Jami Bernard

The real revelation of Sound and Fury is how it introduces hearing people to a culture they insist on ignoring.

How dangerous it is to be a woman in Iran, especially one going against the wishes of her menfolk, is brought home time after time in these related vignettes.

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.

In addition to the strong script, the ensemble performances are topnotch, with no one hogging the limelight.

A tart, funny and tremendously sobering movie about the deepest recesses of personal unhappiness.

Writer-director Danis Tanovic, a Bosnian who spent years documenting his homeland's turmoil, makes a bold feature-film debut with this funny, sobering message movie.

The sunny, funny, toe-tapping Lagaan is the answer to those who ask why they don't make movies like they used to: They do, but in India.

It's enough to encourage the aspiring film makers in the audience, no matter how wee in age, to yell "Cut!"

It's not the best of von Trier, but the movie is shot in an unforgettable, haunting style that evokes both Bergman and the silent era.

An adorable, infectious work of true sophistication.

Once in a great while there's a movie that's so funny, infectious and welcoming - a movie that makes you feel so good about America and the people in it - you just want to climb inside the screen and live there. That's the case with Dave Chappelle's Block Party - part comedy, part concert film, part avant-garde experiment, and all of it a joy.

This powerful, compact trilogy speaks volumes about women in Iran.

The movie adds nothing to the political dialogue, and the love story is mood-killingly sad. The lure of the exotic can be deceptive, it says. The moody, murky atmosphere leaves nothing clear except that mixed intentions will always yield mixed results.

The white-knuckle center of the movie is Sean Penn, who gives an utterly raw performance as Jimmy, father of the dead girl. It's one of the few times that a parent's grief has felt real on the screen through all its ugly permutations.

Funny gem.

Mismatch of tone and material.

A droll gem that celebrates movie love with feeling and deadpan humor.

Streep is perfect, as per usual, but the showy orchid role goes to Cage in an Oscar-worthy tour de force. He pours his body into Charlie's slumped frame of mind and creates a character churning with endearing contradictions -- the unforgettable nebbish.

And still the dialogue is astonishingly feeble, the acting unforgivably wooden. To paraphrase Yoda, the only creature with ­truly human dimensions ever since Harrison Ford's cowboy-mechanic Han Solo departed the galaxy: Bored I am.

Rough around the edges, but effectively presents the quandary of women during the repressive religious regime.

There's something uniquely gratifying about watching nonprofessionals deliver totally natural performances.

A perfect blend of summer action, a big movie with a deeply personal story.

A cat's cradle of creepy childhood memory oozing unreliably from the mind of an aging, desiccated, paranoid schizophrenic, played quite amazingly by a mumbling, stooped, shifty-eyed Ralph Fiennes.

Not since Cary Grant offered Joan Fontaine a gleaming glass of milk has a bedtime toddy looked as suspicious as it does in Claude Chabrol's wittily enigmatic Merci pour le chocolat.

All this frenzy, all these "quotes" from other movies, and yet Vol. 2 is strangely static - a dulling experience that can safely be admired from afar without it ever engaging the senses.

A marvel of character-driven drama that no serious filmgoer should miss.

For devout fans of the greenish monster and for those looking to shoot fish in a barrel.

Seeing the splendid new version of Pride & Prejudice can be hazardous to your health: There's a very real danger of swooning.