Jack Mathews

What we need to remember, what Black Hawk Down reminds us, is that there are no safe missions when you're chasing bad guys. Especially when you have to chase them down a hole.

Amy Berg's riveting documentary, tracks O'Grady's predatory trail from San Andreas, Calif., to Ireland, where he is now living on a church pension that was apparently meant to buy his silence.

Moore's most assured, least antagonistic and potentially most important film.

A smartly written, confidently directed film that delivers big laughs while developing two of the year's most earnest characters and some of its most rewarding sentiments.

The black-and-white animation won't dazzle your eyes, but everything else about Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's adaptation of Satrapi's graphic comic book series Persepolis will hold you in its thrall.

Hilariously inventive Hollywood satire.

A brilliantly spare and poignant tragicomedy that projects such savage self-criticism of China's "economic miracle" that the film has been banned at home.

A hive of broad, brilliant performances.

As the relationship between the two British schoolteachers begins (quietly), builds (deceptively) and dissolves (spectacularly), Dench and Blanchett give a master class in acting. Pick your own sports metaphor, but watching them go at each other is the match of the year.

It's more fun than a turkey shoot. It's also one of the most entertaining riffs on American culture in years.

A sweetly hilarious romantic comedy about a soccer fan whose favorite pro team's unexpected success threatens to push him over the edge.

Peter O'Toole, looking frail beyond his 74 years, gives what may be his farewell performance as a leading movie actor in Roger Michell's Venus. It's one for the books - and maybe the Oscars, too.

It is a devastating indictment of the ruling class of Money, Miss.

The actors are solid at every position, but Broderick, who seems to get better with each performance, is especially good at playing the impulsively self-destructive yet sympathetic loser.

The face-to-face interviews laced throughout the movie are fascinating and often laugh-out-loud funny. Ask people to talk dirty and you don't know what they'll say.

In some ways, The Queen is a comedy of manners - bad, good and archaic. The formal bowing and scraping surrounding Her Majesty is as hilarious as it is (apparently) accurate.

The Manhattan movie of the year, Francis Lawrence's I Am Legend, offers a stunning glimpse into how the city - as we know it today - might look in 2012 if it were abandoned in 2009.

Strong stuff, compelling drama.

More fun than a company picnic - and a lot more fun than the classic 18th century novel that inspired it - Michael Winterbottom's Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story is the first good comedy of 2006.

One of the best things about Michael Apted's uniquely ambitious and continuing documentary series on the lives of a group of British schoolchildren is that you don't have to have seen the last one to enjoy the next.

May be the year's most derivative film, but it's also the most original.

We're treated to two smashing performances from Morel and Blanc, and all of the mysteries raised before are satisfyingly resolved.

With nifty new villains, a revived Green Goblin, plus $300 million worth of aerial special effects, Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 3 is definitely good to go.

Unlike Glenn Ford, a soft-spoken studio star who was cast against type as Wade 50 years ago, Crowe is a perfect fit. Not because of his bad boy behavior offscreen, but because he can blend charm and menace better than anyone.

Dunst and Williams...turn ditsiness into a frenetic comic duet.

Maybe you have to have experienced one of these anti-weather urban cocoons to appreciate the concept of the film, and the prickly people who populate it.

The most compelling and least partisan of all the Iraq documentaries.

Remarkable first film.

Even if The Mummy is imitation Spielberg, it offers more bang for the buck than we're used to getting.

A powerful, deeply moving tale, immeasurably facilitated by the performance of relatively unknown Hilary Swank as Brandon...smartly shot and edited, and the performances are dead-on.

Michael Corrente's Brooklyn Rules takes him to the mean streets of Gotti country, circa 1985, and it's another gem.

A strong, gritty, powerful piece of film making, and one of the three or four best movies made about the Vietnam era.

Funny, insightful, unpredictable and blessed with pitch-perfect performances, Ghost World is one of the year's best movies.

This brilliant documentary, which shows not only how Belgian King Leopold II made the huge and resource-rich central African Congo his own private reserve, but how his legacy of exploiting the land and brutalizing its people continues in modern times.

An astonishingly intimate and painful coming-of-age story.

