Andy Klein

The fractured structure, which moves from one species to another while following a generally chronological overall arc, can occasionally leave your mind to wandering, but for a film with no plot or characters to focus on it is remarkably gripping.

Shot in stylish black and white, with a memorably low-key performance from Duchesne, Bob le Flambeur is definitely worth checking out on the big screen in a fresh print.

Gilroy has brilliantly played to his strengths in Spring Forward. With a story that has no room for big, obviously "cinematic" effects, he concentrates on simple staging, unobtrusive (though often beautifully evocative) visuals, and sheer performance. It's a decision that pays off.

Eureka is, quite extraordinarily, never dull.

Unless you're deeply familiar with Korean culture, you've truly never seen anything like it.

One of the compulsively watchable films this year, second only to "Memento." It's a must-see, except for those with a sensitivity to on-screen mayhem.

Those with an interest in new or singular sorts of film experiences will find What Time Is It There? well worth the time.

It's funny, heroic, exaggerated and, most of all, energetic; the film speeds along as though afraid to lose the audience's attention for even a moment.

Toback has taken a distinctly '60s-ish personal experience and done his best to transplant it into the current, vastly different, cultural milieu. Harvard Man is a semi-throwback, a reminiscence without nostalgia or sentimentality.

The film could be subtitled "Six Characters in Search of an Ending:" When they find that ending, it is gently, delightfully uplifting.

Wisely, Run Lola Run lasts something under 80 minutes; any longer, and it would have been as exhausting and boring as a half-hour Donna Summer track.

What Nolan does accomplish here that we haven't seen from him before is staging a few horrifyingly effective suspense set pieces -- one of which, in particular, is likely to stay with you for a long time.

While Mononoke is often gorgeous to look at and has a far more sophisticated story than most Japanese animated features, it still feels overlong and dramatically unengaging.

An exciting, sharply realized melodramatic film noir, based on Elizabeth Sanxay Holding's novel "The Blank Wall."

Headey, Skarsgård and Rampling flesh these people out marvelously, bringing them fully to life. It's almost a pity: The more real they become, the less pleasant is the time we spend with them.

In the end, the performances and the basic strength of the premise make Shadow of the Vampire a relatively diverting ninety minutes. But there is the inescapable feeling that it is a shadow of the great film it might have been.

From the start, a comprehensible, if necessarily simplified, sense of an extremely complicated moment in history.

What Malick has fashioned here is less a conventional narrative than an impressionistic mosaic of our common, yet varied experience of life and death, as focused and clarified through the relentless lens of war.

One of the glories of the film is that Ramsay keeps us rigorously to Morvern's point of view without ever being explicit about what's going on in her head.

I found myself roaring at the grotesque way some of the characters talk to their pets, pausing only briefly when I realized that I do precisely the same thing.

Makes good use of its actors.

We become so absorbed in the ramifications of the techniques involved that a more challenging plot might have resulted in sensory overload.

While Imamura films generally have their droll moments, this is the most blatantly comic work he's done since the '80s -- richly entertaining and suggestive of any number of metaphorical readings.

Dramatically effective, thanks in large part to Montand's impassioned performance.

Dench is wholly extraordinary in a characterization that is frequently muted, literally and necessarily.

For those with a taste for epics that integrate the historical and the intimate.

Takes roughly a third of its length to really get going, but, once it does, it's a devilishly clever, engaging piece of work that milks every cent of value from its tiny budget.

The only genuine surprises on hand are the few moments when the film defies the expectations that have been programmed into our collective neurons by the past 25 years of horror movies.