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.

High school reunions should only be this satisfying.

It's a stylish scramble of evocative footage, groovy music, and crazy-candid reminiscences from key players still proud to score.

Kinsey is patient and educational and never (darn it) rude or shocking.

Gorgeously shot tableaux of random adolescent brutality are interrupted by flashes of computer garble and chat-room talk, backed by ''Lily's'' music, with its blend of Debussy-like arpeggios and Enya-like sighing.

There's a kind of tough beauty to this deft, satisfying thriller.

This patient, perceptive, nonjudgmental love story about age difference is the first to convincingly explain the temporal physics of May-December romances.

Writer-director Gérald Hustache-Mathieu sustains a fresh voice influenced by the Coen brothers and the infernal snow of "Fargo."

Haunting and hopeful.

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.

Nerve-rattling in the best way, the sharp, visceral urban police procedural End of Watch is one of the best American cop movies I've seen in a long time.

A blithe charmer balanced somewhere between a life-should-be-so-neat fairy tale and a life's-a-real-bitch tragicomedy, leaves political debate at the ticket counter and focuses solely on what it's like for Juno MacGuff to be Juno MacGuff.

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

Jafar Panahi's wonderfully funny, outspoken shaggy-dog story, a light counterweight to his sadder 2000 feminist drama "The Circle."

Ricardo Darín, wearing a mild-mannered expression of emotional remove, plays the unnamed antihero, obsessed with imagining the perfect robbery. The ''aura'' is the clarity with which he sees -- or imagines he sees -- the world in moments preceding an epileptic attack.

They also make joyful music, communicated, both by the singers and their playful, sensitive documentarian, with an authority that quite knocks off socks.

Breillat, the flamethrower who made "Romance" and "Fat Girl," artfully twists period-piece drama to suit her provocative modern notions about sex, gender roles, and power.

Powerful, passionate, and potentially revolution-inducing documentary.

Where "No End" is cool and measured, Taxi is hot, anguished, and sometimes as difficult to watch as pictures of torture ought to be.

A fast, loose, and very funny parody that pulls off the not-so-simple feat of tweaking Trekkies and honoring them.

Ah, monsieur, you can lead a Frenchman to the Big Apple, but you can't make him a New Yorker -- and that's exactly what makes The Professional so fascinating.

Emotional presence and a sophisticated understanding of commitment-phobia (as something other than a comedic punchline or an excuse for sex scenes) distinguishes this intense, contained drama, as does the unforced, sensual, and sensitive cinematography of Uta Briesewitz.

Underneath, 21 Jump Street is a riot of risks that pay off, the biggest of which might be handing Tatum funny business.

A suspenseful and delightfully creepy French drama.

Del Toro builds excitement, dread, and melodrama in equal layers.

It's ''Moskowitz's March,'' really -- and it ends in stirring victory

The pace is quick, the violence is rough, and the visual style is documentary as Padilha hammers home his point: Someone is forever in the pocket of someone else as The System constantly adapts to protect itself.

Juliette Binoche is outstanding as a wildly untogether single mother who parks her son with a French-speaking Chinese nanny while she whirls and worries.

The movie darts, dreams, and sometimes seems to dance. The great Plummer, meanwhile, creates an inspiring, fully rounded man in late bloom, and McGregor responds with a performance to match.

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 many fans of the uniquely droll 2003 animation Oscar nominee "The Triplets of Belleville" will recognize the inventive hand-drawn sensibilities of French filmmaker Sylvain Chomet in his loving and lovely new feature The Illusionist.

Out of a harrowing story set in a foreign thicket, Herzog has found American beauty.

Each episode (originally made for British TV) works by itself, but there's a real payoff in following all three. (Nothing matches The "Wire," but this holds its own.)

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.

A film of uncommon originality.

Resonant examination of friendship, fame, cultural trends, and the creative process.

Xavier Dolan is back with another madly stylish Montreal-made delight.

A curious case indeed: an extravagantly ambitious movie that's easy to admire but a challenge to love.

Bean's commitment to serious theological examination is exciting, Gosling's performance is riveting, and this fiery and imperfect feature shines as a demonstration of independent filmmaking at its most uncompromising.

The vivid fictional specifics, and the simple loveliness of the artless performances by nonactor Mongolian nomads, attest to the filmmakers' abundant artistry.

This is a beautifully built, classically framed movie, shot with the unshowy natural expressiveness of a John Ford Western by Spielberg's great cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski.