With a grating symphonic score by ­Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood and the constant sense of danger following Plainview, "Blood" does not release its grip on the audience until its last, bizarrely crazy minutes.

Fans of anyone other than Sean Connery who has played James Bond may want to look away, because admirers of Ian Fleming's 007 novels are almost bound to agree that Daniel Craig is the best Bond since Sean.

The Trials of Henry Kissinger serves as both a prosecution brief on the above charges and an unauthorized biography.

If "The Godfather" movies were based on real gangsters and some of them were still around to talk about the good old days, they might be as fascinating as the characters in Billy Corben's documentary about the cocaine import business in 1970s Miami.

Does a meticulous job of summarizing these notorious events, but it is the stories of Liuzzo's five children that gives it fresh emotional power.

For the initiated, the third time's a charm. For everyone else, it's just a scream.

As inventive as "Being John Malkovich," as psychologically quirky as "Ghost World" and as honest as the day is long.

If you're in the mood for a horror movie, this ought to do you.

Berry gives a riveting performance, but as a deeply decent man trapped in a hell of his own making, Del Toro gives the kind of career performance Berry gave in "Monster's Ball."

Showing as much courage and talent behind the camera as he has while acting in front of it, Roth has crafted for his first film one of the most bluntly graphic and disturbing movies ever done on the subject.

Eastwood's sepia-toned combat scenes are as graphic, if not quite as jolting, as those in "Ryan." And without a Tom Hanks-size star in the cast, "Flags" is not likely to do "Ryan's" blockbuster business. But "Flags," a true story directed by someone with far more faith in the audience's ability to empathize, is the better movie.

Breathtaking.

"Songs" is a delight. It's a visual feast and often hilarious.

Whether this reserved, hypercautious widower can deal with the arousal she creates in him - let alone be physically able to act on it - is one of the many layers of tension that drive this unusual and absolutely riveting dance.

Surges forward with barely a respite. It's like watching a propane factory burn, waiting for the tanks inside to explode, and when they do, we're right in the middle of it.

The movie is over in a breezy 112 minutes, but it may be another half-hour before your sides quit aching.

What stands out, not surprisingly, is the work and passion that goes into the shows. But seeing all this from the inside creates an extraordinary level of empathy for those involved.

Funny and masterfully inventive.

Boorman signals that he may not like what the real Cahill did, but as a storyteller with a proven affection for larger-than-life subjects, he can't resist him, either.

On one level, Microcosmos is the strangest act of voyeurism ever recorded, with bugs caught au naturel, eating, working, metamorphosing. We're even treated to a steamy scene of unexpurgated snail sex. When this couple gets together, it redefines intimacy and stick-to-itiveness. On another level, the film is a spectacle and celebration of life, in all its phases. [11 Oct 1996, p.F15]

The film is as faithful to its subject as perhaps any film biography has been. As Eastwood said, Parker was a paradoxical character, both self-destructive and full of life, and the movie, simultaneously dark and exhilarating, takes that as its theme. [22 Sep 1988, p. 1]

Buscemi handles all of this with a casualness that seems exactly right for the milieu. His characters aren't caught up in a great dramatic crisis, they're caught up in everyday life, going over these events like so many speed bumps in time. [18 Oct 1996, p.F12]

The island phase of Hanks' performance is simply amazing.

A giddy black comedy about a homicidal housekeeper in rural England, is a hilarious reminder of that 1944 Frank Capra classic about two old maids whose cellar is cluttered with the bodies of would-be suitors.

This epic tale of survival, love and adjustment covers a 59-year period - from 1910, when a band of urban émigrés arrives to start a settlement, to 1969, when only one of them remains.

No actress of her generation inhabits characters as thoroughly and convincingly as she (Streep) does, and this performance carries the movie

It takes a while to get used to the film's campy characters and its broad, "Ace Ventura" stylings. But Ferrell is the anti-Jim Carrey -- his deadpan comic mannerisms are infectiously funny, and his cluelessly narcissistic Burgundy is a joy to follow.

Left-wing flame-thrower Robert Greenwald (Uncovered: The War on Iraq) gets after the global giant anyway, and he may have you thinking twice before entering another Wal-Mart parking lot.

