Charles Taylor

Affliction is a harsh experience, but the harshness isn't a matter of punishing the audience or of the director, Schrader, showing off his toughness: That unvarnished harshness is the very essence of the material.

An almost perfectly realized poetic vision of people who continue in their everyday existence certain that life in a larger sense has passed them by.

The holiday season's best movie so far.

In his dazzling and luxuriant new thriller Femme Fatale, De Palma turns trash into chic. It's a sexy, violent, glamorous, sinfully funny movie with a surface as hard and brilliant as diamonds.

One of the best American movies of the year and one of the lushest movies in recent memory.

Mike Leigh returns to the council flats of London -- and delivers a richly Dickensian masterpiece about working-class family life.

Next to the Hong Kong action picture So Close, nearly every Hollywood thriller of the summer looks like an elementary-school project thrown together the Sunday night before it was due.

A delight from top to bottom, packed with romance, adventure, beautifully executed swordplay and a sumptuous period look.

Yes, there are some "middle-chapter" problems, but Peter Jackson's Tolkien adaptation hasn't lost its devastating humanity, its heart-stopping cinematography or its epic sweep.

Holds us in a state of horrified empathy.

From moment to moment, O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a pleasure. But when the Coens are really cooking, when the acting and the conception and the music all come together, it's something more -- Dogpatch rapture.

Consistently interesting without feeling essential until, in its last half-hour, it becomes utterly compelling.

It's hard to say why The Station Agent sends you out feeling so benevolent. It may have something to do with being in the presence of a director who treats you with respect. McCarthy allows us to feel without telling us how and what we should feel.

Robert Altman's surpassingly beautiful ballet movie feels lighter than air -- but in fact it's the great director's most tender and memorable film in years.

You wouldn't mistake Donnie Brasco for a great movie or an important one, but it's something that's become almost as rare in American movies: a consistently absorbing and intelligent adult entertainment.

Never less than witty, charming, accomplished.

With one foot in the grind house and one in the art house, the smarts in Freeway are more than equal to its visceral kick.

Andrew Jarecki could have done more to lay out the marriage of sexual and religious and social hysteria that made cases like this possible. But he deserves credit for having the guts to say, in this case and in so many like it, who suffered the most.

An art noir that courts pretension but just manages to keep from succumbing to it.

In some ways, this is the most conventional of Sheridan's movies. But it never feels sentimental because of the grittiness of his approach.

Behind its mask of deadpan goofiness, it's a friendly, clever picture, one that doesn't feel untouched by human hands. And at an hour-and-a-half, it doesn't wear out its welcome.

Local Hero is as sweet and loving as movies get. But it's also about as off-kilter as they get, too.

Watching it is a little like stumbling upon a frayed valentine you put away years ago and then laughing with pleasure at how much it still means to you.

The dirtiest-minded American movie in recent memory -- and an honestly corrupt entertaining picture is never anything to sneeze at.

Kundun, which was written by Melissa Mathison ("E.T.") from interviews conducted with the Dalai Lama, doesn't make you greedy for its images the way some gorgeous films do. It allows you to drink each one in tranquilly.

You slip into the movie so easily that by the time it reaches its emotional climax, you're unprepared.

And now in The Straight Story, no director has been so buzzingly alert to the emotional lives of those people or to the beauty of the world they inhabit as David Lynch.

What makes "Out of Sight" a grown-up treat is that the mixture of lust and longing is as flawlessly proportioned as the ingredients in a perfect cocktail.