Reprise is kissed with the breath of French New Wave sensibility, sweet with verve and a love of forward movement. The mood of joy in the midst of youthful pain is enhanced by the freshness of the first-time lead actors.

Writer-director Jeff Nichols builds his elegantly shot, weather-sensitive horror story in waves of tension that crest as if pulled by tempests.

There are no zombies out of ''28 Days Later'' to alleviate the slow creep of realistic doom in this chilly, tense corker.

The amazingly natural first-timer was discovered, in a gift of publicity-ready truth, while having an argument with her boyfriend at a train station.

Minghella makes an enticing, intelligent, well-shaped picture about the extreme perils of class envy and sexual panic.

The whole cast is museum quality, and the ''music'' performances are pitch-perfect in their dissonance.

Each an actor of distinctive delicacy, Duplass, DeWitt, and Blunt do some of their subtlest, most sweetly calibrated work ever, playing off one another with the kind of ease and trust that is, in itself, a demonstration of love.

André Téchiné's beautifully ambiguous, exquisitely underplayed drama Strayed has less to do with the events and moral choices of the era that continue to shape French identity than with the timeless psychological effects of finding oneself unmoored from the familiar.

As she did in her striking 2005 debut, "Me and You and Everyone We Know," July creates a fluid cinematic universe.

Using the droll, wise stories of Etgar Keret as her guide, Israeli filmmaker Tatia Rosenthal concocts an artful film that expresses deep thoughts, lightly.

Acompelling, cant free drama about clashing class systems and challenged family relationships that's all the more engrossing for its organic, near documentary style.

While the young people chatter about life and literature with sometimes overbearing self-satisfaction, the astute filmmaker observes their pretentious gum-flapping with a mixture of amusement, compassion, and wised-up rue.

Grant is the rare actor who can mix the characteristics of sex appeal and ambivalence in believable, rather than irritating, proportions.

Realer and more consequential than much being packaged for TV and movies these days as ''reality,'' the fictional In This World unfolds with the deceptive dispassion of a documentary, but builds with a sure sense of dramatic epic.

Completing his wonderful French cultural trilogy that also includes portraits of the Comédie-Fran¸aise and the Paris Opera Ballet, indefatigable documentarian Frederick Wiseman freely, unobtrusively prowls the joint to create a movie that respects the serious work involved in simulating the sensations of pleasure.

Intelligent conversation about the interplay of erotic and destructive urges takes place over cups of tea in fine bone china. Yet the movie is a radically modern story about sex.

Funny, ungirdled romp - a buddy picture about buddies who actually know what women want.

There aren't many at all like Spielberg and Kubrick, directors willing to lasso dreams (that's Steven) and nightmares (that's Stanley) or die trying. A.I. is a clash of the titans, a jumble, an oedipal drama, a carny act. I want to see it again.

Hard to say who's luckier -- those who have seen the work of Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin before and know what to expect, or those who haven't and for whom The Saddest Music in the World serves as an eye-popping introduction.

A story in full billow; it sails through stretches of bloody battle, anxious waiting, wine-soaked relaxation, and marvelous scientific discoveries by the remarkable Maturin (Paul Bettany, well matched again with his ''A Beautiful Mind'' costar).

Mitchell directs and stars in the riotous, loving, and only occasionally pathos-milking film adaptation of his own acclaimed Off Broadway play, with great up-your-ante music and lyrics by Stephen Trask.

It exchanges the narrative fluidity of the page for visual composition of such strong beauty that the slowness of the storytelling becomes its own eccentric strength.

A muscular, honorable, unflinching translation of Collins' vision. It's brutal where it needs to be, particularly when children fight and bleed.

Consider Primer a successful lab experiment with, as they might say in techie chat rooms, significant indie-cred applications, IMHO. Oh, and :-).

The charming movie, already an international success, seduces.

Serendipity has no business working, but it does. And by the way, Eugene Levy has no business almost stealing the show, but he does, too.

The power comes from Winterbottom's rigorous sense of storytelling, which manages to show and tell terrible tales without telegraphing emotionalism

One of the great virtues of Disney's most elegant animated ''classic'' in years is how blessedly sermon-free this zippy, dignified retelling of Edgar Rice Burroughs' ripping 1914 yarn is.

This dazzling reverie of a kids-and-adults movie, an unusual collaboration between lord-of-the-cult multimedia artist Dave McKean and king-of-the-comics Neil Gaiman (The Sandman), has something to astonish everyone.

