Jami Bernard

It's a white-knuckler all the way, with most of that tension coming from the smallest facial expressions exchanged in uneasy silence between compatriots who knew what they were getting into, but were nevertheless unprepared for the moral and emotional fallout of their patriotic actions.

For film buffs and Lynch fans, this is a glorious high.

Normally the sound in movie theaters is of popcorn crunching. But the sound at theaters where Central Station is showing is of hearts breaking.

Pure, eye-popping pleasure.

Smith's gleeful, touching documentary records the agony and the ecstasy of realizing your dream, and intangible ways that such dreams help keep people alive.

Powerfully uplifting precisely because it's so horrifying.

Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson has perfectly wedded form to function by filming Boogie Nights in a style suggesting the grainy texture of porn and the ambivalence of the era.

It's impossible to imagine how the action genre would have developed without Akira Kurosawa's watershed 1954 movie Seven Samurai.

Gorgeous, fascinating and surprisingly suspenseful.

The most gorgeous movie of the year. This smashing martial-arts romance from Chinese director Zhang Yimou is stunning in other ways, too, like the eroticism that ripples just beneath the surface.

Gently unfolds into an epic, heartbreaking love story that's far greater than the sum of its parts.

You can reexperience the humor and magic -- and the essence of Streisand -- in this William Wyler classic.

A fascinating whirl of politics and palace intrigue.

A caustic, funny, low-budget treat, shot on digital video.

Yet another film from Iran that has the leisurely pace, sly humor and incontrovertible wisdom of a Sufi parable.

This extraordinary film refracts truth through the prism of memory, until what you get is a tragedy of Shakespearean dimensions, full of sacrifice and betrayal.

A simple story that resonates deeply, largely thanks to the actors' ability to invest it with inner life.

Shrek 2 delivers more fun than there is slime in a green ogre's swamp. Much of that is thanks to Antonio ­Banderas, who runs away with Shrek 2 on little cat feet.

If there's a soft spot in your heart for the sword-&-sandal epic -- and from the star rating above, I think you can guess where I stand -- then you'll swoon with giddy delight over Gladiator.

An amazingly self-assured movie, it percolates with themes and ideas, all held together by the gift of the bull's parts.

A pleasure, chock full of creatively choreographed fight scenes.

Written, acted and directed so intelligently that it stands out from the pack, and is guaranteed to give you the warm glow of holiday movies past -- the kind that celebrated faith in human potential and the value of hard work.

The power of the arts to transcend cultural differences is presumably what moves the German to spare Szpilman, and, perhaps, is the key to Polanski's salvation as well.

The movie is an actors' paradise, and absolutely no one disappoints.

Dano is a real find in this daunting role about a teenager's identity crisis. The subject of the movie is dicey but ultimately deeply rewarding.

The love and attention Oshii poured into animating Batou's pet basset hound proves that the human instinct dominates even in a movie dependent on technology.

Inordinately clever, sprightly romantic comedy.

Harris convincingly creates one "Pollock" after another over the course of the movie.