Jack Mathews

In the year of the animated movie, this one soars above them all.

A great big sloppy kiss of entertainment for audiences weary of explosions, CGI effects and sequels, sequels, sequels.

Though Borat has been likened to "Jackass," there's a huge difference. The "Jackass" movies are about extreme stunts. Borat is about interaction and gullibility, and its success is unique to both Cohen and to this one-time-only movie.

One of the most original and ultimately confounding mind games to reach the screen since "The Usual Suspects."

The best comedy of 2004. In fact, it's so far the best movie of the year.

Levinson is so skillful at developing personalities, even among the story's would-be villains, that by the halfway point of the movie, every gesture and expression has unexpected depth and texture. The performances are across-the-board superb.

The biggest little movie of the year - and one of the best ever about the news media.

A movie-movie of the first rank.

One of the most skillful, mesmerizing, tense and satisfying time-warp thrillers ever made.

The incredibly moving post-9/11 drama Reign Over Me proves that behind the funny guy facades of former standup comedians Mike Binder and Adam Sandler are a pair of very serious talents.

May be the best movie of the year.

The most emotionally satisfying because, in addition to having both more intimate drama and more spectacular battles, it resolves all of the issues raised before.

America's favorite superhero reappears in Bryan Singer's Superman Returns, and all we can say is, "Man, oh Man of Steel, it's good to have you back."

For sheer bravura film making, for creating a cartoon world with real air, flesh, blood and the exhilarating cycle of fear and escape, Dinosaur is tops.

What a movie! This is how the medium seduced us originally.

It's an antidote to complacency. The question is, whom is it trying to wake up?

At times, Chicago has the feel of a revue, with the major characters taking turns at their own show-stopping numbers. If it's too much of a good thing, I say, bring it on.

As darkness falls over the movie landscape comes the year's darkest and best movie of them all - Alejandro González Iñárritu's 21 Grams.

Don't miss The Fast Runner. If you do, you will deprive yourself of not only one of the most intriguing feature-film projects in decades and enough plain-spoken anthropology for three credits at Harvard, but one of the most flat-out entertaining movies of the year.

Among the funniest and most satisfying films I've seen in years.

A masterpiece? Probably. Ingenious? Absolutely! Unforgettable? I'll see you at the 10th-year anniversary.

Universally appealing story that plays as well now as it did on opening day a half-century ago. Maybe better.

Turns everything we know about the contemporary world on its head, and substitutes it with one in which spirits, monsters, magicians and animals mix it up in a carnival of energy, good humor and freewheeling illusion.

The best movie I've seen this year.

Amadeus is about as close to perfection as movies get. [2002 Director's Cut]

Hudson, taking over the role of Effie played on stage by Jennifer Holliday, is in charge of Dreamgirls from her opening scene, blowing away Grammy-winner Beyoncé Knowles, Oscar-winner Jamie Foxx and anyone else who gets in her way.

The Two Towers moves faster, covers more ground, has more action and -- with the introduction of the marvelous character Gollum -- packs some much-appreciated laughs.

A great movie -- and the best movie ever about the '70s rock era.

"Letters" isn't about numbers or the battle or even the morality of war. It's about the sanctity of life and how we value our own.

A critic trots out the word "masterpiece" at his own peril, but there it is.

As joyously energetic now as the day it arrived.

A gorgeous, wonderfully inventive computer-animated comedy.

Whether the movie will make you believe a shocking-orange stock car has a future with a lavender Carrera, it's more fun to follow than a televised freeway chase.

Its characters are as entertainingly quirky as any he's given us before, and his familiar themes -- strangers in a strange land, lives reformed by chance encounters -- are played out with much higher stakes and with greater purpose.

Mostow, with his first feature, has made such a convincing, fast-paced, edge-of-the-seat thriller that you'd swear you'd never seen anything quite like it.

Clever, compelling, funny and unpredictable, and it has a lollapa-looza of an ending.

While it won't rival the Harry Potter movies as a cultural milestone, the luminous, irresistible Stardust is no less industrious at scavenging myths and legends and making something altogether new from the familiar pickings.

The story itself is a smooth little gem.

