Ken Fox

Ranks among the best films ever made about the acting profession.

It never fails to come as a shock to find how profoundly moving it all is when these gentle films draw to their graceful conclusions.

Barney has been criticized as willfully esoteric, but if traditional meaning is once again elusive in this film, it remains an enthralling aesthetic experience, one that's steeped in mystery and a ravishing, baroque beauty.

Not much happens in this gentle-hearted, black-and-white film from Argentina, but it's what doesn't happen that makes it such an unusually satisfying experience.

This tightly structured, often exciting film is among the boldest in a series of increasingly explicit movies.

On a miniscule budget, Ghobadi conveys the terror of war, while the beautifully edited sequence in which Iranian villagers make bricks resembles nothing so much as a choreographed dance number.

An intoxicating dream of a film that speaks to the daydreamer in all of us.

A bold, remarkable film.

"All of us are by nature wild beasts. We must be like animal trainers and teach ourselves tricks alien to our bestiality." Cutting-edge Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul uses this quote from the novelist Ton Nakajima to introduce his entrancing third feature.

In a startling move, Oliveira devotes the first 15 minutes of the film to the final moments of Ionesco's play, and it's thrilling to watch.

The result is an interesting hybrid of neorealist grit and star-driven melodrama, in which very real concerns about poverty and social injustice are mixed with a romantic subplot.

The folks at Disney prove that clothes -- and little else -- make a man, and do so with extraordinary style.

Also featured are countless cameos from local superstars ranging from the Fall's Mark E. Smith to Mani of the Stone Roses, making the film an absolute thrill for fans of the Manchester scene.

A marvelously entertaining, deeply moving treatment of a highly controversial practice: female genital mutilation.

Bardem's performance is simply shattering.

For once, Carrey is more than merely tolerable. He's actually good, and the film that ebbs and flows around him is something you won't soon forget.

Builds so gradually you probably won't realize it's a near-masterpiece until it's over, but there are hints along the way.

Ramsay's second feature is an extraordinary adaptation of fellow-Scot Alan Warner's acclaimed novel.

The kind of brainy human comedy that only this formidable French auteur seems capable of making.

Terminal illness, depression, suicide and one very angry young man: If there's such a thing as a kitchen-sink comedy, writer-director Lone Scherfig's sad but often very funny film is it.

Brilliantly edited from well over 100 hours of tape, the final two-hour film recalls Michael Apted's 7 UP series.

Nearly perfect.

It's extraordinarily sexy: The atmosphere is all cigarette smoke and Nat King Cole songs, silk suits and tight sheath dresses.

Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda's most accessible film to date is also his most wrenching.

Moncrieff offers a rare, unromantic take on female adolescence as sharp as a razor: It cuts right to the bone.

Rarely have six hours spent doing ANYTHING seemed so rewarding.

Not only is it a reintroduction to a fascinating culture that has survived 4,000 years in a remote and most inhospitable climate, but it's also the first film ever directed by an Inuit filmmaker and featuring an all-Inuit cast.

Every frame gleams and the camel -- a double-humped wonder whose unusual majesty and quiet mystery drives this wonderful film -- is magnificent to behold.