Lisa Schwarzbaum

Masterpiece of voyeurism.

A film noir great... Just to see and hear the extraordinary 3 minute and 20 second opening sequence — a fluid tour de force tracking shot — without impediment of opening credits and street-sound-masking movie score is accomplishment enough.

The picture was made in 1969 and is only now being released in the U.S., in a beautiful restoration supervised by original cinematographer Pierre Lhomme.

Like any great myth, Pan's Labyrinth encodes its messages through displays of magic. And like any good fairy tale, it is also embroidered with threads of death and loss.

Nothing good happens in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, the riveting, horrifying chronicle of an illegal abortion performed in 1987 when Ceauescu's dictatorial hand still gripped Romania's throat. And yet no lover of greatness in filmmaking will want to look away from one of the very best movies of 2007.

The energy is sapped by clinging condescension in the guise of compassionate liberalism.

A triumph of psychological depth and artistic brilliance offered as the magical adventures of one skinny little girl.

Way ahead of its time 30 years ago, and just as stunning today, Killer of Sheep is one of those marvels of original moviemaking that keeps hope of artistic independence alive.

The result is an intense, action-driven war pic, a muscular, efficient standout that simultaneously conveys the feeling of combat from within as well as what it looks like on the ground.

Blinking his puppy-moist eyes and grappling with an English accent, Downey struggles so manfully in the role that one cuts him a lot of slack; working earnestly on her Irish brogue and mussing up her cupcake demeanor in the service of verisimilitude as a wise madwoman, Meg Ryan’s performance is, refreshingly, less precious than she’s been in a long while.

These 173 minutes don't drag, they waltz.

Soaring and romantic, wild and serene, feminist and gutsy, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is one of the best movies of the year.

It's an intoxicating feeling when a movie excites and enlivens us like this -- and there's a particular giddiness to be had in thinking about what movies can (but don't often) do for one's soul after imbibing such a fine vintage.

The conclusion of Peter Jackson's masterwork is passionate and literate, detailed and expansive, and it's conceived with a risk-taking flair for old-fashioned movie magic at its most precious.

For bleakness, the movie can't be beat -- nor for brilliance.

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

In a class by itself.

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

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.

Vibrantly, intricately alive on its own terms. This is what magic the movies can conjure with an inspired fellowship in charge, and unlimited pots of gold.

Mildly cute, mildly drooly, majorly too late spoof/homage.

The antidote to every square tough-guy caper you've ever seen, and the inspiration for many great ones. It is an existential imperative to seek out a showing and burn rubber to get there, preferably in an excellent car.

The result: This great work of art has the potential to change the world.

Stunning, fully formed masterpiece.

There’s something earthy and elemental in this tale that was missing in Blue, something quirky and (measured by Kieslowskian standards) energetic.

What's astonishing about Sofia Coppola's enthralling new movie is the precision, maturity, and originality with which the confident young writer-director communicates so clearly in a cinematic language all her own.

The simplicity and poignancy of the choices — riding a bus, swinging on a swing — and the great variety of interviewees result in a film of nonsticky freshness, as well as unforced profundity.

If ''Finding Nemo'' is an awesome Pixar superpower, The Triplets of Belleville is a charming, idiosyncratic, self-governing duchy with huge tourism potential on the other side of the animated-movie planet.

(Denis's) visual style is hypnotic, rapturous, and she makes barren landscapes look gorgeous, hard men look vulnerable.

Waltz With Bashir has transcended the definitions of ''cartoon'' or ''war documentary'' to be classified as its own brilliant invention.

The film, by seasoned cinematographer Dror Moreh, is a feat — of access and of passionate and appropriately unsettling political commentary.

A slight romantic comedy about five winsome Australian university students who fret and joke about their romantic woes when not talking about movies and cinematic theories. Each has a charming quirk — one (Frances O’Connor) is a cute lesbian, another (Alice Garner) is writing a thesis on Doris Day — but none is deeper than a bag of Reese’s Pieces.

One of the unshowiest and most true-blooded epics of Americana you're ever likely to see.

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.

American Splendor presents Pekar as drawn on the page, Pekar as brilliantly interpreted by Paul Giamatti, and the actual Pekar, in the double role of narrator and interview subject -- sometimes all at once. The magic act is thrilling, and truly surprising.

This is a great film, and a triumph of creativity and courage over repression.

You could trawl the seven seas and not net a funnier, more beautiful, and more original work of art and comedy than Finding Nemo.

Topsy-Turvy reminds us that, in any age, creative expression is at once the most personal and most communal of enterprises.

Dazzlingly beautiful, funny, and meaningful.

There's also no romanticizing on the part of the director, who proceeds with calm, unshowy attentiveness (even in the midst of scenes of violence), creating a stunning portrait of an innately smart survivor for whom prison turns out to be a twisted opportunity for self-definition.

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.

The movie sparkles with witty self-awareness.

Like a great novel from a more expansive bygone age, The Best of Youth is full of big thoughts; like a great soap opera, it's also full of sharp plot turns, vibrant characters, and great talk. It is, in short, the best of cinema.

