Andy Klein

Maniacally funny. It remains neck and neck with "Young Frankenstein" as Brooks' best film.

The film is a masterpiece of nuance and characterization, marred only by an inexplicable, utterly distracting blunder at the very end.

Its tone has elements of Jim Jarmusch and the Coen brothers but without Jarmusch's self-conscious artiness or the Coens' hip snottiness.

This film made Dietrich a star, and it's easy to see why: Slightly more voluptuous than in her later films, Dietrich is the embodiment of the pleasures of the flesh.

It was Melville's second-to-last feature, and it shows him in top form, with a more generous dose of humor than usual.

The plot may be nothing, but the film is something indeed.

No one can blend melodrama and heightened emotion with laugh-out-loud wackiness the way Almodóvar does.

Wong weaves a spell that no other director could create.

This is a dark, often funny walk through Ingmar Bergman turf.

Released in 1962, it was pretty clearly the most intelligent spectacular within living memory. On its 40th anniversary, it's even better.

Spinal Tap is still on the right side of the fine line between stupid and clever.

There have been other films dealing with the Jewish ghettos during the Nazi occupation of Poland -- some very good -- but The Pianist, the latest feature from Roman Polanski, may be the best.

Craven's other accomplishment here, besides resuscitating the genre, is the way he keeps things scary even when they're at their funniest. The grand finale, while thoroughly bloody and tense, has some genuinely hilarious shtick.

A six-year-old masterpiece, never-before widely seen in the U.S., is still a masterpiece.

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.

Full of provocative concepts, but, like most films that attack such metaphysical concerns head-on, things have become a tad too jumbled by the end to be altogether satisfying. It's a problem built into the subject matter...This all said, Dark City is immensely entertaining, as well as visually dazzling.

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

Altman's technique also allows his huge cast to act up a storm, in the best sense. Gosford Park has roughly half the best actors in England in it.

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.

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.

Singleton may spend the rest of his career chasing the kind of critical and commercial success he won at an early age with "Boyz N the Hood". But even if Rosewood fails to meet that standard, it is a film that reaffirms that depth of his talents.

It's moving; but it's also endlessly engaging, uproariously funny at moments, informative, and eventually touching in ways one might not have expected.

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

The pacing is slow, but the film is entrancing and earns a permanent place in the viewer's mind.

Casting is perfect all down the line.

Once the action kicks in -- starting with an extraordinary balletic fight in the rain featuring the two masters and a flying wooden beam -- you can't take your eyes off the screen.

Pecker is a satire, but an incredibly good-natured one, which is not quite the contradiction in terms it might seem.

Zemeckis is more interested here in getting us thinking (and feeling) than in telling us what to think.