Ella Taylor

Constantine, which opts in the end for what I can only describe as a kind of supernatural humanism, is not without its spiritual satisfactions.

Unlike the zippy American medical dramas it apes, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is paid out with the deliberate slowness of a dray horse straining up a mountain path. With every painstaking turn of the screw that seals Lazarescu's sorry fate, Puiu flirts with tedium, but tedium is the point of this hyperrealist tale, paced in what feels like real time.

Cairo Time is the kind of quietly romantic chamber piece one wants to speak up for, in part to support the small but growing band of Arab women making their mark on national cinemas both East and West.

There's great charm, and also discomfort, in watching these highly motivated, excited women learn the tricks of a trade practiced very differently from their own, and casually swap horror stories of life under the Taliban.

This quietly absorbing film is finally more about character formation--curiosity, persistence, endurance--than about achievement as a means to some extrinsic social end.

A lovely wallow in the sweaty pains and joys of mostly gay adolescent love.

There's nothing profound going on here, and this pristine example of cinéma de qualité must later have driven ardent French New Wavers round the bend. But as a breezy populist comedy, more farce than satire, it remains infectious, and the case made for love and sex over tyranny and death takes us back to an age when romantic leads were less self-serious and more willing to double up as buffoons.

Far and away the strongest performance in Shattered Glass is Peter Sarsgaard’s.

The Terminal perfectly captures Spielberg's ambivalent worship of capitalism. His big boy's love of gadgetry is everywhere apparent in the security cameras, blinking computer screens and one-way glass walls.

Shallow Hal is "Shrek" for grown-ups, a fairy tale right down to its reverse-Cinderella plot.

There's no denying that Fry's movie is all the livelier for its gay embellishment.

An absorbing extension of Cantet's abiding obsession with the seeding of political inequality in intimate relations.

But its quiet, solid center is Forster's Eddie, a man who can keep his cool under pressure and, with the merest twitch of a facial muscle, reveal a capacity for change.

Though it's clearly meant to be character-driven, the movie is thrown out of whack by a total lack of chemistry between the leads, and some great acting (Clive Owen, Chris Cooper, Brian Cox) on the side.

To the degree that ivans xtc. works, it's thanks to Huston's revelatory performance.

McGehee and Siegel's ornate structure and editing stay just this side of tricky, as does their borderline-goofy use of special effects to make us see the world (and the words) through Eliza's anxious eyes.

This unusually classical story from experimental Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai flows along, suffused in a quiet beauty flecked with sober foreboding.

A mood of anarchic spontaneity and freshness that thrills.

This delightful riff on the identity crisis of a young Jewish Argentine man deserves both the Grand Jury prize and Best Actor awards it won at last year's Berlin Film Festival.

As sleek, clever and cocky as its anti-heroic protagonist, Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart), a hard-driving lobbyist for the tobacco industry who can turn the most unpromising PR quagmire to his own advantage with a few well-turned lies posing as rational argument.

My Life Without Me was produced by the studio of Pedro Almodóvar, and one sees the Spanish director's influence in the way Polley edges her Madonna with a touch of the reckless sensualist.

First Snow has a fine sense of place and a small but terrific turn by veteran actress Jackie Burroughs.

Rachel Boynton's painfully timely film is actually a full-court tragedy - the sorry tale of a battle won and a war lost; of a country decimated by 500 years of colonialism and poverty; of globalization and America's losing battle to export market democracy to the developing world.

Director Becker and his sharp screenwriter, Bernd Lichtenberg, come less to bury communism than to hurl darts at the Western commodity culture that floods East Berlin.

Though Baran is more forgiving of the Afghans' Iranian hosts than they may deserve, writer-director Majid Majidi ("The Color of Paradise") handles his unassuming material with surpassing delicacy, and the poetic eye for the rhythms and routines of hard labor that has become the hallmark of Iranian film.

With the possible exception of Neil LaBute, I can't think of a filmmaker who can divide an audience as efficiently as Solondz.

Kopple and Peck went on and off the road with the band for the three years of waffling, agonizing and defiance in between Maines’ mouth-offs.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the jollity that reigns in this household, one wants to ask the Mia Farrow question: Why does this woman keep surrounding herself with others who are completely reliant on her?