It's enough to make you laugh if you didn't feel like crying.

It knocks you off your feet and leaves you shaken.

The story is maddeningly oblique and incomplete, despite paying what at times feels like excruciating attention to the minutiae of a dying love affair's final hours.

It's a story of jaw-dropping chutzpah, grim, mostly hindsight-based humor and more stomach-churning drama than you could find in 10 screenplays.

Doesn't go down smooth, but it doesn't promise to.

Documentary makers struggle for this effect -- a feeling for the land that is both grand and unsentimental. The makers of Duma, a fable fit for children, have found it.

Isn't quite a great espionage movie or a great Africa movie, but in a summer of heat and wind, it's the next best thing.

Weaned on the homilies of "Happy Days" and the hominy grits of Mayberry, Ron Howard brings sitcom aphorisms to bear on the sticky-fingered realities of the beamish Parenthood.

What emerges is quite extraordinary.

A film of rare intelligence, beauty and compassion.

Director Ken Loach is full of astonishments. An avowedly leftist filmmaker, he has always seen beyond political cant to compassionate reality. He's also incredibly sensitive to what might be called the nuances of life, and he always brings a high sense of spontaneous reality to his films.

As an example of the art of casting, the movie is brilliantly engineered. It allows two major stars to each play the showy villain for a time, and also for each to do an imitation of the other.

Lord God, can she take control of a scene, dominate a movie, project to the last seat, radiate power and personality unto the rafters. It's a great performance. I love the way Knightley's eyes light with furious intelligence when she cuts the pompous Darcy a new something or other.

11 minutes longer than the original, and 11 minutes worse.

Mysteries still surround many aspects of bird migration. This film unravels exactly none of them. Rather, in some of the most remarkable footage you'll ever see, the film lets you look over the shoulders of migrating birds.

This story doesn't just belong to them anymore. This richly observed, sometimes heartbreaking movie has become ours, too.

An exuberant, raucous and thoroughly endearing comedy

Not since the 1972 'Cabaret' has there been a movie musical this stirring, intelligent and exciting.

Although we miss some of the finer details that made Jhumpa Lahiri's 2003 book so meaningful, we're moved by the movie's themes of cultural displacement and the power of chance.

The filmmakers have done a beautiful job of preserving the satirical snap of Gibbons's original. But the real joy of Cold Comfort Farm is watching these actors play so freely and exuberantly off each other.

McQueen has taken the raw materials of filmmaking and committed an act of great art.

Have you ever been trapped in the back seat of a car while the old married couple up front bickers and banters for hours? It's either sheer torture or, if the couple happens to be Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, wildly entertaining.

Put delicately, this is one long sit, made all the more so by a turgid story, a dour visual palette and uninspiring action.

Zemeckis, an undisputed master of film technology, shows off an equal aptitude for vivid storytelling.

This uncommonly intelligent thriller evokes the great films of the 1970s ("All the President's Men," "Klute," "Three Days of the Condor") that managed to elicit gritty urban realism while maintaining a suave sense of style and moral complexity.

From the very first seconds a viewer believes totally in Downfall.

In the basest of terms, a horror flick. But it's also a spectacularly moving and elegant movie, and to dismiss it into genre-hood, to mentally stuff it into the horror pigeonhole, is to overlook a remarkable film.

Although it's tempting to call Gibney's documentary "the one Iraq film you MUST see this season!!!" (which, by the way, it is), it's not just about Iraq. It's about torture as policy.

Most footnotes don't get a passing glance, but this one proves worthy of careful study.

Marley, the new documentary about reggae icon Bob Marley opens on April 20 - of course. That date - often referred to as 420 - has been, since the 1970s, a time for people to gather to consume or celebrate pot. It has become an unofficial marijuana holiday, and Bob Marley has become the unofficial saint of marijuana.

Enormously entertaining.

Tells a tale of fortitude that comes not from muscle but from the ineffable, bungee-like sinew that is the human spirit.

Has important things to tell viewers about global politics, and in an eerily resonant way.

The sprawling cast, the naturalistic, overlapping dialogue (here by screenwriter Jenny Lumet, daughter of director Sidney) and the swirling action: it seemed pure Robert Altman.

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.

Is there anything new here? Honestly, not really. The content is the same, the plot the familiar litany of ordeals leavened by soapy interludes. But the fight that develops is taut, tough and extremely bitter; it's never showy in the grinding, big-movie Spielbergian way, but a portrait of the war's daily interface with hell in a very small space, as the four stand against a much larger unit.

Nuanced, exquisite and predictable.

Barry Sonnenfeld's irresistibly charming lampoon of Hollywood.

