The Little Shop of Horrors is a thoroughly original adaptation, if that's possible. With its toe-tapping cadences, its class cast and its king-sized cabbage, it's destined to become a classic of camp comedy. It's vege-magic.

This installment has achieved a nearly impossible hat trick. It's a movie that is exegetically correct enough to appease the most hard-core buffs, while opening up the final frontier to a whole new generation of fans who have yet to appreciate Star Trek's ineffable combination of sci-fi action, campy humor and yin-yang philosophical tussle between logic and emotion.

The Social Network has understandably been compared to "Citizen Kane" in its depiction of a man who changes society through bending an emergent technology to his will.

This is the rare American film really about something, and almost all the performances are riveting.

In spirit, and sheer joie de vivre, it's everything the movie business should aspire to. Win Win exemplifies movies the way they oughtta be.

A mesmerizing cinematic journey that is often as arduous and spare as the lives of its hard-bitten protagonists.

It knocks you off your feet and leaves you shaken.

You know you're in the hands of a superbly gifted filmmaker when he can pull off a talking dog.

Low-key, sleek and sophisticated, Drive provides the visceral pleasures of pulp without sacrificing art. It's cool and smart. Some critics might even call it European.

Like a cold beer under a bluebird sky; like a flawless line drive on a warm summer's day; like a long, languorous seventh-inning stretch - Moneyball satisfies.

Taut, unsettling, haunting and powerful.

A pitch-perfect movie that threads a microscopically tiny needle between high comedy and devastating drama.

Le Havre is a playful parable that conveys profound truths about compassion, humility and sacrifice. It offers proof that miracles do happen - especially in Kaurismaki's lyrically hardscrabble neighborhood.

This invigoratingly fresh, optimistic film - which features the breathtaking debuts of director Dee Rees and leading lady Adepero Oduye - plunges the audience into a world that's both tough and tender, vivid and grim, drenched in poetry and music and pain and discovery.

Leery filmgoers can exhale: The Kid With a Bike may hew faithfully to the Dardennes' house style of spare, lucid storytelling. But without giving anything away, let's just say that with this simple, deeply affecting tale, they never set out to break your heart.

Ambitious, affecting, unwieldy and haunting, it's an eccentric, densely atmospheric, morally hyper-aware masterpiece that refuses to follow the strictures of conventional cinematic structure, instead leading the audience on a circuitous journey down the myriad rabbit holes that comprise modern-day Manhattan.

Monsieur Lazhar resembles a clear, clean glass of water: transparent, utterly devoid of gratuitous flavorings or frou-frou, and all the more bracing and essential for it.

The vignettes are linked as much by theme as story, yet they're carefully structured and delicately balanced.

The Queen of Versailles turns out to be a portrait -- appalling, absorbing and improbably affecting -- of how, even within a system seemingly designed to ensure that the rich get richer, sometimes the rich get poorer.

Instead of a grand tableau vivant that lays out the great man and his great deeds like so many too-perfect pieces of waxed fruit, Spielberg brings the leader and viewers down to ground level.

An electrifying, confounding, what-the-hell-just-happened exercise in unbounded imagination, unapologetic theatricality, bravura acting and head-over-heels movie-love.

Sean Penn makes a striking screen presence in This Must Be the Place, a smart, funny and original road movie by Italian director Paolo Sorrentino ("Il Divo").

While Wright's self-conscious theatricality and dollhouse aesthetic conjure comparisons to Baz Luhrmann and Wes Anderson, he outstrips both those filmmakers in moral seriousness and maturity.

With grace, discretion and supreme tact, Nicks sweeps viewers to a climactic montage that wordlessly honors the best ways we care for one another. The Waiting Room bears poetic witness to an overlooked fact: America's health care system may be broken, but its people are anything but.

Turns out to be one of the most transportingly romantic movies of the year, one that finds the most stirring emotion in struggle rather than in ginned-up melodrama or easy resolution.

By and large, Zero Dark Thirty dispenses with sentimentality and speculation, portraying the final mission not with triumphalist zeal or rank emotionalism but with a reserved, even mournful sense of ambivalence.

Amour is a must-see film that not everyone must see, at least right now.

