Andrew O'Hehir

It's a mixed bag with plenty of gags that fall flat, not a comic masterpiece. But it's got tremendous zing, a sense of mischief and a big heart, more than enough to mark it as a delicious shot of caffeinated ice cream, and the summer season's funniest comedy.

Taken as a whole, Antichrist is a gorgeous, mesmerizing construction, and almost every one of its frames shimmers with demented, imaginary life... It offers more proof, if we need any, that von Trier is one of the most accomplished cinema artists of our time, and also perhaps the most deeply trapped in his own head.

A wrenching, funny and wise little picture, with a diva-like junior star at its center.

Even as this film unravels into incoherent, self-justifying moral instruction, it never becomes boring to watch.

A ripping good yarn, like a Fitzgerald short story rewritten by John Updike, with an uproarious, impossible Hollywood ending.

A fever dream about an aging, grasping, neurotic artist who brings his disastrous personal life, thinly veiled, into his work and ends up as a grotesque caricature of himself, alienating everyone who ever loved him.

A movie where style and craft are fatally confused with substance, and where almost no effort is made to make the characters seem like believable people.

Paradise Now isn't a comfortable viewing experience, but it isn't meant to be. Inevitably, people's reactions to this subject matter -- and this filmmaker's handling of it -- are all over the map. All I can say is that I found it a tremendously compelling existential thriller that kept me up late the night I saw it, and it has resonated in my brain ever since.

Despite the lurid content, this is a beautifully made film that reaches for moral seriousness and resists facile judgments.

Reasonably good fun. If you're a 12-year-old boy riding an intense Cherry Pepsi buzz and totally devoted to destroying some brain cells, that is.

It isn't going anywhere, but the journey is highly entertaining.

The charm and the shoddiness of Haiku Tunnel stem from the same source. It's basically a San Francisco underground theater production that somehow escaped onto the movie screen without losing any of its eccentric, insular qualities.

More than anything, The Betrayal is a cinematic essay about family and loss and home, one that's ironic and elegiac in tone and requires some patience.

Martin Lawrence, no Eddie Murphy, takes a reheated cross-dressing shtick and turns it into something to elate your inner fourth-grader.

It's a funny, strange, sad and wonderful picture, packed with delightful performances by Hollywood stars and made by a director with a startling facility for the form and an expansive cinematic imagination.

Finally, at the risk of seeming provincial, why is it OK that some Canadian has made a movie set in Ireland with no Irish people among the principal cast?

A quiet, unglamorous film that sneaks up on you slowly. I found it had a lovely, peculiar emotional resonance by the time it was over, but it's likely to appeal more to documentary buffs and obsessive Gondry fans than ordinary moviegoers.

Like the very greatest artists in all media -- here I go with the meaningless superlatives again -- Renoir was able to transcend his own perspective, his own prejudices, and glimpse something of the terror and wonder of human life, the pain of misapplied or rejected love, for rich as for poor.

At the risk of retreating into Waffle House aesthetic relativism, I think the unsettling power of Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross' film stems from its contradictions.

The grandest and most vigorous movie he's (Frears) made in at least a decade. Like Okwe himself, it rises above its limitations, and it's just a little bit bigger than the landscape around it.

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

Outsiders will find this schtick-laden, mildly exciting adventure yarn an inoffensive triviality, while fans will savor one more encounter with Picard, Riker, Data, Worf and the gang, replete with all the well-worn character tics and platitudinous parables about the contemporary world they expect.

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.

Primo Levi's Journey is a profound meditation on the unevenness of history, reminding us -- as Faulkner once remarked -- that the past not only isn't dead, it isn't really past at all.

About midway through Denzel Washington's new film The Great Debaters comes a raw and terrifying scene that exemplifies why the movie's worth seeing, despite its hackneyed and awkward story.

Almost as exhilarating as it is depressing. Puiu's filmmaking technique is remarkable, and all the more so because it's almost invisible.

Above all a cracking good yarn that earns its laughter, its wonder and its tears.

Taken on its own terms, it's a light, sweet, curiously enjoyable misfit romance, whose real star is not Aniston but her magnificently awkward Lothario, Jason Bateman.

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.

Although Instinct is strictly a Hollywood formula picture, it's such an efficiently executed one, built around two such outstanding actors, that for the most part you won't mind.

