J.R. Jones

Screenwriter Paul Haggis (Crash, Million Dollar Baby) has turned the Italian romantic comedy "L'Ultimo Bacio" (2001) into something smarter, funnier, and more penetrating.

Managed to pull the rug out from under me about three-quarters of the way through, and I still hadn't found my feet when the credits rolled.

Fox keeps the suspense story at a low boil throughout, allowing the politics to emerge as the characters deepen.

Engrossing and frequently hilarious.

Holiday counterprogramming at its finest. This gut-churning horror indie is based on true stories of tourists disappearing in the vast Australian outback... This scared the hell out of me.

Italian writer-director Emanuele Crialese is best known for the art-house piffle "Respiro" (2002), a sun-kissed fairy tale that didn't prepare me for the weight and solidity of this historical drama about a Sicilian peasant family immigrating to the U.S.

It's a solid indie effort with plenty of nice character strokes by screenwriter Megan Holley and razor-sharp performances by Amy Adams and Emily Blunt.

Kwietniowski follows up his impressive debut feature, "Love and Death on Long Island," with this equally absorbing study of a compulsive personality.

Played by Ron Perlman, he's the most magnetic action hero I've come across in a long while.

The movie premiered in January at the Sundance Film Festival, too soon to include a tragic denouement: in April the U.S. command surrendered the Korangal Valley to the Taliban.

Cillian Murphy gives a tour de force performance.

This absorbing PBS-style documentary by Joseph Dorman follows Aleichem from his early years in the Russian shtetl of Voronko through the pogroms that would drive the Jewish diaspora of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

It's a terrific story -- part mystery, part farce, part legal nail-biter -- with a last-minute reversal so bitterly ironic it could have been scripted by Billy Wilder.

Critics, clients, and colleagues all weigh in on the architect, but Pollack is more interested in the mysteries of the creative process, and his studies of Gehry's buildings, deftly edited by Karen Schmeer, capture their dramatic sense of movement and resolution.

The movie is taut with suspense but culminates in wise resignation as the hero comes to understand he's running from a part of himself.

The characters are so vivid that the suspense never lags. Crowe is best in buttoned-down roles like this one, and he holds the husband's fear and resolve in balance.

Lorna's sudden change of heart is a pointed example of what the Dardenne brothers' movies are all about. Capitalism may seem at times like a raging river, but every day, all over the world, people try to make it flow in the opposite direction.

Apatow became the hottest comedy director in the business by seamlessly combining relationship comedy that didn't bore the guys and wild comedy that didn't nauseate the girls; this is a knockoff, pure and simple, but its wit and ingenuous characters prove how far the bar's been raised.

Chan-wook Park completes his "revenge trilogy" with this ravishing black comedy about a notorious child killer.

Wonderful first feature.

Pegg and Wright are out of their depth in the second half, when they try to engage the more disturbing elements of Romero's movies, but their disaffected slacker take on the genre is a welcome alternative to the usual bloodbaths.

The most powerful and telling image is a black-and-white still of Kerry burying his face in his arms after he threw his ribbons onto the Capitol steps; it's a moment true enough to cost him the presidency.

This melancholy romance is the first Almodovar feature I’ve ever really liked, an expertly fashioned melodrama that steers mercifully clear of his usual puckishness and star-mongering.

Robert Duvall, who played a similar character in Bruce Beresford's "Tender Mercies" (1983), turns up in a supporting role.

The problem with these feats is that they threaten to overwhelm the film's content, both as complex historical commentary and as aesthetic and theoretical gesture.

After trying her hand at Thackeray with "Vanity Fair," director Mira Nair has found a literary property much closer to her heart: Jhumpa Lahiri's best-selling novel about a Bengali couple and their children trying to find their place in American culture.

This sublime French farce reminded me most of Billy Wilder.

Beautifully shot in black and white by Pawel Edelman (The Pianist), this 2000 feature is both funny and unexpectedly touching.

This eerie drama harks back to sci-fi movies of the late 60s and early 70s that explored inner as well as outer space (2001, Solaris, and particularly Silent Running).

This haunting drama by Claire Denis burns with a mute fear and rage at the ongoing atrocities in central Africa.

Soderbergh's treatment of the Internet turns out to be the most provocative aspect of Contagion. Like the virus, which destroys any cell it encounters, misinformation spreads rapidly online and tends to cancel out information that might save people.

Director Laura Dunn presents a surprisingly sympathetic portrait of Bradley, but her advocacy is clear enough in the primal images of natural beauty and her subjects' heartfelt statements of respect for the landscape.

Unfortunately for Polley, Take This Waltz is a good film serving mainly to remind us that "Away From Her" is a great one.

Fully exploits the drama, with scenes, dialogue, and even key visuals pulled from the text.

It's a fascinating cultural artifact and a stomping good time.

The mystery has never been resolved, but to his credit Bar-Lev acknowledges that he himself has become part of the story, torn between sympathy and suspicion.

In the Apatow manner, Segel mines a mother lode of painful personal memories for his breakup gags, and the vanity of entertainment people proves to be another rich vein.