It's often maddening, because of its structure, and some of its visuals are pretentious nonsense. But, as a story of undying love, it's certainly unique.

Good, clean fun, and the view is fabulous.

The playfulness evident in the hundreds of bondage photos that made a pious young Tennessee model semi-famous in the 1950s and an 82-year-old legend today is also the driving force of Mary Harron's superb The Notorious Bettie Page.

A slice of life in the most profound sense.

Some of this is elemental psychology; blood is thicker than water, etc. But the movie also reveals how the privileged class ignored, condoned or denied the reality of the Holocaust.

The Exorcist is still shocking, but mostly because of its graphic, anti-religious language. [2000 re-release]

A charming trifle, beautifully filmed in a Currier & Ives setting, with buttery-smooth performances from Binoche and Depp, and enough good tidings in its nougat center to get you through the holidays.

Ray and his writers found plenty of material to fill Cooper's capable hands. They've turned what must have been a tedious investigation into a sharp cat-and-mouse game between Hanssen and Eric O'Neill (Ryan Phillippe).

Until he was shot to death in 2000, Haitian radio journalist Jean Dominique was a lone voice for truth and freedom in his politically riven country.

Both frustrating and instructive.

A captivating piece of visual wizardry. The house, which eventually frees itself from its moorings and chases after our trio of tweener heroes, is a genuine original.

With echoes of "Dave," in which Kevin Kline takes over for the comatose U.S. President he resembles, Kristoffer begins to feel the power given to him and to make his own decisions, leading to some hilarious situations and an unpredictable ending.

Their ultimate success is a classic victory for the little guy.

The actresses create wonderfully rich characters, and Luis Callejo, as Caye's unknowing boyfriend Manuel, and Antonio Durán, as the sadistic civil servant, fill out the very strong cast.

What Andersen does best is capture the sense of growing up and living among the landmarks of Hollywood's authentic back lot.

In a sad twist of technological birth and infanticide, General Motors - with assists from the oil industry, the Bush administration, cowardly California energy officials and apathetic consumers - doomed the future car to the literal scrap heap of history.

The successful bits, along with an amiable cast of losers and their prom-night prey, make American Pie a winner.

If it weren't based on a true story, you might suspect Sydney McCartney's A Love Divided was created by a panel of militant Irish Protestants.

The Specialist allows Eichmann to convict himself, not of complicity in the Holocaust -- to that he pleads guilty, by reason of nationalism -- but as a man unfazed by his own inhumanity.

At times, the giddy tone makes it feel like a musical set on the eve of Pearl Harbor, but the acting is uniformly good and it's an absolutely gorgeous film to watch.

More than the sum of its parts.

Josh Hamilton gives a marvelously engaging performance in this fish-out-of-water comedy.

Manhattan has always been a fat target for apocalypse filmmakers, but with its 9/11-inspired imagery, Matt Reeves' breathlessly fast-paced Cloverfield is going to resonate with New York audiences in a way no other horror film has.

Joy Ride is plenty spooky but there's also plenty of comic relief -- mostly from the perennially goofy Zahn.

The story feels as urgent as the latest bad news out of the Middle East.

A grim, poetic, heart-wrenchingly fine ode to the lost children of Glasgow's forgotten class.

Japanese Story could have been a two-character play staged in front of a desert mural. It wouldn't have been as pretty, but it's that tight.

Not wildly imaginative, and it has a tepid mix of movie references. But the physical environment and characters make it irresistible.

A fascinating story.

What is lacking in suspense is more than made up for in passion and in sports cinematography virtuosity.

The documentary plays it down the middle, neither condemning nor romanticizing the political outlaws, but making sense of who they were and what they did.

A flawed but highly entertaining B Western blown up to John Ford scale.

It has a nifty premise and outstanding performances from Ferrell, as the protagonist-in-progress, and Emma Thompson, as his blocked creator.

This is a crazy, gorgeous, disturbing, darkly comic horror story about an early-18th-century Frenchman born in a Paris fish market without any odor of his own but with a sense of smell that would make a pack of bloodhounds wail with envy.

A slog to get through, but Jeanie Drynan's nuanced performance as the enduring matriarch makes it all worthwhile.