Lisa Schwarzbaum

The setting is somewhere between a post-WWII Brigadoon and the environs of Marcel Carn classic "Children of Paradise," but the story is as timely as this morning's news from Europe.

What's astonishing about Sofia Coppola's enthralling new movie is the precision, maturity, and originality with which the confident young writer-director communicates so clearly in a cinematic language all her own.

Jennifer Baichwal's gorgeous documentary Manufactured Landscapes amplifies the powerful work of Edward Burtynsky, a Canadian artist who specializes in large-scale photographs of terrain transformed by civilization into rivers and tides of industrial ugliness.

Trier's compassion for what it takes to survive, mixed with the love he bestows on Oslo, is rewardingly profound.

It's a work of art that deserves a space cleared for its angry, nervous beauty.

It's a lovely, original, Australian take on a climactic moment usually thought of as all American.

A memory of the automobile in which a father drove away from his family provides the title for Blue Car but no hint of the power of writer-director Karen Moncrieff's superb feature debut.

A confidently original, engrossing interpretation.

Can be interpreted politically or even biblically or not at all, as the elemental struggles between dominance and submission, impulse and action, man and nature, father and son, play out to their stunning conclusion.

This is a great film, and a triumph of creativity and courage over repression.

Fierce, loving, and electric, this movie's got bite as well as bark.

The lightness with which Buñuel was able to insert the little jokes and knife stabs of surrealism he loved so much is, in fact, divine.

The title embraces the richness of Kechiche's beautiful film, which captures the rhythms of displacement and hardship, the bond of family meals, and even the daily routines of the magnificent women who are part of Slimane's life.

Like a great novel from a more expansive bygone age, The Best of Youth is full of big thoughts; like a great soap opera, it's also full of sharp plot turns, vibrant characters, and great talk. It is, in short, the best of cinema.

A film of wonderful looseness and innovation. Set free to film fakes, the director is the real thing.

The movie — the third in a trilogy of powerful political dramas from Larraín, including "Tony Manero" and "Post Mortem" — uses period detail, archival footage, and '80s-era technology to create an excellently authentic, bleached, crummy-looking document of a great democratic accomplishment.

Errol Morris may have been put on earth to make The Fog of War, a stunning portrait of Robert S. McNamara that closes a year of outstanding nonfiction movies on a high note.

With the pitiless, devastating Fat Girl, Catherine Breillat puts men and women, boys and girls on notice: When fantasy, hypocrisy, and manipulation mix in a wet, sandy place, you dive into sex at your own risk.

The movie sparkles with witty self-awareness.

The storytelling is the series' best, with a zingy balance of drama, humor, and Deep Thoughts (in a screenplay by Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan, directed with confident exuberance by Irvin Kershner). [Special Edition]

Ceylan, who also served as cinematographer, frames the affecting, unstudied performances in gorgeously chosen shots and nonevents that sometimes teeter on the edge of comedy before knocking us breathless with their emotional power.

A movie masterpiece...is Lars von Trier's ecstatic magnum opus on the themes of depression, cataclysm, and the way the world might end.

The movie is small, local, and idiosyncratic. Then again, it's also a thing of beauty and originality - and for that, sustained huzzahs are in order.

Affliction -- a beautiful bummer, a magnificent feel-bad movie -- is American filmmaking of a most rewarding order.

49 Up is a precious document, and must viewing.

Way ahead of its time 30 years ago, and just as stunning today, Killer of Sheep is one of those marvels of original moviemaking that keeps hope of artistic independence alive.

Topsy-Turvy reminds us that, in any age, creative expression is at once the most personal and most communal of enterprises.

Murray, meanwhile, turns in a thrillingly knowing, unforced performance--an award-worthy high point in a career that continues, Max Fischer style, to defy the obvious at every turn.

The first great, mind-tickling treat of the new movie year.

The picture was made in 1969 and is only now being released in the U.S., in a beautiful restoration supervised by original cinematographer Pierre Lhomme.

Rees presents this vivid, hidden culture with raw honesty.

Sad, funny, sexy, and altogether marvelous.

The result, in Pina, is...wow.

Temperamentally in sync with her "Wendy and Lucy" director, Michelle Williams plays one of the toiling wives. And the actress, with her calm center, compresses the entire history of frontier wifeliness into the concentration with which she gathers firewood and loads a musket.

