Ella Taylor

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.