Lisa Schwarzbaum

A warm embrace of tradition and boisterous, ethnographically rich local culture.

With exemplary use of archival footage, director Asif Kapadia expertly contrasts episodes of adrenaline-rush speed with moments of reflective slow motion to capture the addictive thrill and danger of the sport, as well as the personal values of the humble, spiritual sportsman.

The personalities in this well-drawn family combine to produce subtle new flavors — and in the end, no one is spiced as you’d imagined they’d be.

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.

Utterly riveting fictional drama.

Nothing in this enjoyably twisty, cool/ hot, genre-grafting Italian psychological thriller by Giuseppe Capotondi is what it seems. And the more you try to solve the narrative puzzle, the more you may want to watch it again - or at least argue about what's real.

Don’t miss this astonishingly bleak, inventive, funny, sumptuously designed film.

But the notable accomplishment of actress-writer Kasi Lemmons ("The Silence of the Lambs") in her feature directorial debut is in creating a landscape quite beautiful and entirely her own -- a fluid, feminine, African-American, Southern gothic narrative that covers a tremendous amount of emotional territory with the lightest and most graceful of steps.

Riveting family portrait.

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

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 1 also bravely faces the future, slipping with expert ease among the thrilling mass of complications (and complicated set pieces) that Rowling throws fans in the final sprint, then guiding the faithful to the fate that awaits everyone in this world, the moment called The End.

A realistic drama that looks and feels as inevitably true and moving as a good documentary.

Here, love and attraction between two teenage girls put them on a collision course with Tehran society in general and one girl's troubled, increasingly religious brother in particular.

British filmmaker Andrew Haigh's background in editing (from Gladiator to Mister Lonely) is evident in the casual beauty of moments that only appear "found," giving Weekend an engrossing documentary feel.

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.

There's a bravura recklessness to Beautiful People that perfectly fits its subject.

A movie at once understated and radical, deceptively unremarkable in presentation and ballsy in its earnestness. Don't let the star's overly familiar squint fool you: This is subtle, perceptive stuff.

It's probably the impresario's best-made movie yet, his most joyful, and his most moving.

Superb, Oscar-nominated documentary.

A quietly dazzling microcosm that's always just this side of eerie, just that side of tragic.

Which brings us back to Kidman, who really IS sensational here.

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

Up and Down captures Prague life with a fervor that's comical but a longing that's serious; no one is easy to pigeonhole.

Duck Season unfolds with a slaphappy logic that only looks casual. In fact, every unfinished conversation and banal picture on the wall (one's of ducks) matters as four little people share one memorable little day.

I mean no impertinence when I say that as a portrait of love and grief, writer-director Mike White's exceptional film Year of the Dog deserves the same admiration accorded Joan Didion's exceptional memoir "The Year of Magical Thinking."

Something marvelous happens as the filmmaker, in his first feature, expertly metes out small scenes of communication between people taught, for generations, to be wary of one another: This Band swings with the rhythms of hope.

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.

A mesmerizing work of disturbing power and unease.

Smith transfers an Iowa-based short story by Randy Russell to India's western Goa region -- and works in Hindi, primarily with novice actors. The result is a story both authentically specific and profoundly global.

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

Film music by Nino Rota provides a Fellini overlay.

This truly intimate film invites viewers to commune as well and feel a profound living connection with fellow humans of 30,000 years ago.

Traces the sport to its Polynesian beginnings, then zooms in on the genesis of 20th- century Southern California surf culture -- the boards, the bikinis, the laid-back cowabunga.

Lauren Ambrose is lovely as the girlfriend he's a fool to lose but seems intent on losing anyhow.

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

The jazzish score, by Lee's music man, Terence Blanchard, is typically intrusive. But the mood is right, the twists are new. And with one casting inspiration, Inside Man furthers the rising stardom of Chiwetel Ejiofor (Serenity).

Janet McTeer displays Amazonian power while Jennifer Jason Leigh tears into her role as a high maintenance creature with a ferocity that leaves little room for her usual acting tics.

