Lisa Schwarzbaum

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

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.

High school reunions should only be this satisfying.

The movie wants so badly to be mentioned in the same breath as "Heathers" or "Election" that it's not even funny. Really, I mean it, this charred-black comedy is not even funny.

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.

When not unnecessarily bland, synthetic, and indistinguishable from undistinguished teen TV, A Cinderella Story is unnecessarily coarse and dumbed down, with every character except Sam and Austin subject to perfunctory ridicule.

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 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.

Indeed, the point of Syriana appears to be that the whole lousy, corrupt, oil-producing and -consuming world is a ball of wax, ready to melt.

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.

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

In their stark, black-and-white visual style, they are redolent of Italian neorealist cinema or fine muckraking WPA photojournalism.

A memory of the automobile in which a father drove away from his family provides the title for Blue Car but no hint of the power of writer-director Karen Moncrieff's superb feature debut.

Almereyda's fascination with creative creatures and their mysterious ways is abundantly clear. And distracting.

This is a movie that considers graphic violence with a refined taste for the sensuous: Guts spill, blood spurts, corpses stink, but there is a handsome, absurdist humanity to the way Jeunet (who wrote the script with Guillaume Laurant) maps out the crossroads of human carnage and human caring.

Nightwatch is a horror for reasons that have nothing to do with suspenseful moviemaking.

Add The Unforeseen to the catalog of artfully produced nonfiction films that show how humans are screwing up the planet.

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

A grandly entertaining historical drama.

Definition eludes the delicate pleasures of this marvelous, idiosyncratic movie collage.

Don't let unpleasant personal dental associations stand in the way of seeing a luminous specimen of independent filmmaking.

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

The film excels in small scenes of cannily chosen Indian everydayness.

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.

Director Roger Michell (''Notting Hill'') conveys some of the sharpest insights into the woman buried beneath the wife and mother in those early scenes, using ragged, vérité-style camera work that takes merciless inventory of a certain stripe of posh, hard-edged modern family life in which dowdy grannies are invisible.

One of the year's most original and emotionally profound movies masquerades as the tiny story of a young couple who take a backpacking trip in the Caucasus Mountains the summer before their wedding.

Nanking, a carefully nonpunitive documentary of remembrance, is emotionally draining, as it should be, but it's also overstructured, as it needn't be; the actors are intrusive in a story that isn't theirs.

Dense with plot intricacies, thick with atmosphere, and packed with showy roles for a hip ensemble.