Lisa Nesselson

A demanding but rewarding emotional odyssey in a challenging visual package.

A spy spoof that -- rarity of rarities -- represents a remake actually worth making. Current comic fave Jean Dujardin plays title character OSS 117 as a kind of James Bond crossed with Maxwell Smart.

Repetitive and needlessly prolonged tale does build to an inspired final scene, but it's too little, too late.

Companion piece to Teboul's "Yves Saint Laurent -- Time Regained" nicely complements that excellent film but is less riveting as a free-standing experience.

Almost completely dialogue-free but graced with terrific sound design and a swell score.

Romania-set scare-fest deploys the full cinematic vocabulary of creepy sounds and hostile intruders.

A well-oiled script is nicely served by a multigenerational cast, a bittersweet and consistently entertaining mainstream comedy that tackles the big themes of Life and Art with unpretentious brio.

Uproarious romp, grounded in believable if gleefully implausible human behavior, is a model of comic timing.

The kind of tale where even viewers who didn't miss a frame will feel as if they entered in the middle, muddled but amusing account of an adorable yet profanity-prone feline who travels through time and space is fueled by irony and incongruity.

Docu's pace will be a little too meditative for many, but the rigorous, sinewy lensing will have Hypnotic power on those so inclined.

For his (Besson) fans, Angel-A is an achingly sincere but protracted effort to trade mostly action for mostly dialogue.

Consistently engaging, non-judgmental and cumulatively powerful two-hander marks a noteworthy feature debut for Israeli helmer Keren Yedaya.

Always watchable but not transcendent, Cedric Kahn’s character study builds its portrait via landscape, work, prayer and friendship.

The pleasures are modest but consistent in John Carpenter's Vampires, a part-Western, part-horror flick that doesn't aim too high but nails the range it occupies.

A zippy and sardonic feast of bad decision-making under pressure, 11:14 artfully molds the seemingly unrelated misfortunes of 10 characters into a satisfying and consistently entertaining whole.

Moral ambiguity is the real star of Ben Affleck's helming debut, Gone Baby Gone, an involving Boston-set tale of mixed motives, selflessness and perfidy in the wake of a 4-year-old girl's disappearance.

Modest but spot-on co-helming debut by actress Yolande Moreau (the concierge in "Amelie") and Gilles Porte is beguiling in the slightly surreal vein of the best of contempo Belgian cinema but without the typical nasty streak.

The daunting logistics and emotional juggling act of child custody and visitation rights post-divorce are examined via spot-on acting and deft helming in docu-styled Children of Love.

An entertaining ensembler marbled with wit and heartache.

An offbeat, darkly hilarious portrait.

Compact, ultra-explicit two-character pic about what transpires when a beautiful straight woman hires a handsome gay man to "look" at her is gloriously mannered, proudly pretentious and undeniably compelling.

In what is arguably her best performance since "Van Gogh," Zylberstein brings Mathilde to life with grace and fervor.

While not a classic, this is a pleasantly disturbing, nominally voyeuristic romp in the territory Chabrol knows best.

All-American adaptation by Paul Haggis of Gabriele Muccino's 2001 Italian hit "L'Ultimo bacio" is chummy, consensual and always watchable in Tony Goldwyn's polished rendition of emotional messiness.

The whole endeavor pleases with its wealth of tiny observations that add up to an affecting whole.

Wonderfully engaging look at 1970-71 from a child's p.o.v.

Most of all, the satisfyingly cinematic screen adaptation puts motion and energy into a story that was mostly internalized from Victor's perspective in Rendell's book.

The first-ever screenplay written in the Inuit language, Inuktitut -- and the first time's a charm.