Lisa Schwarzbaum

This is essential viewing for understanding our world.

Juliette Binoche is outstanding as a wildly untogether single mother who parks her son with a French-speaking Chinese nanny while she whirls and worries.

Feels delightfully organic, eccentrically rambling, the found artistic collage of a woman who herself loves to collect.

An amazing thing -- a work of cinematic art in which form and structure pursues the logic-defying (parallel) subjects of dreaming and moviegoing.

The thrilling conclusion to a phenomenal cinematic story 10 years in the telling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2 is proof that authentic movie excitement is its own form of magic.

Writer-director Jeff Nichols builds his elegantly shot, weather-sensitive horror story in waves of tension that crest as if pulled by tempests.

Beautiful, compassionate, articulate domestic drama.

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.

The Savages is terrific -- a movie of uncommon appreciation for the nature and nurture that go into making us who we are, a perfectly calibrated drama both compassionate and unsentimental.

Afterward, you'll want to listen to the Beatles sing ''She's Leaving Home.'' It might be a girl like Jenny the lads had in mind.

It took writer-director Samuel ''Shmulik'' Maoz nearly 30 years to make this disturbing, visceral, personal film.

The real soullessness here is built into the production, a polished adaptation of Hong Kong-style filmmaking that, with its cast of depressive characters, allows for little Hong Kong-style joy.

Gripping, highly original.

Jafar Panahi's wonderfully funny, outspoken shaggy-dog story, a light counterweight to his sadder 2000 feminist drama "The Circle."

The very opposite of a storybook romance, and also the very model of a great comedy for our values-driven time.

The very title The Departed suggests a James Joycean take on Irish-Catholic sentiment when, of course, this story is anything but: It's Scorsesean, and he's in full bloom.

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.

Mezzogiorno (Love in the Time of Cholera) plays Dalser with the kind of fervent intensity once seen in silent films.

Riveting family portrait.

The power of this great movie -- part comedy, part tragedy, part satire, mostly masterpiece -- is in the details.

I wish 'Hero's emotional heat rose more intensely -- more recklessly. There's something grand but distant and almost fetishistic about the operatic solemnity with which Zhang approaches the Rashomonic story of assassins attempting to kill a king.

Mitchell directs and stars in the riotous, loving, and only occasionally pathos-milking film adaptation of his own acclaimed Off Broadway play, with great up-your-ante music and lyrics by Stephen Trask.

An exhilarating puzzle, one of the grand cinematic eruptions of the year.

Jack Nicholson's dyspeptic retiree in "About Schmidt" would no doubt identify with O'Horten's entertaining pain.

In the end -- an ending of such power and narrative originality (in both book and movie) that those who know it ought never breathe a word to those who don't.

Malick clings to the promise of grace: His vision of the afterlife is a dreamy beach, enhanced by an excellent playlist of fine classical music, and promising the peace that surpasses all understanding. Plus a beautiful sky.

Bong Joon-ho's wildly entertaining saga should become the hip, thinking-person's monster movie of choice.

An only-in-the-movies mother hustles pool to raise the money to abduct the son she's been forbidden to see since her divorce.

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.

Circles the heart of noisy, modern Tehran with an informal, documentary-like freedom that is thrilling in its naturalism.

Superb family drama.

The movie is enchanting.

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.

In Get on the Bus, director and material come together with perfect ease — one of those occasional confluences of subject and strengths that make a moviegoer go, ”Of course!” Of course Spike Lee throws all of his bravado, all his storytelling talents, and all his artistic chutzpah into a movie about last year’s Million Man March.

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

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

A tacit auteur-to-auteur endorsement of the inalienable right to make movies--regardless of talent or sobriety or adult responsibilities--is what gives American Movie its uneasy kick.

For some viewers, Moonrise Kingdom may be movie heaven, another bric-a-brac-jammed bauble to place alongside "The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou" and "The Darjeeling Limited." Personally, though, I wish that Anderson would come out from under the glass, or at least change what he's doing under there.

Filmmaker Yung Chang finds a sad and beautiful way to glimpse the big picture of dislocation through an exquisitely poised small study.

49 Up is a precious document, and must viewing.

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.

It's a merciless and mirthlessly funny antiwar weapon from a filmmaker who has seen battle firsthand and has lived to make art from memories of hell.

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.

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

The time swivels in Looper evoke some of Inception's fancy temporal tricks... But it's the glimpses of Children of Men-like societal dystopia that give the movie its real weight, and distinguish Johnson's third feature as a marked step forward.

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.

There's no great romantic climax to Don Juan DeMarco (and that may be a drawback for Depp lovers looking to swoon), but there is an airy delicacy to this tall tale that fits in perfectly with the weather these days, the hormones, the whole seasonal gestalt.

In a movie like this one, a little madness is its own Holy Grail.

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.

The London universe Leigh creates (employing his trademark improv techniques to unite his ensemble, many of whom make their film debuts) isn't so much a reality as a hope, and an invitation to find joy and grace in everyday moments.