With its ingenious structure, seamless visual conceits and mordant humor, Stories We Tell is a masterful film on technical and aesthetic values alone. But because of the wisdom and compassion of its maker, it rises to another level entirely.

The writing is so musical, so attuned to human frailty and aspiration, that I defy anyone to watch the movie without smiling — with amusement one minute, rueful recognition the next, but probably always with some measure of simple, undiluted delight.

In this good-natured film, even the smallest efforts at kindness yield positive results.

It's hard to remember a recent love story -- maybe "Moonstruck" -- that's as involving as this one. This is not to suggest that the two movies are in the same league, but this is a teen movie that transcends its teen limitations.

Van Sant's sensibility is wholly original, wholly fresh. "My Own Private Idaho" adds a new ingredient: a kind of boho sweetness. I loved it.

All about undertones, obliqueness and expectancy, about the scent, if you will, of something no one can stop

Barry Sonnenfeld's irresistibly charming lampoon of Hollywood.

Genuine, amusing and, best of all, humanly scaled and humanely oriented.

So unassuming and pure of heart, you can't help but warmly extend your arms and yell "Safe!"

The director isn't much on orgies; he's all talk. But that's good, not bad, because his talk is so brilliant. Stillman is the Balzac of the ironic class, the Dickens of people with too much inner life.

It's funny and human and really pretty damned wonderful, all at once.

With a cast of actors playing some of England's smartest people and with a crackling script by Stoppard -- no slouch in the brains department -- it pays to stay awake.

The movie's stroke of sheer genius is its wondrous ending.

The scenes unfold with such unhurried delicacy, and the characters are so intriguing, you can ignore the editorial bluntness and savor the smaller, sweeter details.

Holofcener is honest enough to present human foibles, not just as weaknesses but as unexpected sources of humor and strength.

A 160 minute work of sustained brilliance and delicacy.

Childishly simple, but extremely funny.

Not just a fitting document of a life brilliantly lived but a vibrant, almost palpitating piece of cinema.

I love the unsettling details.

Wise, funny, sweet, sexy and kind.

Has a refreshingly keen ability to see everything from multiple angles.

The sexiest movie of the year.

There are some things the French do better than we do, and this small movie is one.

So elegantly layered and emotionally restrained, it makes the horror at its center all the more disturbing.

Brilliantly played by Denzel Washington

Anyone interested in serious film should absolutely not miss it.

Profane, sacrilegious, pornographic, sadistic and Sade-istic, titillating and the most honorable movie of the year.

A chalice of unpretentious delight, flowing over with goodwill, a cheeky love for soccer and, uh, Buddhist humor.

This is one fan's valentine to the music he loves. It just happens that the fan is a terrific filmmaker and the music loves him back -- and we get to see it and hear it all. What a treat.

It's a brilliant, profound movie, but it's almost no fun at all.

What's best about Faithless is its honesty, its lack of desire to ingratiate itself with the audience.

On one level, Yi Yi is classic soap opera, with a suicide attempt, a wedding ceremony, even a brutal 11 o'clock news murder, all in the mix. But Yang's direction is so admirably restrained, it lends rich heft to everything.

A three-ring circus of visual pleasure, showing us the beauty of Korean garment, custom and national character.

To appreciate the movie, you have to be okay with vampire violence. I don't mean subtle little nips at the neck and, ooooh, it's directed by Werner Herzog.

There are so many things to enjoy here.

Majidi has discovered a wonderful cast of players to bring this gentle allegory to life, especially Naji as the irascible but generous Memar, who displays nearly perfect comic timing.

Demonstrates what writer-director Levinson does best: evoke the sights, smells and atmosphere of his youth with intelligence, humor and a keen sense of social perspective.

Although the cast is uniformly strong, the real revelation here is "The X-Files' " Anderson, who plays Lily with subtle gradations of emotional depth unexpected from someone who has made a career out of deadpan.

Passionate, literally shimmering movie.

Surprisingly powerful and universal: the search for meaning and small blessings in the face of life's utter randomness.

The Blue Angel it's clear to Von Sternberg, and to us, that he's connected with some pure being of cinema, whose power to ignite an audience was unstoppable. She became a great star.

It's sad, funny, shocking and completely unlike any movie in a dozen years.

Wins you over with its devastating simplicity.

A movie that dares you to slow down and enjoy the subtleties of life.