But if the storytelling is murky, the filmmaking is stunning and, more important, the passion for this city -- its people and landscape -- is pure.

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.

What feels at first like a quiet, straightforward picture builds into one of the richest and most satisfying of the year so far, in any genre or any language.

A jumble of spare parts and leftover dialogue, as if it had been assembled out of unused bits of every movie where an unknown whatzit threatens our way of life and the government goes into full institutional pants-crapping panic mode.

Sloppy but cheerful documentary.

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.

For the most part Yes buzzes with visual life and imagination.

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.

The Last Kiss is more a capable-craftsman film than a work of genuine dramatic insight, but here and there it opens a window onto the terror and wonder of grown-up life, one its characters don't especially want to look through.

OK, so Valentine is, like, this new serial-killer movie that totally blows. But kind of in a good way. Like, it's funny.

All I can say about Timberlake's performance as the thoroughly odious, desperately seductive, textbook-case metrosexual Parker is that he brings so much reptilian fun that he unbalances the movie, almost fatally.

To state the obvious, Manderlay is often patently offensive in its racial politics, and it surely isn't for everyone. It is, however, very funny, very dark and very skillfully played.

So stylized and slow-moving (even at a spare 75 minutes) that you may have trouble adapting to its hypnotic rhythms -- but if you can, there are sumptuous visual rewards to be found, plus the faintest emotional uptick right at the end.

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!

It's a difficult film to follow and at 172 minutes is maybe a half-hour too long. But simply as a sensory experience The Fast Runner is amazing.

Requiem, the new film from German director Hans-Christian Schmid, is absolutely astonishing. See it if you possibly can.

Director Cook and screenwriter Anthony Frewin were both intimates of the real Kubrick, which I guess counts for something. But for what, exactly? Does it uniquely qualify them to make a mean-spirited, trashy and intermittently funny film about a guy who wasn't Kubrick?

Dark, hilarious and oddly moving.

A very mixed bag. It's an oddly dry fusion of documentary and narrative film that arguably doesn't quite click on either level.

The funny thing about all this is that a half-hour into Underworld I couldn't wait for it to be over. When it really was over, I couldn't wait for the next installment. Go figure.

Captures the awful intimacy and the grimy, second-rate quality of the Northern Ireland conflict in resonant fashion.

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.

With all his artifice, his prodigious narrative risks and seemingly undisciplined mélange of styles and tones, Desplechin has made a film that feels more like real life than anything I've seen in years, from any source. It's a masterpiece.

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 a tremendous experience, whatever it is; the kind of thing supposed art-movie audiences used to tolerate and pretty much don't anymore.

Gibney's immensely funny and sad new motion picture Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson -- the "Dr." was a mail-order divinity degree -- is principally intended to rehabilitate Thompson and introduce his work to a new audience.

Too jumbled to become the major pop hit it wants to be. But it's not an entirely bad film despite its lack of coherence. Horror aficionados and other midnight-movie fans shouldn't miss it.

The hectic, sprawling Fanfan la Tulipe eventually feels like too much -- too many goofy asides, too much Comédie Française hambone acting, too much gallantry and villainy, too much forced good cheer.

Greenwald isn't capable of the magisterial, mournful manner of, say, Eugene Jarecki's "Why We Fight," but the two films would make a natural double bill.

I don't even care that there's no plot in this Antonio Banderas-Lucy Liu faceoff. It's still terrible!

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.

What makes me respect The Man Who Wasn't There despite myself is the sense that the Coens want it to be about something that can't be described or defined.

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

An endless battle scene in search of a movie. It's every bit as harrowing -- and also every bit as pointless and misguided -- as the botched military mission it depicts.

Home of the Brave isn't exactly a subtle or a delicate picture -- it's an old-fashioned Hollywood movie, at least in tone, that's being released like an indie -- but it has some terrific acting and comes straight from the heart.

Manufactured Landscapes may tell you more about how the 21st century world actually works than you really want to know, but it's a heartbreaking, beautiful, awful and awesome film.

A middling little movie that tries to trespass on Bergman-Renoir territory and simply isn't adroit enough to pull it off, and because in its weaker moments it's overheated and silly.

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

It's a glimpse into a world most secular, metropolitan liberals never see, and it's likely to induce howls of both terror and hilarity from big-city audiences.

A sunny, cheerful, thoroughly artificial concoction, going nowhere with no particular speed. Still, better than your average airplane movie.

