Lisa Schwarzbaum

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.

Davies registers believable frustration and deadpan teenage disengagement in equal measure.

Rutina Wesley glowers with just the right touch of sweetness as a brainy student (and stellar after-school stepper).

The spectacular battle scenes are the engorged heart of the delirious adventure. But Woo also gets maximum romantic value from Tony Leung as a war hero married to Chiling Lin as the tea-pouring beauty.

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.

Drawing on a documentary visual style he deftly employed in "One Day in September" and "Touching the Void," director Kevin Macdonald uses McAvoy's boyishness to treat Garrigan's apolitical foolishness as yet another damn mess in one African country's hell.

The narrative logic of Swimming Pool slips through our hands like cool water, shimmery and light-dappled, leaving behind the pleasures of summer heat and goose bumps.

Campos (who was 24 when he made this jolting pic) captures the numbing psychic scramble that just might cause the YouTube generation to go morally haywire. Or become filmmakers.

What the characters in The Witnesses -- and we, the audience -- pay testimony to in André Téchiné's urgent, compassionate, and ultimately optimistic French drama are the toll the epidemic has rung, and the responsibility of the living to choose life.

Undoubtedly downplays the seamier, less attractive experiences of Arab women and men in Tunisian cabaret culture, and plays up the fairy-tale charm of the universal ''Flashdance'' formula in an unusual setting.

Gray has an artful, understated way of conveying what's going ?on inside, often simply by focusing his camera on Kazan.

Allen draws a snappy, loose-limbed performance from Penn.

Director Ira Sachs moves to the rhythms of his native Memphis, teasing emotional resonance out of geography.

Great, restrained performances of Beatty and Schreiber, delicately framed by the filmmaker's taste for visual compositions.

The chief frustration of this otherwise well-made, well-acted, well-heeled picture -- a movie classy in its artful modesty, with every detail of plot and period furnishings lovingly conceived, every lick of jazz-influenced score true to the times -- is that it is so very self-absorbedly graceful about something so very insular and...unremarkable.

Ice Age: The Meltdown blithely looks on the bright side of life, amassing a screen full of vultures to sing and dance ''Food Glorious Food'' and daring us not to get happy.

This is no real-life comedy à la "Election" -- more like a valuable, teen-scaled version of the presidential election that currently obsesses us.

The dramatic power, though, comes entirely from the eloquence of old people, shot in medium close-up, barely moving as they remember things.

An energetically demented psycho-killer comedy set in faux-noir L.A., Seven Psychopaths rollicks along to the unique narrative beat and language stylings of Anglo-Irish writer-director Martin McDonagh (In Bruges), channeling Quentin Tarantino.

In a world full of off the rack thrillers, it's fine boutique quality.

The filmmaker of August Evening creates a succession of quiet, elliptical scenes that accrue into an affecting big picture of family ties and immigrant experience.

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

There's unwieldy mess -- but there's also unruly brilliance to this dark and funny story about the havoc that ensues when a man's uncensored Freudian id is allowed the run of the place.

Willful, meandering, and intriguing, this Wuthering Heights is similarly headstrong.

Working from a script by his wife, Sarah Koskoff, "High Fidelity" actor-turned-director Todd Louiso shapes the movie to Lynskey's rhythms.

The Corporation has better manners and a longer fuse than ''Fahrenheit 9/11.'' But the acerbic, sardonically illuminating Canadian documentary shares with its American cousin a certain bleak leftist glee in pursuit of its cause.

There's a relaxed, unforced, melancholy sweetness and swing to this modest iteration of the "Big Chill/Return of the Secaucus 7" formula, a pleasing directorial debut for screenwriter Jamie Linden (We Are Marshall).

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.

In a staring contest with his audience, Solondz never blinks. He picks and picks at the themes that consume him, and he doesn't care who stays and who leaves. Me, I'm rapt.

Ziplessness has rarely looked so inviting, nor have a couple of actors seemed so much like real people -- attractive, but hardly hunks of perfection -- who happened to get lucky, and are delighted to throw some of their guiltless good fortune our way.

While each Yorkshire playmate-of-the-month warmly assesses her own undewy flesh, the movie gives off a happy vibe of appreciation -- for the dignity of the real Rylstone lot, the actresses who play them so lovingly, and the simple, flower-bed borders of the story.

