Ken Fox

Thom Andersen's idiosyncratic, three-hour masterpiece is both a dazzling work of film criticism and a fascinating piece of urban anthropology.

The film's opening dedication to Pasolini acknowledges Arslan's debt to Neorealism, but the gritty, documentary style is offset by a charming bit of chalkboard animation that helps lighten the mood considerably.

It's very funny, and the little woodland critters that make up the cast are a kiddie-pleasing bunch.

A sad and sometimes funny tale of Alzheimer's, love and loss.

Directed with charming restraint by the acclaimed American producer Dan Ireland, the film is a quiet triumph for Dame Joan.

Important, awareness-building documentary.

It's a bit like a Chinese "Splendor In The Grass."

At a little over two hours, there's a lot of Langlois to digest. But cinephiles won't mind a bit: Richard includes tons of great anecdotes and clips from classic films that wouldn't exist if Langlois hadn't saved them.

Film works best as a soberly witty commentary on the workplace and makes an interesting companion piece to "Mondays in the Sun."

Novice filmmakers Arin Crumley and Susan Buice's charming homemade movie is a surprisingly successful experiment in collaborative creativity that sprang from a larger artistic project: their own real-life relationship.

The film avoids theorizing about why the bridge should exert such a hold over the imaginations of suicides all over the world, but Steel's dramatic cinematography, particularly the distorted telephoto shots that make the bridge loom even larger than it already does in life, provide one answer.

First-time director Mark Milgard displays enormous promise and a surprisingly sensitive touch with this beautifully rendered tragedy.

Though absurdly criticized for being too "white" to play Mariane Pearl, Jolie gives an excellent performance. She portrays Mariane as gutsy, smart, passionate and highly efficient.

Never the most optimistic of poets, Sokurov does suggest the possibility of dialogue on the individual level, and the hope that by asking difficult questions of one another, these mortal enemies can find answers and reach an understanding everyone can live with.

May be the best film to date about the humanitarian and environmental impact of China's enormous Three Gorges Dam project.

Amazingly, not all of the witty and wise barbs are Wilde's, and any confusion between the old and the new is probably the highest compliment one could possibly pay to screenwriter Howard Himelstein's tart screenplay.

Driven by Edward Norton's and Evan Rachel Wood's riveting performances, writer-director David Jacobson's tense drama samples bits of cinematic Americana from sources as diverse as "Shane," "Badlands" and "Taxi Driver."

The accolades are typically gushing - Bono likens Cohen to Byron and Shelley.

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.

Filmmaker AJ Schnack's hauntingly beautiful film is a bold and successful attempt to recover the human being who disappeared under the heavy mantle of "face and voice of a lost generation," and whose life has been increasingly overshadowed by his sensational early death in 1994.

Svankmajer has crafted his finest live-action feature to date.

Rarely do movies portray the elderly with such admiration and respect.

Wood is excellent, but this is a career highlight for Douglas. His depiction of the manic Charlie stays surprisingly grounded and prevents the story from being a naive celebration of mental illness as a kind of freedom that it so easily could have become.

Does find a spot closer to the middle than most.

Neil Armfield's film hits hard because it sensitively shows how life on drugs can never be about anything else, and how the real horror of addiction is not what users do to themselves, but what they do to each other out of loneliness and despair.

A remote, Israeli desert town is the setting for this droll, endearing comedy about an accidental cultural exchange that very quietly says some very important things about contemporary Arab-Israeli relations.

Schroeder's film is a fascinating character study in contradictions and in the end Verges remains loathsome, oddly charismatic and willfully enigmatic.

Mohammad Rasoulof's heartfelt and darkly comic second feature proves beyond any doubt that Iranian film is still alive and well, despite waning Western interest in one of the world's richest contemporary cinemas.