An agreeably chewy, pulpy work of old-fashioned crime cinema, a fair bit overcooked and overlong, but worth catching for its acting, its atmosphere and its action set-pieces.

Autumn is actually pretty damn good. It's a defiantly odd work, a movie-movie set more in the crime-film Paris of Jean-Pierre Melville or Jacques Becker or early Godard than in the real 21st century city.

A compact near-masterpiece that combines a slow-motion romantic comedy with a docudrama-style portrait of a remote, nomadic culture as it is gradually eroded by the tides of the 21st century.

Mamet's trademark artificial, mutual-incomprehension dialogue and con-game plotting are ineptly matched to the action genre (and feel stale in any case), while the jiu-jitsu scenes are so incoherently shot and edited you can't tell if the fight choreography is any good or not.

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 casting Jack Nicholson as the jaded Anglo-American journalist who abandons his previous life during a trip to Africa and adopts a dangerous new identity, Antonioni was working with a more powerful and charismatic actor than he has before or since. The result is something like a glamorous thriller or a disaster film in slow motion.

What makes Boynton's film stand out amid the current crop of political documentaries is its rigorous reportorial fairness, and its refusal to simplify material in order to score facile ideological points.

Juliette Lewis makes Aurora Borealis into a funnier, richer, more powerful film than it has any reason to be.

It's a classic gal-pal movie, perfect for daughters, sisters, moms and the guys whose asses they kick.

A winsome, charming and irresistibly romantic picture, and also a profoundly self-involved one that has nothing whatever to do with Iraq or war or much of anything else besides the butterfly-like spirit of Roberto Benigni. But I guess that combination makes it a great holiday selection choice for certain disheveled, liberal family groups. Mine, for instance.

It's not merely that these subjects have already been satirized to the point of ultimate tedium; more importantly, Simone just isn't very funny.

Add Christopher Walken, giving one of his patented demented performances as a Kurtz-esque mining tycoon deep in the Amazon jungle, along with some vague Hollywood politics about labor exploitation, and The Rundown is far too cheerful and good-hearted to be terrible.

Scorsese is pushing, I guess, for something that combines a '40s horror-thriller with a contemporary psychological tragedy. What he ends up with is more like a Hardy Boys mystery directed by David Lynch.

A feverish, breathtaking tour through Mexico City high and low, an explosive, mosaic-style portrait of our continent's largest city.

Robert De Niro and Frances McDormand almost rescue this lifeless, clichéd cop drama! Close isn't good enough!

Hu, a Chinese-American immigrant who made a mid-career switch from business to filmmaking, approaches these characters with genuine passion and compassion, and her evident talent shines through the timeworn material. Acting by all three principals is tremendous.

Haneke's new Funny Games has a current of bleak humor that comes through more clearly when you're not reading subtitles. It remains a horrifying, implacable mind-fuck, liable to be widely misunderstood and widely despised.

A tightly constructed drama that will keep you on the edge of your seat.

Many years in the making, Freida Lee Mock's documentary Wrestling With Angels paints an intimate and detailed portrait of playwright Tony Kushner, in the years since he became the most important living American dramatist. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that this is something of a booby prize.

The thing is, it works. Or at least it works for me. I left the theater convinced that House of Fools is Konchalovsky's best work in almost 20 years (which it is) and that it might be something close to a masterpiece.

Richly enjoyable and consistently surprising.

An engrossing, gem-hard little popcorn-cruncher.

A lugubrious sub-"Exorcist" demonic possession film that's absolutely no fun at all.

Copying Beethoven has an ace up its sleeve: the wonder and drama of the Ninth Symphony itself (heard here in Bernard Haitink's tremendous 1996 recording with the Royal Concertgebouw).

The movie never fails to be crisply written and cannily delivered, but it's way too steeped in TV-culture inside jokes for its own good, and August's attempts to suffuse the whole thing with ontological or theological meaning are ultimately pretty dumb.

A gorgeous transcription of medieval decorative art and its themes into a contemporary animated narrative, one that should enthrall children older than 8 or so, along with the adults lucky enough to watch with them.

Dragons torch the earth as manly men with weird hair battle them in this colossally misconceived dud.

Such a feebleminded, good-natured comedy that it actually makes you laugh with that timeless gag of somebody pretending to cough while calling someone else a bad name.

