Ken Fox

Cheung gives a revelatory performance.

The title, by the way, is age-old slang for a soldier's complete combat gear, which for the U.S. soldiers in Iraq -- both real and otherwise -- weighs over 50 pounds.

Powerful crime drama does more than just expose the criminal underbelly of South African township life.

If one masterpiece were to emerge from the recent glut of generally good quality Japanese horror movie, this chilling apocalyptic ghost story from Kyroshi Kurosawa is it.

It's simply one of the most beautiful films he's (Hou Hsiao Hsien) made to date.

Amalric is extraordinary, creating a character literally without moving a muscle.

Jordan and McCabe's real triumph here, however, is the tenderness with which they imbues "Kitten," and the astonishing grace with which the extraordinary Murphy pulls it off.

Shakespeare himself couldn't have written better or more complex characters, and far from strange, by the end of this extraordinary film you couldn't imagine Shakespeare performed anywhere else.

Sicilian-born filmmaker Emanuele Crialese takes a huge leap forward from his pretty but simplistic "Respiro" with this highly original, startlingly beautiful and emotionally resonant film.

It's full of humor, pathos and a deep humanism that comes as a warm blast in this age of lifeless, cinematic junk.

With his carefully controlled pacing and superb use of sound, Sarkies draws the viewer deep into the experience of a town caught completely off-guard by a kind of violence they could never have expected, and won't soon forget.

Burtynsky's keen sense of color, pattern and composition are obvious from his work, but equally acute are his thoughts on how he as an artist as well as an inhabitant of the planet fits into the larger scheme of things.

Dunn's elegant, full-length debut presents a frightening and powerful argument against the kind of reckless, profit-driven land development that not only threatens natural resources, but life itself.

Even Wong's detractors, who consider him more stylist than auteur, will have a tough time dismissing the extraordinary emotional depth he achieves here.

This exceptional film features some of the most beautiful cinematography ever seen on film, in service of some of the most horrible images imaginable.

Hadzihalilovic succeeds brilliantly at crafting a meaningful enigma that somehow grasps the essence of adolescence, but only grows more mysterious with each revelation.

So it should come as no surprise that what Maddin eventually produced is a film about HIS Winnipeg, a psychological terrain that's no more -- nor less -- "real" than William Carlos William's Paterson or Marcel Proust's Combray.

Rather than adapt the novel per se, Winterbottom has adapted Sterne's hilarious attempts to make the mess of life fit the neat contours of the novel by making a movie about an attempt to make Sterne's chaotic and confusing novel fit the contours of a film.

Documentary filmmakers Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine found an ingenious way to tell their story in a film that is as unflinching as it is uplifting.

Actor-turned-writer Dan Futterman's smart, subtle screenplay, which explores both Capote's determination to turn murder into literature and the deeply troubling questions he raised in the process.

Wu is able to demonstrate both the timelessness and the universality of stories which, on the surface, sound extreme and unique.

Throughout this raw, often brilliant drama, the Dardennes refuse to judge these deeply flawed characters. They instead maintain a moral objectivity that ultimately leaves room for the possibility of redemption, no matter how dire the sins committed.

Superb drama from New York-based filmmakers Ryan Flek and Anna Boden.

After reminding us that the AIDS crisis in the West is far from over in "The Event," Fitzgerald widened his scope with this much-needed perspective on the global dimensions the disease has achieved. Despite the importance and seriousness of the subject, there's plenty of Fitzgerald's brand of sly humor on hand, particularly in the scenes involving the Quebecoise porn industry.

The result is a beguiling and often poignant pageant of outsider musicians, but the broken heart of this extraordinary film comes directly from Zobel's own personal experience.

Lee has perfectly captured the details, textures, sights and sounds of a China caught between East and West, occupied by an ancient enemy and quaking on the eve of an earth-shaking revolution.

This is a powerful, important and, in the end, profoundly poignant movie dedicated to the lives of men and women who fight wars and shoulder the burden of becoming "heroes" to help the rest of us make sense of what remains incomprehensible.

A small comic masterpiece that dares to deal with that of which many Sicilians dare not speak: the Mafia.