Bill Gallo

The whole thing is absolutely beautiful to look at, even when it has a bad case of the cutes.

In elevating bawdy teen farce to political metaphor without squeezing the fun out, Alfonso Cuarón has pulled off a nice little miracle.

Not just great fun but high art.

If, in its groundbreaking assault on the mythology of the American West, Brokeback Mountain gets a lot of people into a furious lather, so be it.

The unfettered comedy of life bubbling up from the Spanish unconscious continues to be proudly liberationist, gloriously extreme, and achingly human.

A beautifully acted, carefully written meditation on one woman's grief, the enigma of imagination, the persistence of desire and -- let's face it -- the power of denial.

Baby may not be quite as compelling as Mystic River or Unforgiven, but there's something so stirring, and disquieting, too, in his quest that we cannot help but pay close attention to him. In the middle of his long career's third act, he's still searching for the secrets in things with striking resolve. You certainly can't ask more than that of any 75-year-old ex-gunslinger.

There are no hearts and flowers in Loach's hard-edged world, no kindly interventions, no signs from heaven. Instead, he gives us the unvarnished facts about working-class exploitation and the failure of ambition in low places.

In this modest but brilliant little movie, we find ourselves immersed in life itself.

This full-tilt visual and aural bombardment is simply a lot of fun. It never lets up. Nor does it ever want to.

Touching, frequently hilarious.

Lawrence constructs a vivid pastiche of human foibles, nicely flavored with a touch of suspense and some well-timed jolts of humor. In the end it's a terrifically entertaining film, if not quite so profound as the makers might wish.

It gracefully defies the usual categories, gets under your skin in ways you cannot anticipate, then works its way straight toward the heart. It's far and away the bravest and best movie of the year.

Unsettling, morally complex and timely view of American power abroad. Many will find it courageous and some, no doubt, will absolutely revile it, but no one is likely to look away from the screen.

Has plenty of dark horror style, but it lacks the weird charm of the 1971 original starring Bruce Davison...It's a nice homage.

This is provocative stuff--and not just for its searing indictment of Brazilian society.

It takes an especially fine-tuned director and an inventive actor to cut as close to the bone as Spider does.

The horrors therein are vivid, even if the movie is a bit plodding.

Happily, this irreverent, sharply observant comedy sweeps us into the maelstrom too. Amid the glut of teen movies rolling out of the studios every week, Election deserves special attention.

A thoroughly professional, frequently spectacular piece of muckraking.

This is a grim and sometimes guilt-ridden examination of the Third Reich in collapse. But it's also weirdly sympathetic, and not just to the peripheral figures in Hitler's twisted world.

One of Void's great strengths is that it doesn't say much about "voids." It simply shows us, in incredibly vivid detail, heart-stopping danger and the raw will to survive.

Money Can't Buy You Happiness. It hasn't been this vividly re-examined in decades, and we're the richer for it.

Exceptionally smart and charming.

Weaving many interconnected plot lines and more than a dozen lives together, this gifted writer-director has fashioned a bleak, brilliant comedy about loneliness, lovelessness, and alienation--a film that constantly upends our assumptions about what is heartbreaking, what is hilarious, and what is both.

The singing and dancing in this Chicago are uniformly splendid, right down to Gere's tap dancing. The high wit and dark eroticism Marshall brings to the famous "Cell Block Tango" number are matchless.

The result is a vivid anthropological document suffused with plenty of emotion and a touch of ancient magic.

Combining the tragic and the comic, this drama is amateurish in places, but it's a triumph of atmosphere (the makers are both North Carolinians) and the acting is first-rate.

Stacy Peralta may think otherwise, but this 101-minute homage to the heroes of surfing is nothing if not a monument to their self-absorption--and to his own. That's probably inevitable.

If you're shopping for neatly tied bundles of plot and the rigid arcs of "character development" common to mainstream movies, look elsewhere. Whether he's playing on the road or at home, Jarmusch always throws a lot of off-speed stuff, and that's his glory.

This nicely acted study of a love that survived all manner of trauma is a must-see for Joyce fans, feminist historians great and small and admirers of the Emerald Isle.

This is anything but pleasant stuff, but it's a must-see for anyone interested in men and women, fathers and sons, and the kind of murder mystery in which the real casualty is the human soul.