Best of all, a revisit with Jedi makes a viewer appreciate spectacle, presentation, mythology -- that, and the power of a bitchin' helmet to speak volumes in a language even an alien can understand. [Special Edition]

The serious struggle in this lilting doc is told with an inviting light touch and a big heart.

Hip, funny, mostly nonmusical, decidedly non- epic family picture.

Storyboarded with precision, and enhanced with a resonant score by Deborah Lurie, Acker’s handsome, feature-length 9 is, for all its visual flights of fancy, grounded in an apocalypse-proof message graspable by any schoolchild.

These movie guys specialize in snapping vignettes of human inconsistency - no fancy lighting required.

Shine beams with warmth, sensitivity, and fine taste.

Undeniably powerful, the work also comes with its own built-in shield against feeling any one character's difficulties too deeply, or for too long.

When they're good, the Yes Men are astonishing, anarchic sights to behold.

Stronger on beautiful imagery than on narrative flow.

The observations about parenthood, pro and con, are quick and smart, and Scott effortlessly steals the show, softening Westfeldt's brittle cuteness.

At the bone, Zombieland is a polished, very funny road picture shaped by wisenheimer cable-TV sensibilities and starring four likable actors, each with an influential following.

A denouement more textbook than thrilling stalls some of the movie's power. But the early chills are potent, intense.

Imamura's delight in the infinite oddity of men and women is goofy; it's also, at heart, reverent.

A tough, authentic street drama born, bred, and shot in the no-spin zone of working-class South Boston.

The performances are relaxed. The open-ended, vignette-like structure of the filmmaking sometimes imitates the movement of weary, life-worn men nursing liquor.

With him (Schwarzenegger), we return to a franchise we never knew we missed, surprisingly grateful for the star's generosity -- and evident pleasure -- in strapping on the old sunglasses and blasting adversaries to hell.

The story is timeless; this could have taken place when Doyle graduated in '76 -- or any year, really, since the effects of high school linger throughout adult life and nerds are forever.

Battleship is a sound vessel floating in Hollywood's oil-slick sea of "Transformers" sequels and vampire riffs.

Another grotty drama about junkie love? Well, yes...I make an exception for Jesus' Son.

Lest the audience miss a cue, Hooper and soundtrack composer Alexandre Desplat count on the ringing grandeur of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony - the famous second movement, no less - to amp the emotions.

The Sessions is first and foremost about Hawkes' virtuoso performance, one of those "My Left Foot"-y transformations that make audiences verklemmt and generate awards talk.

That Annaud and his deft production team create believable dramatic characters without compromising the dignity of the animals they've borrowed as stars -- is the striking (and sometimes unnerving) achievement of a film that also swoops and loops through fairytale hoops.

The movie luxuriates in cinema references while laughing at its own fetishes -- a neat talent.

Peculiarly bloodless.

It's a buoyant, old-wave disaster pic for a generation of well-conditioned thrill seekers charmed by the revelation that Richard Dreyfuss really is the Red Buttons of our day.

Enchanted is festooned with extravagant set pieces -- there's a great number in praise of romantic gestures, and a ballroom scene to make even grown-up girls swoon.

There are times (and plenty of them) when Slither slops over from smart, affectionate homage into unmodulated frat goofiness as Gunn cannibalizes so many horror plots with such high spirits.

Writer-director Salvatore Stabile has a good eye for the details of hard-luck ordinariness, and he sketches believable family bonds with a minimum of flourish.

To Winn-Dixie's great credit, both as a book and as a dandy, dignified movie, there's nothing condescendingly lesson-like in the wisdom India acquires.

It's a pleasure to meet up again with Marion, the distractible, acerbic, New York-based French photographer played once more by Julie Delpy in 2 Days in New York. This bouncy hand-knitted comedy of cross-cultural relationships, also directed and co-written by Delpy, makes a jaunty sequel to "2 Days in Paris."

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.

By not trying too hard, this remake of a dumb movie has got spring in its step. The bounce is on us.

Färberböck's sensual adaptation is a matter of fact embrace of the unconventional and dangerous during a terrible time.

A "Romeo and Juliet" tragedy of surprising power.