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.

Utterly riveting fictional drama.

The gorgeous music includes Ralph Vaughan Williams' wafting tone poem ''The Lark Ascending'' -- apt in describing an artist who might well be part bird.

Enough to anesthetize the living.

Sad, funny, sexy, and altogether marvelous.

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.

Pay attention to the enhanced detail audible in a new six-track sound mix, which may be the most important cleaning job of all; silence and Jerry Goldsmith's score have never twined so hauntingly.

Bale exists all too large under the circumstances, a well-fed actor playing at emaciation for the sake of a fiction about a character whose torment is as unreadable as his vertebrae are countable.

Clint Eastwood's profound, magisterial, and gripping companion piece to his ambitious meditation on wartime image and reality, "Flags of Our Fathers."

Diva is based on one novel in a series about Gorodish and Alba by the pseudonymous ”Delacorta,” but the movie’s mad excitement hinges entirely on the pleasure to be had in moving our eye from one gorgeously composed stage set of artifice to another.

If you see only one comic love story from Kazakhstan this year, choose this prize-winning honey.

Hersonski quietly and insistently unravels reality from "reality"; her commitment to archival authenticity is its own tribute to those no longer able to testify.

There's piercing sadness, and fury, too, in this Everyman's isolation, and Cantet is singularly skilled at evoking the universal condition of such tragic ordinariness.

Munro's stark lily needed none of this gilding.

For all its wispy fun, Small Time Crooks still tilts, with little-guy stubbornness, at windmills in Allen's mind.

A delightful, perceptive, funny, detail-perfect fable.

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.

Dizzily rich, witty, and satisfying.

A lovely, thoughtful, and yes, uplifting adventure.

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.

It's a great, IQ-flattering entertainment both wonderful and wise.

Yagira's performance is so extraordinary, it won him the best actor prize at the 2004 Cannes film festival.

Facing a diagnosis of Alzheimer's, the older woman enrolls in a poetry class, desperate to find the words to describe beauty before language fails her. She does even better: She herself becomes a kind of poem about what it means to really see the world.

A graceful, unsentimental, well-made movie.

Shine beams with warmth, sensitivity, and fine taste.

Naples-born Servillo is a national star, famed as a theater, opera, and film director as well as an actor. And he's got the face of a mensch (or a Madoff) -- which makes his embodiment of criminal banality all the more identifiable, as well as horrifying.

So superb, so graceful, so strong -- another beauty in this year of good documentaries -- that I do believe it will influence career choices, sending inspired viewers to study pedagogy, or cinematography.

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

A mesmerizing work of disturbing power and unease.

Bestows generous blessings on all that's good in Englishness, in moviedom, and, of course, in cheese.

Mr. Lazarescu is that rich and riveting a film of universal small human moments and big-system failure.

Unfolds with a simplicity that's as breathtaking as its inevitability is harrowing.

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.

Errol Morris may have been put on earth to make The Fog of War, a stunning portrait of Robert S. McNamara that closes a year of outstanding nonfiction movies on a high note.

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

No one charts the wilds of childhood more precisely than the Dardennes.

The filmmaking is as strong as the subject matter, with an elegant structure.

The picture moves with stealth, enjoying its own thriller-ness as hints are laid and mislaid. There's a sense that Hitchcock is hovering in the background and cheering for Auteuil, who musters all his French superstardom to play a man having his mask of blandness torn off.

Almodóvar's masterwork, is a spectacular synthesis of everything that has always interested him -- proud women, lovely boys, beautiful drag queens, grand movie stars, gorgeous frocks, wild wallpaper .

Murray, meanwhile, turns in a thrillingly knowing, unforced performance--an award-worthy high point in a career that continues, Max Fischer style, to defy the obvious at every turn.

This movie is as packed with flashy bogusness as a lead singer's tight leather trousers. On the other hand, there's nothing bogus about the charisma and tough sweetness of Wahlberg.

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

This warm, funny, sexy, smart movie erases the boundaries between specialized ''gay content'' and universal ''family content'' with such sneaky authority.

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

The uncoagulated anguish of parents mourning the death of a child has rarely been more powerfully depicted than in the collected vignettes of grief, rage, and retribution that make up the riveting domestic drama In the Bedroom.

Unusual, unhurried tour de force--a seamless match of strong artistic vision and physical performance. [19 Dec 1997, p. 52]

It is their shared strength as a band of brothers humble before their Christian God - and indeed before the God of Islam - that may stir viewers to an awe that transcends skeptical opinions about religion or politics.

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

Brims with life and loveliness even as it meditates on the loss of childhood.

Like everything else in this superb work of art, ''Shrinking Lover'' is exquisitely Almodóvarian. It's funny, tender, a little shocking, and it pays homage to what we know about movies: that they can move us beyond words.

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.

It's also one of the great movies of the year - an ambitious, challenging, and creatively hot-blooded but cool toned project that picks seriously at knotty ideas about American personality, success, rootlessness, master-disciple dynamics, and father-son mutually assured destruction.

Sad, menacing, empathetic story.

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.

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.