Lisa Schwarzbaum

I wish 'Hero's emotional heat rose more intensely -- more recklessly. There's something grand but distant and almost fetishistic about the operatic solemnity with which Zhang approaches the Rashomonic story of assassins attempting to kill a king.

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.

An exhilarating puzzle, one of the grand cinematic eruptions of the year.

Jack Nicholson's dyspeptic retiree in "About Schmidt" would no doubt identify with O'Horten's entertaining pain.

In the end -- an ending of such power and narrative originality (in both book and movie) that those who know it ought never breathe a word to those who don't.

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.

Bong Joon-ho's wildly entertaining saga should become the hip, thinking-person's monster movie of choice.

An only-in-the-movies mother hustles pool to raise the money to abduct the son she's been forbidden to see since her divorce.

Temperamentally in sync with her "Wendy and Lucy" director, Michelle Williams plays one of the toiling wives. And the actress, with her calm center, compresses the entire history of frontier wifeliness into the concentration with which she gathers firewood and loads a musket.

Circles the heart of noisy, modern Tehran with an informal, documentary-like freedom that is thrilling in its naturalism.

Superb family drama.

The movie is enchanting.

A doozy of a French gangster pic that, in its beautifully refurbished and pithily resubtitled re-release, turns out to be one of the highlights of the 2005 movie year.

In Get on the Bus, director and material come together with perfect ease — one of those occasional confluences of subject and strengths that make a moviegoer go, ”Of course!” Of course Spike Lee throws all of his bravado, all his storytelling talents, and all his artistic chutzpah into a movie about last year’s Million Man March.

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

The message, if there must be one, of this marvelous, stubbornly personal movie is that there is a spark in every soul.

A tacit auteur-to-auteur endorsement of the inalienable right to make movies--regardless of talent or sobriety or adult responsibilities--is what gives American Movie its uneasy kick.

For some viewers, Moonrise Kingdom may be movie heaven, another bric-a-brac-jammed bauble to place alongside "The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou" and "The Darjeeling Limited." Personally, though, I wish that Anderson would come out from under the glass, or at least change what he's doing under there.

Filmmaker Yung Chang finds a sad and beautiful way to glimpse the big picture of dislocation through an exquisitely poised small study.

49 Up is a precious document, and must viewing.

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.

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.

Both the definition of ''my'' and the definition of ''Winnipeg'' become profoundly fluid in this exquisite ''docu-fantasia'' (Maddin's term), an entrancing riffle through the olde curiosity shoppe of the filmmaker's psyche.

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

The time swivels in Looper evoke some of Inception's fancy temporal tricks... But it's the glimpses of Children of Men-like societal dystopia that give the movie its real weight, and distinguish Johnson's third feature as a marked step forward.

It's in all the moments where little happens that Reichardt is most amazing, investing even a gas-station pit stop with perfect emotional pitch.

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.

In a movie like this one, a little madness is its own Holy Grail.