An unlikely comedy charmer.

Greggory anchors Gabrielle in manly bewilderment and rage, while Huppert claws the title character's way to self-awareness.

The movie bubbles with intellectual curiosity and narrative ambition.

In the grim and empathetic lost-youth drama Sweet Sixteen, the director focuses on a few failed souls -- rather than excoriate the system that failed them -- to produce a story of particularly streamlined, eloquent despair.

And among the things this ''HP'' does very well indeed is deepen the darker, more frightening atmosphere for audiences of all ages already familiar with the intricacies of the ''Potter'' landscape. (This is as it should be: Harry's story is supposed to get darker.)

Almodovar is positively mature, adapting a novel by Ruth Rendell so deftly that the plot now also describes the invigorating and sometimes disorienting effects of democracy after long years of repression under the Franco regime.

This charm-filled documentary about passionate Harry Potter fans (and one foe) leaps all over the place.

Does a great job of being in two places at once: In the head and gangly bodies of kids, and in the hearts of those of us who have survived grades 6-8.

Gorgeous as the underwater life-forms are, the excitement of Aliens of the Deep comes from that most old-school, low-tech of elements: real human beings.

Sagnier is yummy.

Director Sérgio Machado, who worked as an assistant to Central Station's Walter Salles, lingers sensually over every wrong move his attractive tragic trio make.

Fan-ready and saga-solid.

The movie's hide-and-seek attitude toward truth mirrors the intricacies of one lover getting to know another -- an arresting notion of the heart that's much more than paper-deep.

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.

By the time Worf (Michael Dorn), knocking off a slimy attacker, growls a Schwarzeneggerish ''Assimilate this!'' we've already done so, with pleasure.

Anderson brings compassion to his amused sense of yuppie tragicomedy, as he does to his nuanced understanding of Boston, the setting of this appealing fairy tale.

The two XXL personalities are in fit, fighting form in a comedy as bracing and furiously right for the moment as it is broad and huggable.

The already heavy-footed clomp of Grisham's declamatory storytelling style has been given an extra-thick-soled, wing-tipped, liberal-leaning, reality-tampering kick thanks to a screenplay credited to four writers.

Charms because of its natural, non-magical attitude toward humanity.

Although In the Mood for Love isn't in the mood for action, it dazzles with everything but.

There's a contemplative loveliness to The Way, an affecting personal project both for Emilio Estevez, who wrote, directed, and plays a small role, and for his father, Martin Sheen.

Gehry sketches and free-associates about how he's not nearly the menschy aw-shucks pussycat from Canada he appears to be but rather a wily, complicated L.A. lion.

A ferocious, funny, gory, and astute Canadian horror parable.

Redgrave shimmers like one of Tuscany's magnificent cypress trees as an Englishwoman searching for Lorenzo (Nero).

It's refreshingly low on the kind of Cinema of Empowerment pedantry that often goes along with stories about ethnic families, sweatshop working conditions, or women confronting issues of weight and body image -- and this little crowd-pleaser embraces all three.

Satisfying, melancholy political suspense story.

Korine remains unnecessarily smitten with sordidness, and there's plenty of it here.

An animated family movie about penguins -- in the wake of "March of the Happy Feet," they're the Angelina Jolie of animals, both cute and admired everywhere. Plus, it's about surfing.

Hilariously fake and rude. And thus true and tonic, if you know what I mean.

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.

Genre-hoppers like Steven Soderbergh ought to love this neat triple doozy. [Note: From a review of the entire trilogy.]

Writer-director Tanya Hamilton's intellectually ambitious debut drama Night Catches Us is all the more notable for setting well-drawn fictional characters in a fraught, real moment in civil rights history.

The hoot and giggle of a girl-power fairy tale blended from potions of ''Monty Python,'' ''Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,'' and ''Shrek.''

The daffy, innately British joke that propels the cheeky U.K. comedy hit Shaun of the Dead is that although real zombies have risen up -- slacker wankers Shaun (Simon Pegg) and his best pal and roommate, Ed (Nick Frost), are too slack, wankerish, and blitheringly British to notice.

The generosity and gorgeousness with which Aussie writer-director Stephan Elliott (and costume designers Lizzy Gardiner and Tim Chappel) turn this most unlikely road picture into something arresting - if a tad sentimental - in its naive vision of a perfectly tolerant world.

