Ella Taylor

The movie's staccato pacing, lent emphasis by Dario Marianelli's haunting score, evokes the cycles of tedium and terror that make the journey so unnerving.

Enlivened by journalist Avner Bernheimer's delicately witty script and some lively ensemble performances under the direction of Eytan Fox, the film offers a haunting portrait of a generation forced to risk their lives in the service of military goals they're far from totally committed to.

A painful, hilarious and immensely moving rumination on mid-life angst.

Junge's testimony about the last days in Hitler's bunker will fascinate the layperson, but it adds little to what is already known by historians.

To anyone whose soul lives or dies by reading or writing or both, the movie is a total thrill, and not just as a debate on the nature of the one-shot writer or the decline of publishing.

Enthralling documentary.

Among other things, this powerfully confused man is a study in American extremity.

Ray Harryhausen's original stop-motion Sinbad classics are a hard act to follow, but Tim Johnson and Patrick Gilmore's update, couched in a gorgeous palette of indigo and dark rose, is a big, beautiful thrill all its own.

Danièle Thompson's romantic comedy is excellent fluff français, leavened with charm, wit and smart observation about the way we love now.

Quietly devastating.

The Well-Digger's Daughter offers a fervent poem to the region's abundant beauty.

British actor Damian Lewis, in an astonishingly elastic yet disciplined performance, invests Keane with a richly ambiguous, heartbreaking inner life that's only at peace when he manages to form a tenuous human connection.

The movie's real strength lies in its intelligent, sympathetic account of the dynamic, difficult marriage of Regina's parents.

Cloaking (Bateman's) world in a hyperrealist light so sharp you could cut yourself on it, Harron keeps the violence minimal, over the top and ghoulishly funny.

What makes 5 Broken Cameras stand out is its insistence on nuance and its refusal to get caught up in the self-defeating war of words over who is the bigger victim.

The speed with which a healthy, relatively young stud can morph into a tub of lard is as horrifying as it is entertaining to watch.

McElwee fans will welcome back the wonderful Charleen, his former teacher and lifelong friend, older and mellower but as beguiling and free-spirited as ever.

Director Roland Suso Richter gives a raw, frank but sophisticated account of the excruciating logistics of this great escape, and the appalling, inspiring blend of betrayal and courage that attended the group's herculean efforts.

Eerily compelling.

As funny as it's got all year. Manipulative and calculating? Sure. Submit! Enjoy!

Perhaps the most telling image in this remarkable movie is that of a relative intently swatting flies in Riyadh's house, while fighting rages outside.

Bollywood meets The Godfather.

What makes you sit up straight is that The Oranges takes seriously everyone's unhappiness, including the home-wrecker's, without letting anyone off the hook of responsibility for their own becalmed misery.

This mouthy express train of a movie has giddy charm to burn, due in major part to the frantic charisma of Nathan Lane.

Antarctica is a beautiful blue paradise, and the final set piece, in which penguins and humans tap their way to a unity of green-minded spirit, is a small masterpiece of conciliatory wackiness.

Directed by Lee Tamahori with his customary flash and glitter, Next lives from one brilliantly executed chase sequence to the next, which is more than enough reason to stay the course.

Exciting though the car-racing scenes are, with their millions of fan-cars swaying fluidly around the stadium, it's the drives through the canyons and passes, and the quiet old ruin of a town (which recalls the abandoned mall in Miyazaki’s "Spirited Away"), that truly quicken the pulse.

The film is not a biopic or a portrait of a famous marriage so much as it is an imaginative essay on what made a union between two radically different people work as well as it did.