Fascinating and transgressive love story.

Lilya's struggle to make a life for herself is both heartbreaking and heart-stirring.

It's not the sort of film one can be said to enjoy, but it is the sort of film that has the clarity of a dream and lingers for hours.

You keep waiting for the movie to clarify, to settle down to its archetypal purity: icon of psychotic evil against icon of neurotic good. Music by Wagner in his "Götterdämmerung" mood, screenplay by Nietzsche, with additional lines by Babaloo Mandel. Oh, what a great big movie wallow, what a transformational blast of cine-pleasure. It never quite arrives

Thanks to the new guerrilla narrative, the world has a constant flow of images to file in its collective consciousness. And that camera-testable accountability slowly becomes a global civic right that fulfills the noblest purpose of journalism -- to bring truth to power.

Made with uncommon skill and assurance, the film never succumbs to rank sentimentality, but it manages to get at the nuances of human relationships.

Neither federally admonishing nor irresponsibly romantic, Cowboy stays high without being highhanded.

A canny (and profoundly sexy) movie.

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.

The film, built of interviews with participants, is fast-paced, utterly absorbing and ultimately tragic.

It offers a special "something" for everyone who ever appreciated the Quiet Beatle's musical gifts and spiritual explorations.

This is an absolutely brilliant film but in a quiet way.

Its mixture of wisdom and whimsy -- exemplified by the movie's unnamed and occasionally cheeky narrator -- makes this Australian movie feel as timeless as it is timely. And instead of feeling dutifully cultural as we immerse ourselves in this story, we're genuinely intrigued, touched and even amused.

As played by the captivating Mariana Loyola, Lucy is a life force, cut from similar cloth as the perky schoolteacher of Mike Leigh's "Happy-Go-Lucky": unsinkable, unswervable and more than a little irreverent.

With elegant, clockwork construction, Smith has transplanted his novel of greed, betrayal and getting what you deserve to the screen, where it is told by director Sam Raimi with a spareness befitting the whiteness of its snowed-in setting.

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.

Cronenberg's deeper purpose is to pull audiences into an affecting, powerful story about right and wrong.

Combines the derring-do of classic adventure tales with far more serious issues of moral agency. And it serves as a haunting reminder to seek joy and beauty, even in the depths of despair.

Gets viewers inside these tense, emotional and occasionally terrifying events with immediacy and, given the confusion of the time, remarkable clarity.

A sobering reflection on our culture's attitude toward violence.

Lynch's new movie, Mulholland Drive, is a trip and a half: It's like playing Twister and Scrabble simultaneously while high on LSD. Oh, and it's dark out.

There's an extra dimension here, not present in the other comedies. Not only is the material amusing, it's charmingly engaging.

It's more than a detailed account of one man's petty vindictiveness in a bygone era. It's about how our hatred can consume us so deeply that we lose sight of everything.

Not only gives us a superb new cast of believable characters, it transcends its own genre. Only superficially a teen comedy, the movie redounds with postmodern -- but emotionally genuine -- gravitas.

An elegant romantic thriller adapted from a novel of the same name, is a terrific film.

Writer-director Derek Cianfrance, who with Blue Valentine makes an astonishing debut.

A movie to cheer you up and on and help you feel that spring will, in fact, arrive before we are all too desiccated to enjoy it.

Suffers from what might be called colonitis. It comprises too many equal parts, and they tangle each other up. Everything is important, which comes to mean that nothing is important.

Not nearly as accomplished narratively as it is visually.

A lean and hungry thing. With the sparest of storytelling, the French filmmaker ("35 Shots of Rum") devours her audience, swallowing us up in a yarn that is as enigmatic as it is engrossing.

The best advice to filmgoers who appreciate smart, mature, humanist movies is, simply, Go.

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

No one can deny the powerful reality that weaves its way through Bamako.

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

That rare, genuinely transporting movie that creates an alternate universe, invites the audience in and lets them sink ever deeper into its particular, sublime reverie.

It's uncompromisingly steamy, in a way that seems designed to make people who are uncomfortable with a physical relationship between two men even more uncomfortable.

In many ways Fish Tank joins "An Education" and "Precious" as an acute, empathic portrait of a girl growing up, but more than those films Arnold leaves viewers with a feeling of unsettled ambiguity.

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.

No isn’t nearly as definitive or declarative as its title: It leaves viewers wondering whether they should cheer, shrug or shake their heads.

This is a bittersweet story, no question. But to the son's great credit, what emerges from his patient investigation is a remarkably rich, even sympathetic, portrait of the father.