Underneath the ravishing imagery however, hearts are in flux.

X2 sparkles with a lightness of spirit that was missing from ''X-Men.''

In One Hour Photo, Williams is a snapshot of human complexity worth framing.

Wide-eyed Sara Paxton and hipster-bespectacled Pat Healy play the joint's only two employees, working each other into a lather of what turns out to be well-founded hysteria. Kelly McGillis is a surprise treat as a grouchy medium.

Damon's how-to-break-the-law lesson - as ludicrous as anything else in this enjoyably zigzaggy exercise in accumulating peril - grants Neeson the fun of experimenting with an American ex-con accent for his one scene.

As engrossing and logic-resistant as the state of dreaming it seeks to replicate, Christopher Nolan's audacious new creation demands further study to fully absorb the multiple, simultaneous stories Nolan finagles into one narrative experience.

Reflect the robust status of Yiddish theater in the early 20th century, and its post-Holocaust decline.

There's something invigorating about this unpretentious dog tale. And if a penguin drops by to promote his own movie product, well, there's room on the frozen continent for all.

Mamet regulars Ricky Jay and Joe Mantegna blend well with Mamet newbie Tim Allen, a treat as a spoiled-rotten aging Hollywood action star.

Ozon specializes in dissecting the vulnerability, erotic longing, and garbled intentions with which people regularly rub up against one another.

Lasse Hallström calms Irving's typically busy 1985 best-seller with a balm of the Swedish director's typically soothing lyricism.

Johnson also grabs hold of a fundamental truth and seduces us with it: The schoolyard can be the noirest burg of all.

The characters in Alien Trespass (directed by X-Files producing alum R.W. Goodwin) are specimens of Sputnik-era determination, led by a gung-ho Eric McCormack.

I'm holding the filmmaker responsible for getting us all back again - to feelings of excitement and delight. Vital as they are, Gollum and Bilbo can only do so much to keep us enchanted. Is Jackson able to sustain the magic in two more installments? I peer into Tolkien's Misty Mountains and embrace the journey.

The ever-magnetic Sam Rockwell is Kenny, Minnie Driver is full of beans as Betty Anne's best friend, Melissa Leo is wicked good as an ornery cop, and, in her two chewy scenes, Juliette Lewis reminds fans why we want her to run free forever.

It's in the brightly observed vignettes from mall-society life, captured with a low-key, on-the-run visual style, that Burman shows his best stuff and deadpan wit.

Good times and bum times, they've seen it all and they're still here. Lucky us.

The result is a duet of outstanding loveliness between Kendrick and Gordon-Levitt, also an actor of nuanced control.

The performances are razor sharp. And the ideas in this movie are, no kidding, big.

New-era losers (the cast is a cheery scrum of relaxed kids, led by genuine whiz pitcher Sammi Kane Kraft in the role created by Tatum O'Neal) now include a rotten kid in a wheelchair.

An elegant adventure of a different kind.

A majority oriented movie that assumes sophisticated familiarity with a sexual minority.

Intense, autobiographically based drama.

It's not quite the same thrill as glimpsing the man behind the curtain of the great and powerful Oz, but for journalism junkies, the fascination of Page One: Inside The New York Times is something like that.

As ever, Egoyan assembles a devoted repertory cast, including Christopher Plummer.

Nakedness has rarely looked so...naked. And innately, universally comic.

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.

This striking, slow-building drama from Cate Shortland uses fractured, impressionistic imagery as a mirror of moral dislocation as the children make their way through an unfamiliar landscape.

After teeny indies, this studio release retains the trademark love of warped American gothic that the Polishes share with David Lynch and the brothers Ethan and Joel Coen. But the unexpected streak of yearning sunniness -- the Spielbergian touch of boyhood dreams propelling a grown man -- gives The Astronaut Farmer a warmth that's new for them.

As loose and restful as pajamas.

Cynical and cheerily merciless.

A nifty, entwined, ultimately gripping adaptation of British crime writer Ruth Rendell's novel ''The Tree of Hands'' by French director Claude Miller.

