Lisa Schwarzbaum

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.

It’s only when you’re in the grip of the climax that you realize how richly the filmmaker has painted a landscape that to other eyes might appear so parched.

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.

Hanks towers as a near naked, near biblical man. Zemeckis tells his story -- the screenplay is by William Broyles -- with a control magnificent in what isn't shown as much as in what is.

Shine beams with warmth, sensitivity, and fine taste.

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.

You're either in the mood to go along with the puzzle pieces or you're not. I'm not usually a puzzle-piece fan myself, not when it's clear that the filmmaker rigs the moves. But I couldn't help but fall for the repurposed real estate, and cheer for the lady strong enough to break through walls when she senses a child is waiting.

Although the talent of a kid with the last name of Culkin may not, at this point, register as such a novelty -- Rory follows brothers Macaulay and Kieran -- there is something precociously mature but natural about the work of this youngest Culkin sibling that stands apart.

Quite grand, quite exotic, David Lean-style epic.

This sincere, delicate, and intrinsically religious comedy may also become that most unexpected of blessings - Danny Boyle's first family classic.

Haunting and hopeful.

May be the most kick ass demonstration yet, for the majority of American moviegoers, of what the fuss is all about.

The production feels self-congratulatory and illuminated only dimly.

Achieves its exquisite tension--deepening beautifully from a "Death in Venice" setup to an imaginative meditation, on art and life, of uncommon sensitivity.

Deserves sympathetic attention, if only for the family-values specifics loaded into the story, and the way mildmannered stars Ben Shenkman (Angels in America) and Tom Cavanagh (Ed) embrace their instructional roles.

The fine Polish director Agnieszka Holland (Europa Europa) pays her respects with a daringly murky-looking movie that demands viewers enter the void too and meet Socha and his Jews as real, flawed men and women behaving in flawed ways under suffocating conditions.

It's a lovely, original, Australian take on a climactic moment usually thought of as all American.

It's okay for a grown movie critic to admit she cried freely and with great feeling for more than half the movie, and grinned like a dork through the remainder.

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.

A desert of shrill juvenile jokes and clanging chase sequences.

The History Boys is as much about the meaning and value of reading and learning as it is about the ho-humness of genital fondling by sir with love.

Despite the best of intentions, an actress who makes her own headlines gets in the way of the big picture.

Breakdown feels at first so casual, so comfortable with its own small expectations (a good but unglamorous cast, a sturdy but unspectacular plot), that the authentic feelings of suspense are a surprise.

The result is a picture half sweet, half bitter. Charles Dickens would approve.

If only Roberts' warmth, coupled with Javier Bardem's scruffy sexiness as Felipe, were enough to compensate for the folded-map flatness of this production.

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.

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.

Glued tightly from page to screen, Sin City is so seduced by the visual possibilities of sin that style becomes its own vice.