Despite a couple of low-budget, rookie-director rough spots, this fascinating look at Israel in ferment feels as immediate as the latest news footage from Gaza and, because of its heightened, well-shaped dramas, twice as powerful.

Thoroughly entertaining Home Movie carries on a grand tradition of American documentary -- seeking out the eccentrics and contrarians among us.

Davies has nailed Wharton's bitter satire of the flights and follies of New York society in the Gilded Age, and leading lady Gillian Anderson shows dazzling range in her portrayal of the book's doomed heroine.

Like all good concert films, it's the next best thing to being there.

It's difficult to imagine a more eloquent tribute.

For better or worse, the filmmaker says nothing directly political about the cruel fate suffered by her people, but the dark poetry of her allusions is powerful.

In the end, leaves you feeling both violated and startlingly informed, as if a mugger had whacked you in a dark alley.

We expect some depth and perspective from filmmakers, but even in talking about the movie Peralta sounds like an ex-high school quarterback who never got over the Big Game, or an old campus revolutionary who's never glimpsed the folly that went along with the fervor.

Arteta and White manage to bring off both the comedy and the tenderness in this tale of a jilted friend who sticks to his passions like chewing gum on a shoe.

Karen Moncrieff makes an extraordinary debut as a feature film writer and director with this observant drama about a budding teenage poet who, amid many traumas, finds the courage to become herself and set out as an artist.

A beautifully acted, graceful, and intelligent film that usefully dramatizes the gulf between Fortress Bush and the relativist politics of Western Europe.

This is probably the funniest Mamet piece to date (but not the weightiest), and it might be destined to take a seat alongside "The Player" and "Sunset Boulevard" in the front row of movieland satires.

Broken Wings' great strength is that it doesn't overreach. These characters undergo no enormous sea changes, no crazy upheavals. Instead, they find themselves trying to roll with the punches--trying to maintain and survive.

The most liberating thing about this funny, touching, heartfelt little movie is the way it defies the rules and, in the end, begins to set its heroines free. They've earned it.

An ideal film for movie buffs, who are bound to delight in each new misfortune even as they sympathize with the documentarians' sometimes inflated vision of a tortured genius at work.

One beautiful piece of work--as alert and aware a survey of interpersonal relations as you're likely to find at the movies this year.

This is a highly original film blessed with fetching complications all its own and some hair-raising turns of plot.

Rookie writer-director Dylan Kidd, late of NYU film school, knows how to get the best out of jittery, handheld camera shots, and he knows how to go for the jugular. Roger is the bleakest comic portrait of misogynist self-delusion we've seen in a long time.

If you're in the mood for a quiet, beautifully acted little drama, liberally spiked with comedy, about the universal desires of the human heart, this may be the obscure gem you're looking for.

There are a couple of technical rough spots, but this daring film challenges most widely held notions about religious conviction while providing a complex portrait of an identity crisis that's run amok and a good mind that's jumped the tracks.

By the time Sprecher's skeins, set forth in 13 related episodes, come together, we've got as clear a view of the big picture as we got assembling the elements of "Nashville," "Lantana" or "Magnolia".

A vivid double portrait of the artistic sensibility in its many weathers -- expressed by two fine actors clearly engaged in a labor of love.

A mood-switching meditation on love and death that goes out of its way to yank our chains.

Can be as howlingly funny as it is touching.

This is not pleasant stuff, but it's important, and thoroughly heart-wrenching.

Wise and surprisingly witty, the film is a minor masterpiece and could serve as a fitting companion piece to America's "In the Bedroom," another superb film about the torments of bereavement.

For all its long shadows and ominous atmosphere, this is a very funny movie -- as funny as the Coens' masterful "Fargo."

The young actors, all first-timers chosen in auditions in Puglia and Basilicata, are completely natural.

In the end, what Minghella has wrought is a nearly perfect drama of love and war (still the great subjects, after all), an epic that's fluent, frightening and beautiful all at once, that lifts the heart and dashes our dreams in about equal measure.

A perfect marriage of author and director.

Despite a little rough stuff here and there, this is one of the more insightful and affecting teen-trauma films of recent years.

We do glimpse the dynamic interplay between rising comedian Eddie Griffin's hilarious obsessions and the loving, screwed-up people who made him what he is.

By the end, you may be exhausted by the effort of trying to unravel the thing, but you may also be taken by the power of its spell. This is a movie that compels you to watch.

A fresh, intimate, gloriously unpolished performance film that measures up to the classics of the genre.