Cagey, high gloss comedy.

There are many places a visitor may go astray in 2046 -- places where the filmmaker appears to be a bit at loose ends too. Still, Wong's invitation -- ''Let's get lost'' -- is irresistible.

A surreal, elegantly melancholy, and yet witty ensemble story.

There are no zombies to distract from the plausibility of Right at Your Door. And that's what makes this smart, coolly horrifying American indie thriller one of the scariest movies you're likely to see all year — a post-9/11 nightmare about terrorism, panic, and paranoia with real, waking-life implications.

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.

The chattering smarty-pants who ran the U.S. government on "The West Wing" are slow talkers compared with the motormouthed and hilariously imperfect power elite in the brainy British comedy In the Loop.

A work of American art as classic as it is modern. Note to tourists: Leave before the very end of the credits and you'll miss some of the best and funniest roadside sights.

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.

This is a dark story as well as a frothy one. But the bubble of absurdist self-absorption in which Menzel places this specimen of man-child is exquisite.

Under the direction of "Bend It Like Beckham's" Gurinder Chadha, this festively busy and exuberantly multicultural charmer is its own intriguingly postmodern creation.

Anna's thoughts matter because, as played by the wonderfully nuanced newcomer Alycia Delmore, the no-bull responses of this perceptive woman are a key to Humpday's sly, wised-up feminist outlook.

As a sharky, gay TV journalist investigating the story, Tom Selleck charms by playing in contrast to his own determinedly hetero persona.

Kenan directs with a zingy sense of kids, comedy, fright, and visual perspective. But the movie also shimmers and shakes in all its motion-capture animated beauty with the slyly deep sensibilities of executive producer Robert Zemeckis.

In a season of bulging Movies Earmarked for Importance, it is almost startling to come across something as unhyped - and perfectly swell - as The Ice Harvest.

Bolt breaks no great new stylistic ground -- and yet it's a sturdy beaut.

A gaily busy kid flick.

Not coincidentally, African Cats opens on Earth Day. Meeting these magnificent fellow creatures might be a fine way to celebrate.

How exceptional a film actor is Russell Crowe? So exceptional that in Cinderella Man, he makes a good boxing movie feel at times like a great, big picture.

Rodrigo Santoro (Paulo on Lost, Xerxes in 300, and even better, Raúl Castro in Che) is mighty matinee-idol charismatic himself in the title role, alternating between swaggering lady-killer and ravaged victim of self-destruction.

In the very funny cop comedy Hot Fuzz, overachieving London police officer Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg) commits a very British sin: He's too good.

It's agony, in a rewarding way, to squirm and cringe and groan through an ordeal so realistically re-created.

Crowe sometimes summons up one of the most powerful depictions of mental illness I have ever seen with barely an eyelid flicker separating manifestations of sickness from utterly sane displays of creative concentration.

A smart, playful, informative pleasure.

Among Gosling's many star-making qualities is his nuanced mastery, since "The Believer," of a facial expression of infinitely adaptable, imperturbable, sustained calm that can read as chilling or ardent, hard or soft, as the role demands.

It isn't easy to get close to these two women. But the effort yields a rewarding take on the resiliency and therapeutic importance of friendship.

The disarming comedic tone -- silly and novel in its lack of cynicism -- is driven by the fearless, cheerful unself-consciousness of Will Ferrell, a big man last seen streaking (all too unself-consciously) through ''Old School.''

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.

For kids, blessedly unironic by nature until wised up by nurture, the movie is just shiny, funny, and filled with songs.

Cloverfield, a surreptitiously subversive, stylistically clever little gem of an entertainment disguised, under its deadpan-neutral title, as a dumb Gen-YouTube monster movie, makes the convincingly chilling argument that the world will end -- or, at least, Manhattan will crumble -- with a bang and a whimper.

Among all the chess-piece players on the board, the star is the only one who really builds a solid emotional foundation for his character.

Eight months of interrogation and torture in fetid Abu Ghraib followed before he was released, innocent. None of The Prisoner's showy flourishes -- animation, sound effects, fancy editing -- can match the power of Abbas' stillness as he describes one man's agony in one huge hell.

A delightfully weird, if occasionally too arty, documentary as darting in its structure as a dragonfly's flight.

Ong-Bak (taken from the name of the sacred statue) is delivered raw, with an on-the-fly compositional approach from director Prachya Pinkaew that includes dim lighting and jumbled editing.

