Michael Sragow

What makes this movie an up is that even when its characters are crying for help, they're also crying for Help!

Through unexpected and cathartic twists, this movie leaves you with atonement and redemption.

In "Jaws," you didn't know whether to laugh or to scream. In The Host, the yocks rarely mesh with the yucks.

Hathaway carries you on an emotional whirligig that can be horrifying and funny, hopeful and devastating.

A terrific social drama, the work of an artist, not a pleader.

Slumdog Millionaire dives headfirst into something greater than a subculture - the enormous unchronicled culture of India's mega-slums - and achieves even more sweeping impact.

At last, a great contemporary holiday movie that's strictly for grown-ups - a holiday movie that really is a moviegoer's holiday from desultory daily fare.

It's both irrefutably concrete and irresistibly uplifting.

The Man Without a Past has the slenderness of a folk-tale -- also the clarity and charm.

If, like me, you're both desperate to see new public-works systems in our own country and sensitive to the possible human and ecological damage, Up the Yangtze provides a devastating view of top-down, broad-stroke social programs.

Voluptuous dance about love, pain and the whole damn thing.

It's the oddest case yet of the Emperor's New Clothes. After all, the Emperor in the fairy tale was naked. This movie has tons of fabulous clothing. The people disappear within their wardrobes.

No Man's Land is a 98-minute wonder: this story of three men in a trench renews the meaning of the word "trenchant."

One of the most gorgeous and sophisticated portraits of an artist ever put on film.

A spare, trembling lyric poem of a movie that uses stillness and facial blips the way melodramas use showdowns and action films big bangs.

Penelope Cruz is sensational in Volver - she's its lifeblood, its raison d'etre and its meaning.

Plays like a remake - not of "Knights of the Round Table" (1953) but of director Antoine Fuqua's previous "Tears of the Sun" (2003).

British director Mike Leigh has made the first great comedy for our new depression.

A computer-animated burlesque fairy tale that generates more belly laughs than any live-action comedy since "Best in Show."

Some of the movie's sunniest moments arrive as Chappelle ambles through Ohio. He's an observational comic with a drawling syntax that's almost as sly as Mark Twain's.

Takes 20 minutes to burst into fierce, inspired filmmaking.

This thoroughly modern movie pulls off a classical feat. It elicits the searing combination of pity and terror that leaves a viewer feeling purged.

Mystic River wants to be a Bruce Springsteen-like anthem of life and death in blue-collar America. It's no more than a doggerel rendition of poetic injustice.

Hammers away at the plot so relentlessly that you can feel the nails entering the back of your skull.

A friendly movie, as scruffy and cozy as a woolen watch cap.

Phone Booth may not be awful, but it's puny.

Wastes amusing beginnings.

The movie is a parable of patriarchal pride as well as a paradigm of how immigrant groups can accomplish goals without any help from their host culture.

A pop masterpiece.

A headlong pastiche of lower-depth melodrama and absurd black comedy.

A harrowing depiction of a woman's plight under the Taliban.

It's like a New York City equivalent of a Third World bazaar: It hums with nerviness and cunning. And this movie presents a tingling vision of a working neighborhood after hours. Night falls in Chop Shop like a comfort, a cloak or a shroud.

This movie is genial, forgettable piffle about the perhaps-beginning of a maybe affair. It's a romantic daydream so slim that it barely leaves the requisite sweet aftertaste.

Spider-Man 2 offers one emotional or action-packed aria after another; at the end you feel like giving it a standing O.

Quick and lowdown-delightful. It's also a graveyard or two up in class from the torture films that, in recent years, have redefined horror for the worse.

This film about fierce competition among classic video-game players is a comic action epic in documentary form. It captures fear -- and heroism -- in a handful of dusty video games.

Spider as a character is a fantasizing detective, but the movie is no Singing Detective (the high-water mark of the sub-genre). This film rarely rises above a murmur.

It's not a great movie, but it is an enlivening and unusual one: an effervescent political film that also packs a knockout punch.

The picture has immediacy, force and humanity. It's a muckraking work of art.

What emerges is a fallen warrior's tale: the inside story of a man bloodied and bowed.

Eastern Promises is intensely anti-dramatic.

Enraging and inspiring. It boasts the miraculous quality of finding a letter in a bottle and discovering that its authors are alive.

I found the movie impossibly basic and sanitized as a "never again" parable of the Final Solution - and simply wrongheaded as a story about children.

The impact is hypnotic.

You have to be willing to take a lot of punishment for a few good scares.

The dramatic content in Memento is as blank as Leonard's post-traumatic mental state.

Director Joe Wright's new movie version of Pride and Prejudice is more Gene Kelly than Fred Astaire: more earthy and athletic than balletic.

Venus is a magnificent tribute to actors by filmmakers who know they are the essential human material of theater and the screen.

In its own quiet, voluptuous way, Rivers and Tides, an unpretentiously brilliant documentary, uses the work of Scottish sculptor Andy Goldsworthy to open up the hidden drama of the natural universe.

The title Tell No One recalls the days when ads proclaimed, "No one will be seated after the first 15 minutes" and "Be considerate of your neighbors: Don't give away the ending of this picture." Both rules apply to this canny, refreshingly emotional and intuitive thriller.

The movie grows richer as it goes along and contrasting pieces click together.

A thriller from the inside out, a romance from the outside in: that's the double-edged brilliance of The Constant Gardener.