An alternately charming and frustrating comic entertainment.

If Christensen's conventional plot is somewhat at odds with her downbeat realism, the idea that these characters are willing to fight like cats and dogs, and destroy each other and themselves, to avoid confronting their intense attraction to each other is totally convincing.

An irresistible fable of reconciliation and forgiveness.

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.

You can't imagine a soapier setup, but Gilles' Wife taken on its own terms is a spectacular achievement, a heartbreaking cinematic work that finely balances melodrama, family love story and devastating tragedy.

One of the most extraordinary accomplishments in recent American nonfiction filmmaking. It hits hard as to facts, and opens its eyes to inexpressible mysteries. It strikes a clear moral and philosophical stance, and then -- as part of that philosophical stance, actually -- reveals its villain as a tragic and sympathetic figure.

A distinctively absorbing entertainment, offering just enough popcorn thrills for mass audiences and just enough chewiness for hardcore sci-fi fans.

A scared-straight after-school special, but actually good.

Been Rich All My Life is something like the "Ballets Russes" of tap dancing. I'm delighted to report that the similarities include the fact that the Belles are transmitting their improvisatory "rhythm tap" style to generations of younger dancers.

This is a tepidly amusing film that will offend no one, including those it claims to skewer.

While excellent in many technical respects, is a muted, pretty, anesthetic concoction that's never fully satisfying.

For the most part "Inception" is a handsome, clever and grindingly self-serious boy-movie, shorn of imagination, libido, spirituality or emotional depth. Nolan establishes a fascinating world, loaded with trapdoors, symbols and hidden secrets, and then squanders the opportunity on an overpriced "Twilight Zone" episode.

A movie that is never elegant but is often hysterically funny, and maintains a rabbit-on-speed pace that Hollywood comedy long ago abandoned.

So ingeniously constructed that these meta-noir ingredients feel dizzyingly enjoyable, never hackneyed. In fact, the overheated melodrama of Identity is crucial to its method -- and the key, in some ways, to its narrative secrets.

It's a lot like a '70s exploitation movie, with its determination to seduce and shock the viewer with alternating currents of electrical stimulus, and its weird combination of arty arch-decadence and neo-Victorian moralizing.

Comic, disturbing and affecting by turns, and often all at the same time. Its funniest scenes are also its most unsettling.

Given the debased standards of action cinema these days this might be enough to make The Town a hit. But almost everything else about the movie is badly off balance, starting with Affleck's decision to cast himself as the implacably sexy and good-hearted Doug.

This Friday the 13th is glossy, good-looking garbage, acted out by a cast of big-chested androids (male and female alike) and with the original series' rough edges smooved over. It's reasonably entertaining.

A stunning technical accomplishment that virtually bursts with noise, ideas and references, but it's fundamentally a gracefully crafted movie that's about human beings and not images.

Wonderfully acted and energetically filmed, and in fact it partly echoes a real-life pedophilia scandal that rocked Belgian society to its foundations in the '90s.

If The Cell were six minutes long it would blow your mind. At two hours, it's a disordered muddle of hellacious highs and pedestrian lows.

However you respond to it, the fraught sexual and investigative chemistry between Mikael and Lisbeth is the most powerful ingredient of Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. The movie's second half is a capably executed but mostly by-the-numbers procedural.

This fantasy crap, fake-o effects and all, betrays princes of dice, masters of graph and wielders of bong.

Gruesome and terrifying things happen in The Last Winter, but there's no gratuitous gore or torture, and the film's real power comes from its building sense that something really, really bad is ABOUT to happen.

Proceeds at such an amiable pace and features enough creepy-crawly effects that many viewers won't quite notice or care how rickety and second-rate it is.

There's nothing unconventional or daring about On_Line, but considering how cheap it undoubtedly was to make, the acting, writing and direction all stand up pretty well; this is more intelligent and better structured than at least half the Hollywood movies I see.

It's a challenge to take a comic-book adaptation that stars Josh Brolin, John Malkovich and Megan Fox and drain nearly all the fun out of it. Jonah Hex is one of those movies that combines a certain amount of being ridiculous on purpose with a great deal of pseudo-profound silliness.

It's a marvelously acted film, driven by a sweaty-palmed, exponentially mounting tension.

Dismissed in some quarters as trash because it depicts a sexual act (of sorts) between two teenage girls, Water Lilies struck me instead as a hypnotic and wholly convincing look at teen culture from the inside, with all its courage, cruelty and unspoken codes of silence intact.