Pulling the bandage of sentiment cleanly away from oozing concepts like ''heroism'' and ''our nation's war on terror'' in the aftermath of recent wounds, here's a drama about the most politically charged crisis of our time that grants the dignity of autonomy to every soul involved.

Real Steel is directed by "Night at the Museum's" Shawn Levy, who makes good use of his specialized skill in blending people and computer-made imaginary things into one lively, emotionally satisfying story.

Riveting true-life drama.

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

The nonprofessional cast of Bahman Ghobadi's remarkable, slow, rough edged feature reveals a simple, piercing grimness and determination framed by the gray, icy landscape of Iranian Kurdistan.

Stepping into sacred shoes once worn by Kevin Bacon, Wormald handily owns the role for a new audience. Same goes for a terrific Miles Teller (Rabbit Hole) in the sidekick role of Willard so memorably originated by the late Chris Penn.

Raquel's devotion to her employer is barbed with hatred, need, and an insecurity she manifests through constant tiny acts of sabotage that would be funny if they weren't also so chilling -- bordering on psychotic.

The tonal elegance of this black comedy set in a dark time -- is boldly dependent on performances that tug at taut lines of moral complexity.

An 
unexpectedly revealing, disconcerting documentary that benefits from the filmmaker's unmediated approach, his home-movie-
quality visual style, and his controlled use of on-the-fly moments.

A pitiless yet elegiac Australian Western as caked with beauty as it is with blood.

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

Lathan, charismatic and beautifully strong, holds the screen in every scene.

Leconte (''Ridicule'') gives his heart to the luck of romance, to the dream state visual style of Fellini, and, most lyrically, to the passion of the dagger point swoon.

This super-duper deluxe nature documentary clearly aims to recruit young viewers as conservationists.

The result is a portrait that expertly mirrors its subject: Buck is shaped with the same economy, restraint, and unfussiness as the man, to unexpectedly inspiring effect.

The fine Polish director Agnieszka Holland (Europa Europa) pays her respects with a daringly murky-looking movie that demands viewers enter the void too and meet Socha and his Jews as real, flawed men and women behaving in flawed ways under suffocating conditions.

This funny, gory stab-athon is as sophisticated about the mechanics of Part 2s as the original was savvy about horror flicks.

It's a thin line between 20th-century Nazism and 21st-century corporate culture in Heartbeat Detector, Nicolas Klotz's rewardingly chilly psychological thriller.

What matters now, what Lumumba conveys, is the urgent chaos of revolution.

This sincere, delicate, and intrinsically religious comedy may also become that most unexpected of blessings - Danny Boyle's first family classic.

Frankenweenie is a cool little flipbook of historical Burtonian style. It even brings back old friends, including "Beetlejuice's" Winona Ryder and Catherine O'Hara.

Goes where all too few films dare to venture these days -- into the heart of moral darkness.

A warm and honest portrait of a marriage at its most mysterious, and ordinary.

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 deliriously enjoyable noir comedy-thriller Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang does nothing by halves and everything by doubles.

Fonteyne edges closer than most to capturing the mysterious rhythms of liaisons -- pornographique, romantique, and otherwise.

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

Gere is terrific at suggesting the kind of addictive cocktail of excitement, panic, chutzpah, creativity, and naked hunger for fame and megabucks that might inspire such big, fat lies.

Following 2009's "Bluebeard," French filmmaker Catherine Breillat continues her unique and psychologically, erotically daring deconstruction of classic fairy tales and the female condition.

What's new about the unsensationalized portrait of one-day-at-a-time progress (and setbacks) is the low-key energy of this drunks' tale, by and for a generation with a high tolerance for humor and a low tolerance for soapiness.

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

While Rodriguez punches through the indie clutter to announce herself as a superb new movie talent, so Kusama scores big points in her first main event.

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.

Many have tried, but none can match Malick's touch for shuffling a deck of elegiac images (water/sky/clouds/rain) and fanning out the hand to express what speech cannot; he's a master, too, of incorporating sound that is often wordless but never empty.

Wilkinson once again astonishes with his ability to convey weakness and strength, hypocrisy and gallantry, cruelty and compassion in the same male animal.

Dazzling psychological cat-and-mouse drama.