A triumph of psychological depth and artistic brilliance offered as the magical adventures of one skinny little girl.

Both the definition of ''my'' and the definition of ''Winnipeg'' become profoundly fluid in this exquisite ''docu-fantasia'' (Maddin's term), an entrancing riffle through the olde curiosity shoppe of the filmmaker's psyche.

Family nuttiness, football madness, romantic obsession, and certifiable mental illness coexist happily in Silver Linings Playbook - a crazy beaut of a comedy that brims with generosity and manages to circumvent predictability at every turn.

Alexander Payne's scathing, subtle, and complexly funny tragicomedy builds a perfect, off-kilter universe--it's a first cousin to "Rushmore."

Essential, unique viewing.

While never slow, the film feels quiet and spacious, like a prayer.

Pfeiffer reveals an emotional nakedness that's almost shocking. Never has she exposed so much and done it so simply. Who knew she could be this good?

Sophisticated, funny, and joyously subversive animated bug epic.

The stories are shocking, tender, sometimes funny, with a soap-opera abundance of plot. Always, the camera stares, respectfully neutral about ordinary people grappling — inconsistently, as men and women do — with the ordinary mysteries of being human. You’ll stare back, amazed it’s taken more than a decade to spread the word.

Naples-born Servillo is a national star, famed as a theater, opera, and film director as well as an actor. And he's got the face of a mensch (or a Madoff) -- which makes his embodiment of criminal banality all the more identifiable, as well as horrifying.

A gaily funny, shrewdly inventive satire.

Half Nelson offers an opportunity to marvel, once again, at the dazzling talent of Ryan Gosling for playing young men as believable as they are psychologically trip-wired.

It's in all the moments where little happens that Reichardt is most amazing, investing even a gas-station pit stop with perfect emotional pitch.

A movie of uncommon sweetness and delight.

Don't let unpleasant personal dental associations stand in the way of seeing a luminous specimen of independent filmmaking.

For bleakness, the movie can't be beat -- nor for brilliance.

Clint Eastwood's profound, magisterial, and gripping companion piece to his ambitious meditation on wartime image and reality, "Flags of Our Fathers."

Unusual, unhurried tour de force--a seamless match of strong artistic vision and physical performance. [19 Dec 1997, p. 52]

The message, if there must be one, of this marvelous, stubbornly personal movie is that there is a spark in every soul.

There's also no romanticizing on the part of the director, who proceeds with calm, unshowy attentiveness (even in the midst of scenes of violence), creating a stunning portrait of an innately smart survivor for whom prison turns out to be a twisted opportunity for self-definition.

Don't leave before the final frame -- if you're still breathing.

The real feast is in the mix of characters, each so finely and unschmaltzily delineated in a script so confident and controlled that even the most passing of participants comes alive.

Rosetta is a character of raw pride in a film of lingering power.

Around town, Stephen Fry ("Peter's Friends"), as a fluty artiste, dogs Flora with his devotion and declares, "I'm engorgedly in love with you!" That's how I feel about this gem.

A film noir great... Just to see and hear the extraordinary 3 minute and 20 second opening sequence — a fluid tour de force tracking shot — without impediment of opening credits and street-sound-masking movie score is accomplishment enough.

This warm, funny, sexy, smart movie erases the boundaries between specialized ''gay content'' and universal ''family content'' with such sneaky authority.

Tiny Furniture is proof, against steep odds, that there are no small stories, only small storytellers.

American Splendor presents Pekar as drawn on the page, Pekar as brilliantly interpreted by Paul Giamatti, and the actual Pekar, in the double role of narrator and interview subject -- sometimes all at once. The magic act is thrilling, and truly surprising.

The serious accusations are leavened by the moments of brimming, illogical, intimate neighborly dailiness the filmmaker also captures with warmth and infectious high spirits.

This thrilling stop-motion animated adventure is a high point in Selick's career of creating handcrafted wonderlands of beauty blended with deep, disconcerting creepiness.

Madly original, cheekily political, altogether exciting District 9.

Think of this witty, economically gory little tour de force as "28 Days Later" written by linguist Noam Chomsky.

