Michael Atkinson

Exactly the sort of mysterious and almost holy experience you hope to get from documentaries and rarely do, Jeff Malmberg's Marwencol is something like a homegrown slice of Herzog oddness, complete with true-crime backfill and juicy metafictive upshot.

Jacques Perrin's Winged Migration is merely about birds, and though you learn less about the various species Perrin circled the globe to document than you might from an afternoon with Animal Planet, you become intensely chummy with the process and labor of flying.

An organic, childlike wonder, fabulously unpredictable and seethingly inventive.

A mild upkick in pacing and texture can be credited to director Alfonso Cuarón (more Little Princess than Y Tu Mamá), who avoids Chris Columbus's mastodon-like setups and knows a bit more about whipping up atmospherics.

Slowly evolves into an oddly affecting mood piece.

It's a shame that, somewhere in his mystagogical handstanding, Fresnadillo forgot the real world.

For the discouraged filmgoer, Erice's tone poem will be a ray of hope itself.

Yamada shoots his movie with a grandfatherly expertise, never squeezing the drama for juice or distancing us too far from the characters -- it's a pleasure to see a movie that makes every shot count, narratively and emotively.

The jerry-rigged result is a trite espionage thriller without the thrills but with a lingering measure of nausea.

The movie is itself a rat-maze of one-sided mirrors, windows upon windows, anonymous hallways, compartmentalized instances of watching, being watched, seeing and not-seeing.

Another unforetold career acme: Christopher Guest's seductive and brilliantly modulatory A Mighty Wind, which trains its laser-sight on the decaying legacy of Peter, Paul and Mary-style pop-folk.

My Joy is a maddening vision and one of the year's must-see provocations.

The summer's best cinematic equivalent to a lazy afternoon in the shade with a cool drink.

The commonest sort of cultural pasteurization.

For some viewers, this will seem a trial of predictability and unrelenting sweetness; for others, it's more than enough.

It's the rare contemporary film that's as majestically and gruelingly rigorous in its form as in its thematic interrogations.

In the end, this morphing of ideas and styles is more deadpan romantic than sociocritical, and sweeter for it.

Camus's film remains a revivifying experience - and a mid-winter oasis. Born and bred in France, Camus made other films, and lots of French TV, but Black Orpheus may still be the greatest one-hit-wonder import we've ever seen.

Perhaps little more than an object lesson in the end, the movie's nevertheless a sobering day trip, more for its hints of a forgotten history of culture collision than its sensible but rote socioeconomic sympathies.

Possibly the Iranian new wave's last meta-man, Panahi is in an ideal position to make the unique methodology of his filmmaking merge with its substance. But he's always been fascinated by how a film's bell-jar bubble can be punctured, leaving a viscous interface between real and cinematic.

Leon’s grungy resume indie is a conscientiously modest deal in the end, with a sweet, mumblecoresque ending, but it glows with unmistakable star power.

There's something dull and evasive at the film's center--for one thing, contrary to its festival buzz, Bad Education tiptoes around the issue of priesthood pedophilia; lovelorn gazes are as desperate as it gets.

An earnest, roughshod document, it serves as a workable primer for the region's recent history, and would make a terrific 10th-grade learning tool.

Whatever extraordinary ingredients are necessary to fashion a 1776 home run, this movie doesn't have them.

Like a Hollywood dolt, Majidi strives to overwhelm us with emphasis, but it's the reality he was savvy to load his movie with that's touching.

Has a customarily jovial air but a deficit of flim-flam inventiveness.

Saraband doesn't ask to be considered prime-cut Bergman, and it isn't, although its slightness may not matter to the art-film starving class.

As the miners make clear, workers have no rights in this democracy that they don't fight like dogs for, and the film has no conclusion--the combat will always continue.