Andrew O'Hehir

It’s certainly not Wong’s greatest work; it may be a masterpiece that evades the mass audience or a beautiful failure with moments of greatness. All I know is that I got lost in it, and that I would still have loved it if it were twice as long with half the action.

All in all, an exciting and terrifying new perspective on an era you probably thought you understood.

The best film in the alien attack, conspiracy theory, "Silence of the Lambs" rip-off, disgraced-cop drama, deranged circus wirewalker, anti-capitalist parable genre I've seen this year.

Considered as a whole it's a wonderful and hilarious phenomenon, most of it is executed to Dadaist perfection.

In its cornball "Let's put on a show!" crudeness, its Cuisinart collapsing of rock history, and its reduction of the ambiguous, libidinal revolt led by Elvis and Mick and Johnny Rotten and Kurt Cobain to the level of pampered middle-school posturing, School of Rock is a clever and sometimes a beautiful thing.

It isn't likely to drive anybody out of the theater -- although getting people out of the house to see a meticulous, minimalist study of madness and memory may be another story.

A compelling, compact melodrama that packs an emotional wallop. It's my nominee for sleeper surprise of the summer, at least so far.

It's not a picture with tremendous drama, and the entirely nonprofessional cast is sometimes a little stiff, but on sheer charm, intimacy and the pictorial wonder of its setting in the wide-open Mongolian grasslands, it's one of the family pictures of the year.

A spiny, puzzling and highly entertaining film, and whatever you go into it thinking, you're likely to come out thinking something else.

Speaking as one New Yorker who lived through 9/11 and saw this film with a packed house of natives at its Tribeca Film Festival premiere, I experienced Man on Wire as an almost mystical incantation.

Supremely economical, pulse-pounding and undeniably bewildering thriller, which plays like a blend of mid-'90s Hong Kong action flick and mid-'70s European crime drama. Arguably this movie amounts to less than the sum of its parts - but hot damn, those are some parts.

Roehler mixes cheap sex humor, existential darkness, buffoonish satire and profound tenderness in almost classic proportions. Maybe this is too uneven to be a masterpiece, but it's somewhere close.

It’s no ordinary movie: Rabin, the Last Day is a disorienting mixture of drama, documentary and meticulous re-creation, and very little of it takes place on the last day of Rabin’s life.

Completely deranged, and the portrait it paints of our beloved country depicts a dangerous place full of neurotics and obsessives. But lots of fun, with porn, booze, backyard barbecues and elaborate revenge schemes!

Dark, hilarious and oddly moving.

As this wry, dry and glittering near-masterpiece proclaims, life is full of wrongness, but also full of mystery and wonder.

It's still dynamite, the kind of sexy, paranoid, creepily atmospheric picture that invades all your senses at once.

Schizo is in its way a taut and exciting thriller.

It’s more that the filmmakers close out this oddly inspiring yarn of apocalypse and paranoia with a note of false reassurance. Yes, the world is fundamentally screwed and most people are apathetic or paralyzed. So start ringing doorbells!

The result is a tight, taut, witty and highly theatrical entertainment, shot in shades of wintry gray, that will keep you guessing right through its final fadeout.

A prodigious, almost spiritual experience, a luminous, challenging art movie out of the Tarkovsky school that happens to be about a real war and its effects on real children.

It's hyperactive, often hilarious and ultimately exhausting.

When Vikram Gandhi set out to become a guru, he didn't expect to really become a guru. But that's what happens in his slippery, ambiguous, tense and finally moving Kumaré, which is officially termed a documentary but could also be considered as the video corollary to a thorny work of performance art.

Robot & Frank is such a sly, dry, modest-seeming picture – part science fiction, part social satire, part geriatric comedy – that you don't realize how well it works until it's over.

This film stands as an intimate, terrifying document that renders an incomprehensible slice of recent history in human terms.

Dense with pathos, poetry and humor, this is Park's finest work to date. His stomach-churning climax -- which depicts gruesome bloodshed without directly showing it -- simultaneously gratifies and indicts our most primitive instincts.

If a movie can be stark and rapturous at the same time, this is that movie.

Brick doesn't work 100 percent of the time, but it's a striking achievement, beautifully shot, often hilarious and occasionally moving.