Ale's community is like a band of pirates - collegial, bickering, larcenous and supportive - and his life within it is both heartening and heartbreaking.

Sensational...as authentic as news footage, and far more intimate.

Stamp, whose ability to make Wilson simultaneously coarse and charismatic is irresistibly entertaining.

What keeps the film from becoming obnoxiously redundant is the conviviality of the comedians. These are funny people even when they're not telling the joke.

Perversely funny.

Built from a perfect story-telling collaboration.

The memories recalled here aren't epic tales, just moments that make life worth living. Like seeing a good movie. [12 May 1999, p.44]

Works on every level. The humor and language are as crude as an R rating allows, but Carell and Apatow's script is so hip, funny and - yes - innocent that it's never offensive.

Arguably Lumet's best film in 20 years.

Locks in on its self-destructive subjects so precisely, it's almost unbearable to watch.

Every once in a while, a performance pops out of a Hollywood movie that is so brilliant and unique to the matching of actor to role that it's impossible to imagine anyone else achieving it.

Given the near total absence of intellectually ambitious American movies today, a critic's first impulse after seeing Francis Ford Coppola's reedited Apocalypse Now may be to treat it as the new, improved version he says it is and proclaim it a masterpiece - if not in 1979, then now. But it's not that simple: Apocalypse Now Redux is not a new movie, and neither is it necessarily improved.

The performances are all terrific, but Gene Hackman is close to a career best as the family patriarch Royal, the most useless man you can't help loving.

A slick, fast-paced production with first-rate performances and an emotional punch you won't soon forget.

Represents the year's biggest gamble - and it delivers the year's biggest and most ambitious fantasy.

It's not as clever, or as consistently funny, or as well-cast as "Shakespeare in Love," but Richard Eyre's Stage Beauty is the most fun I've had with the Bard since that 1998 Oscar winner.

Darkly hilarious.

It's a slice of life, with all the trimmings, and one of the strongest films of the year.

28 Weeks Later has a stronger story line, equally fine performances, greater tension, enough gore to satisfy the most hard-core zombie fan, and a narrative pace that flings us from the opening scenes to the very last image.

A two-hour, one-joke comedy that never gets old, Stuck on You is the most mature, consistently funny and satisfyingly sweet movie in the rollicking careers of brother filmmakers Bobby and Peter Farrelly.

Except for Hempf, every character is under incredible duress, and the performances are exceptional. With his first feature, an Oscar nominee for foreign-language film, von Donnersmarck has certainly left his mark.

Intimate, deeply affecting family drama.

Critics are already comparing the two movies and largely agreeing that Tarantino?s story about a psychopathic stuntman who targets women for highway carnage is the best. I disagree.

For Hobbitués and adventure fans of all other ages, it's the year's best thrill ride -- maybe the best film.

When it comes to sports movies, there's nothing like the real thing, and there's never been anything quite as real as the documentary Murderball.

This is likely the fastest-moving intentionally funny action movie ever made. It's as if the 21 Bond movies and four "Die Hards" had been distilled to remove their body fat (that is, character development, buildup, rest stops, etc.) and left us with only the killing and the punch lines.

Fascinating, amusing and ultimately disturbing.

As tawdry as this may seem, Bertolucci is not trying to one-up himself. He was 27 when the student riots occurred and very much a participant in a revolution that was both complex in its implications and naive in much of the behavior. He has caught that perfectly

Based on the true story of the first emperor of unified China, could be downsized and told as an American Western.

It's as harrowing as moviegoing gets.

The strength of McKay's film is not in identifying a cultural period, but in giving voice to so many great theater people. Their passion is infectious, their stories are priceless and their humor is boundless.

The naturalistic dialogue is a masterful bit of writing, credited to Linklater and his "Sunrise" co-writer Kim Krizan, as well as to the two stars.

I wouldn't recommend the movie to anyone, but if the families of the victims take something positive from it, as their cooperation with Greengrass suggests they do, that's justification enough.

A powerful movie that should win all the year's ensemble acting awards. Pitt has never done better dramatic work, Blanchett is as convincing as always, and - in introducing themselves to American audiences - veteran Mexican actress Barraza and Japan's Kikuchi are revelations.