High-style goofballing and globetrotting can get you pretty far, but maybe not as far as Johnson wants us to go.

Après Vous offers nice sound design and an unfussy presentation of middle-class Paris. It comes and goes with no unpleasant aftertaste.

A vital documentary in the truest sense.

One of the greatest of all Holocaust films.

Whatever you think you know about Turkey, Crossing the Bridge will change your mind. With a dynamite album of music from the film in simultaneous release, I smell a "Buena Vista"-style crossover hit.

It isn't surprising that the film was originally based on actors' improvisations, since it creates a universe of tremendously enjoyable characters and allows them plenty of room to roam, but has only the most predictable notion of plot and nothing whatever to say beyond be-yourself pieties.

Amid the dozens of documentaries made about various aspects of '60s society and culture, Commune stands out for its ambiguity, honesty and sheer human clarity.

Pretty much rocks.

Amid the infoglut that surrounds us, Gibney's film feels too much like more noise. Is it telling the most important business story of our lifetimes, or is it just another fantastical yarn, crammed into the schedule after Scott and Laci Peterson, but before Charlemagne and the ancient Peruvian astronauts?

A dreary, humorless affair, with no real feeling for the rhythms of either baseball or love.

It's terrific! Shot by the brilliant cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle ("Dogville," "28 Days Later," etc.) and anchored by amazing performances from identical (but not conjoined) twins Harry and Luke Treadaway, Brothers of the Head is not a freak show, or a knockoff "Rocky Horror" camp celebration. It's a work of powerful atmosphere and significant mystery. Plus, it rocks.

Some viewers may find this movie sexist or misogynist simply based on its premise, but it's a mistake to take Greenaway's symbolic narratives too literally.

Arias' blend of traditional cell animation and 3-D CGI effects is thoroughly mind-blowing, and the film's visual sensibility is utterly distinctive.

If you liked "Rocky Balboa" you should be in good shape, since it's exactly the same movie, just aimed at a teeny-tiny-bit younger demographic and with an affectless leading man who avoids hambone acting by not acting at all.

Moving and surprising documentary.

A well-acted little thriller of the sort sometimes called a "twisty" -- I wouldn't call it a great movie, but it'll keep you guessing about its characters and it has an intriguing mean streak.

Once again, the filmmaker gets incredibly wobbly at the end of his story, and his resolution of both the alien incursion and of Graham's crisis of faith feels more like a cheap trick than the product of a genuine belief in anything at all.

A lovely, faintly sinister travelogue.

Despite an overly abrupt and oblique conclusion, this is a major American film, announcing the arrival of an independent director who deserves all the hype.

Lee Harvey Oswald's guilt or innocence or accomplices are not the point of the film; Stone is more interested in the fact that much about the Kennedy murder is now so shrouded in myth and mystification as to be permanently unknowable, and that that fact alone has gnawed away at the self-confidence of middle-class white America ever since.

A work of loopy, original comic genius.

This is another mini-triumph from the resurgent Irish film industry, but much more than that it's a resonant yarn of love, loss, loneliness -- and things that go bump in the night.

It's a reassuring and delicious film, but in no sense an adventurous one.

Its stars, Emily Blunt and Natalie Press, are film newcomers who give startling performances. The photography is often breathtakingly original.

The kind of little indie you'll either hate or find impossible to resist. I fall into the latter camp, but can appreciate opposing views.

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

A dispiriting and thoroughly ineffective romantic comedy, with some juicy morsels provided around the edges by a great supporting cast but no heat whatever in the central coupling between Lopez and Aussie TV hunk Alex O'Loughlin.

This is a movie full of now-you-see-it, now-you-don't plot points.

May indeed induce dizziness, sweating and hot-and-cold flashes among politically minded leftists.

There have been dozens of Holocaust documentaries, and one could well argue that the world doesn't need another. But Michèle Ohayon's Steal a Pencil for Me offers a simple human story of dignity, levity and romance.

It will disturb you as much as thrill you, make you wonder whether the boundaries between life and death, reality and fantasy, imagination and insanity are ever what they appear to be.

Some of American Hardcore is amusing -- many of the aging punks Rachman and Blush track down have turned into highly ordinary middle-aged Americans -- and some is profoundly disturbing.