His (Tarkovsky's) pictures, and his sounds -- such as the symphonic drip of raindrops in a wooded pond -- tell more than just the immediate story; they rejuvenate the mind.

Guilty, deftly orchestrated fun.

Where Elizabeth really triumphs over its dusty source material is in transforming all this boring history into a real, rip-roaring adventure tale.

Climb into this rig and you'll be sweating bullets.

A canny (and profoundly sexy) movie.

A memorable and devastating indictment of the oppression facing many women in Iran.

It's a new new thing, classic myth from both literature and the movies, commingled, set to great folk music, and untrammeled by any sense of predictability, urgency, realism or believability but hypnotic, graceful and seductive.

One of the most exhilarating movies ever made about absolutely nothing.

Never has an actor embodied the passing down of violence and bitterness from father to son more powerfully.

A witty, raunchy comedy, which proves that a well-written piece of business – oozing with sex, wit and nasty intrigue – works for any generation.

The dance between authenticity and storymaking works beautifully.

The movie's pace is unhurried by Hollywood standards, but it's all the richer in character detail.

The trick of this movie is that it's so changeable: You think you've got it nailed and it slithers away to become some other new, fabulous thing.

One of the most enjoyable experiences of the year.

A wonderful thing to snuggle into, as full of heart and pep and innocence as the title character himself.

It's simple, sizzly and very funny.

That tale gets a first-class Hallmark Hall of Fame treatment in Kevin Reynolds's swaggering The Count of Monte Cristo, which is old-form moviemaking at its best.

A movie made by filmmaker working in sync with his times -- an exciting, disturbing, provocative film.

Takes both its characters and the audience to the depths, but it's a journey Kidd redeems with wit and fluency and, ultimately, a deeply persistent humanism.

You realize this is a story about the life beyond this movie, about the great changes in life we never give ourselves time to consider. And for a moviegoing experience, that's a lot of bang for your buck.

A big, sexy, sun-splashed thrill ride, is what a summer movie ought to be: not totally mindless, but more interested in jangling your nerves than engaging your brain.

Anguish ranges from gritty and realistic to the tragicomic soap opera found in Pedro Almodovar's films.

The movie equivalent of a great read. It's a masterfully conducted concert of characters...already head and shoulders above most of the competition.

Steers refreshingly clear of the usual cliches. Character takes the wheel and dictates the action, not the other way around.

This Tarzan doesn't bellow, he kvetches; he doesn't dominate, he persuades; he doesn't rule, he seeks consensus. He isn't the king of the apes, he's a citizen of the animal planet.

Pure energy, a perfect orchestration of heroism, villainy, suspense and comic relief.

Unabashed, streamlined entertainment, and you won't hate yourself in the morning for liking it.

Martin Scorsese brings honor back to the remake. He shines up this reprise of the original with original brilliance

A modern epic that fuses myth with hard-edged reality, it's a one-of-a-kind, thoroughly engaging experience.

Mullan's movie is admiringly uncompromising. He refuses to augment the horrors with relief.

One of the most thought-provoking documentaries of recent times.

Small, quiet movie that imperceptibly takes its viewers by their throats and doesn't let go

Merchant's attention to Trinidadian culture, locales and general atmosphere is inescapably alluring.

One of the year's best films.

The genius of the film is its utter commitment to the Pekar point of view.

Brings kinetic, stylistic and even sexy dimension to the Bram Stoker legend.

The movie may take five extra minutes to end and could do with one less sunset but . . . other than that it's damned near perfect.

The next worst thing to being there. That's how real it feels.

It's a highly professional project complete with exquisite production details and superb actors, yet its subject matter is so far out of the mainstream, it feels almost radical.

Maybe Thomas Wolfe was right: You can't go home again

A darkly enjoyable roller-coaster ride -- Clooney and Kaufman deftly interweave the macabre with lightheartedness.

The nail-biting quality of Shackleton's true story outdoes any dramatic fiction on the market.

Viewers who come to this delicate creation with expectations of just another quaint or sad story are in for a surprise.

Succeeds where 100 studio-generated teen romances -- starring the bland, the blunt or the blow-dried -- have failed.

Makes compelling, provocative and prescient viewing. You can draw your own conclusions.