A History of Violence is a hollow story from an empty graphic novel.

Sugar is a near-great movie with qualities more unusual than some all-time classics. It resists cliche at every turn and puts something solid in its place: raw yet controlled observation that gives the film the form of a flexing muscle.

Takes a chaotic moment in the long history of "the Troubles" and turns it into a keening, air-clearing epic.

Bitterly funny about divorce, it's even sharper and more original about intellectuals and their discontent.

Watching this movie, you can dream with open eyes.

What makes this movie ultra-contemporary is the way Abrams has re-imagined Spock and Kirk as a team of rivals.

Making you feel the presence of absences - of the distant and the departed, of dreams that never quite come true - is the key thing that this uneven film gets exactly right.

Howl's Moving Castle is one animated epic that has it all: poetic intensity, potent storytelling, vivid and surprising characters, and intoxicating powers of visual imagination.

The Prisoner of Azkaban is to Harry Potter what that other No. 3, "Goldfinger," was to James Bond: the movie that takes the invention and gamesmanship of the series to a whole new giddy peak.

That's the problem of Downfall in a nutshell: It provokes insufficient emotional and intellectual responses to a grotesque and atrocious dictatorship. Instead of the banality of evil, it gives us the banality of banality.

Most contemporary horror films derive shocks from mere torture. Let the Right One In locates most of its fright-power in the needs and confusions of people who are usually overlooked.

It's like an Indiana Jones movie without rhythm, wit or personality, just a desperate, headlong pace.

As a documentary, The Agronomist, in its excitingly fractured, modern manner, does what Lawrence of Arabia and The Leopard do: It traces the upheaval of a civilization in the profile of a magnificent individual. It's a 90-minute nonfiction film with the impact and the greatness of an epic.

For audiences, two things keep the tension from becoming too excruciating: the presence of the survivors in front of us and the knowledge that in the grip of Macdonald's humane, lucid filmmaking, we're in the best of hands.

Pawlikowski's heart may be with Mona, but his art is closer to Tamsin. He luxuriates in his sensibility without delivering a movie that pays off in originality or insight.

An unconventional and engrossing French thriller.

Strip away the portentous style and lush views of nature in The Return and all you've got is a slender nightmare of a family gone haywire in an outing that turns into survival camp.

A solid, satisfying movie.

Until the final shot, the movie keeps you wondering how it will turn out.

As a spy film, The Sum of All Fears is flaccid, and as an expose of nuclear threats, there's not enough information.

The triumph of A Mighty Wind is that it makes an audience love the sing-along catchiness of folk and still break up at its banalities. This tiny titan of a movie is a perfect melding of form and content.

The movie has been hailed and marketed as this year's Little Miss Sunshine, but it has none of that movie's empathy and comic surprise. Too much of it is like a subpar episode of Freaks and Geeks, padded out to 92 minutes with pseudo-witty dialogue.

When it comes to the oft-doomed genre of seafaring adventure, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World is a spectacular throwback and a great leap forward.

On screen, Road to Perdition becomes a lace-curtain shoot-'em-up about fathers and sons. The graphic novel is more kinetic and more powerful than the motion picture.

The Station Agent has craft and pace and that far rarer quality, fellow-feeling.

Bright Star delivers a prismatic depiction - tart, funny and piercing - of the romance between poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne in the three years before he died, in 1821, at age 25.

A first-person documentary with the subterranean pull of a superb confessional novel.

It gives you such an intense hit of creativity that afterward you may find yourself trying to jete out of the theater and into the street.

Too bad the bulk of Rowling's humor goes down a black-magic drain.

In its entirety, Hairspray has the funny tilt that only a director-choreographer like Shankman can give to a movie.

When it comes to what's great about King Kong, it's not the harum-scarum. It's the girl.

Chicago is the zingiest, most inventive movie of its kind since "Cabaret."

It's a bad joke that District 9 will be hailed for its "originality."

The movie gets as overblown and masochistic as the worst Joan Crawford vehicle. Its saving grace is that Bernal really does have his own deep-set, smoldering variation on Bette Davis eyes.

Too often when actors portray complicated or enigmatic characters, they seem to be flirting with the audience, playing hard to get. Not Williams.

This movie has an aura of forced tragedy, like a fourth-generation version of "Requiem for a Heavyweight."

You have to grasp at straws to make even "poetic" sense of the narrative.

One happy surprise after another, even when the content is bittersweet or sad.

Promises may want to unite the audience in humanitarian emotions, but it's more useful as a prod to examine what these children are learning from their schools, their leaders, and their media.

A scary movie that's also funny, touching and good for you.

As magical as it is realistic.

Beguiling, moving and just plain fun documentary.

The movie may be Nine Queens, but it slakes your thirst for surprises and thrills because of its Nine Jokers.

The film saddles Craig T. Nelson with the generally thankless role of Paxton's cold, distant dad. But when he feels like the only person who doesn't understand what's going on with Tate and his son, you feel like saying, "No, me too."

Casino Royale marks a shrewd relaunching of a franchise. But Campbell and company show too much of their sweat. If these movies continue to follow Fleming's profane pilgrim's progress, the next Bond movies should be more emotional and funny, with a bit of brass-knuckled charm.

The compositions evoke a kind of open-air claustrophobia, whether in overhead shots that pin the characters in the landscape or in tableaux of men, women, and children staving off the chaos of the wide-open spaces with their weary fences and weathered towns.