Carina Chocano

Norwegian director Joachim Trier's inspiring first feature Reprise joyfully tackles the process of self-creation, as well as the friendships that feed and sustain it. He captures, in a way that's cool and romantic and heady, the moment in life when nothing matters more than ideas, influences and the possibility of shaping one's life into a work of art.

The camera is so unobtrusive and the acting so naturalistic that it takes a while for a narrative to emerge. When it finally does, you're surprised to find you're deeply invested in the characters.

Wong brilliantly blends musical styles and eras to create an intoxicating mood.

Poignant, wise and unafraid -- just the sort of film for a young person, or any person, for that matter, to make.

In some ways, it reminded me of the final "Seinfeld" episode. As much as I laughed throughout, I kept wondering what was with all the emotional lessons.

Good Dick carries its messed-up, highly improbable premise so lightly and gracefully that it ultimately comes off as a sweet, plausible and curiously grounded love story -- and touchingly old-fashioned.

28 Weeks Later lacks the streamlined thrust of its predecessor but makes for compelling, adrenaline-fueled viewing just the same.

Why aren't there more American movies like this? I mean smart, unpretentious, sophisticated, un-condescending and cheap.

A sweet, funny and gripping romantic adventure, it's about the limitations of political activism in this day and age, and what happens when your girlfriend and your best friend fall in love.

Gently seductive, genuinely tender and often moving without being maudlin.

Spritely, tender and unpredictable.

A squarely suburban movie with a distinctly bourgeois-shaped window on the world, but it's genuine and exceptionally well observed.

What Last Days offers is a blank and narrative-free, but pitch-perfect, dreamscape on which to project your own personal ruminations on Kurt, fame, whatever, nevermind. If you have none, you're on your own.

Buoyed by an unreserved humanism and a cheerful sense of the absurd.

What's rare to see, and what ultimately makes Nacho Libre so enjoyable, is the story of an underdog who's allowed to remain a humble clown all the way to becoming a hero.

An unassuming but quietly heartbreaking drama.

An impassioned piece of activist filmmaking that's as persuasive and entertaining as it is disturbing.

Ghobadi uses the lack of resources and the surfeit of drama that had been the lot of the Kurds throughout Hussein's dictatorship and both Gulf wars much in the way De Sica and Rossellini used the European tragedies of the '30s and '40s,

Captures the energy and exuberance of a young nation in the throes of optimism and works it into a foreboding frenzy.

If Linklater regards the fake culture that has replaced real places with horror, he has nothing but respect and affection for his characters, and the movie is rescued from nihilism by his humanistic view.

Among other things, the characters in A Love Song for Bobby Long really know how to turn a phrase, in itself a pleasure so rare it all but demands any flaws be forgiven.

The beauty of this film is in its lapidary details, which sparkle with feeling and surprise.

For an exquisitely melancholy story steeped in a sense of the past as a succession of great waves of political, ideological and economic change, it's fitting that the movie should end with an underwater sequence. It looks like a dream of a memory of a place about to be wiped out by the next great flood of history.

Volver is just as funny as "What Have I Done," but it's also more sanguine and complex. Its humor is brighter and loopier, more a function of the characters' indomitable spirit than of their terminal despair.

It's a deeply affecting performance, and it drives this quietly powerful, unrelenting film.

The plot, naturally, is silly and not exactly bound by logic. But it's Judge's gimlet-eyed knack for nightmarish extrapolation that makes Idiocracy a cathartic delight.

Clean is one of those movies that's slightly off the mark in ways that are hard to put a finger on, but it is shot so soulfully and features such beautiful performances that it's easy to forgive the occasional false note.

2 Days in Paris is pure Julie Delpy, figuratively and otherwise. Since first becoming known to American audiences in the early '90s, she's revealed herself to be an artist of sundry and unexpected talents, with a distinctive voice and point of view.