Man on Fire, with a best-ever Denzel Washington, is the first (nonreligious) sure thing to hit the multiplex this year.

For a black comedy whose tangled sequence of events is completely improbable, Pedro Almodóvar's Volver feels absolutely authentic. So, think of everything as metaphor and enjoy one of the year's most delectably twisted treats.

Spider-Man is an almost-perfect extension of the experience of reading comic-book adventures.

Harris brings into focus a nearly forgotten success story, filling in another blank in the ultimate mosaic of the 20th century's greatest tragedy.

Whether Adam Sandler can actually act is not actually answered in Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love. But he's great in it.

It's a sensation - both a milestone in computer-animation and a likely Christmas classic.

Beautifully shot, both in darkened homes and on the misty green Irish landscape by Loach's frequent cinematographer Barry Aykroyd, "Wind" has a you-are-there intensity and intimacy about it that make it nearly overwhelming. But for all its violence and subsequent sadness, it's a movie of extraordinary importance.

If you're at all curious about what it feels like to be inside a race car going 200 miles per hour at Daytona International Speedway, I don't think there's a better, quicker or safer way to find out than Simon Wincer's documentary.

But there were few, if any, better performances in 2000 than the one Blanchett gives here, and Raimi's crafty blend of dramatic realism and supernatural knowledge is one of the year's best directing con jobs.

This quiet yet jolting meditation on love, obsession, loneliness, friendship and fate has the quality to entrance you through a first viewing, and compel you to take its themes and characters home with you for further consideration.

The whole system was sadistic and indefensible, and the church, looking the other way as long as profits rolled in from the laundries, deserves the scorn that Mullan and his fine cast heap on it.

One of the most inventive, funny and ultimately tragic coming-of-age movies in years.

An audacious, snappy visual and emotional feast of dishes both familiar and fresh. It's the first really good movie of 2001.

This is Guest's fourth ensemble parody of showbiz subjects, and though his sketch-comedy style and acting troupe are now familiar, this is his most accomplished movie.

The effects in "T3" are spectacular, and the action sequences -- particularly the fights between the good and bad terminators -- are exhilarating.

Gently hilarious comedy.

What follows is an extreme case of reverse courtship, which begins at conception and works backward toward getting to know each other, and then moves forward to one of the funniest birthing scenes ever filmed.

If the structure is a tad out of whack, "No Country" does not lack for action or suspense. Some of the scenes of Chigurh's stalking of Moss are nearly unbearably tense. Bring your worry beads.

Passes like an evening spent with friends.

School of Rock may be to Black what "The Nutty Professor" was to Jerry Lewis, or "Groundhog Day" was to Bill Murray - that rare, perfectly tailored opportunity to play against one's broadest impulses. Not to neutralize them, necessarily, but to tame them and turn them into something very human and charming.

Tony Gilroy, co-author of the superb Jason Bourne film trilogy, makes a stunning directorial debut with Michael Clayton, an out-of-courtroom drama that helps solidify George Clooney's acting bona fides.

Kempner demonstrates how the star's success and dignified bearing inspired a generation of Jews to fight through the ethnic barriers in all fields.

Though made 31 years after D-Day, the dramatic scenes have the period look of a '40s movie, which links them perfectly with the stunning archival footage.

There is a little of all of us in their awkwardness, fears and neuroses, and we root for their success in the mundane as if they were ascending Everest. Elling is still in the running for 2002's most uplifting movie.

A love story told from the point of impact, at the heart, and no conventional resolution could be more profound.

The stories are eye-opening and heartwarming at the same time, but you'll be moved less by empathy for the characters than by the summoning of your own emotional memories. This movie is personal.

A movie-movie about the movies.

Parents, who are more apt to be bored by the simple story line, are going to be amazed nevertheless by the smooth, convincing animation that lends Stuart his lifelike physicality and expressive facial gestures.

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.

Fujimori comes off as amiable and in full denial, recalling the positive headlines of his presidency - and there were many - while laying the scandals off on Montesinos.

Does something no other Jesse James movie has done: It tells the truth.