It's long. Long movies almost always mean the audience member has time to think, and in this context that's not a good thing.

May be a bit too grim and claustrophobic to become a certifiable summer blockbuster, but it's a pulse-pounding thriller that brings one of the Cold War's darkest and deadliest episodes to the big screen.

I think the movie is so restrained, and holds back so much on conventional plot and characterization, that its emotional impact is severely blunted. Nolte is excellent, I suppose, but we've seen this damaged-American-dude shtick from him before.

So finely crafted, so alive with wonderful acting and an extraordinary commitment to realism that most audiences will be happy to surrender themselves to its improbable ride.

In all honesty, Burnett's writing can be stiff and the acting in Killer of Sheep is indifferent. But the reason to see this film does not lie in the dialogue.

If possible, Roberts' movie-within-a-movie is even more amazing than it sounds. She captures a tale of courage, heroism and tragedy more thrilling than any Hollywood spectacle.

I've never seen anything crazier than Palindromes. You can read that as praise if you're that sort of person, but I don't mean it that way.

It's not merely that Dear Wendy was shot on Danish and German locations that don't look quite right; it's that almost every decision made by the production designers is wrong, or at least discordant.

Film scholars and queer-theory types will long argue over the intricacies of Whale's Bride as a study of artistic creation and an acidic fable of homoerotic love, but for fans it's simply the most beautiful horror film ever made.

Fahrenheit 9/11 is more like a drug experience than a political documentary. It's a mind-bending, half-digested mass of video clips, interviews, statistics, rampant speculation and the cheap gags Moore has never been able to resist.

An extraordinary social comedy.

It's a sloppy, fun, late-'80s style Hong Kong action flick full of pogo-dancing zombies and voracious vampires who look vaguely like Siamese cats with spoiled cottage cheese cooked onto their faces.

I'm not sure yet if Time is a masterwork, a deranged folly or just a showman's highly persuasive trick. Whatever else it is, it's a clean, economical and handsome film, terrifically acted, with a heart full of treachery and mystery.

Bronson owes a little or a lot to Kubrick's "Clockwork Orange," but if that's a crime I wish more people would commit it.

This is the weirdest film I've seen all year, or at least the weirdest good film. It's also among the most powerful.

The wonder of Sherrybaby is that we can admire Sherry's exuberance and evident love of life -- and the extraordinary actress who portrays her -- without really being sure where she's going.

The first Holocaust movie that's actually about another Holocaust movie, and in some peculiar way it brings us closer to the terror and tragedy of the original event.

Yes, yes, yes, Downey is blasé, intelligent and hilarious as Tony Stark -- what do you expect me to say? -- but I'm convinced that sticking with this character much longer won't be good for him.

A strange, strident and finally fulfilling father-son saga.

Ang Lee's dark and sober fable might be the most interesting and least dogmatic view of the Civil War to wend its way into the multiplexes.

Arguably a more important movie, which more clearly lays out what must be done to save the world, and how we can begin.

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.

While the women's battle with the cave creatures has fine jump-from-your-seat moments, it gradually becomes the same chase flick horror fans have seen dozens of times. OK, it's a darn good one in most respects.

Profane, hilarious and ultimately heartbreaking, Alex Holdridge's black-and-white feature In Search of a Midnight Kiss has a gutter purity that makes you root for it all the way and forgive its patches of ultra-indie awkwardness.

Doesn't work at any level, but the total lack of chemistry between its central couple is fatal.

If The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada has some languid patches, it's also a work of uncommon maturity and remarkable poetry.

What we've really got here is a tame screwball adventure dressed up with some desert scenery and some awful computer graphics.

It's essentially a mishmash of random ingredients, not very systematically presented and skewed to flatter its audience's presumed enlightenment.

Essentially dumb and sadistic, but it's not like that's something new for pop culture. What we've got here is a solid, grade-B genre sequel, not as scary as the original but a bit funnier, and with a nasty little sting in its tail.

A charming but silly love letter to a vanished era of urban bohemia?

You could call Just Another Love Story nothing more than an exercise in style, but A) Bornedal's got style to burn and B) that's not quite fair. Beneath all the dazzling cinematography, propulsive score and overcommitted acting, I found this movie an affecting, mordant comedy about male midlife crisis in its most extreme form.

A loving tribute to one of the strangest and most enjoyable figures to emerge from American pop culture in its entire history.

