Lisa Schwarzbaum

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.