Hot Fuzz deploys the same mix of genre conventions, slapstick and old-school British humor that made "Shaun of the Dead" such a dumb-but-good romp.

Like a dark-comedy sequel to the masterful German film "The Lives of Others," Corneliu Porumboiu's Police, Adjective gives viewers a penetrating glimpse of surveillance culture, in this case as it plays out in post-communist Romania.

Breathes its own refreshing, occasionally demented, life into that time period, albeit in a pulpy, stylized cinematic language more akin to vampire-hunter cartoonishness than "Lincoln's" more classical reserve.

From the first smoky notes of a theme song sung by Adele, it's clear that Skyfall will be both classic and of-the-moment.

It lacks Altman's wisdom, but its sense of humor is corrosive, if dispiriting, and its willingness to show the human animal at his most disgusting has a kind of anti-grandeur to it.

A candid, colorful and deeply meaningful sociocultural time capsule, one that captured the black community at the height of its political energy and optimism.

With its deft intercutting of place and time, the film creates a powerful sense of mysticism and fate.

A riotous, rapturous explosion of sound and color, Black Orpheus is less about Orpheus's doomed love for Eurydice than about Camus's love for cinema at its most gestural and kinetic.

A celebration -- of love, commitment and devotion until the bitter end. Gay and straight viewers alike are sure to be inspired by this lyrical testament to a corollary of Tolstoy's famous dictum: Every unhappy family might be unhappy in its own way, but every genuinely happy family is a triumph.

As good as Rourke is, and as willingly as he throws himself on the figurative hand grenade, his performance constantly begs the question of whether the story would be worth telling without him. Marisa Tomei, as Cassidy the pole dancer, delivers a courageous performance, one nearly as ego-battering as Rourke's.

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

The story holds a potential for sap that is mostly unfulfilled thanks to Beresford's stately approach, the stars' better judgment and the protagonists' sharp wits. Admirably, Driving Miss Daisy takes the road less traveled.

An electrifying documentary.

Probably the most engaging Potter film of the series thus far.

The film suggests that it doesn't really matter whether Harris ever gets back in uniform. He's forever carrying around a piece of unexploded ordnance in his head.

When Hairspray is twisting and shouting and swiveling its hips, you can even dare to believe a great society is waiting in the wings.

I love the unsettling details.

An enchanting Italian serio-comedy about the most unlikely of cinematic subjects-the origins, structure and reach of poetry.

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

Writer-director David O. Russell's exhilarating follow-up to "Spanking the Monkey," is even wilder, giddier and more unpredictable than that irreverent debut.

Jackson's big monkey picture show is certainly the best popular entertainment of the year. The film is a wondrous blend of then and now: It honors its mythic predecessor of 1933 while using sophisticated movie technology to seamlessly manipulate the fantastic.

Turns out to be cracking good entertainment, as well as a fresh start for the perdurable 21-picture franchise.

Sheer pleasure to watch, full of rich visuals and felicitous comic turns.

One heck of a tale of deliciously unladylike payback.

Unfolds with a marvelously understated humanism.

The movie, a lyrical blend of documentary and fiction filmmaking techniques, offers a bold example of the rewards of crossing boundaries -- stylistic, cultural, temporal and even commercial.

At its heart, it's about the communities we forge - real and imagined - to save our own lives.

A sci-fi-fueled indictment of man's inhumanity to man -- and the non-human -- District 9 is all horribly familiar, and transfixing.

A movie with the visual expanse of a John Ford western and the ensemble grandeur and long takes of a Robert Altman picture. The movie is definitely Chinese in content, but it exudes American style and spirit.

It's best appreciated by assuming something of a dream state ourselves and enjoying the giddy flow.

The only artwork by Ai that Klayman's film dwells on at any length -- aside from the iconic "bird's nest" stadium he helped design for the Beijing Olympics, and then denounced as tasteless -- is "Sunflower Seeds." Created for a 2010 exhibition at London's Tate Modern, the installation featured 100 million hand-painted ceramic sunflower seeds spread out on the floor.

To watch Bad Education is to revel, along with Almodovar, in the power of cinema to take us on journeys of breathtaking mystery and dimension and beauty.

Thankfully, this fractured fairy tale of mental illness, family drama, ragged romance and die-hard Philadelphia Eagles fandom has landed in the superbly capable hands of David O. Russell.

Filmmaker Davis Guggenheim's scathing, moving critique of American public education, makes you actually want to do something after you dry your eyes.

It's as much fun to anticipate what he's (Herzog) going to say as it is to appreciate the snowy landscapes, belching volcanoes and mustachioed seals before his lens. And what could have been a conventional travelogue becomes a sort of ruminative odyssey of the mind.