His scattershot and ad hominem attacks against many different forms of religious hypocrisy don't add up to a coherent critique, and he's not qualified to provide one.

A brilliant and gruesome work of cinematic invention as well as a passionate and painful human love story.

It's the film's reassuring, almost hypnotic visual rhythms, along with its Hollywood-like narrative structure -- which is closer to "Drumline" or "Bring It On" than to most documentaries -- that make it bearable.

You could describe Love Songs, as a blend of François Truffaut's wistful Parisian sentimentalism and Pedro Almodóvar's acrid polysexual comedy, which were never far apart to begin with (given the difference in climate and native temperament between France and Spain).

I can admire the professional flexibility that leads Van Sant from slow-motion, half-experimental works like "Paranoid Park" or "Last Days" to an inspirational, Oscar-season package like Milk, but I wish he could split the difference between his two modes more effectively.

Following four players through the first season of Miller's regime, Browne captures not just a high-energy sports spectacle played out in the bowling megaplexes of outer suburbia but, even more interestingly, a clash of cultures between bowling's hallowed past and its possible future.

A highly original and at times thrilling use of the documentary medium, and one of the most revealing films about the troubled nature of contemporary manhood I've ever seen.

Somehow Kutcher and Heigl and Tom Selleck and Catherine O'Hara (as her parents) are all fun to watch a fair amount of the time, without the movie they're in being any good at all.

An important human and artistic testament -- a calm meditation on something no one can consider calmly.

After this movie, the Beasties and their fans, camera-totin' or not, are left drenched, exhausted, delighted.

But imagination and energy are often not enough. On balance, this is the dumbest of the entries in Hollywood's anti-consumerist new wave.

I'd have no problem with the element of rampant, half-wacky speculation at the outer edges of physics in these movies if they came labeled as such.

Whole New Thing comes unglued toward the end, spiraling into melodrama without ever escaping its whiny, indie-rock soundtrack.

This film never feels like copycat Americana to me. Its vision of the bleak, ruined, urban-cum-rural landscape of Naples and environs is distinctively European and postmodern, redolent of the spiritual and physical desolation Antonioni captured so memorably in "Red Desert."

Not for the first time in his career, Soderbergh has made a mainstream film that is simultaneously a thought experiment.

Familiar and profoundly unoriginal.

A glossy, enjoyable thriller that isn't quite as tricky or Hitchcockian as it wants to be, Roman de Gare gets by on high style and nice central performances by rubber-faced Dominique Pinon.

Range has a marvelous feel for the clichés and conventions of TV-news documentary, and the tone of mournful elegy he strikes here is both convincing and -- believe me, I'm shocked to be writing this -- moving.

This is a tremendously atmospheric movie full of moody mystery, and it'll keep you on the edge of your seat from beginning to end.

A stark and beautiful film traces a Afghan woman's journey across a landscape we may never understand.

Extraordinary.

A dark and mesmerizing immersion into a distinctive world.

It has, at times, a loopy, edgy humor and moments of genuinely affecting pathos. But somehow the combination doesn't add up to anything.

Turns a hysterical night of African-American humor into the hottest little picture of the summer.

A sprawling and adventurous tale of teen alienation, might just be the movie that pushes the Japanese new wave out of the film-geek ghetto.

From the first frames of Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight, replaying some of the oddest and twitchiest podium performances of Donald Rumsfeld during those heady days of spring 2003, you may feel the crushing weight of an almost Sophoclean impending doom.

If you're ready to roll with Hotel and take what it gives you, there's some rich entertainment here.

A terrific comic-book movie, the most completely satisfying and unsettling one I've ever seen.

Scott Thomas' delicate, ferocious performance captures a woman quietly at war with herself, who begins to realize that her vision of respectability may not fit the remarkable young man in her care.

It's a tremendously absorbing blend of history, journalism and drama. As soon as it was over, I wanted to watch it again.

A distinctive achievement, a World War II movie unlike any other and one of the few films ever to address a topic that makes almost everyone want to look away: What happens to women in wartime.

A Garry Marshall movie has to be funny in order to be anything at all, and this one is so deeply involved with its pseudo-meaningful roundelay of beautiful but inexplicably lovelorn people as to be teeth-grindingly, mind-warpingly boring.

It may be a haphazard mess, but it's actually pretty funny.