There's wit but never a wink in this smartly shot production, which pays homage to the 1980s without fetishizing the era.

A peculiar combination of willful meandering and matter of fact violence, and it occasionally confounds in its attempts to exalt.

Excels at creating a keen, creepy sense of a civilization stopped dead in its tracks -- vaporized, almost, except for those disemboweled bodies left still undisposed.

The son is obsessive and petulant, punishing and self-pitying, and by the time he gets to a talk with his hurt old mother, we understand why.

A fine example of Danish filmmaker Susanne Bier's (Brothers) talent for weaving together accessible domestic melodrama and issues of ethical awareness of the world beyond our doorstep.

There are no big thrills, only gentle laughs in this light story by Hugh Wilson and Peter Torokvei (Wilson also directed).

It's a merciless and mirthlessly funny antiwar weapon from a filmmaker who has seen battle firsthand and has lived to make art from memories of hell.

At a little over two hours, this is a pared-down but no less essential Dickensian feast.

Anderson's big, showy flower of a movie unfurls brilliantly, each plot petal a thing of exquisite design. Then it ripens. Then it disintegrates, leaving a mess of color and a faint whiff of rot.

I'm as touched and charmed by its failures as I am transfixed, at times, by its successful inventiveness and audacity.

This is an origami story, really, about what a construction of chance the big world is.

This is a gentle, engaging narrative of constancy and devotion against all odds, both natural and bureaucratic, in which the past represents enduring family values and customs.

Very ''Waking Ned Devine.'' There's shrewd wit to Pouliot's gentle, no-bull farce.

An irresistibly vibrant concert-tour documentary.

The title Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence is a brain banger. But as sci-fi nomenclature goes, it's easy to read--no twistier, certainly, than "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow."

Jacquot economically conveys the small, painful sacrifices both lovers -- but particularly the woman -- must make, and the constant, ongoing negotiations of power required to maintain no-strings freedom.

Clooney proves himself to be a true movie star and romantic leading man. His charm, his energy, even his ease with children (one of any adult actor’s most terrifying challenges) carry One Fine Day into irresistibility.

Here's a scare-the-crap-out-of-you medical thriller about a viral pandemic that will have the immediate post-screening effect of causing a handwashing stampede.

The soft-spoken, impressionistic documentary (with a hypnotic score built from the sounds of construction) climaxes with a six-minute helicopter-cam view of the colossal structure to which these somebodies have been dedicating their sweat, and sometimes their very lives.

It's a psychological thriller that actually thrills.

Writer-director Jim Sheridan, co-screenwriter Terry George, and Sheridan's favorite actor (and Oscar winner for My Left Foot) Daniel Day-Lewis reunite in The Boxer with a mellower political message that translates, roughly, into ''Can't we all just get along?''

Yet precisely because this is by Roman Polanski, it's irresistible to read his sorrowful and seemingly classical take, from a filmmaker known as much for the schisms in his personal history as for the lurches in his work, as something much more personal and poignant.

There's nothing nice about 30 Minutes or Less. It's got no redeeming social value. It just ticks away, exploding all notions of where you think it's going to go. It blew me sideways.

The true pleasures of Bound lie in the Wachowskis' inventive updated take on film noir traditions, sensuously realized by cinematographer Bill Pope ("Clueless").

The grand old filmmaker frames each scene like a fine painting. And fake snow falls with happy artificiality between rueful vignettes.

The enjoyably icky heart of Bug is still contained within the airless, increasingly ''bug-proofed'' room that becomes Agnes and Peter's whole world.

It's as if the star (Douglas) finally gets to integrate all his onscreen personas, all at once.

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

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

Malick clings to the promise of grace: His vision of the afterlife is a dreamy beach, enhanced by an excellent playlist of fine classical music, and promising the peace that surpasses all understanding. Plus a beautiful sky.

I do wish the movie's ending weren't so squishy. It's been changed from the finale that Sundance audiences saw earlier this year and now reeks of focus-group testing.

Ineffably Australian and intriguingly (rather than annoyingly) artsy, Look Both Ways introduces a handful of people gobsmacked by life-changing crises, all of them trying to make sense of responsibility, mortality, and connection.

A helluva lot happens in 16 Blocks - an outrageous amount, really, along with a coda that deposits the audience squarely at a movieland finale. Who knew that looking both ways before crossing is where the real action is?