Martha Marcy May Marlene leaves a viewer hanging, quite literally, lost in an enveloping fog of mood without resolution. Olsen, meanwhile, definitely marks her arrival.

Hope Springs dares viewers to look closely at the remarkable sight of naked adult intimacy and its discontents.

Cheery, expertly constructed Spanish farce.

Jeunet maintains a firm control of his dreamscape creation, drawing on influences as varied as "Toy Story," "Children of Paradise," and TV's "Mission: Impossible."

Director Betty Thomas demonstrates her expertise at keeping indulgence at bay in even the coarsest of comic situations.

Luc Jacquet's exquisitely shot eye-of-God study of a year in the lives of these distinctive birds is a nature film built with a feel for the epic and a love of operatic narrative.

In our summertime-movie world of aliens and superheroes who look all too familiar, Dodge and Penny look all the rarer in their precious humanity.

In his elliptical and somewhat loopy drama about the slipperiness of love at any age, French filmmaker André Téchiné uses the sight of scudding motorboats on the waterways around workaday Venice as a visual reinforcement of time as a river.

There’s a self-awareness to Shampoo that gives the movie a cleansing sadness and, oddly, makes Beatty an affectingly amoral roue.

Allusions to "Vertigo," "Rebecca," and Georges Franju's great 1960 French horror movie "Eyes Without a Face" are intentional: The Skin I Live In is, above all, the creation of a movie fanatic who loves to look.

In the handsome, haunting submarine thriller Below, the usual perils of deep-sea maneuvers are heightened by psychic unraveling.

Conveys the heaving passion of Puccini's famous love-jealousy-murder-suicide fandango with great cinematic innovation.

There are moments in Baran as wholesomely heart-tugging as any involving Charlie Chaplin and a blind girl, but the film is saved from aren't-kids-cute sentimentality by a warmth that isn't faked and a stately sense of composition.

Pandaemonium goes a long way toward capturing the compelling delirium of opium among a crowd of freethinking British iconoclasts.

Enough does work, and well, to make Set It Off a valuable model for a new kind of girl-pack story: one that’s not just for girls.

Genre-hoppers like Steven Soderbergh ought to love this neat triple doozy. [Note: From a review of the entire trilogy.]

Slums of Beverly Hills has the kind of big heart, strong voice, vivid look, and original sense of humor many young artists -- particularly young female artists -- don't find until they're riper, and some never find at all.

Lee's bigger theme isn't God or survival, but the awesome adventure of making the imaginary visible, the adventure of making movies.

Gentle study in human resilience and luck.

It's the first futuristic disaster movie that's as cute as a button. Which, when all the special effects blow over, is what we Americans like in a monster hit.

A funny and intermittently sharp German satire that musters gentle nostalgia for East German communism while mocking the not-so-distant past.

This patient, righteous documentary by Ken Burns, David McMahon, and Sarah Burns recounts the story of justice undone (a serial rapist confessed) with extensive interviews, a thorough use of archival footage, and a less-than felicitous use of ominous-rumble music that unnecessarily insists, Isn't this an outrage?

Wild Grass is itself odd stuff: Sometimes it's as playful as Marguerite's crayon-red corona of frizzy hair, and other times as autumnal as the sight of Georges alone in his study, feeling stuck.

There's a grim modern parable to be read into the dangerous effects of the gospel-preaching local crazy lady Mrs. Carmody (brilliantly played by a hellfire Marcia Gay Harden) on a congregation of the fearful.

May not tell a great story, but it's a great wow.

Reveling in mess and homegrown multiracial mayhem, Death at a Funeral finds a new lease on life.

Rock and Mac exult in the kind of highly charged verbal and physical antics that are star-turn rewards for performers currently at the tops of their games.

There's a painterly translucence to this ''Springtime,'' and a mystery, too; each frame is as delicately poised and lit as a Vermeer portrait of a woman, beckoning but unknowable.

It's a bouncy, loose limbed, ''families do the darnedest things'' sitcom that elicits ungrudging laughs.

The humor built into this sharp-witted human comedy is enhanced in the translation. Meanwhile, the arrestingly stylized imagery of the original Madness has not been lost.

Chiara Mastroianni charms here just as her maman, Catherine Deneuve, did in Demy's 1964 classic.