Bernstein blunts the inherent tension by zipping everything along at the pace of a snail with a sore foot. Still, Montenegro does wonders in her long silences, and makes her love scene with the eager 72-year-old Cortez look like a hookup at Club Med.

Reilly can play nuts, too, and in a lower gear that reins Ferrell in. They're a great team.

If you've got the patience, this is still one of the all-time exercises in cinematic cool.

Images wash over you like wind-blown rain, fierce and beautiful at the same time, largely shaped into themes by the haunting music of Philip Glass, who is here joined by cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

It is remarkably, unsentimentally dramatized by Fred Schepisi, courtesy of the pitch-perfect performances of its ensemble British cast.

Energetic, provocative.

Plumbs the issue of sibling love and family responsibility in quietly powerful ways, and the performances of the two stars surpass convincing to reach a level of biographical realism.

Whether he'll achieve his goal of setting the world land-speed record for motorcycles is never in doubt, of course, but getting to a film's climactic scene has rarely been more fun.

It's a human drama, drawn in such careful emotional detail, its two acts of violence -- one shown, one not -- are almost incidental.

As cool a summer lark as you'll find.

The movie belongs to Luke, who brings the heroic Chamusso to life as richly as Forest Whitaker does the evil Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in "The Last King of Scotland."

The first pleasant surprise of 2003, a cross-cultural romantic comedy that doesn't stint on romance or comedy, and- - when you least expect and most need it- - throws in some jaunty musical numbers of its own.

The dubbing from German to Polish is off-putting, but it is Schlondorff's best film since his classic "The Tin Drum."

Has the gentlest feel of any movie I can remember.

It's a slight, old-fashioned B movie, the last thing you would expect from an actress coming off a breakout year, but it has a charm and freshness we don't see much these days.

The things you can look forward to, however, are the humor, intellectual musing, emotional tumult, superb acting and challenging adult questions.

Turgoose, in his first film role, is entirely convincing as the strong-willed but naïve Shaun, and Graham is a genuine fright as the feral prototype of the violent skinhead culture on the horizon.

This is melodrama with broad theatrical flourishes, but Dietrich's sensuality is still a natural wonder, and with a new print, the Film Forum run offers a rare opportunity to see it big-screen-size.

As tension mounts through the evening, Giraldi cleverly sweeps in and out of conversations -- and brings it all together in a climax that is as hard to see coming as it is to resist.

This is a pitch-black sendup of a classic femme fatale, a teenage version of the husband-killers in "Double Indemnity" and "The Postman Always Rings Twice," without the saving grace of passion.

You have never seen a concert film like U2 3D, and it may change your expectations for the rest of your rocking years.

I quibble over a film that has none of the artistic pretensions of "The Silence of the Lambs." This is more of a greatest-hits Hannibal movie, with a thunderingly portentous soundtrack, lots of mugging and autopsy detail, and a bang-up double ending.

By turns cheerful, funny and melancholy, and at all times honest, Nicole Holofcener's Lovely and Amazing stands out in the current run of ensemble women's films.

If you're looking for a bit of an uplift, you could do worse among the gloom of so many holiday dramas.

Seth, who played Nehru in the Oscar-winning "Gandhi," gives a subtly layered performance as a complex, tormented and very decent man in crisis.

He's not someone you may wish you'd known, but he's a fascinating street character.

North Country may be a simplistic account of a hard-won battle, but it will have audiences cheering.

Lost in La Mancha basically catches "Don Quixote" in free fall…It's our loss nonetheless. Gilliam is one of the great film fantasists of our age, and one expects he would have done Cervantes proud.

A "Ben-Hur"-size epic with beefcake, beauty, outsize heroes, flashy duels and epic battles. There are breathtaking vistas, taut political intrigues, dangerous romantic liaisons and one of the greatest wardrobes ever assembled for a costume drama.

Newly minted celebrity couple Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston don't have many opportunities to demonstrate their romantic chemistry in Peyton Reed's funny, heart-wrenching The Break-Up, but they still give what may be the best performances of their careers.

A breathtaking visual history of big wave surfing. This is vicarious daredevilry at its best.

Penn hasn't attempted much comedy since "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," but he's masterful here.

Clever as it is, Blood Simple is derivative and self-consciously stylized.

