Lisa Schwarzbaum

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

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

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

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

Stunning, fully formed masterpiece.

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

These 173 minutes don't drag, they waltz.

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

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

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.

The setting is somewhere between a post-WWII Brigadoon and the environs of Marcel Carn classic "Children of Paradise," but the story is as timely as this morning's news from Europe.

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.

Jennifer Baichwal's gorgeous documentary Manufactured Landscapes amplifies the powerful work of Edward Burtynsky, a Canadian artist who specializes in large-scale photographs of terrain transformed by civilization into rivers and tides of industrial ugliness.

Trier's compassion for what it takes to survive, mixed with the love he bestows on Oslo, is rewardingly profound.

It's a work of art that deserves a space cleared for its angry, nervous beauty.

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

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.

A confidently original, engrossing interpretation.

Can be interpreted politically or even biblically or not at all, as the elemental struggles between dominance and submission, impulse and action, man and nature, father and son, play out to their stunning conclusion.

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

Fierce, loving, and electric, this movie's got bite as well as bark.

The lightness with which Buñuel was able to insert the little jokes and knife stabs of surrealism he loved so much is, in fact, divine.

The title embraces the richness of Kechiche's beautiful film, which captures the rhythms of displacement and hardship, the bond of family meals, and even the daily routines of the magnificent women who are part of Slimane's life.

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.

A film of wonderful looseness and innovation. Set free to film fakes, the director is the real thing.

The movie — the third in a trilogy of powerful political dramas from Larraín, including "Tony Manero" and "Post Mortem" — uses period detail, archival footage, and '80s-era technology to create an excellently authentic, bleached, crummy-looking document of a great democratic accomplishment.

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.

With the pitiless, devastating Fat Girl, Catherine Breillat puts men and women, boys and girls on notice: When fantasy, hypocrisy, and manipulation mix in a wet, sandy place, you dive into sex at your own risk.