Dennis Lim

The central conceit is Allen's most amusing since "Bullets Over Broadway."

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

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.

The Machinist has no meat on its bones, and we've seen it all before.

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.

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

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.

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.

The cumulative effect is perversely deflationary: long before it's over, the film has flushed the paranoia from its system.

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

As a historical document, 24 Hour Party People may be most meaningful to fans whose epiphanies were experienced at least one remove away -- at a different place or time.

The scenario eventually becomes so coincidence-choked that the filmmakers have no choice but to play it for mild snickers.

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.

The film never finds a confident tone: it's pitched as a satire, but seems to have no real targets.

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.

The time-outs from wisecracking -- invariably, to impart a simplistic self-esteem lesson or two -- feature the most awkward silences you're likely to endure in a comedy routine.

It's hard not to wish that Chicago had taken place inside a more imaginative head.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Anyone expecting the decorous serenity of the Ang Lee film should be aware that Iron Monkey strives for no more or less than comic-strip thwack and thump.

Easily the artiest queer stroke movie of the year.

The film is slight but sweetly inquisitive, and its participants are endlessly fascinating.

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.

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

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.

A disappointment after the droll, breezy suggestiveness of Fontaine's equally Freudian "Dry Cleaning," How I Killed My Father is rather less than the sum of its underventilated père-fils confrontations.

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

This is pure essence of Bay--it's big, it's loud, it has no context, and if you show up tanked, I'm sure it's really quite poetic.

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

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

You have to, if not love, at least not mind a movie in which the very act of Ashton Kutcher reading is enough of a cosmic trauma to rip a hole in the fabric of space-time.

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.

Skin is less life story than luxuriant mood bath.

Watching the film is like reading a Times Portrait of Grief that keeps shifting focus to the journalist who wrote it.

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

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.

Solid middlebrow entertainment, a vast period epic with an almost DeMillean taste for excess.

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

Ju-on never snaps into focus like a "Go" or a "Pulp Fiction," and what at first registers as sloppy plotting starts to seem positively diabolical.

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

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

The flashes of emotional eloquence from the actors (especially Fitzgerald and Julianne Nicholson, as the radiant vet student who befriends both boys) are muffled by the ultimately asphyxiating preciousness.

Mariage takes his time and allows the film to drift in an almost ostentatiously casual manner.

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.

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.

Neither as weighty nor as weird as it would like to think.

An out-of-body experience for its viewers as well as its heroine.

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.

The title's pointedly incorrect pronoun is typical of the film's obtuse childishness.

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.

It's doubly frustrating that after flirting with (and even upending) biopic conventions for much of its length, A Beautiful Mind finally gives in to them so readily.

A ponderous, almost wordless sliver of grotesquerie.

Tumbles happily into every pitfall that lines its well-trodden path.

Raw, fascinating, often unpleasant film.

It's instructive that Waking Ned Devine is being so aggressively sold as a feel-good comedy; the "good" feeling in question is called condescension.

Open Water is simply a stunt--hopelessly literal-minded and cheap in every sense.

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

Superhumanly awful BBC bottom-feeder Love, Honour and Obey, which, paramount among its many faults, is not recognizably a film.

Perhaps awed by the congress of Method men, director Frank Oz stands back as his actors phone it in.

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

The movie's idiotic fascination with the senselessness of its central act is scarily close to a fetish.

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.

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 the final shot, which assumes the viewpoint of a decapitated head, its appalled comedy has swelled, beyond outrage, to a pitch of punch-drunk hysteria.

After simmering for an eternity, it derails, with spectacular, psychotic force, bulldozing its way toward an almost unwatchable theater of cruelty.

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

Manipulative and cloying, Pieces of April turns into something altogether creepier, even pathological, whenever first-time filmmaker Peter Hedges (screenwriter of "What's Eating Gilbert Grape" and "About a Boy") brings up race.

Bad Santa is a one-joke film; to his credit, Thornton embodies that joke with vicious, vaguely insane conviction.

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.

Much of Undercover Brother plays as a funnier, if similarly addled, "Bamboozled."

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

Smitten by the symmetry of his parable, director Roger Michell crosscuts emphatically between the preening leads -- a strategy that only draws attention to the numerous lapses in logic and unpersuasive changes of heart while sidelining the lively supporting cast

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.

Thrives on vivid incidentals and telling details.

The journey is a yawn -- an outpouring of backstory, punctuated by cute episodic diversions and ill-advised running gags.

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

Unfolds in a shroud of nonspecific suggestiveness but never emerges from under it.

Denying Reality, more like. John Keitel's first feature is impossibly naive, even as smoothed-over coming-out tales go.

Some of the testimonials are underedited, but as a work of passionate advocacy, I Remember Me can't be faulted.

It is not, the filmmakers stress, a sequel to "Four Weddings and a Funeral" (which writer Richard Curtis was also responsible for), but it fits the latter-day Hollywood definition of the term -- same movie, only worse.

There's no gold dust to be found here, just an awful lot of stick-on glitter.

Kormakur's debut feature fulfills the basic requirements of good slacker comedy: It's grounded in quotidian tedium and frustration, and it acknowledges both the humor and pathos of the relevant coping mechanisms (here, lackadaisical flings, porn addiction, amnesia-courting binges).

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.

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

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

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

Boldly engineering a collision between tawdry B-movie flamboyance and grandiose spiritual anomie, Rose's film, true to its source material, provides a tenacious demonstration of death as the great equalizer.

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."

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).

Essentially humorless, Me Without You manages some pleasing textures all the same.

Still most easily defined by its unavoidable parallels to any number of lesbian-overtone psychodramas.

Don Argott's lively documentary, ostensibly a paean to alternative pedagogy, extends its subject a long leash, and he in turn does his damnedest to sabotage the project. Rock School ends up being a movie about just how little fun rock 'n' roll can be.

Time to Leave amounts simply to a semi-thoughtful disease-of-the-week weepie, admirable in its restraint but shying from the terror of the situation.

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

The scenario is stale but the actors are faultless.