Ken Fox

In the end, it's best to make peace with the film's essential and deliberate inscrutability -- something Lynch fans have learned to do since Twin Peaks -- and to simply marvel at Dern's astonishing performance, which few actresses are likely to top anytime soon.

It's also very cleverly edited - one scene will often branching off from another in much the same way a crossword puzzle works - and features a bang-up ending that will actually leave you cheering over a word game.

An uncanny and thoroughly creepy nip-yuck nightmare about plastic surgery and identity.

In the end it remains an academic exercise, though a dazzlingly ambitious one that’s well worth seeing.

(Valli) brings an ethnographer's eye for detail to a plot that amounts to little more than the good old generation gap.

Occasionally melodramatic, it's also extremely effective.

Overall, the filmmakers are a little too reverent -- it would have been interesting to hear Derrida respond to criticism leveled against deconstruction as an academic methodology -- but then again, they're not entirely in control here.

The true star of this nerve-racking family crime drama, shot with a minimum of fuss by Ron Fortunato, is playwright and first-time screenwriter Kelly Masterson's deft script, which carefully develops each fatally flawed character and tells their stories in achronological flashbacks that seamlessly fit together like a jigsaw puzzle.

You'll feel lucky for such a comprehensive introduction to Turkish music.

It's a surprisingly uplifting experience, and in the end, unmistakably a Kiarostami film.

Wrenching documentary.

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

A wild, endlessly inventive romp set in a post-war world so full of machine-guns and hand-grenades that people barely flinch when one or the other goes off.

It's never dull: Shalhoub's direction is smart, the dialogue is tart and the Adams' family shares a palpable intimacy that translates directly onto the screen.

Davaa's second fable of animals and the people who love them mixes aspects of ethnographic filmmaking with heart-grabbing story lines that wouldn't be too far out of place in a 1950s live-action Disney feature.

Both De Bouw and Decleir are superb.

Belvaux is no Douglas Sirk, but the film is an admirable, if uneven, conclusion to an audacious project.

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

Ratanaruang's simple willingness to tie different strands of melancholy melodramas and violent yakuza thrillers together with flashes of surreal mystery immediately sets him apart from the herd.

An illuminating depiction of Islamic women that is entirely at odds with what we are often lead to believe.

Director Laurent Cantet's fourth feature abandons the contentious French workplaces of "Human Resources" and "Time Out" for sunnier climes, but this Haitian idyll is an equally excoriating look at labor and exploitation.

The final confrontation is a slow-motion, De Palma-esque massacre in a hotel lobby that begins and ends in the amount of time it takes for a high-flying can of Red Bull to hit the floor. Breathtaking.

Neo-Gothic fantasist Tim Burton and writer John August (Big Fish) play it strictly by the book for this darker but far more faithful adaptation of Roald Dahl's cautionary 1964 young-adult novel.

Through the hard-won experiences of these families, Karslake shows that Scripture and homosexuality are not mutually exclusive, and with the help of a number of academics and theologians, shows how the Bible has been misread, particularly during the 20th century.

Teenage angst and adolescent agony are the stuff of sharp, observant comedy this quirky, wonderfully dry first fiction feature from documentary filmmaker Jeffrey Blitz (Spellbound).

The subject matter is certainly controversial -- it's not every day that we see a sympathetic portrayal of a pedophile -- but Cuesta avoids the taint of salaciousness, thanks in large part to a brilliant performance from Cox.

Rough, breathless adaptation of Fernando Vallejo's ferociously sardonic novel.

Bakan's arguments are buttressed by entertaining clips culled from commercials, industrial films and, appropriately, monster movies.