The Cuban escapade, designed to provoke, backfires when he loses focus by including Cuban firefighters in an homage to 9/11 first responders.

If all this sounds awfully classroom-bound, it isn't -- far from it. Each man's story as he tells it is riveting, truly stranger than fiction, and awesome, too, in the way of unfathomable humans.

This is jumbo-size science fiction, with a handsome, impermeable titanium gleam - and a thick coating of creationism lite.

It's a good bet the average American moviegoer, however familiar with the rhythms of cinematic global culture, has never experienced such a handsomely self contained world.

Well-made film. Indeed, discovering such a small pleasure is the kind of experience that rewards film lovers who browse with open eyes as well as hearts.

Where ''Rushmore'' surprises and delights with its spiky depiction of sprawling American idiosyncrasy, Tadpole's more urbane, less complicated charms are specifically made in New York City.

Genre-hoppers like Steven Soderbergh ought to love this neat triple doozy. [Note: From a review of the entire trilogy.]

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.

Baumbach's movies are addictive dispatches from a genteel jungle of white privilege, where highly educated people behave badly. I can't take my eyes off the exotic wildlife.

The interviews Bitton conducts, almost all with Arabs and Jews who share her despair, are less meaningful than what she captures in silence: the sight of farmers separated from their farmland, everyday people thwarted in their dailiness, and children playing next to what looks like prison walls.

A sly catalog of deceits and a gentle commentary on slippery creativity and desire.

Scott gets into the zip and rush of urban energy with an enthusiasm bordering on hilarity.

The performances are vividly alive.

Terry Gilliam-ish territory here, spiked with imagery from Holocaust nightmares and drug trips. Attention, university film clubs: Here's your cult-ready midnight-movie programming.

While inevitably oversimplified, is never less than engrossing.

Art history majors may write in with corrections. Meanwhile, I'm declaring that the masterly, big-canvas biographical drama Chi-hwa-seon: Painted Fire is about the Jackson Pollock of 19th-century Korea.

An unexpectedly alert teen-scream disaster chiller.

The technique is impressive. But it would count for little if the human story -- of a magnetic, resourceful, and, in the way of all Rohmer heroines, articulate woman who was mistress to the Duke of Orleans -- weren't engrossing on its own dramatic terms.

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

The unexpected star is Hathaway, looking cool as a runway model in the role originated by Barbara Feldon, lithe as a (pink) panther, and displaying great comic timing.

Larrain's (literally) dark, edgy movie is a precise artistic commentary on Augusto Pinochet's miserable regime.

Something particularly clean shines in this American fairy tale, a quality of simplicity that's almost as hard to achieve in such movies as a middle-aged man's boyhood dreams.

The result is an unabashedly home-cooked homage to New York eccentricity.

Tamahori proves that he can shape a studio picture effectively to his specs; his action sense is as personal as his screenwriter’s. As for Hopkins and Baldwin, the well-matched actors grab their parts with disciplined ferocity.

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

Narc is as cop movie as a cop movie can be.

There's something Slavic about Warner's storytelling.

Lucy Walker's observant film Blindsight is about profound East-West differences in the importance of journey versus destination and comradeship versus competition.

An effortlessly clever animated confection.

This is familiar psychological as well as stylistic territory for Anderson after "Rushmore" and "The Royal Tenenbaums." But there's a startling new maturity in Darjeeling, a compassion for the larger world that busts the confines of the filmmaker's miniaturist instincts.

The most spellbinding aspect of Bright Future is that the surrealism sustains its own squiddish logic, concluding with one of the most breathtaking film finales of the year.

Not only makes excellent use of the singer's sweetly coltish acting abilities, but it also promotes a standardized set of sturdy values with none of Mariah Carey's desperate ''Glitter,'' or any of Mandy Moore's gummy pap in ''A Walk to Remember.''

An affecting, old fashioned, antiwar war story.

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

The intense interviews and damning statistics (20 percent of all female personnel have experienced sexual assault) do the work of whipping up outrage.

First-time writer-director Rodney Evans makes a ballsy leap into historical fantasia, with heartfelt fervor outrunning stray moments of artistic gawkiness.

Arriving amid the traditionally withered harvest of January releases, Orange County is peachy.

For the love of all things sensual and mysterious, see this one on a big screen.