Lives happily ever after because it's such a feisty but good natured embrace of the inner ogre in everyone.

Noyce's movie works because the director -- trusts himself, and his audience, to understand that catastrophe isn't always a matter of loud ideology. Rather, it's the result of age-old human weakness. And sometimes it's quiet.

The calm poetry of the cinematography offsets the mess of the politics to stunning effect.

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.

How Do You Know asks really good questions but doesn't so much answer them as toss the ball from player to player until the clock runs out.

A riveting and unexpectedly inspiring essay on the peace that comes from shared physical and mental concentration.

Damien Chazelle's extraordinary black-and-white retro dream of a feature debut.

Bridges' guileless performance makes this piquant little indie tale of country music, redemption, and the love of a pretty younger woman such a sad-song charmer.

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]

The notion of meta has never been diddled more mega than in this giddy Möbius strip of a movie, a contrivance so whizzy and clever that even when it tangles at the end, murked like swampy southwestern Florida itself, the stumble has quotation marks around it.

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.

But Solondz also creates keen portraits of the participating characters in Dawn's daily drama. (The only downside: The drama veers unsteadily toward outlandishness.)

The chattering smarty-pants who ran the U.S. government on "The West Wing" are slow talkers compared with the motormouthed and hilariously imperfect power elite in the brainy British comedy In the Loop.

Although it shares a bitter interest in slum desperation with last year's Brazilian-underbelly docudrama ''City of God,'' Bus 174 pulls ahead, I think, by not confusing cinematic pizzazz with the content of misery.

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

The movie is a rare uncensored postcard from a ruined place, a document at once depressing and hideously beautiful that sketches the real hardships of trampled people -- specifically women -- with authority and compelling simplicity.

Between cycles of gunfights and glowering, Yun-Fat displays some of the dignity and suave good looks that account for his star status (without much chance to show his wit).

As he did in his striking 2005 first feature film, "Man Push Cart," about a Pakistani street vendor in New York, perceptive indie filmmaker Ramin Bahrani looks at what others overlook and finds drama in everyday details.

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.

It took director-producer Leon Gast 22 years to edit and finance When We Were Kings, his thrilling documentary about the legendary 1974 heavyweight-championship fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire. But the lag time has only deepened the impact of this thrilling documentary: All sad thoughts of Ali as a wounded warrior fall away in the glow of seeing the champ at his best.

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

Don't be fooled: In this unpeaceable kingdom, the den mama is also ready to eat her young.

Hugo both ticks and flies by, a marvel meant to be pulled from the cabinet and enjoyed again and again.

Fiennes' very skin participates in the project -- his fingernails are nicotine-stained the color of tea bags. The performance works; it's a ballet, a concerto of big, big Acting.

A muscular sequel to To's riveting 2005 gangster picture "Election."

A witty, stylish, beautifully made charmer of a family picture.

There's no denying that when it comes to communicating a certain delirious romanticism of character shaped by thousands of hours spent sitting in the dark, the artist who made this showpiece is a master.

Stunning and compassionate period drama.

It's impossible to watch Tony Kaye's theatrically supercharged, equal-opportunity button-pusher without experiencing a welter of emotions -- which is just what the filmmaker planned.

I will salute the deftness and intelligence with which Goldfinger observes the reactions of the living to the revelations of the dead.

The result is flashy, but the meaning is a bit of a bob and weave.

Footnote is itself a perfect little piece of Talmud, full of text, commentary, and colorful argument.

Essential, unique viewing.

An appalling, jaw-dropping movie that will cause serious nightmares.

The movie is so finely minced a mixture of Sondheim's original melodrama and Burton's signature spicing that it's difficult to think of any other filmmaker so naturally suited for the job.

Ballard, working from a screenplay by Robert Rodat and Vince McKewin, lets the melancholy hang in the air with a few too many poetic shots of the lonely girl. But as Thomas teaches Amy how to spread her wings, any lacy sentimentality (as well as the jarring tree-hugger subplot about meanie land developers) falls away, revealing the soaring beauty of the flying sequences.

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

Flirting is a little too weighed down with stage business to soar. But episode for episode, it's one of the ha-ha-funniest movies currently around.

The many fans of the uniquely droll 2003 animation Oscar nominee "The Triplets of Belleville" will recognize the inventive hand-drawn sensibilities of French filmmaker Sylvain Chomet in his loving and lovely new feature The Illusionist.

In this typically exquisite, nuanced, memory-infused work from master British filmmaker Terence Davies, we believe every minute of the torment of Hester (Rachel Weisz).

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.

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

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]

This tender documentary considers the mysteries of both art and coping.

In hovering, The Squid and the Whale becomes its own realistic display of family entropy, as cautionary as it is educational.

Mesmerizing.

Everything is aces about this lineup's pedigree. But Devil never lets loose. It's a jazzy composition about sex, sleuthing, corruption, race, and cheap liquor that's a half step out of tune.

A disturbingly avid re-creation of the last six weeks in the life and slow, self-imposed wasting of Irish hunger striker Bobby Sands.