Lisa Schwarzbaum

The script is a steady accretion of small stabs to the heart, propelling the gorgeous performances of Berling, Regnier, and especially the 76-year-old French cinema veteran Bouquet, whose every faint smile is killing.

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.

In his debut feature, the director is wise enough to move his hand-held camera wherever Steen wants to go.

At once an unsentimental portrait of the ambitious singer who thought himself bound for glory, and an affecting elegy for a time when song was a form of revolution.

Doug Pray's cool documentary about 85-year-old Dr. Dorian Paskowitz, his wife, and their eight sons and one daughter is about surfing insofar as surfing is the family's shared passion.

Renner's Cross is a conflicted hero built to take advantage of the "Hurt Locker" star's best qualities as an actor - his default intensity, the way he conveys that complicated mental calculations are taking place under cover of watchful stillness, even underwater.

The rare footage of '50s and '60s L.A. alone is a treasure; the City of Angels has rarely looked so hip. Bonus: cool music from the likes of Charles Mingus and the Velvet Underground.

But while this piquant, tapas-like movie (a 2003 film- festival favorite only now being released) asserts that landscape is a kind of destiny from which one cannot escape, Sorin takes delighted, serious interest in how far a person can advance psychologically, even if all roads lead back to a home at the end of the world.

Whenever Rupert Everett appears as a rich fellow who distinctly does not fancy ladies, it's a hysterical history lesson of the hilarious variety.

With its warring factions, citizen uprisings, guerrilla insurgencies, political intrigue, bloody warfare, family tensions, and homoerotic subtext, Coriolanus is one of the year's best political thrillers.

This galvanizing cinematic work is also gorgeous, experimental, alive with a Scandinavian strain of chutzpah, and artistically elegant.

With a slow, relentless buildup focused on sexual humiliation, Compliance intensifies the "requests" put on Sandra, and eventually other employees, to behave immorally in the name of cooperation.

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

The most unexpectedly audacious, exhilarating, wildly creative adventure thriller I've seen in ages.

Rachid Bouchareb's intensely dramatized, passionately partisan story of militancy in the struggle for Algerian independence from France after World War II makes effective use of "Godfather" storytelling theatrics.

Each and every character in Christopher Guest's latest hilarious cultural corrective is something inspiring to behold.

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

Nothing I've read about Iraq or seen on TV in the past few weeks has felt nearly as real and intimate as this commanding fiction.

With an outstanding screenplay by Brian Koppelman and disciplined direction by Koppelman and David Levien, a story that could have been generic (or worse, scented with flowery bulls---) turns into a precise, honest, and affecting drama.

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.

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

The superb character actor Celia Weston (In the Bedroom) is truly breathtaking as Ronnie's boozer mom.

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.

Surges with an energy and visual verve that improve the play and enhance the themes of dramatist Peter Morgan's script.

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

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

The result is an engrossing chronicle of creative people under pressure, a movie about the madness of opera for which no knowledge of opera is required for full enjoyment.

The most beautiful movie ever made about a man who could only move one eyelid -- almost dangerously beautiful.

But the story is, still and all, only a pause, deferring an intensely anticipated conclusion. And it's in that exquisite place of action and waiting that this elegantly balanced production emerges as a model adaptation.

The movie was a major success for Melanie Griffith, sure, but it was as the secretary's boss ... that Weaver combined all of her star qualities, pulled in laughs, and took home an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

Of all the shocks in the riveting and timely political thriller Paradise Now, the most unsettling may be the dignity bestowed on a pair of prospective Palestinian suicide bombers.

The breath of cinematic life, though, the sensibility, the energy, belong to Joel and Ethan Coen, and this is their stirring success.

A dark and hilarious thwomping of the whole miserablist British gangster genre.

Exquisitely structured, pitiless study of a middle-aged man trapped in a stagnant emotional weather pattern.

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.

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

Without doing anything so divisive as taking sides, The Counterfeiters pays sympathetic attention to those who play their cards to win even when the rules are terrible, not least because the remarkable Markovics, an Austrian TV actor with a pugnacious anvil of a head, is so riveting as an unsaintly survivor.

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.

Even blood, spilled so freely, has a distinctive intensity of red in this beautiful and harrowing film.

It's a tiny, sunny character study about a fat guy who's an unlikely chick magnet. And as such it's a pip.

One hell of a creepy little eco-horror picture.

In Please Give, the sharp-eyed filmmaker sends her vibrant representative out into the world to explore what it means for a woman to be lucky and still feel itchy. The report has the resonant ring of truth.

The fetching cast (including Jennifer Beals as a histrionic girlfriend), while a long way from Gwyneth and Matt stature, nevertheless reflects Stillman’s enhanced status as an established indie talent.

Turns out to be the funniest, most risk-taking, most incisive movie of the summer.

Talented filmmaker Susanne Bier (Brothers), armed with an outstanding compositional sense, keeps control over the storms of melodrama that swirl in this rich weepie.

Sky Captain is a gorgeous, funny, and welcome novelty.

A stunning study of one desperate woman's conscience.

The subtle selectivity of Leconte's eye, how he moves with great control from gesture to gesture, is matched by the disciplined intensity of the performances.

With its propulsive punk-rock soundtrack and beautifully rough cinematography, Dragonslayer makes you care about this scrawny young man, skating to nowhere.

Everything is vast and hugely ambitious in Martin Scorsese's magisterial, scrambled historical epic.

Many of the characters go by two different names. So best advice for optimum viewing is, see Broken Embraces...twice.

Her death was shocking; this well-made telling of her life is inspiring.