There's a shocking, casual quality to the self-destructive narcissism of the pretty, petty kids squandering their lives in the L.A. sunshine of The Young Unknowns.

Honoring the literary ground beneath it, spotted yellow lizards and all, the movie Holes is easy to dig.

Hanna's intriguing, disorienting pleasures - the movie is part poetic dreamscape, part sinister spy saga - lie more in the filmmaking flourishes than in the narrative.

As an exception to the norm, Kitano doesn't appear this time, confining himself merely to writing, directing, and editing.

McAvoy and Fassbender are a casting triumph. These two have, yes, real star magnetism, both individually and together: They're both cool and intense, suave and unaffected, playful and dead serious about their grand comic-book work.

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.

By rocketing ahead 200 years from the previous film and jiggering the story cleverly (with a script by Toy Story coscreenwriter Joss Whedon as late-'90s wiseacreish as Alien3 was early-'90s portentous) to create a Ripley reconstructed through a mix of human and alien DNA, Alien Resurrection power-kicks the whole definition of the Horrifying Other into a fresh, deep, exhilaratingly thoughtful, millennium-sensitive direction. [5 Dec 1997, p. 47]

An artlessly powerful performance by newcomer Nicole Behaire anchors American Violet.

Shows a beguiling aptitude for self-mockery in the pursuit of polemic.

Children bumps into a few dead spots along its irreverent way... But casual sophistication and wiggy Australian self-awareness give this product of unreconstructed bourgeois decadence its idiosyncratic charm.

Dumont's rigorous, serious attention to the mysteries of good, evil, and faith rewards those willing to be confounded.

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 denouement of the movie is as preposterously happy as a children's fairy tale. But the moral is ageless.

This gallantly imperfect indie pops with attitude.

The intimate movie hums with a back-in-the-hood vibe that gets the two stars playing contentedly, and delightfully, for the love of local filmmaking.

James Westby's loving and self-aware homage to mouth-breathing boys who worship Wong Kar-Wai and can't talk to girls is the opposite of Tarantino-esque: It's Westby-ish, interspersing settings of biting social oafishness with spasms of film knowledge.

The Tango Lesson is about as far away from Al Pacino’s Scent of a Woman hotdogging as you can get; it really is about the scent of a woman, in all her fascinating peculiarity.

Every moment spent in the company of Keaton... is such a joy that the whole is more delightful than the sum of the formulaic ingredients. Keaton makes Nicholson bounce the way Shirley MacLaine once did in ''Terms of Endearment.''

Let loose in a plot that's surprisingly modern about sex and relationships, Morton gives Eva's torn longings an immediacy that transcends a lot of damp, 1950s rusticated preciousness.

For one of those obstreperously original books that are themselves impossible to translate, Everything Is Illuminated is impressively well lit.

Part supernatural thriller, part Oliver Sacks-style meditation on the neurological mysteries of perception, and part Buddhist treatise on reincarnation, the story luxuriates in shadows.

The two are unlikely compadres — no Hope and Crosby, just a couple of average guys walking, talking, and looking for the love of good women. But Poirier establishes an attractive, believable friendship between the immigrants.

The discreet stink of the bourgeoisie perfumes the wonderfully mordant, dry-eyed family saga, The Flower of Evil.

Marvelously inventive, often-ironic Israeli storyteller Etgar Keret and his life- and workmate, Shira Geffen, spin in Jellyfish a dreamy, arty, alluringly cockeyed tale involving three unrelated women in Tel Aviv.

A grandly entertaining historical drama.

Fados connects today's leading interpreters with legendary fadistas of the past. And it's the last title to be released under the banner of the venerable New Yorker Films.

With a taste for dark lyricism, the director delicately emphasizes the contrast between surface innocence and subterranean danger, and between grown-up secrets and boyhood bravery.

Graeme and Clive, representatives of a nation of nonbelievers in UFOs and big dinner portions, come to the psychic capital of a country that wants to believe, and they're transformed. In Paul, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost do likewise, in celebration of what the Spielbergian cosmos is all about.

Bale is mesmerizing and Rodriguez keeps up with him as the whole unsafe contraption zooms.