It feels like real life unfolding before your eyes.

There's a lot in this movie, simple, big, small and exciting. It's the year's first serious contender for big prizes. What's not to like about this picture?

A disconcertingly assured tango between tenderness and brutality.

Raimi offers all the fantasy, camp and hardcore horror you devoured in the comics. You can feel the pen-and-ink drawings coming to life. Dipping wittily into myth, the macabre and the modern, it's an effervescent adventure that's as amusing as it is genuinely gripping. [19 Feb 1993, Weekend, p.n38]

Dogme 95 at its best: open-ended and exciting, with a grand sense of experimentation.

One truly, madly, deeply satisfying creep-out.

It eases up on you, lazy as a cloud, and carries you off in a mood of exquisite delight. To borrow W.P. Kinsella's phrase, it has the thrill of the grass.

Using home movies, photos, a brilliant soundtrack and candid, articulate interviews, director Stacy Peralta (one of the original Z-boys) details the birth of a pop culture phenomenon.

Still a marvel of verve and bone-dry wit, the movie has been treated kindly by time.

It's a kind of 18th-century "Dead Man Walking" but with that earlier film's foreground arguments against capital punishment pushed to the background here.

Exults in the hard-riding romanticism of classic Westerns, but it takes revisionist stock too. It dismounts at places usually left in the dust -- the oppressed lot of women, the loneliness of untended children, adult illiteracy and the horrible last moments of the dying.

Every moment of the way, there is a delectable sense of subtle menace and, at the center of it all, Huppert's haunting expression, part sphinx, part grace and maybe part scary.

The film is a strictly no-bull proposition.

The longest, hardest sit of the season -- you are stuck there, a single tube of puckered muscle, waiting for the extremely ugly violence to occur -- but it is driven by performances of such luminous humanity that they break your heart.

A smart cartoon about the life of the mind. It's about the fuzzy border between dreaming and living. It's thoughtful, provocative, liberating and fun.

Outstanding entertainment for little ones but just as rewarding for their adult companions.

Though brilliant, Menace II Society is definitely a film to guard yourself against. There's not a trace of softness or sentimentality. At times, the picture takes on the scary you-are-there verisimilitude of a tabloid-TV show.

Takes you down paths full of primitive, almost biblical implications, but it also finds comic relief in moments of palpable tension.

It is difficult to watch, but it's also impossible to take your eyes off the screen. It does not blench at the things that Hollywood routinely blenches at: substance abuse, dying, family dysfunction, love.

A well-orchestrated nightmare that keeps you on edge until the very end.

This is the Mickey Mouse factory at its finest, with inventive animation, stirring music and a pride of inspired, almost-human animals.

When you're in the hands of the Coen brothers, you're in for sheer originality.

A dead-on sense of how rich kids live and talk today, a sense of the melancholy of a dysfunctional family, and some great dark laughs.

The disturbing ideas it plants in the soil of the soul need time and darkness ? not light ? to germinate.

It takes the rock movie into regions it has never been before.

It is in fact a traditional mystery more reminiscent of Agatha Christie than the reigning film noir aesthetic of 1947. But it's fabulously entertaining.

Though it might lack in Hollywood production values, it overflows with moral impact.

A stunner -- as big and messy as a war, as small and perfect as a diamond.

This isn't a stand up and cheer flick; it's a sit down and ponder affair. And thanks to Kline's superbly nuanced performance, that pondering is highly pleasurable.

Enormously entertaining.

As Morvern, Morton is disconcertingly enigmatic, often bordering on catatonic. But she carries the movie effortlessly. And even though we're on the outside looking in, she carries us along, too.

The real importance of "Earnest" is the thrill of brilliant repartee. And as we laugh, an amazing thing happens: Oscar Wilde comes alive.

Makes for fascinating cinema.

Unusual, unexpected and strangely refreshing. For this movie to have resorted to a familiar action-flick finish with everything explained, pressed and dry-cleaned would have rendered it banal.

Thanks to strong performances from all, particularly Mount and Nicholson, we're with this story all the way.

Aniston delivers an utterly un-Rachel-like performance. It's neurosis-free and unmannered, by turns funny, sad and profound.

It is quietly observant, with a detached eye for the telling moment, and the visual compositions are often exquisite.

