very good film able to catch audiences up emotionally.

Blasting onto the screen at warp speed and remaining there for two hours, the new and improved Star Trek will transport fans to sci-fi nirvana.

A dazzling -- and unexpectedly daring -- addition to the Disney canon.

Skillfully adapted from Tim Tharp's novel, evocatively lensed in the working-class neighborhoods of Athens, Ga., and tenderly acted by Miles Teller and Shailene Woodley, this bittersweet ode to the moment of childhood's end builds quietly to a pitch-perfect finale.

Ultimately, the pic will be noted and remembered not for any inherent drama or analysis but for its simply having so thoroughly documented a strange place most people have never seen and never knew existed.

An unparalleled technical achievement... Yet the story amounts to little more than inspired silliness about the filmmaking biz where cartoon characters face off against cartoonish humans.

Quietly intelligent and respectable.

An endearingly schizoid Frankenstein of a movie, by turns relentlessly high-spirited and darkly poignant.

A provocative and surprisingly emotional saga that ranges from wrenching to downright hilarious as it spans more than a quarter-century of unpredictable twists, "Nim" reaches far beyond mere scientific curiosity to become compelling human drama.

Scorsese has met most of the challenges inherent in tackling such a formidable period piece, but the material remains cloaked by the very propriety, stiff manners and emotional starchiness the picture delineates in such copious detail.

The pleasure is doubled in Spider-Man 2. Crackerjack entertainment from start to finish, this rousing yarn about a reluctant superhero and his equally conflicted friends and enemies improves in every way on its predecessor and is arguably about as good a live-action picture as anyone's ever made using comicbook characters.

Tightly made and populated by a uniformly larger-than-life cast of characters , pic is a total delight for every second of its running time.

Through immaculate use of picture, sound and time, the director adds another panel to his series of pictures about disaffected, disconnected youth.

Offering further proof that the latest 3D technology is good for a lot more than just lunging knives and fantastical storylines, Wim Wenders' dance docu Pina reps multidimensional entertainment that will send culture vultures swooning.

In attempting to make his first film for all ages, Martin Scorsese has fashioned one for the ages. Simultaneously classical and modern, populist but also unapologetically personal, Hugo flagrantly defies the mind-numbing quality of most contempo kidpics.

Carried by snappy dialog and a wonderful ensemble full of familiar faces.

This slow but brilliantly sustained journey into madness is fronted by a remarkable performance from Ralph Fiennes and superb backup from Miranda Richardson in a triple role.

The picture is single-mindedly devoted to pushing the audience's buttons, and who better than Raimi to do the honors?

Taxidermia sets a benchmark for body horror in the cinema.

An agreeably meandering exercise that brings some clever French New Wave fillips and structural repetitions to Hong's characteristically boozy party. Rougher but more approachable than his previous "Oki's Movie."

Certain moments in the film resemble nothing so much as attending a school reunion, being buttonholed by an old acquaintance and shown snapshots of the grandkids. A complacently conservative acceptance sometimes seems to blanket all of 56 Up, as if maturity entails a serene blessing of the status quo.

Distinguished by intelligence, wit and violence but is lightly wounded by some ill-fitting moments.

The timing in the Clooney-Farmiga scenes is like splendid tennis, with each player surprising the other with shots but keeping the rally going to breathtaking duration.

The title says it all. Compact and exuberant, U2 3D may be no more than a pint-sized concert film with a lustrous surface, but the lensing is so vibrant and the music so buoyant, even nonfans may find their eyes popping and their heads bobbing.

The achievement here is a thoroughly compelling story in which the underlying technological razzle-dazzle never intrudes.

Beautifully detailed and deftly structured, every scene in The Apostle logically leads to the next one, each elaborating on the central theme of religious redemption.

Originally conceived as one film, the two-parter that has finally emerged can now be seen as a truly epic work.

Mike Leigh is at the peak of his powers with Vera Drake, a compassionate, morally complex drama that stands easily alongside his best work, "Secrets & Lies" and "Topsy-Turvy."

A tightly plotted and paced thriller whose not-so-hidden agenda is to expose the bad conscience of the world's haves toward its have-nots, "Hidden" is one of Austrian helmer Michael Haneke's most watchable and pungent works.

An extraordinary docu achievement. Handsomely filmed on silvery 35mm and high-definition by Kaye himself, the shrewdly edited picture balances a full spectrum of views from all sides of the abortion debate without obviously taking a position itself.

Picture's title comes from the sea creature mentioned in the book of Job, which is briefly quoted at the film's opening. Cast list cheekily includes not only the names of the men aboard the vessel where the documentary was filmed, but also the Latin names of the species caught.

Mullan's increased maturity as a director is evident in his skill at manipulating light and dark dramatic tones, and shifting between moods of anger and plaintive melancholy.

By getting Tyson to open up as he has, Toback has succeeded in illuminating one of the most polarizing, complex and -- the film almost forces one to admit -- misunderstood figures of our time.

Henry V is a stirring, gritty and enjoyable pic which offers a plethora of fine performances from some of the U.K.'s brightest talents.

