Jami Bernard

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

A gentle comic stew of monster movies, adding dashes of Bugs Bunny irreverence and British gentility.

Accomplishes two great things on what was undoubtedly a minuscule budget. It breathes life into a small story that has larger ramifications. It also shows that America, as represented by Jackson Heights, is still the promised land for people about whom movies are rarely made.

Inordinately clever, sprightly romantic comedy.

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

Tarnation represents a breakthrough in the possibilities of the personal film as a mix of poetry and journalism. It's also harrowing as hell.

Caché seems at first glance like a straightforward thriller - about a talk-show host being stalked by a technologically savvy blackmailer. But it's really a sly, subversive commentary on conscience, race, class and inequity.

Almodovar is adept at weaving together strands you'd never guess would match.

A brilliant if slow-paced movie about one man's unwitting journey into adulthood.

The already minimalist filmmaker has gone positively threadbare with Ten, a movie that feels as if there was no director on the set. For the most part, there wasn't.

It's sweet but not the least bit plausible that any kid in the mid-'80s would be surprised that along with rock 'n' roll come sex and drugs.

A fascinating movie that explores grief from an emotionally truthful angle rarely seen in movies.

Million Dollar Baby is a knockout. It is Clint Eastwood's baby in every respect — a movie that approaches the level of great boxing films, like "Raging Bull," by using sport as a metaphor for human nature.

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.

If there is any justice in the world, Farnsworth will be remembered at Oscar time.

Borderline brilliant. Tackles the war on drugs from a kaleidoscope of perspectives.

Exhaustingly manic but curiously unfunny movie.

Varda injects her sprightly personality into the film, a seasoning that sometimes overwhelms the stew.

Linklater's ravishing new movie represents a bold leap into the possibilities of technology.

It's a compassionate story about what makes people tick and what really matters.

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 combination of the ancient tinted footage and Butler's crisp, sweeping vistas of the same areas provides a breathtaking recap of one of history's most stirring rescues.

Billy Bob Thornton wrote, directed and stars in this compassionate, occasionally funny, character-driven movie about a mentally unstable man who takes the best interests of children very seriously.

There's no refuge in this uncomfortably realistic movie, and that is its strength.

Amazing... There are only a finite number of filmmakers with the devotion, patience and ability to tease out these stories.

Payne achieves an impressive control over the look and tone, so that, melancholy as the movie is, it comes off as both comedy and comment on the human condition.

Wiseman's film is revealing. But it is also a silent rebuke to a society that tries to hide this pervasive problem behind a smug vision of itself.

As gorgeous and contemplative as it is, Hero is a genre picture and needs to deliver the action goods. To that end, there are plenty of clever, lovingly choreographed sequences.