Dennis Lim

As botched-drug-deal tales go, Pusher digs surprisingly deep— its surface clichés give way to an existential despair that finally swallows the movie whole.

The lead performances could hardly be better: Gosling, having stolen and propped up entire movies last year ("Murder by Numbers" and "The Believer"), crackles with the economical intensity of a young Tim Roth. Morse, who has racked up decades worth of idiosyncratic character parts, is monumental in this career-peak turn.

Gray's brand of film-buffery manifests itself, simply and irresistibly, as ardent, uncynical movie love.

Constipated English whimsy for the easily tickled.

It's the sort of movie that could haunt your dreams for weeks. In the end, it is, as promised, all about love—this brave, foolish, improbably moving film's great achievement may be the utter sincerity with which it lives up to its title.

Chéreau's film is an unsentimental, almost uninflected, account of a preparation for death, told with a painful clarity that eventually bleeds into compassion.

Nolan, withholding master of disorientation in his previous non-linear films, allows far too easy access into the psychic tumult of Al Pacino's cop and Robin Williams's prime suspect.

While the ideas about techno-saturation are far from novel, they're presented with a wry dark humor.

A lightly comic slacker drama that takes the desperation of teenage tedium seriously.

In much the same fashion as Gregg Araki's "Mysterious Skin", Auraeus Solito's feature debut confronts the taboo of pre-teen sexuality with a startling mix of openness and sensitivity. No less than precocious Maxi, the film is alarming, endearing, and utterly unflappable.

Craven's terror-alert white-knuckler is zippy, unpretentious.

A "guilty pleasure" -- only it's the sort of film that would mock anyone who felt guilt in pleasure.

The movie takes shape as an entertaining psychological armwrestle between rank belligerence and blustery condescension.

The brilliant concluding chapter in the death trilogy that inspired Gus Van Sant's artistic rebirth.

Swinton provides her own brand of incandescence, doubling as the film's aching heart and its center of gravity.

A humane, unassumingly quirky rumination on chance and caprice.

Oneiric as it is, though, Tony Takitani conveys a powerfully tangible sense of loss and loneliness. In both concrete and existential terms, it's a film that dwells on what the dead leave behind and how the living carry on.

Best understood as a memorial…Like most memorials, it is respectful, premised on competing obligations to the dead and the living, and eager to stress that the deaths were not in vain. It not only tells us we should never forget but also illustrates how we should remember.

Münch's characters are given to a certain rapt, unwieldy thoughtfulness, and accordingly, his films cultivate a mood of almost trancelike introspection.

Closer casts a smugly amused eye on the human capacity for betrayal. But because it also seeks to congratulate its audience for its urbane unshockability, it never strays beyond the limits of middlebrow complacency.

Using vagueness as a crutch, Charlotte Sometimes makes a fetish of opacity. Still, whether or not it's a pose, the film's poised reticence is refreshing in context -- a rebuke to the contemporary crop of blabbermouthed American indies.

Neither sardonic nor slapstick enough, Bandits is framed as a flashback -- which merely heightens the general feeling of inevitability.

As with Altman's best movies, Gosford Park is above all an entrancing hum of atmosphere and texture.

Less a thriller than a comedy, and a formulaic one at that, predicated on an amusing but bizarrely simplistic clash of personalities and cultures.

By turns expansive and astringent, The Mother is a portrait of a woman who, with the dazed courage of someone finally awakened to the world after decades of passivity and repression, keeps on walking.

Bittersweet, haunting, and as original and eccentric as homage movies get.

Darwin's Nightmare strings together cruel ironies into a work of harrowing lucidity. It illuminates the sinister logic of a new world order that depends on corrupt globalization to put an acceptable face on age-old colonialism.

Spins in place with aplomb, generating exponentially more vertiginous doublings with each sweaty-palmed set piece.

Set largely in empty public spaces late at night, Blue Gate Crossing supplements its slender narrative with disarming performances and plangent atmosphere.

Recoing's meta-performance is an unemphatic marvel, his placid countenance stretched tight over telltale flickers: a quickly suppressed smirk of incredulous delight, a nervous twitch of chagrin, an abrupt pang of guilt.

A nostalgic coming-of-age sex comedy tastefully lecherous enough to indicate that its intended demographic is several decades past puberty.

With remarkable directness and composure, it shatters the myth of childhood innocence and the deathless taboo of prepubescent sexuality.

There's not a false note among the performances: Henderson, Hart, Shepherd, Markham, and in particular McKee add unspoken complexities to their portrayals.

At once robust and ethereal, this is an existential ghost story, with fresh blood pulsing through its veins.

Captures the latent anxieties of a hazy, ambling existence with pinpoint accuracy.

Weirdest, funniest studio release of the summer so far and a bona fide cult object in the making.

Like "Blissfully Yours" and Apichatpong's first feature, the exquisite-corpse road movie "Mysterious Object at Noon" (2000), Tropical Malady promotes new ways of seeing.

You're paying for the view, and it's truly breathtaking.

16 Years' greatest asset may be its star: Trainspotting's McKidd, coiled and queasy, transcends the dubious romanticism and hard-man clichés of his role -- he exudes a commanding air of constancy in a film that teeters between the rapturous and the ridiculous.

This Canadian cheapie plays like an above-average "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" episode, filtered through the sensibility of early David Cronenberg.

Obsessives will be familiar with the "new" material (almost all available on the original DVD), which elaborates on the time-travel metaphysics and tightens the emotional screws. Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal) shares one additional tender exchange with each family member

An engrossing quartet of hour-long films by British documentarian Adam Curtis, doesn't so much challenge Freud's theories of the unconscious as shadow them through the corridors of corporate and political power. What emerges is nothing less than a history of 20th-century social control.