Herzog's eye for the weird sometimes makes the docu feel strained, but engaging characters imbue the pic with depth and emotional appeal.

Though tinged with the sheer gumption and personal resolve of amateur vidmaker and would-be rapper Kimberly Roberts, this is ultimately a minor doc contribution to the bulging library of Katrina-related films and TV reports.

Both sharp and fleet, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street proves a satisfying screen version of Stephen Sondheim’s landmark 1979 theatrical musical.

Scabrous, brutal and hip, Trainspotting is a "Clockwork Orange" for the '90s.

Brandishes the sort of intelligent wit and bracing nastiness that will make it more appealing to discerning adults than to teens who just want to have fun.

Although laid out with such clarity that any layperson could catch the gist of what's being discussed, Side by Side is not afraid to get nitty-gritty about more technical matters.

Genuinely funny, randy and moving by turns, breezily enjoyable throughout.

An imaginative, fascinating film.

Clint Eastwood has crafted a tense, hard-edged, superbly dramatic yarn that is also an exceedingly intelligent meditation on the West, its myths and its heroes.

Takes a beautifully lensed look at the work of Scottish "landscape sculptor" Andy Goldsworthy, whose unique creations -- composed of icicles, leaves, sticks, rocks, etc. -- are often as not simply swept away by the next tide or wind gust.

Time shifts may overcomplicate the narrative for some, but the pay-off packs a major punch.

While Franco can sometimes be a wild card, getting increasingly self-conscious with recent roles, his take on Ralston feels both credible and compelling; few actors could have made us care so much, or disappeared so completely into the role.

Though almost laughably intricate in its plotting, this thoroughly Gallic adaptation of Harlan Coben's novel reps an entertaining sophomore outing for thesp-turned-director Guillaume Canet.

Incendies vaults Denis Villeneuve to the status of serious director.

Davies is in fine form here, with luminous performances, especially from Rachel Weisz, rounding out a classy package whose only major problem is it may be a bit too true to its period sensibility and legit origins.

By turns amazing, amusing and appalling.

The film pulls no punches, takes no prisoners and flies in the face of feel-good pictures.

This feels like short film material stretched exasperatingly thin but nonetheless casts a certain sad spell, graced by moments of droll observational humor.

A superior all-ages adventure pic made by a filmmaker who knows more than a thing or two about the genre.

Succeeds in capturing the book's essential themes and concerns, albeit in a hectic style that could not be more antithetical to that of the literary master of international intrigue.

An ambitious, keenly observed, and often very funny look at one of life's most daunting passages, Parenthood's masterstroke is that it covers the range of the family experience, offering the points of view of everyone in an extended and wildly diverse middle-class family.

A powerful, slow-burning portrait of human fallibility.

Sympathetic, genial and exceedingly wholesome, it's a film that, once seen, will permanently and favorably influence the way viewers regard the characters' real-life counterparts.

Though tastily lensed and with a convincing cast led by Cillian Murphy, essentially small-scale picture lacks the involving sweep of Loach's earlier historical-political yarn, "Land and Freedom."

A provocative premise, virtuoso direction and two dazzling lead performances go a long way toward offsetting a lack of dramatic structure and a sense of when to quit in Face/Off.

A movie for the age, and a keeper for the ages, Pride & Prejudice brings Jane Austen's best-loved novel to vivid, widescreen life, as well as making an undisputed star of 20-year-old Keira Knightley.

This edition of the seminal example of genre sensationalism refined by the cream of Hollywood craftsmanship is more complicated than a standard director's cut.

Visually stunning, practically dialogue-free and very family-friendly.

Pic makes up in strong performances and wry observation what it sometimes lacks in narrative drive. Result is a perceptive (and unexpectedly moving) portrait of lives in crisis.

Combined with hilarious physical business and perfectly overearnest delivery of pseudocool lines like, "Let your fingers do the rocking!," he (Black) pretty much single-handedly keeps the formulaic progress funny.

Woody Allen uses New York City as a backdrop for the familiar story of the successful but neurotic urban over-achievers whose relationships always seem to end prematurely. The film is just as much about how wonderful a place the city is to live in as it is about the elusive search for love.

First-time feature director Rob Marshall and Oscar-winning "Gods and Monsters" screenwriter Bill Condon have spun the dark tale of two murdering floozies into a widely palatable entertainment, but the long-gestating film comes up short in rhythm and personality.

A richly compelling story of family and self-discovery.

The fun that Schlesinger and his first-rate ensemble must have had while working on this production is infectious, for there isn't one dull -- or quiet -- moment in the film.

Picture represents a powerful, pertinent but not entirely perfect debut for British visual-artist-turned-feature-helmer Steve McQueen, who demonstrates a painterly touch with composition and real cinematic flair, but who stumbles in film's last furlough with trite symbolism.

The way Kuenne presents the material, with an aggressive style that lingers less than a second on most shots, it's impossible not to feel emotionally exhausted.

Well-shot and edited, Anvil! is an underdog saga even non-metalheads will root for. It tows that fine line between chuckling at its protags' somewhat absurd situation and celebrating their sheer unwillingness to give up.