Lisa Schwarzbaum

The facts are so awful that Dear Zacharycan be forgiven much of its antsiness--as a memorial, as a condolence to Bagby’s parents (who became activists for judicial reform in their late son's honor), and as a howl of grief.

Killer Joe throws down a dare by expecting its audience to be the cool connoisseurs of the story's "comic" outrageousness, then rubbing viewers' faces in close-up scenes of brutality that reasonable people ought not to be able to watch. That up-close experience, however effectively done, is a movie specialty that's its own kind of mean.

But it is the steady accretion of hundreds of small moments in this elegant, high-spirited, intensely satisfying production -- the director's third American movie, but the first to approach the dazzle of his Hong Kong stuff -- that, toted up, makes everything right about this des- perately welcome thriller.

Out of the zany strictures of Dogma 95...Danish newcomer Thomas Vinterberg has made a funny, volatile, visually dynamic story about the unraveling of one extended family during the course of a patriarchal 60th-birthday dinner.

Where "No End" is cool and measured, Taxi is hot, anguished, and sometimes as difficult to watch as pictures of torture ought to be.

As Demme's audienc we're at the mercy of political passion overshadowed by style.

The story itself is so powerful and troubling, the moral geometry so vertiginous, and the photography so big that anything other than the natural sounds of snowfall and footfall is a Flat Earth Society intrusion.

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.

The ensemble cast shared the best-actor award at the 2006 Cannes film festival -- and rightly so.

Somewhere in this broody ''Twilight Zone''-ish story about magical thinking (and the lure, to filmmakers, of garish casino culture) is a provocative and maybe even shocking thought on the Holocaust as a crapshoot.

Expertly sinister, office-as-devil's-playground French thriller.

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 enveloping dream of an epic narrative experiment comes from the great Chilean-born, France-based filmmaker Raúl Ruiz (Time Regained).

Hands On a Hard Body itself is sometimes as bumpy as a panhandle dirt road, but out of the low-budget roughness and moments of Lettermanesque ain’t-folks-nutty humor, sharp portraits emerge of contestants as well as of the families and friends who massage, feed, and revivify the flagging bodies.

With In Between Days, the filmmaker captures feminine melancholy with rare precision. Find this movie.

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

A marvel of warm collaboration and shared jokes about husbands and wives, shot both in dreamscape color and pristine black and white.

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.

A peculiar combination of willful meandering and matter of fact violence, and it occasionally confounds in its attempts to exalt.

What's lost in translation is recovered easily enough in Michael Sheen's astonishing performance as Clough.

A blithe charmer balanced somewhere between a life-should-be-so-neat fairy tale and a life's-a-real-bitch tragicomedy, leaves political debate at the ticket counter and focuses solely on what it's like for Juno MacGuff to be Juno MacGuff.

A story in full billow; it sails through stretches of bloody battle, anxious waiting, wine-soaked relaxation, and marvelous scientific discoveries by the remarkable Maturin (Paul Bettany, well matched again with his ''A Beautiful Mind'' costar).

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

There's much that's simplistically grand, worthy, and fine in Perdition. If I yearn for less measured filmmaking that cries out with more reckless despair, it's because I think hell on earth is a meaner, much more interesting, and far less tidy cinematic place than Mendes trusts his audience to handle.

French mood-and-feeling master filmmaker Claire Denis returns to the Africa of her youth for an intense, mysterious drama exploring revolution and loss.

That his (writer-director Tom McCarthy) strange, often funny film is so well-disciplined and deadpan refreshing is an achievement.

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

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

The movie darts, dreams, and sometimes seems to dance. The great Plummer, meanwhile, creates an inspiring, fully rounded man in late bloom, and McGregor responds with a performance to match.

Campion's big-sisterly encouragement of Cornish's lovely, openhearted performance -- and Whishaw's well-matched response -- results in a character instantly, intimately recognizable to anyone remembering her own first love.

It took me two viewings to enjoy the landscape of Weerasethakul's mysterious jungle -- so very thick, steamy, and foreign -- without wishing for clearer trail markers.

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.

Thornton, giving a splendid, disciplined performance, seamlessly shapes his coach into a believable man of quality rather than star-size charisma.

There are mountain tunes as powerful as moonshine to be enjoyed in Songcatcher -- but there's also a mighty mushy heap of corn pone to be swallowed.

You need know nothing about Italian politics to completely enjoy the fantastical, Fellini-fied, tragi-comic, biographical fun-for-all Il Divo.

The amazingly natural first-timer was discovered, in a gift of publicity-ready truth, while having an argument with her boyfriend at a train station.

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.

The son is obsessive and petulant, punishing and self-pitying, and by the time he gets to a talk with his hurt old mother, we understand why.

In the very funny cop comedy Hot Fuzz, overachieving London police officer Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg) commits a very British sin: He's too good.

Yet another outstanding little movie in the exciting Romanian New Wave.

Grant is the rare actor who can mix the characteristics of sex appeal and ambivalence in believable, rather than irritating, proportions.

The high-low setting effectively reinforces the emotional geography of both lost souls. Gillian Anderson makes a brief, well-placed appearance as one of the rich.

This beautiful, terrible story is not easily forgotten.