The visual and verbal jokes are as bouncy and multilevel (hip height for adults, knee-slap-size for kids) as we have come, no doubt selfishly, to expect from DreamWorks.

Safe gets messy, but you won’t be able to wash it out of your system anytime soon.

Clever, laid-back.

So jaunty, so limber, and so visually self-assured that art peeks through where crap has traditionally made its home.

Slow -- sometimes maddeningly, soporifically so.

This gripping if tamped-down drama is steeped in ancient Albanian culture, where the real, tragic consequences of blood feuds can keep families trapped in their homes for generations.

This charming, if unnecessarily coronation-length production gets the duckling-to-swan ambivalence just right.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Lynn Collins are so interesting that it's easy to put up with the decision-making dithering that goes along with the title.

With every detail in this clever peekaboo, the sly filmmaker dangles the possibility that fiction is fact and that Yvan and Charlotte are real -- or at least as real as the movies.

The easygoing silliness with which this late-summer movie surprise scuttles from mayhem to mayhem and the verve with which the cast throws itself into the fray are so cheering and liberating.

Mesmerizing.

Charms with its amalgam of absurdity, optimism, humor, and avuncular regard for the million small daily chores, rituals, suspicions, and courtesies of dwellers on even the sparsest spots on earth.

The whole film is cracked, but in a stylish, downtown way.

This is a sensual, psychologically modern costume drama influenced by both "The Godfather" and gals' guides to empowerment.

Every signifier in this quintessentially American domestic thriller is in satisfying running order.

These guys are not charming; they're horrifying in their ignorance, and they cause real damage. But there's a weird relief to be found in the opportunity to laugh ourselves sick at their expense, if only for an instant.

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

Like a dowser who can divine hidden sources of water, Atom Egoyan has a talent for locating the dream-state perversity that runs just under the surface of everyday life;

Oscillates between streaky black comedy and sanitary instruction.

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.

A spare, controlled study in communication gaps and a piercing sketch of suburban American loneliness.

Kicky, elaborately constructed fantasy.

The story and setting may be ancient, but under the direction of Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland), and with a nicely textured screenplay by Macdonald's Scotland coscreenwriter Jeremy Brock, the vigor is fully modern.

The hilarious Malkovich, coiffed in an artful pageboy and savoring a fruity French accent, would overpower the competition on sheer thespian madness.

More naturalistic -- and as a result, more believable.

The newcomer kids are delightfully...kidlike. Cosmic bonus: "The Office's" Rainn Wilson plays a New Agey science teacher.

The movie's most artful feature is the fluidity with which the past slides into the present, echoing Murdoch's own unmoored sentience, so that the younger self, played with dash and vigor by Kate Winslet, turns into the old woman lost in her own home.

The mechanics of the actual plot are pretty amazing. Singer has assembled a top-notch international cast.

A serving of "True Blood's" Ryan Kwanten in his native accent is the chief selling point of this picturesque, contentedly imitative Australian Western/thriller/Coen-brothers homage, the feature debut of writer-director Patrick Hughes.

The comic moments in this ingratiating bit of malarkey from director Peter Cattaneo and screenwriter Simon Beaufoy (both TV trained, both making their feature debuts) are winning.

Miracle -- the title taken from TV announcer Al Michaels' famous game-clinching cheer, ''Do you believe in miracles? Yes!'' -- wins not when it exhorts by word but when it shows by action.

Veteran French farceur Francis Veber proves that feature-length idiot humor is not limited to the Farrelly brothers.

Against all odds in heaven and hell, it creeped me out just fine.

The movie is a guzzle of yahoo-Mountain Dew empty-calorie satisfaction: A quick blood-sugar high, an eyeful of bikes and bosoms, and you're out of the theater in 80 minutes. And on a bleak winter's day, that can be meal enough.

God forgive me, but I enjoyed the nerve-racking silliness of this newest, loudest exercise in destruction.

To contextualize the story's lack of subtlety, it helps to see these casting choices as ongoing penance for the time when, as a boy, Chen denounced his own father to the Red Guard.

Driven by Bogosian's finger-snapping dialogue and theatrical structure, subUrbia doesn't allow for much pleasurably Linklaterish lounging; each character has got some serious orating to do before the night is over.

Inside the Norwegian director's glove of empathy is a fist of unappeasable anger.