Ella Taylor

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.