Ella Taylor

This highly entertaining spin on eco-catastrophe could turn the most meteorologically challenged among us into Weather Channel freaks.

Subtle distinctions have not been Costa-Gavras' long suit, but urgency becomes him in this forceful and intelligent evocation.

Far from a spontaneous movie -- the passage of this relationship is mapped from the get-go -- but it is warm and deep, and its visual style bespeaks a new maturity in Leconte.

Gluck, an oral historian, has the magpie eye of a born collector of objects, people and ideas, a cheeky appreciation for the ironies life drops on us, and enough of an open mind to let her odyssey lead her where it may.

Cast for fun, and the whimsy is enjoyable both for its parody of heavy-handed "relevant" updates of the play.

As their extraordinarily brave black female attorney points out, at stake are not merely the rights of this family or indeed of all white farmers, but the future of race relations and human rights in Africa.

Marvelously conciliatory film.

I was astonished to find myself weeping copiously over von Trier's latest, which is another parable of monomaniacal sainthood.

This brilliantly caustic movie -- easily the best in a burgeoning and fertile effort to come to grips with post-Soviet malaise in Central and Eastern Europe -- offers living proof that when it comes to politics, comedy is the sincerest form of dissidence.

It's not a happy film, but there's much incidental, quotidian happiness in it. Like Lynne Ramsay's lovely "Ratcatcher," the movie is far from sentimental about children.

The two films bursting out of The English Patient (a chamber piece and a David Lean dune epic) require a juggling of tone, pace and scale that might easily defeat a director more seasoned than Minghella.

Line for line, Knocked Up isn't quite as funny as "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," which got most of its laughs from the friction between prissy Carell and his sex-crazed stoner co-workers. But it is equally good as a nutty anthropology of marginal living and as an illustration of how much energy it takes to do nothing in a work-obsessed society.

Charlotte Gray is not a subtle movie, but it is an honorable and surprisingly gripping one.

Boasts one of the most entertaining and bitterly astute screenplays I've had the pleasure of listening to in a while, with its lengthening spirals of deceit, mendacity and one-upmanship, and its elegant linguistic dances around difficult truths.

Who could resist a movie in which a garden gnome holds the front line in high-tech home security?

Carrey is a genius at registering the rage behind television's sunny smile, while Laura Linney excels as his wife.

Glazer shoots with the dreamy impressionism much favored in his principal line of work, all floaty slo-mos and in-your-face close-ups punctuated by a hard-driving rock score.

Improbably, Read My Lips escapes the cynicism of much contemporary neo-noir, if only by a hair, by ending as a love story of delightful crackpot idealism, in which Paul has made a crook and a hussy out of Carla, and she's made a gentleman out of him.

A sophisticated and beautiful feature debut.

Its suggestion that Israel, of all nations, should know better than to persecute minorities within and across its borders, give the film a thrilling universal appeal.

A warped, but beautiful and strangely hopeful, coming-of-age tale.

Abu-Assad, who made the lovely 2002 film "Rana's Wedding," is a far more gifted observer of the everyday than he is an action director, which is why, in Paradise Now, he productively sidetracks into a persuasive and often very funny portrait of the irrationalities of life under occupation.

Made with local talent by a South African director, Tsotsi is lifted above the current slew of movies portraying Africa as a helpless victim of its many problems, redeemable only by sympathetic white Westerners (as in John Boorman’s sermonizing 2004 drama "In My Country," and to a lesser degree "The Constant Gardener"), by its vigorously transcendent spirit of self-help.

There’s no denying the sharpness of his (Jason Kohn) insights into a society that hasn’t so much collapsed as reconstituted itself around venality, profiteering and rage.

If this terrific documentary doesn't adjust your idea of what it means to have a hard life and a good attitude, you haven’t been paying attention.

Both funny and telling about the messy passages of grief.

Resolutely descriptive, It Felt Like Love doesn't exactly have a plot, which feels absolutely right for a film whose elliptical yet intensely focused visual style seem to flow directly from Lila's consciousness.

An excellent documentary by MacArthur fellow Stanley Nelson (The Murder of Emmett Till), offers no grand theories for the Jonestown phenomenon.

With masterful tonal balance and control, and a visual sophistication as yet unusual among Israeli directors, Gabizon catches both the absurdity and the sadness of what it means to live with such daily threat and confusion.

Anderson and co-writer Lyn Vaus have a wonderfully light touch with dialogue both comic and sad, and Davis is the perfect mirror for the movie's gracefully shifting moods, and its soulful bossa nova score.

This utterly beguiling foray into family comedy from Hong Kong director Stephen Chow (Kung Fu Hustle, Shaolin Soccer) may be the tribute to Spielberg's "E.T. Extra-Terrestrial" the gleefully childlike filmmaker has had up his sleeve forever.

Modest, wise ensemble piece.

Fascinating.

Mercifully there's more Hitchcock than Lacan in this slickly enjoyable little number, which cannily plays off the ingénue image of "Amélie's" Audrey Tautou.

Though it was made before "Run Lola Run," feels like the work of a more seasoned heart and mind.

