Ella Taylor

Niftily shot and edited, The Grace Lee Project isn't just a witty unpacking of stereotype. It's also a welcome freshening of the old documentary saw that there's no such thing as an ordinary person.

Stellan Skarsgård's deceptively low-key performance as the beleaguered musician -- furtive, indignant, drowning in self-pity blended with a kind of ruined nobility -- pushes the emotional temperature to a quiet fever pitch.

Immensely moving.

Smart, witty look at the human cost of free-market reforms and globalization.

The rueful ghost of François Truffaut hovers over writer-director Yann Samuell's wonderfully capricious tale of Gallic lovers with no idea of when to say finis.

O'Donnell's directing is assured and glossy as befits a former maker of television commercials, and Jeffrey Caine's exuberant script sidesteps cliché -- just.

A profession of faith, made with the confident disrespect of a true believer.

One of the most fascinating and least documented tributaries of the Jewish experience in World War II.

The movie's pleasures draw on old-fashioned Italian neo-realist simplicity.

Personally, I'd show up for Maggie Smith's top-drawer basilisk stare if she were guesting on "Sesame Street."

The film has the unpolished charm of a diamond in the rough, and it boasts a richer inner life than most of the teen movies currently bouncing off the assembly line.

Leuchter is such a riveting, disturbing and finally pathetic character that his story hardly needs embellishing with Morris' fancy visuals and ominous mood music.

Like Michael Haneke's "Caché," this effectively creepy little customer from Dominik Moll (With a Friend Like Harry) fires yet another shot across the bows of French bourgeois complacency, while throwing in a wink and a nudge about the perils of surveillance.

Light on visceral thrills and heavy on the quotidian rhythms of life on the force, Xavier Beauvois' police procedural owes more to "Prime Suspect" and "Hill Street Blues" than it does to any film genre.

What sets this engaging little movie above the pack of glib, brittle or sickly-sweet teen comedies is the clear eye it casts on the suburban American family, while stoutly defending that battered institution’s elastic ability to adapt.

Wittily manipulating scale to generate the requisite fright factor, the movie is stuffed with visual delights both lyrical (a squadron of ants hang-gliding on flower petals) and visceral (a battalion of bottle-blue wasps on the wing).

Momma's Man taps into that ambivalence, and those moments when all of us long to flee adulthood and sink back into being our parents' beloved baby birds, whether or not we ever were in the first place.

Pascale is the movie’s most defined character, and its most repugnant. Whatever sympathy we can muster for her boils down to Huppert’s richly layered portrayal.

Joyeux Noël finishes up as no more than a garden-variety tearjerker, neatly packaged for Oscar candidacy. It's not hard to see why the French chose this inoffensive weepie as their nominee for best foreign-language film, when they might have had Jacques Audiard's far superior, if more difficult, "The Beat That My Heart Skipped" or Arnaud Desplechin's "Kings & Queen."

Fun, scattershot Hollywood spoof.

A rough but boldly imaginative first feature by British-Canadian writer-director Alison Murray.

What Lurie has made is "The West Wing" without the constraining niceties of prime time.

Selected as Italy's entry for best foreign film at this year's Academy Awards, Private was disqualified for not being predominantly in Italian. A pity, since this meticulously nonpartisan film, even as it makes the case for passive resistance, shows what devastating lack of appeal the strategy has for young Palestinians.

The East makes for a passable thriller, as 1 percenters get theirs in satisfying, if incrementally implausible ways.

This winning confection, from a director (Heavy, Cop Land) not known for the lightness of his material or his touch, shows a fine understanding of what the screenwriters of the '40s instinctively grasped, that good screwball is about dialogue and chemistry.