Andrew O'Hehir

Fascinating quasi-documentary about Norma Khouri.

There's nothing scarier than a group of hormone-crazed 20-somethings, but this sequel isn't much more than a footnote of a footnote.

The Tree of Life is pretty much nuts overall, a manic hybrid folly with flashes of brilliance. But even if that's true it's a noble crazy, a miraculous William Butler Yeats kind of crazy, alive with passion for art and the world, for all that is lost and not lost and still to come.

A thrilling ride and a sometimes dry, sometimes sweet comedy, but beneath all that is a humane and tragic view of life worthy of the greatest films. Even those without rubber monsters.

Junger and Hetherington take our conflicted ideas about war and its let's-make-a-man-out-of-you purpose and throw them in our faces, in a way "Hurt Locker" never does.

In this quiet, beautiful and terrifying fable about a group of lost pioneers, Reichardt combines epic ambition with a focus on intimate, personal detail.

Fruitvale Station is a document of irreparable grief and paradoxical hopefulness; it launches the careers of two immensely talented young African-American artists and offers the possibility that Oscar Grant’s life, while it was much too short and ended so dreadfully, served a higher purpose in the long arc of history.

The real star of the film is not a person but a city, the vertiginous, exciting, massively overcrowded "maximum city" of Mumbai. On one hand, this environment of Dickensian, almost hallucinatory contrasts between rich and poor, good and evil feels perfect for Danny Boyle.

If Paranoid Park is mainly an accumulation of the signs and symbols and images inside Van Sant's own head, that's artistically legitimate. When he makes a feeble effort to connect Alex's plight to the Iraq war and the cultural climate of Bush-era America, I just don't buy it.

May well be the most exciting documentary of the year so far. I guess it took a British director, David Sington, to capture the story of the dozen American men who walked on the moon -- the only human beings in our species history yet to visit another celestial body.

Austrian director Spielmann has long awaited discovery by a wider world, and for my money the gorgeous, brooding, unpredictable neo-noir Revanche is one of the year's best films.

Extraordinary.

Rapturous and hilarious.

Chang's images of the Yangtze and the new megacities replacing the villages on its banks are spectacular, and his cast of characters rival any fiction film I've seen recently.

Elegant but never overstated, sinister but never coldhearted, this is a note-perfect masterwork on a modest, human scale.

The latest riveting, heartbreaking chapter to one of the supreme creations of documentary filmmaking, the "7 Up" series.

It remains a puzzling dream, vivid in detail and overly obvious in symbolism, fueled by half-digested lumps of malice and wonder.

A movie for hardcore film geeks and regular folk alike, a stunning, and stunningly improbable, fusion of postmodern pastiche and old-school Hollywood melodrama. It's both a marvelous technical accomplishment and a tragic love story that sweeps you off your feet.

Among the most depressing films ever made...It's a stomach-turning tale of globalization at its very worst, though what any of this has to do with Darwin is unclear to me.

Like all poetic inward journeys, My Winnipeg is likely to resonate with sympathetic viewers in unexpected ways. In viewing his apparently placid prairie city, and his apparently placid prairie childhood, as an intensely symbolic landscape of mystery and terror, Maddin invites all of us to view our own equally ordinary lives in the same light.

How do you screw up a family movie that has a cute bull mastiff, a cute 6-year-old and David Arquette playing a mailman? Apparently by unleashing half a dozen writers to gnaw it to pieces and entrusting the result to a TV director (John Whitesell of "Cosby" and "Roseanne") with little sense of how to tell a story longer than six minutes.

Shot in spectacular black-and-white by cinematographer Christian Berger, and marvelously acted by a first-rate German ensemble, The White Ribbon captures a mood of thickening tension and mounting violence.

It's a marvelously constructed personal journey, both wrenching and bittersweet, whose emotional ripple effects stay with you for days and weeks afterward.

Like any truly successful horror film, The Witch operates on various levels at once and is open to interpretation.

I'm not ready to proclaim Looper a sci-fi masterpiece just yet; let's let it sit awhile. But it's a lean, mean, smart, violent picture with a bit of Stanley Kubrick edge, fueled by the terrific Gordon-Levitt.

Old Joy is only 76 minutes long, but it has the contemplative power of Buddhist meditation. Reichardt gives us long, stoned takes of rural roads; shots of birds, insects and slugs in the spectacular Oregon rain forest; interludes with Mark's dog, Lucy. Some viewers may well be bored, or monumentally irritated, by this. I found it masterly, riveting.

A highly unusual combination of craft, emotion and integrity.

Ballast is an audacious and ambiguous debut from a filmmaker whose motives and aims are not as transparent as they seem.