It makes an eloquent case against the death penalty, especially when imposed on the mentally incompetent. For if one thing is clear by the time she went to the execution chamber, it's that Wuornos is barking mad, her eyes wild and vengeful, yet also, on some level, already dead.

Ali boasts a whole tribe of outstanding secondary performances, of which Jon Voight's Cosell, in an outrageous rug and several tons of pasty-face makeup, is easily the funniest.

For once, it's no stretch for Jerry Bruckheimer to turn a human life into an action movie. Give or take a pack of screaming clichés in Carol Doyle and Mary Agnes Donoghue's screenplay, Joel Schumacher's propulsive thriller is also a smart character study, with Cate Blanchett as the jewel in its crown.

For all its hectic comings and goings, though, Kings & Queen is superbly controlled, gracefully shot and edited, and, for its entire 150 minutes, as engrossing as its meanings are opaque.

A strange and beautiful film.

Faster and, if possible, furiouser than its predecessors.

The eerily timely subject of Haneke's film is France's unwilling encounter with the disenfranchised minorities it has tried to sweep under the rug. As one who giggled through his widely admired, irredeemably silly "The Piano Teacher," I wasn't prepared to be easily won over by Caché, but it turns out to be his most human and affecting movie to date.

Comes as close as perhaps any film has gotten to approximating the inner life of an artist.

Frances Reid and Deborah Hoffman's heart-stopping, Oscar-nominated documentary about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is narrow in focus, but broad in its reach for insight into the power of public drama.

Though technically sleek and assured, On the Run offers much more than the exercise in style that weakens so much contemporary neo-noir. The movie is an unflinchingly intelligent probe into far-left monomania and the brutish power of ideology divorced from ordinary empathy.

Affliction is a work of realist art rich in quotidian detail, a Grimm fairy tale about a community under siege, and a lament for a good man gone bad for nothing.

In this wonderfully strange, hypnotically beautiful second feature from writer-director Claudia Llosa, the traumatic experience of the 1980s civil war on Peruvian women is passed down through song and, it is said, through their mothers' milk.

In this fascinating documentary, directors Ronit Avni and Julia Bacha ask what kind of person counters malicious violence with activist conciliation, but offer neither pat answers nor false redemption.

Director Lee Je-Yong gives the book a makeover full of wit and startling beauty as a tragicomedy of Korean manners at the dawn of the Chosun dynasty in the late 18th century, a period known for its gravitas.

The movie's true genius lies in the exquisite animation, a blend of hand-drawn and state-of-the-art digital technology that suggests an old world being bullied into a new one.

Smartly directed, grown-up film of ideas -- with a debonair script by Paul Attanasio (Donny Brasco) and Daniel Pyne.

For the committed word nerd, spelling has its intrinsic pleasures, but in Spellbound it's another example of the peculiarly American mania for turning everything -- even play --into work.

It's the dialogue -- wisecracking and wistful in equal measure -- that plays out the tyrannical illogic of romantic attraction, and so endears us to this ensemble of bruised souls that when, as in life, not everyone gets what they have come to deserve, it feels, as in life, like an injustice.

A sexy, hugely enjoyable romp, hedged with lyrical grace notes and intimate detail.

Laila’s Birthday is beautifully shot and overlaid with a spare, lyrical score that lends rueful emphasis to Masharawi’s exasperated fidelity to a chronically malfunctioning city.

The movie is a great piece of populist outrage and a dangerously good comedy about a looming American tragedy.

This powerfully rough slice of neo-realism, hitched to soapy melodrama, puts a heartbreakingly human face on the widespread problem of sexual assault in Mexico.

With its ludicrous parallels and brisk, funny script (pardon my provincialism, but it sounds all the funnier in Danish), Italian for Beginners is full of larky charm while drawing its emotional vitality from urban loneliness.

Warm, playful and inventive, this tale of an elephant with a spirit as generous as his waistline comes juiced with the genially goofy animation of the folks who brought us "Ice Age" (and, less memorably, "Robots") coupled with a respectful doffing of the cap to Geisel’s exuberantly wacky visual style.

British director, Roger Michell, strikes an assured balance between intense mood piece and Gothic chiller.

Deft, funny and intelligently scary.

All but a silent movie, Frédéric Fonteyne’s strikingly atmospheric film - adapted by Philippe Blasband and Marion Hänsel from a 1937 novel - relies on the extraordinarily mobile face of Emmanuelle Devos to express the pain of a woman who has no language for her inner turmoil.

Had this idea been pursued to its conclusion instead of the pat, wishfully ready-for-TV ending we're fed, the movie would be a standout.

Generation War holds the line admirably in showing how totalitarianism corrupts almost everything in its path, individual responsibility included, and creates an appalling space where sadists and conformists alike can flourish and break every rule of war at will.

A morally complex and emotionally satisfying drama about the vagaries of Catholic response to the Third Reich.

Their pain is our pleasure, for though occasionally Apted's bluntness makes you want to take a bite out of his neck, there's something immensely satisfying about watching the playing out of ordinary lives we've become attached to over time.