Zigzags across the conventions of genre, occasionally driving on the shoulders of black humor -- it's a road movie for the way we process suspense today.

The words belong to Mr. Shakespeare. All else in this Macbeth is the pleasurably fevered invention of brash Australian director Geoffrey Wright.

Coppola's stranded royal suggests that at heart, Marie Antoinette was just a simple girl who wanted to have fun, and got her head handed to her.

A good measure of the movie's white-knuckle fun comes from Craven's old-hand familiarity with the way thrillers tick.

The flourishes don't answer the question most on Potterites' minds -- who lives, who dies? -- but they briefly stupefy.

The title Terror's Advocate is both a statement of fact and a worrisome understatement in a documentary as slippery as its subject.

Did granny intend this stuff for strangers? We'll never know. File this ''therapeutic'' movie, well made and creepy, on the dysfunction-as-art shelf next to "Capturing the Friedmans."

Bright dialogue and finely embroidered performances adorn The Guru like festive beading on a pair of made-in-India bedroom slippers.

Argues on behalf of the Darwinian theory that all of life imitates high school...But the argument is only halfhearted. Just Friends is much more interested in - and hilarious about - the small nostalgias of suburbia.

The always surprising Watts creates a woman at once contemporary and retro. And Norton, as a producer as well as star, concedes enough space for Schreiber and the effortlessly fascinating Jones to earn their own spotlights.

It offers an attractive getaway route from self-importance, snark, and chatty comedies about male bonding. Here, stick shifts do the talking.

Gravity-defying kung fu choreography.

This audaciously issues-loaded indie drama works, improbably and entirely, on account of the marvelous, often familiar-looking, rarely starring character actor Richard Jenkins and his perfect performance as a stodgy, widowed economics professor.

Ewan McGregor and Eva Green are easy on the eyes as lovers in Perfect Sense, an intriguing apocalyptic romance with a multi-purpose title.

Another thinking-person's thriller from director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland, also co-pilots on "28 Days Later."

Adapting Satrapi's graphic novel about a violinist (Mathieu Amalric) in late-1950s Tehran who's got a broken fiddle and a broken heart and takes to his bed, willing himself to die, the filmmakers rely on expressive eyes to carry a narrative style suitable for a silent movie.

Casé, with her sturdy, elemental body and shining eyes, is the reason phrases like ''inner beauty'' were invented, and she's also the reason this idealistic, naturalistic film by Rio de Janeiro born Andrucha Waddington has been such a success at festivals around the world.

This is a tough-minded story of change that happens in almost imperceptibly tiny increments - as true growth so often does in reality.

In watching the birds and the man with an affectionate, curious eye, the filmmaker builds a story of surprising emotional resonance.

When it comes to crazy, violent, semidelirious, testosterone-laden, proto-Viking tales about a mute visionary one-eyed warrior who breaks skulls, Valhalla Rising is pretty great.

The mad genius of this cheerily bonkers feature is the integration of a documentary-style safari into an outlandish fiction involving a fancy-pants CIA pursuit of a downed spy satellite, and a shotgun-wielding outback widow.

This strong, assured Band of Brothers-style drama from director Jang Hun makes universal points about bonding, misery, loyalty, and the senselessness of war through a portfolio of soldiers.

The lyrical animation, with its meditative attention to nature, bears the unique stamp of Japan's Studio Ghibli, cofounded by the great ­"Spirited Away" animator Hayao Miyazaki.

A nifty horror movie that doesn't claim to be anything other than a zippy exercise in creature-feature entertainment.

If you sign on, disarmed of irony, for her trip -- I did -- you'll be rewarded with a rare thing that may in itself prove the existence of a Higher Power: a Hollywood entertainment that makes you consider deep thoughts.

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.

Asif Kapadia's blazing feature debut, a gorgeously photographed saga with a fine sense of the way place shapes personality, has won numerous awards in the filmmaker's native Britain.

Naturally, a subject this right-on draws a right-on cast. Kris Kristofferson, Avril Lavigne, and Ethan Hawke pitch in.

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

The Illusionist looks rigorously styled and measured, and every one of Norton's postures feels chosen. Yet the interesting actor has chosen so thoughtfully that we're riveted.

For those who wish to decode The Names of Love, there's a sharp commentary on French prejudices, character types, history, and culture embedded in Michel Leclerc's droll autobiographical French comedy.

The unusual intimacy and authenticity can't be faked: The cast is peppered with nonprofessionals, most notably Michal Bat Sheva Rand.