A compelling, compact story about a country that was left to destroy itself while one man presided futilely over the carnage.

The Last Temptation of Christ, Martin Scorsese's provocative, punishing, weirdly brilliant adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis' novel, has a feverish intensity. And undeniably, there's a prodigious greatness on display here. But just as undeniably, it is failed work.

Moormann deserves credit, not only for choosing a wonderful and deserving subject for a film, but for doing him proud.

For all its virtues, Wendy and Lucy seems like the most overrated of art movies. Yes, it's obscure and distancing and makes you pay attention. Williams's performance is nuanced, moving and well worth any awards she gets. But Wendy is also anonymous.

Upon leaving the theater, a girl of about 6 turned to her grandmother and said dreamily, "That.Was.The.Best.Movie.Ever." And that sums up why this little movie is so very big.

Manages to be one of the genuinely fresh discoveries of the summer, a little gem that deserves to become a big sleeper hit.

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

See Food, Inc. after dinner, but see it.

The first section of Three Times is fabulous; the second is fascinating if remote; and the third a jangly, modernist mess.

A marvelously moody meditation, beautiful to look at and beautiful to ponder as the camera slowly pans from one scene to the next, framing life as still life.

There's another satisfying benefit to Everlasting Moments. It's gloriously absent of the hyper-speed anxiety that passes for storytelling on our multiplex screens.

As von Trier's ultimate wish-fulfillment fantasy, Melancholia is a broodingly downbeat self-portrait but also the inspiring work of an artist of seemingly boundless imaginative power.

You leave the theater feeling moved by a mother's courage, sickened by the crime and a little frustrated, wondering if this unquiet moment in our history will ever rest easy.

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.

Quite simply, a beautiful film, in both form and content.

A heartbreaker, plain and simple.

It's a deliciously dishy comedy, but like sushi an acquired taste.

Remarkable.

When you think you've figured out Bielinsky's great game, that's when you're in the most trouble: He's the con, and you're just the mark.

It would be difficult to identify a single frame in Saraband that is not a distinguished composition in itself; Bergman has the eye of a latter-day Vermeer.

The beauty of Nine Lives is that its occasionally overlapping stories feel entirely unforced; Garcia's is a filmmaking style of rare lyricism, compassion and discretion.

The story is riddled with absurd coincidences and improbabilities. It doesn't have an original bone in its body. And no one's going to leave this film thinking De Niro should stay behind the camera. But none of these problems stops the movie from being enjoyable. If Bronx Tale feels too familiar, it's at least the familiarity of good Italian movies.

True Grit has sweep and scope and entertainment value to burn, but it's Mattie who invests even the grandest aesthetic elements with meaning.

He treats jocks like humans, not stars or superheroes, and in the end has managed something unique for documentaries these days: It's as entertaining as it is fair.

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

Big Night, a scrumptious tale of great food and grand passions, belongs on the menu with such mouth-watering movie fare as "Babette's Feast" and "Like Water for Chocolate."

Could hardly be more suspenseful if it were scripted.

Searing dramatization of a story of remarkable courage, stamina and spirit.

It's hard not to feel a certain affection for a tale that is so unapologetic about just that: affection.

Profoundly affecting.

Majewski's film is a captivating exercise that will interest fans of art, not to mention arthouse cinema. But the movie's lasting impression is about more than novelty. It's a portrait of suffering and subjugation that urges viewers to stop what they're doing and take notice of the world around them.

The movie made almost no sense whatever to me. I literally could not follow it, even as I was dazzled by it.

The genius is in the writing and in keeping all gambits created by the individual writers in sync, so the piece has a tonal consistency and a narrative flow. A lost art in Hollywood? It's really one of the best movies of the year.

An exhilarating, often mind-blowing history of surfing.

Director Pascale Ferran makes this a sort of opera of two bodies, as the characters discover not only each other but themselves. And the French filmmaker cannily turns their corporeal discoveries into a moral mission, two desperately lonely souls crying for spiritual freedom in a world of moral constriction.

Smart, subtle, deceptively simple little.

For all its visual delights, however, Coraline remains more an engaging spectacle than a connective drama. That is chiefly because of the writing. Director-writer Henry Selick doesn't reach for the kind of universality that would enrich the movie.

All the performances are exceptional.

At its best, Tokyo Sonata is a deft interweaving of seemingly dissonant ideas -- war and music, family and politics, authority and freedom.

It's pretty funny. You don't actually watch it so much as indulge it and admire its cleverness.

The film, therefore, is like a child's view of these events, untroubled by complexity, hungry for myth and simplicity.