Paul Cox's admirers are sure to embrace this latest eruption of sincerity and sensitivity.

Scrupulously accurate, sometimes-tedious account of Stephen Glass' malfeasance.

In the end, Stone Reader gives us an old-fashioned romantic's view of writers and their craft--complete with the hint of a happy ending.

Maugham's signature wit and tragic colorations are well served by director Istvan Szabo (Mephisto) and screenwriter Ronald Harwood (The Dresser).

It's a bewildering but deeply satisfying paradox, this constant, nearly silent collision in Tran's films of the visible world and the turbulent, unseen world.

So thoughtful and provocative that we cannot help but become engrossed.

The result is a lovely piece of writing brought to life by a terrific cast, a vivid sense of place and, not incidentally, some perfectly chosen pop tunes by such as Bree Sharp, Leona Naess, Smog and Tin Star. As for Lauren Ambrose, her big-screen debut is a revelation.

Waking Ned Devine works up enough feel-good momentum that in the end it's irresistible.

Holes is a nicely made movie for kids, as entertaining as it is thought-provoking and--thanks to director Davis--a bit harder-edged than the usual Disney fare.

This uncommonly clever, surprisingly poignant fairy tale packs a social wallop that we're not quite prepared for.

A fluent, intelligent piece of work whose sex and violence are anything but gratuitous, and exactly the kind of highly personal, no-holds-barred vision of life on the ragged edge that independents always aspire to but rarely have the goods to achieve.

The film splits the difference between the brutal reality of the cable-TV prison series "Oz" and the romanticized fantasy of "The Shawshank Redemption" and provides a vivid, well-rounded gallery of inmate portraits.

Mrs. Henderson hits all its marks, well-worn though they be, and Dench fans will once more find themselves glorying in her reckless spirit.

Arcand loyalists are bound to miss Rémy, but at least he goes out in style. Even the antagonists will have to admit that.

Moviegoers bewailing the absence of literacy and shallowness of character they usually get for their seven bucks need look no further than this fluent and satisfying triptych for a source of hope.

Beautifully observed, miraculously unsentimental comedy-drama.

Disturbing, beautifully acted movie.

Even in Las Vegas, which is possibly the most irrational place on earth, drama demands a bit of dramatic logic. Romantic fairy tales just don't play well on The Strip, despite its fake Eiffel Towers, bogus Italian palazzos and strike-it-rich fantasies.

The movies' time-honored old-man-and-boy theme has rarely been used to such great advantage.

Impeccably acted by a fine ensemble cast, it's a sheer pleasure to behold.

Happily, North Country is not all social-realist grit or straight sermonizing. Not only is Theron achingly real, the fine supporting performances here lend even more dramatic reach and human scale.

The bittersweet charm of this extraordinary film is trumped only by its wisdom. Without resorting to schmaltz or sticky pathos, director Vladimír Michálek (a child of 49) fashions an allegory about aging, friendship and love that equals (and often surpasses) the best American movies on those tricky subjects, from "Cocoon" to "On Golden Pond."

Not just another lawyer movie, but rather one of the most striking dramas of the year.

An unabashed flag-waver and one of the best feel-good sports movies ever, this authentic charmer does for its young hockey players what John Wayne used to do for the U.S. Marines, and it lifts us, too, onto the boys' cloud of belief.

Indeed, in this era of muckraking left-wing documentaries, The Inheritance offers a more fascinating fictionalized look at what cut-throat capitalism can do to conscience.

The political, social, and linguistic adjustments Parker makes to this hugely entertaining Husband give it fresh relevance without betraying the original.

It's a pleasure to watch these two superb actresses circle and attack, conspire and conflict in the corporate shark tank, and it's just as profound a pleasure to behold a talented new filmmaker who's managed to succeed his first time out.

As is common in a Frankenheimer picture, the plot lines get a bit tangled in Ronin, but the atmosphere is tense, the style impeccable.

Jack's odyssey, despite some clunky writing and predictable first-movie missteps, gives off a flavor and a flair that stick with you.

A fascinating, frequently hilarious meditation on delusion, self-loathing and personal salesmanship

This vivid exploration of the human animal creates a romantic alchemy that's raw, unsettling, and touching.

Connoisseurs of horror are bound to play favorites here (this amateur votes for Box), but there's one more thing that connects these three films--the brilliant cinematography of Christopher Doyle.