A doozy of a French gangster pic that, in its beautifully refurbished and pithily resubtitled re-release, turns out to be one of the highlights of the 2005 movie year.

Rohmer treasures the undervalued glories of discourse and the intimacy of conversation over the obviousness of action or sexual display.

Dizzily rich, witty, and satisfying.

David Cronenberg's brilliant movie -- without a doubt one of the very best of the year.

Eastwood directs Mystic River with an invigorated grace and gravitas. This is a true American beauty of a movie, a tale of men and their bonds told by and for adults who value the old-fashioned Hollywood-studio notion of narrative.

Tsai builds this shimmering story with deft, deadpan wit and a warm, understated love of the absurd, both in life and afterlife.

A small cubist masterpiece about crime and punishment set in that most split-level of environments, Los Angeles.

There are moments in A Little Princess--particularly Cuaron's Indian play-within-the-play, which is nearly avant-garde in its conception--when you may just want to clap from pleasure. My advice to you is: Go ahead, you're a grown-up. [26 May 26 1995]

Nothing good happens in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, the riveting, horrifying chronicle of an illegal abortion performed in 1987 when Ceauescu's dictatorial hand still gripped Romania's throat. And yet no lover of greatness in filmmaking will want to look away from one of the very best movies of 2007.

Like any great myth, Pan's Labyrinth encodes its messages through displays of magic. And like any good fairy tale, it is also embroidered with threads of death and loss.

This triumphant sequel to the hard-to-top 2002 original may be the first great comic-book movie in the age of self-help and CGI wizardry, an entertainment in which both the thrills and the therapeutic personal growth are well earned.

One of the unshowiest and most true-blooded epics of Americana you're ever likely to see.

Watch for the director's own mother, Lili Kosashvili, a standout as Zaza's fierce, stately mama.

The result is a movie, and Cannes Palme d'Or winner, of riveting power and sadness, a great match of film and filmmaker -- and star, too.

Director Bahman Ghobadi (Turtles Can Fly) shot his faux documentary in secret, and the close-to-the-ground style compensates for the tenuous narrative structure by capturing the energy and variety of Tehran's music scene in all its bravery.

Sweetness makes the raunch in this honestly funny movie even funnier.

It's the beaming movie-star intensity of the complicated comic Carrey in the role of the dominant lover and Obi-Wan Kenobi McGregor as the gentle beloved that makes this unfettered, stranger-than-fiction picture pop.

The great Polish director Andrzej Wajda musters the power of classical filmmaking and personal emotional investment to dramatize a stunning atrocity long covered up.

The first Irish creation I've seen in ages to pull off the high-difficulty feat of trafficking in grit, drollery, and emotion without turning to blarney as a crutch.

The clammy power of Young Adam lies as much in the frank, emotional nakedness the actors bring to their roles under Mackenzie's care as in the baroque hopelessness of the plot.

Darkly funny, twisty-cool existential tragicomedy, loaded with smart notions and filmed like a surrealist dream.

What matters for today's hero is the good fight, and Gladiator KOs us with a doozy.

A superior lyrical ragamuffin Irish drama.

A rich, dark, pulpy mess of entanglements that fulfills all the requirements of the genre, and is told with an ease and gusto that make the pulp tasty.

A jolting, artfully made drama set in and around a suburban playground somewhere between "American Beauty" and "In the Bedroom" on America's psychic highway.

A funny, shrewd, no-bull family comedy about the relationship between mothers and teenage daughters that allows Curtis the comedian to remember her days as a slinky starlet while making use of her wisdom as the mother of an adolescent girl herself.

It's all very French, very intricate, and -- this is Rivette's magic -- seemingly as light as air.

Young Adult bumps along with nasty swerves, middle finger proudly in the air, toward an ending blessedly free of anything warm, fuzzy, or optimistic. Now that's adult entertainment.

That the story is so oldfashioned and domestic and the family so average and secular is, in its way, the wind beneath this Broken Wings.

The movie is smart, serious, and adult about something that matters, but not at the expense of a kind of awful, sensual revelry as le Carré's capacious plot hurtles to its big finish.

Superb psychological thriller.

Another 3-D animated kid movie demonstrates that cartoon storytelling pitched to young people is the last, best refuge of sprightly filmmaking this hard, hot summer.