I admired the humor, the tremendous craftsmanship and even the shock value of Hostel, but found the Grand Guignol torture scenes excessive. (Unless you're a hardcore fan of Italian, Spanish and Japanese gore flicks, you've never seen anything like this.)

Conveys an intense sculptural loveliness with something moving beneath it, maybe a sense of menace. And it's leavened, like once per hour, with a teeny dash of humor. This isn't nearly as immediately likable or showy as "Cremaster 3," but in a quiet way just as spectacular.

A flinty, almost hardhearted work about characters who have lost almost everything in pursuit of some undefinable abstraction, like honor or their country or doing the right thing. It's an impressive film, but don't expect any warm fuzzies.

It's perhaps most remarkable as a sweet, mysterious portrait of pre-flood New Orleans, which Almereyda not incorrectly portrays as a land of wandering, uncertain souls.

Creates such memorable images out of squalid surroundings that I sometimes wondered whether I was being distracted from the devastating stories of these kids by the beautiful cinematography.

There's a commitment to half-improvised, ground-level realism that lends the picture news value and an obvious urgency.

An ingenious mixture of satire, dead-end suburban realism and gory vampire fantasy.

A wildly uneven and sloppily directed movie, full of clashing tones and undigested bits of superior films.

A strange piece of work, perhaps closer to an imaginative portrait or an experimental fiction that borrows elements from real life than a traditional documentary.

Nathalie becomes a complicated three-handed game, far more concerned with the narcissistic, pornographic and mutually manipulative relationship between Catherine and Nathalie than with the latter's purported affair with Bernard. If you live in New York, run, don't walk to see this on the big screen, because it won't be there long.

Black Gold is more an Al Gore-style message of hope than a total downer.

The story sounds great, on paper: It''s got interracial romance and betrayal, political and ethnic violence, and a faint feminist undercurrent. But the resulting movie is so pretty and so utterly lifeless you can almost smell the embalming fluid coming off the screen.

But in the end conventional sentiment, rather than any actual morality, is all that the script for The Family Man (by David Diamond and David Weissman) has to offer.

What results is a patchy, uncertain motion picture, full of incidents and images but fundamentally unfocused and superficial.

Crisply and competently filmed, Tell No One is an intriguing sample of new-school French cinema at the more commercial end of the spectrum.

This third-act redemption raises Towelhead several notches, but it still ends up feeling like a well-acted and well-intentioned after-school special, a long way from the vividness and texture of Ball's television work.

The British street artist's hilarious documentary is a head-spinning, wild ride.

Roy is like a meta-Cruise or a Cruise pastiche; even the disturbing, stalkerish aspects of his character seem as if they were constructed from tabloid stories about the actor's marriage, his religious affiliation, his sexual identity.

Thoroughly enjoyable, but not because it's any good.

Dark, sleek, funny and creepily infectious, the genetic-engineering horror-comedy Splice is a dynamic comeback vehicle for Canadian genre director Vincenzo Natali, who made a splash a few years ago with "Cube."

Mediocre raunchy comedy.

A relentlessly gruesome, visually impressive and ultimately not very interesting movie with some pretensions to seriousness.

A bit pedantic, but thorough and interesting throughout, a must for history buffs.

A highly unusual combination of craft, emotion and integrity.

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

Director Ian Allen (a longtime playwright and stage director) has lovingly re-created the look and indeed narrative style of silent film -- and he's from Salt Lake City, so if he says Mormons are vampires with hypnotic powers, who am I to argue? I suppose this is a one-note joke, more in the style of '70s avant-garde camp than anything else. But, hey, at least it's a funny joke.

The GoodTimes Kid has a whimsy, a passion, a sophistication and, above all, a vigor that's mostly drained out of Amerindie cinema over the last decade or so.

It's both happy and sad. That's exactly the way to describe Hou's marvelous film as well.

Offers an exquisite tour of the twilight zone between high school and the so-called real world, as well as between bohemian subculture and the even stranger culture of America at large.

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.

The movie is a hilarious, riveting must-see about a family as it breaks down almost all the way and then reinvents itself.

It's a classic and even charming yarn of vanity, hubris and redemption, played out against the bizarre, intense alternate universe of '70s English soccer.

A trashy thriller of the kind that used to make up the second half of double bills in crumbling downtown theaters, circa 1977.

A finely balanced piece of comedic machinery.