Gripping, highly original.

MIB3 is one giant leap for mankind because Josh Brolin shows up to play the younger Agent K. And he just nails the feat, triumphantly creating a riff on/homage to the Tommy Lee Jones-ness of K that goes much deeper (and funnier) than a simple imitation of drawl and speech patterns.

A satisfying contraption of twists, missteps, and blithe repartee that produces old-fashioned, honestly earned guffaws.

"Old Boy's" vivid star Choi Min-sik plays a terrible schoolteacher -- yet another damned soul in Park's inflammatory, inimitable movie inventory of hell on earth.

Bleak, scathing, and utterly compelling.

The charm and art of De Felitta's gentle domestic sketch expand far beyond biographical borders.

The movie is also visually magnificent - modestly so. Plus, it's half the length of "Avatar."

Like Crazy tells the truth, simply: Love is thrilling. And - just because of the way life happens - sometimes love hurts.

So much goes down on Nick and Norah's one enchanted evening that the best advice is to enjoy the ride -- the actual ride -- around this vibrant new New York.

A pleasurably unsettling, sunbaked tale of sex and politics set in late-1970s Haiti.

Jaoui handles her crowd of vivid characters so naturally, and shoots her scenes so unobtrusively, that the diagrammatic cleverness of the plot never overwhelms the intelligence of the observations.

Kelly, the 26-year-old writer-director of this excitingly original indie vision, shares more artistically with Wes Anderson or Paul Thomas Anderson than he does with Spielberg or John Hughes, but the point is, he's out on his own here. He swings big -- with flair.

Amir Bar-Lev's engrossing film is as much about the stubborn ambiguities of art, truth, meaning, and relationships as it is about the authenticity of the Olmstead oeuvre.

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

Crystal turns in his best (read: least sappy) performance in ages, getting through an entire movie -- most of it, anyway -- without mugging.

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.

Earnest messages about bad climate change and good parenting skills have been replaced by a we-all-share-a-planet sense of fun that's more "Finding Nemo" than National Geographic.

The players are timelessly familiar in American Teen, too. But filmmaker Nanette Burstein tells their stories with a distinctly 21st-century pop and audacity.

What the activist drama "Fast Food Nation" does with talk and the aid of movie stars, Our Daily Bread, a riveting documentary by Austrian filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter, does even better, with no voice-over and barely a word spoken by the unidentified workers involved in matter-of-fact killing and harvesting.

Fantasy leaks into reality.

The startling power of Tomboy, a beautiful, matter-of-fact French drama about a young girl who wants to be a boy - and for one singular summer around her 10th birthday passes as one - begins with the one-of-a-kind natural performance by Zoé Héran as Laure.

Amreeka is strategically inviting and carefully mild even when making unsubtle points about Palestinian suffering and American insensitivity.

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

If only for the comedy glory of Sigourney Weaver as a TV network president who confuses acid reflux with gut instinct, this very smart, very funny movie about the making of a network sitcom is a cut-glass gem of a showbiz conceit.

I don't know what tools of the trade Paul Rudd and director David Wain share to dream up the kind of inspired nutso stuff Rudd has done in smart-funny-raunchy winners like "Wet Hot American Summer" and "Role Models." But whatever it is, the two are in a groove - and backed up by some blissed-out creative co-conspirators.

The blessings of salvation have rarely felt so mixed, the parameters of Lolita-hood so elusive - which is exactly Martel's specialty.

Spirit, animal, and human worlds coexist in dreamy harmony in this remarkable drama.

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

Blithe and exhilarating romantic comedy.

A stirring action movie -- in the international manner of ''The Fast Runner'' or ''No Man's Land."

If I ran the circus, the gang that made the sturdy, witty, inventively animated Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who! would get first dibs on any future movie productions of the Theodor Seuss Geisel canon.

What blows us away is the power of Ifans' moist puppy eyes and chilling smile as a true believer undeterred by reality.

In the juxtaposition of cataclysmic matter-of-fact misery and cinematic poetry, the filmmaker finds a calmly stunning way to convey the experience of living with death as something intimate, and, unnervingly, almost natural.

Superb family drama.

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

The worldview, the sense of childlike fun shaded with adult melancholy, and the joyful, serene attention to visual oddity and wordless beauty could only be made in Japan. And, specifically, made by Hayao Miyazaki.

The director of The Descent is savvy enough to suggest even more than he shows. And he's old-school enough to load up on glimpses of good, clean, gruesome gore.

A cheeky, great-looking, thoughtfully loopy creature feature about the lure and dangers of cutting-edge gene splicing.

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.

Sean Baker's singular little ultra-indie is a strikingly unsentimental study in female friendship between unmoored souls in L.A.'s bleached, glamour-challenged San Fernando Valley.

Helen Mirren's allure lies not in finding what's regal in every woman she plays, but in finding what's womanly in every royal.

Nobody’s Fool shines with intelligence and grace and the natural light of fine moviemaking. Like a shot of superior whiskey, it’s a sharp comfort in the grayness of winter

This unsentimental, smartly assembled film is equally attentive to the cacophony of African poverty and the balm of harmony provided by these pied pipers of hope.

We do live in a fraught world of interconnections, Bier makes clear, and what happens far away matters, in unexpected ways, close to home.

So sharp and dryly urbane in its mod-Brit take on the noir, noir, noir, noir world of gambling, dames, and pulp fiction, it makes higher-profile attempts like ''Rounders'' look blah, blah, blah, blah.

A gaudy, daring, operatic, and bloody funny provocation of a melodrama from Park Chan-wook.