Dennis Lim

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.