Though Casino Jack never lets its protagonist off the hook for his misdeeds, it does underline the hypocrisy of those politicians who were content to take his money but then ran for cover in February 2004 when the Washington Post began to expose his fleecing of six different Indian tribes.

None of this makes any sense if you think about it, but the idea is so much fun that thinking about it may be your last impulse.

Doug Liman's Fair Game is a model exercise in dramatizing recent political scandal, and easily the best fact-based Hollywood political thriller since "All the President's Men."

The mesmerizing narrative recounts a media circus of unrivaled malignance.

The movie endorses the liberal conception of the Chicks as free-speech heroes, which doesn't quite wash: Maines shot her mouth off to a receptive overseas crowd, then issued an apology as soon as the backlash began back home.

The dazzling star power of the French screen royalty Ozon has assembled and the film's sheer exuberance in its own artifice make this a delight from beginning to end.

Written by Angus MacLachlan, this indie drama explores the lingering tension between north and south with vinegar and precision.

[A] well-crafted piece of middle-American uplift...For once it really does matter most how you play the game.

Davies adapted a classic 1952 play by Terence Rattigan, whose centenary is being celebrated in Britain this year, and though you might have trouble sorting out the film's competing levels of authorship, one element attributable solely to Davies is the strategic use of music and quiet on the soundtrack.

Period westerns are so unfashionable and costly that they usually require a top-drawer script to get off the ground -- and this one, adapted from an Elmore Leonard story and its 1957 movie version, travels with an arrow's clean arc.

Genuinely sad: few bands have burst onto the scene with such a perfectly realized look, sound, and philosophy or been more trapped by their own meatheaded genius.

The elder Wexler keeps insisting that he won't sign a release for the film unless he approves of the finished product, so he must have been pleased with its brutally honest assessment of him as a gifted filmmaker who never realized his true potential.

The movie is impressive for its even mix of snarky humor and sincere sentiment, and even more impressive when one considers that director Isao Takahata made his name with the harrowing antiwar drama Grave of the Fireflies (1988).

On paper the story may seem hopelessly contrived -- another nostalgia piece for art-house liberals -- but on-screen it's presented in purely emotional terms, which allows Duigan and his excellent leads to inhabit and ultimately transcend the period.

It's become a critical cliche to say that everyone in the U.S. should see a particular war documentary, but even the most selfish citizen might want to check out The Ground Truth, because unlike the Iraqi victims of the war, the American ones are all around us.

Some might call this movie a step backward after Burger's previous feature, the painfully honest Iraq war drama "The Lucky Ones," but as a stylish intrigue it's hard to beat.

Dark and challenging.

Here the idea of sleep as the ultimate threat is still fresh and marvelously insidious, and Craven vitalizes the nightmare sequences with assorted surrealist novelties.

The new version of Jane Eyre is far and away the best I've seen, thanks largely to the skilled young actress Mia Wasikowska.

Jennings's film, with its missing fathers, sometimes threatens to become cloying, but it's almost always righted by a healthy dose of slapstick or the spectacle of little kids posing as muscle-bound killers.

Smart dialogue, an impeccably crafted story, and eye-catching LA locations make this low-budget feature by Alex Holdridge the most worthwhile date movie I've seen in some time.

Stark, mysterious, and often weirdly funny.

The immersive quality of 3-D is particularly well suited to undersea documentaries, and this one, directed by Howard Hall ("Into the Deep"), offers a close-up look at such fantastic creatures as the fried egg jellyfish, the mantis shrimp, the sand tiger shark, and the thuggish wolf eel.

On paper this may sound like soap opera, but Bier and screenwriter Anders Thomas Jensen (Mifune) have a good feel for character, and they're aided by a fine cast.

This smart and rocking video documentary by Tim Irwin follows the trio from its origins in suburban San Pedro, California, in 1979 to the death of singer-guitarist D. Boon in a 1985 car crash, which ended his deep and creatively fruitful friendship with bassist Mike Watt.

As a director Carnahan definitely has the goods: the opening foot chase, a sequence that's been done to death, is genuinely terrifying.

The sadism of "1,000 Corpses" is ameliorated here by the addition of an action plot and open spaces, and the comedy is more skillfully played, mingling agreeably with Zombie's ardor for southern trash culture (the final showdown plays out to the strains of "Freebird," for heaven's sake)

The performances are so gripping that the movie works despite its diagrammatic structure, which focuses on ironic rhymes between past and present and leaves out the entirety of the couple's marriage.

Tim Burton finally fulfills the promise of "Beetlejuice" with this imaginative masterpiece.

Ferguson is admirably tenacious in assigning blame for the boneheaded mistakes that have doomed Iraqi reconstruction. Paul Bremer, former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, is hung out to dry.

The resulting portrait shows a seriously troubled man whose brutality was bred into him on the punishing streets of Brooklyn and whose modest wisdom seems as hard-won as any title. Tyson's fight career may be over, but his battle with himself has many rounds to go.