Chinese director Zhang Yimou has made some of the most beautiful movies of the last 20 years, and with his latest, Curse of the Golden Flower, he has also made one of the most deliciously nutty.

Sophie Scholl is the subject of a feature film that has earned an Oscar nomination for a Germany she would have loved to live in.

Despite all the violence that ensues, The Proposition is a psychological Western more in the mold of Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven" than the John Ford films its stark cinematography resembles. It's about a good man, Stanley, who does bad things, and a bad man, Charlie, fighting his conscience.

The casting of Ferrell and Heder turns out to be inspired. The direction, by a pair of NYU grads who've only made TV commercials and two short films, is pitch-perfect. And - miraculously - the skating sequences are passably realistic.

Dublin-born Byrne and native New Yorker Linney...are both exceptional at depicting characters about to burst from inner turmoil, and Linney, in particular, is heartbreaking.

The Savages is a TV movie made for the big screen - and it needs the larger venue to accommodate the huge performances of its stars, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney.

In the end, I don't know that Delirious has all that much to say about the fame game, but you'll laugh nonetheless.

It's too long, unnecessarily complicated and often silly, but Gore Verbinski's Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest is still the purest popcorn entertainment of the summer.

Hurt and Dancy are terrific in these roles, but the power of the movie is in the tension created by Caton-Jones on the same sites where this historical event unfolded.

Hilariously funny, full of fang-popping scares, and guaranteed to increase travel by train.

If you can watch it without weeping over your own predicament, you'll see some serious talent bursting out.

A remarkable and moving account of a part of the French experience that needs more remembering and less forgetting.

This is a riveting story about a man who for years moonlighted as an anonymous hangman while holding a day job as a wholesale grocery delivery man.

The new buddy comedy movie that assumes the names of the series' characters and features the same hot-to-trot, tomato-red and shocking-white 1974 Ford Gran Torino is more fun than a Heidi Fleiss open house.

In condensing Rusesabagina's story, George has undoubtedly overstated the specific dramatic moments; the movie has more cliff-hangers than the "Indiana Jones" series.

Looks a lot like 1950s American gangster films -- particularly, John Huston's "The Asphalt Jungle" -- but it's decidedly French in its sexual candor and moral laissez-faire.

People unfamiliar with either man may think Altman is mocking Keillor and his 32-year-old radio program here. But, it is pure affection, and the movie is as much up-tempo, irresistible fun to watch as the show is to hear.

The story is fanciful, with grotesquely improbable twists involving the fictional Garrigan (James McAvoy) and one of the dictator's three wives (Kerry Washington). But as Amin, Forest Whitaker's command of the screen is so thorough, so frightening, so ripe with malice that you won't move in your seat for fear of catching his eye.

A charmer, a comedy with drama -- or vice versa.

Hand-held cameras give their surface showbiz relationship a sense of immediacy that, like love itself, has more than a hint of danger.

A mostly accomplished first film, with precise comic timing and some hilarious moments.

A dazzlingly original visual adventure.

This is a family movie in the best sense; it plays to children without talking down and to their parents without pandering. Mostly, it's just good fun.

Other than a tortured apology from Bill Clinton for having misunderstood the gravity of the situation, there isn't a peep of remorse heard from the normally sanctimonious West. And Dellaire's final bit of self-abuse is to blame himself for his failure to shame the world to action.

The first of three planned remakes of Dutch films by the late Theo van Gogh, Steve Buscemi's Interview takes the most unnatural act in human intercourse - the celebrity interview - and makes an explosively funny two-character psychodrama out of it.

This is as bitter and despairing an exploration of the human spirit as any of Bergman's films, and it is just as vibrantly written and directed.

Any opportunity to see Pete Seeger perform, even at age 85, is worth taking - and Seeger is front, center and full-throated in Jim Brown's concert film.

As a sign of how stubborn some irrational religious traditions can be, Hindu protesters forced Mehta to close down her Indian location and finish the film in neighboring Sri Lanka.

There is no turning back; the biggest project in China since the Great Wall and the Grand Canal has claimed its human cost and now must prove its own worth. -

This is good clean fun, with or without the soap, and one of the most spirited entries of the season.