Though overlong at two hours, 6ixtynin9—only the director's second outing (after 1997's spoofy" Fun Bar Karaoke')—is impressive for the tonal control Ratanaruang applies to his swerving scenario.

If little else, the third and supposedly final entry in the X-Men mega-franchise suggests that some movies -- or at any rate some formulas -- are not just critic-proof, they might even be director-proof.

The final scene is as close to perfection as any Amerindie has come in recent memory--in a single reaction of Marnie's, we see a small but definite shift in perspective; abruptly, Bujalski stops the film, as if there's nothing more to say. It's a wonderful parting shot for a movie that locates the momentous in the mundane.

As square-shouldered as you'd expect of a National Geographic co-production. But Bigelow hits all her marks and more within the narrow parameters.

The film is a model of precision and economy, from the scrupulous framing and editing to the dryly note-perfect performances.

The film's ephemeral, semi-evasive lyricism ultimately works as a modest frame for Bardem's tender, deft portrait, which is in turn suitably expansive and rooted in the most concrete details -- Arenas's pride and anger, his unsentimental wit and defiant vitality.

As a historical document, 24 Hour Party People may be most meaningful to fans whose epiphanies were experienced at least one remove away -- at a different place or time.

On a first viewing, the movie seemed a dilution of the formal strategies Jia had perfected-at once less dispassionate and less empathetic. After a repeat viewing, it still strikes me as Jia's fourth-best film (that it's one of the year's best says plenty about the level at which he's working), but it's more apparent that The Worl d's muffled emotional impact should be understood as a function of its setting.

For a quality horny-Italian-teen frolic, you need look no further.

Without deploying reductive backstory or simplistic psychology, this fearless movie -- easily the year's best debut feature -- illuminates Esther's pathology as an extreme response to the mind-body split.

The golden-hued footage is lovingly faked by ace cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, and the straight-faced result is as improbably touching as the Farrelly brothers' underrated "Stuck on You."

Come Undone's true subject is, simply enough, the perspective-warping enormity of first love, as preserved in a scrapbook of before-and-after snapshots.

A breezy first-person video essay that goes in search of the average Asian American woman, all the while wondering if there is in fact such a thing.

You can see the strenuously grand conclusion of Alex Winter's clammy psychological thriller, Fever, coming a mile off, but the director's impeccably chic expressionism and Henry Thomas's persuasive, dread-soaked performance make the wait a painless one.

Japanese director Ryosuke Hashiguchi ("Like Grains of Sand") enriches his rendition with melancholic ambivalence, sociological specificity, and a knack for delicate epiphany.

Matching their superbly expressive computer-generated counterparts, the actors are all enjoyably hammy, but the real star of Antz is the art direction, a marvel of teeming detail wittier and more sophisticated than the script.

The result is a freakishly potent farce.

An all-access fan's valentine as artfully scrappy and likably wide-eyed as its subjects.

Cavite is such a shrewd melding of form and content that any seeming contradictions and shortcomings end up working to the film's advantage.

Raw, fascinating, often unpleasant film.

Splendidly entertaining.

Enemy of the State isn't really a smart film, but it makes a concerted stab at pretending to be one.

Nowhere Man, despite a tossed-off ending, is a compulsive bit of meta-exploitation.

It's an astonishing Kidman who contributes the film's -- and maybe the year's -- most inspired turn.

Skin is less life story than luxuriant mood bath.

Sometimes exerts the gross-out fascination of reality TV's muckier specimens--its arc suggests a slow-motion "Fear Factor," or "Extreme Makeover" in reverse.

As with Téchiné's best work, Strayed is a peculiar, lingering blend of robustness and delicacy--a movie with hardly a single wasted frame, incongruous word, or false gesture.

Winds up a sweetly nonchalant and excellently unwhiny allegory of seeking and gaining entry to the Caucasian fortress that is present-day America, or at least nocturnal New Jersey.

Still astonishingly vital at 96, the Portuguese maestro Manoel de Oliveira here takes a becalmed trip through stormy waters.

Thrives on vivid incidentals and telling details.

Primer unites physics and metaphysics in an ingenious guerrilla reinvention of cinematic science fiction.

The movie might test your tolerance for the mystical, but its whispery vagueness is of a piece with the luxuriantly grainy atmospherics.

Less interesting for what it has to say about evil -- namely, that it's banal/unknowable/random/everywhere -- than for the microsurgical procedures it performs on genre conventions and expectations.

McElhinney may have made the ultimate anti-calling card, a movie bold and deranged enough to tip its hat to Edgar Ulmer and Barry Lyndon.

Coppola looks beyond the seductive metaphysical puzzle and locates the core of Eugenides's allegory in an obsessive, almost forensic act of remembering, both futile and inexplicably essential.

Built on a foundation of cinephilia, Cinemania is a valentine of sorts to this movie mecca (you have to love a city, and a film culture, that can sustain such bottomless appetites).

The Intruder, is a decisive breakthrough--her (Claire Denis) most poetic and primal film to date, as thrilling as it is initially baffling.

Deceptively placid and subtly unpredictable drama.

Funnier and sprightlier than Eleven, which exhibited a genial self-consciousness but never thought to challenge the genre textbook, Twelve is committed to not taking itself seriously.

A tongue-in-cheek allegory on the hazards of harboring secrets in a relationship, Mr. & Mrs. Smith is most entertaining when the Smiths are hell-bent on mutual annihilation.