Their love story was inevitably complicated. And so is the documentary Chris & Don: A Love Story -- not simply a love letter to love -- by Guido Santi and Tina Mascara.

More than a million people have been displaced in central China in the cause of generating electrical power to meet the needs of the future; Jia's flowing river of a picture washes over a few of them as they adjust to life's currents in the present.

In the creature’s mating habits and its wriggling life, Imamura creates a parallel to the upstream battle of these fragile outsiders, and he makes his points with abundant, tender humor.

The third starring the totally captivating cool cucumber Daniel Craig as Agent 007 - is both an elegy and a mission statement. It's also a great, long-lasting jolt of pleasure.

''Documentary'' is too impersonal a word and ''visual poem'' is too mushy a phrase to describe Of Time and the City, a short, beautiful, characteristically sublime memory piece by the great British auteur Terence Davies.

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 archival footage is so breathtaking, the reminiscences so piquant, that even a stranger to dance can't help but be swept up by this peek into such exquisite, now vanished glamour.

Fantasy leaks into reality.

Not to be confused with a dramatization of Kate Chopin's great 1899 proto-feminist novel, this by-the-numbers British ghost story, set just after WWI, devotes a lot of energy to set decoration.

One of the wonders of the holiday season.

Allen has fun in his imaginary French capital, turning his star-studded cast loose to interpret their characters as they wish.

A highly original Death in Venice-scented comedy drama written and directed with flair by British feature novice Richard Kwietniowski.

The vivid fictional specifics, and the simple loveliness of the artless performances by nonactor Mongolian nomads, attest to the filmmakers' abundant artistry.

Madly original, cheekily political, altogether exciting District 9.

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

Flight opens with one of the most harrowing in-flight-disaster depictions of all time.

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.

Powerful, passionate, and potentially revolution-inducing documentary.

A superior lyrical ragamuffin Irish drama.

Director Peter O'Fallon fires his biggest gun: a blast of Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus, truly heavenly music wasted on a handful of dust.

Ridicule gently suggests that the culture of sound bites has deep roots.

While we can admire their attractive exteriors, we don't know anything about the interior lives of the three women so vibrantly miserable in their unhappiness.

Superb, Oscar-nominated documentary.

The performances are tender, the script elegant, the cinematography (especially during a virtuoso chase scene in a soccer stadium) artful.

A reality-twisting cousin to "Being John Malkovich" -- showcases a Van Damme who's sly like a fox about his own image.

The lyrical animation, with its meditative attention to nature, bears the unique stamp of Japan's Studio Ghibli, cofounded by the great ­"Spirited Away" animator Hayao Miyazaki.

Evenness of political keel, combined with a generic filmmaking style, is an artistic weapon way too puny for a successful assault on so tough, bruising, and crucial a subject.

In watching the birds and the man with an affectionate, curious eye, the filmmaker builds a story of surprising emotional resonance.

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

The chemical energy between Bullock and Reynolds is fresh and irresistible.

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.

What could have been a parlor game becomes a surprisingly rich sketchbook, boosted by the work of fine actors.

Stunning, unsettling, beautifully written drama.

This outstanding work — so meditative — is clearly an affirmation of life (and never more provocatively than in the film’s unusual coda, in which moviemaking itself becomes part of the discussion). It’s also so grounded in the real emotional scope of ordinary people that the magnitude of the subject is answered in the most mysteriously matter-of-fact way.

Truer than the John Wayne showpiece and less gritty than the book, this True Grit is just tasty enough to leave movie lovers hungry for a missing spice.

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

As a horror picture, Blair Witch may not be much more than a cheeky game, a novelty with the cool, blurry look of an avant-garde artifact. But as a manifestation of multimedia synergy, it's pretty spooky.

Noyce honors the story best by standing back (and getting Kenneth Branagh, as a supercilious official, to stand back, too): Noyce lets the landscape and the untrained young actresses own the screen, particularly the naturally magnetic Everlyn Sampi.

Thrilling little epic set in the bewildering arena of the English language.

The trek is long, the direction (by Murray’s Quick Change colleague Howard Franklin) is soft, the script (by Roy Blount Jr.) is windy, and the occasional laughs are as heavy-footed as the thunking lead pachyderm herself.

An inviting international audience-pleaser.

The mechanical beauty and android possibilities of the future excite the filmmaker, and that's where Minority Report becomes an alluring postcard from the edge. But it's an edge over which Spielberg never seems to want to step.

The best thing about this long-awaited feature-length project, a classic Simpsonian interplay of family psychology, social commentary, and brainy visual and verbal jokes tossed off at rat-a-tat speed, is how relaxed it manages to be.

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.

There's an adult life force in every frame of this luxuriously paced work, even in the sight of rain and a lady's stocking.

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.

An ambitious debut feature.

Known for distinctive horror movies like "Cure" and "Pulse," inventive Japanese filmmaker Kiyoshi Kurosawa finds just the right melancholy tone to suit a new and all too familiar kind of horror: economic downsizing.

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

Acompelling, cant free drama about clashing class systems and challenged family relationships that's all the more engrossing for its organic, near documentary style.

A stunning study of one desperate woman's conscience.