A beautifully textured, disarmingly simple movie about romantic devotion.

The movie becomes something quite rare and magical: a text about a text that is also full of life. In other words, it's a true first: It's both postmodern and fun!

It's a classic story in form, and in this country it used to star Jimmy Cagney.

Frances McDormand enjoys the comedic role of her career.

Sure, the heroes and villains are arranged in a convenient moral gallery. But the performances, Weir's adroit direction and John Seale's superb cinematography take care of that banality.

Filmmaking at its purest and most visceral – a tale full of sound and visual fury, signifying, if not exactly nothing, then something not so readily articulated in words.

What this intelligent, balanced, devastating movie puts before us is nothing less than a contest between good and evil.

A smart, restrained entertainment, it doesn't splash around in blood and hysteria. It doesn't have to.

Cuts a path directly to the heart.

With their inspired, absurdist taste for weird, peculiar Americana-but a sort of neo-Americana that is entirely invented-the Coens have defined and mastered their own bizarre subgenre.

This is a fully realized movie, whose intelligence -- despite its grim findings -- dwarfs any Hollywood production.

The creepiest, clammiest, twitchiest squealfest in months. It offers, among its many pleasures, the happiness of safe fear.

Hilarious, touching and wonderfully dyspeptic.

An intriguing yarn.

Without hesitation, I hand the comic award to Smith. She plays a pinched guest known as Constance, Countess of Trentham, to such a hilarious tee, her tee runneth over.

One thoroughbred of a movie. Sleek, well-muscled and brisk, director Steven Soderbergh's newest offering delivers just about everything anyone could possibly want from filmed entertainment -- except deep thought.

The Blair Witch Project is terrifying. It's also an exuberant prank of genius.

Costner (with Michael Blake's screenplay) creates a vision so childlike, so willfully romantic, it's hard to put up a fight.

Part of this success is due to the exquisitely cast ensemble-composed of actors, not movie stars. To a man, woman and child, the unforced performers are spot-on.

In keeping with the Smith rules, the movie is irreverent, self-referential, twisted, cheap and tasteless. And, of course, I mean that as the highest compliment.

The plot is far from intricate, but Waking Ned Devine more than makes up for its narrative simplicity with a uniformly engaging cast of Hibernian oddballs.

If Frears and screenwriter Donald E. Westlake (who scripted "The Stepfather") are light on substance, they're satisfyingly heavy on nuance. Grifters may not blow you away afterward but it keeps your attention riveted during.

It is through the genius of Frears, screenwriter Jimmy McGovern and this talented cast that Liam lets no one off the hook, least of all the audience.

An elegant drama about power and its frightening uses, The Cat's Meow is the bee's knees.

Spade and Warburton might not have made The Emperor's New Groove one of the mouse factory's all-time greatest, but they've certainly made it one of the funniest.

Director Van Sant, who made the lyrical "Mala Noche," "Drugstore Cowboy" and "My Own Private Idaho," returns to his favorite hunting ground -- the subworlds of grimy, poetic lost boys -- and pulls us right in

Shows us, in an extraordinarily simple way, the hopes and frustrations of one woman's life.

For students of cool ... Le Cercle Rouge is required viewing.

Charlotte Rampling takes you so far inside the pain of Marie Drillon it leaves you stirred, shaken and a little in awe.

Really, really good -- Yes, it's over the top, giddy and parodistic (God bless it). But it also takes a thoughtful, if surreptitious, look at what eight women might act like when men aren't around.

More juvenile than a Mel Brooks movie, wittier than "Get Smart," almost as low as "Animal House" and close to the laugh count of "Airplane!", "Gun" is a loving parody of every cop show that ever syndicated its way to your living room. [2 Dec 1988]

Want to see something strange, funny, twisted, brilliant and macabre? Sure you do.

In this admirably unconventional film, director Paul Schrader is interested in just about everything BUT traditional biopic business.

One of Martin Scorsese's most brutal but stunning movies, an incredible, relentless experience about the singleminded pursuit of crime.

Richard Linklater's satirical take on high school life in the 1970s is not only funny and entertaining. It's practically a historic document of life during the smiley-face button era.

This is about the rise of a pop star, plain and simple. The real deal –- and the movie's greatest fun –- is in the rap contests.