Michael Sragow

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

The love that heals and the love that kills are one and the same in the exhilarating Head-On, Fatih Akin's overgrown dead-end-kid romance for live-wire adults.

Humpday mixes hilarity with upset as the irresistible force of male pride meets the immovable object of sexual identity.

To discover why movie fans are screaming for more Will Ferrell, and to savor the work of improv wizards like Carell, go see Anchorman.

Greengrass and his tremendously smart and emotionally agile lead actor, James Nesbitt, paint their portrait of a good politician without illusion or sentimentality.

A sophisticated thrill. And incandescent Thandie Newton is a worthy successor to Audrey Hepburn in 'Charade.'

It's intelligent and emotional, not studied or sappy.

Paul Giamatti - that huddle of broiling instincts, out-of-control impulses and aggravated ardor epitomized in "Sideways" - you feel his soul's absence as dearly as its presence.

Will be hailed for its macabre imagination and inventive farce. But it also elegantly renders an archetypal teenage tale.

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.

Goes down like a single-malt aged for 25 years.

Levinson's quirky caper is rich with laughs.

Turns the kleig lights around to produce a wry and dead-on commentary on the film industry and the journalists who cover it.

The glory of the movie is Depp, who achieves his own immortality.

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

Original, unfailingly entertaining marital-breakup movie.

Takes 20 minutes to burst into fierce, inspired filmmaking.

What a relief to see a movie in which an audience responds with peals of laughter to subtle facial shifts as well as punch lines.

It overflows with a combustible blend of street sensitivity and testosterone.

This movie is about the survival of the open-minded. As far as current American independents go, it's the fastest and the funniest.

A stinging elegy for lost American dreams.

This documentary could have been a simple downer. Instead, it's a giddy, manic-depressive roller coaster - because it brings us eye to eye with Gilliam.

Few directors are able to showcase actors with fast-cutting techniques. Hill is an ace at it because everything about his action is organic.

Brosnan turns his typical talent on its head. So does director Boorman, who forsakes his usual tingling virtuosity.

A delirious surprise .

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

Although it's in the same genre as "The English Patient," it's a vastly better movie --more surprising and original, more rigorous and sympathetic. This film is oddly shaped. It is also heartbreaking and exhilarating.

An unconventional and engrossing French thriller.

It flows like fast-moving lava to a climax filled with pyrotechnics. And for once in a summer blockbuster, the fireworks are both emotional and physical. The movie leaves you sated, yet wanting more -- just what you want from a series with two entries left to go.

The result is an exciting, infuriating, combative experience.

If the movie has a flaw, it's that the working out of Vincent's psychology is too perfect.

In its peak moments, the movie delivers, all at once, genuine street wisdom and psychology and wrenching expressions of family and friendship.

Himalaya does for yak caravans what "Red River" did for cattle drives: it sees them as the stuff of epic conquest.

It's one of the most ambitious biographical films ever made in this country, and one of the most unusual, moving and exciting.

This picture boasts a story about a yarn-spinning Southern father (Albert Finney) and a sober-sided son (Billy Crudup) that gives it ballast and staying power beyond anything in previous, precious Burton fables like "Edward Scissorhands" or "Ed Wood."

Experiencing this film is like hurtling down a verbal slalom.

Lightning in a Bottle has breadth, both in its multitude of perspectives and its spectrum of performances.

Gloriously funky in the good old meaning of the term. Its vulgarity may be offensive, but it's also pungent and real, and it fuels some ferocious humor.

In the full-house ensemble of Henry Bromell's Panic, Neve Campbell is the wild card.

Ron Howard has made his best movie with Frost/Nixon, an electric political drama with a skin-prickling immediacy.

A bittersweet joy. Its humor and romance are refreshing because the writer-director, Greg Mottola, realizes that maturity is a two-steps-forward, one-step-backward process.

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.

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

Screwball farce, romance, domestic tragicomedy and literary frolic rolled into one.

Italian for Beginners, on its own small scale, is a one-of-a-kind movie: a baggy-pants spiritual comedy.

It's a nightmare that starts like a normal daytime drive and ends in a vortex-like sinkhole.

Without ever telling viewers what to think or how to feel, it raises more questions about the corruption of crime and crime fighting than any expose or thesis.

As the sequence builds, it accretes so many heroic and nightmarish associations it plays like a prelude to apocalypse, which of course will come in Episode III. Attack of the Clones is part soda pop, part witches' brew - and all visual ambrosia.

Captures the feel of a first-rate comic book. It puts the pop back into Pop Art: It blows viewers away with a blast of kinetic energy.

Kore-eda expresses the terror of the kids' predicament with a touch that's equally tender and dispassionate.

A dizzying - sometimes frustrating - marvel of moviemaking instinct and ingenuity.

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

The movie may not be perfect, but it's jam-packed with goodies -- like a breakfast cereal fun-pack with a prize on every box-top.

Has nearly perfect pitch.

Remarkable documentary.

Guerrilla provides one huge compensation: the getting of historical wisdom.

A Slipping-Down Life may be low-key, but if you enter its unique atmosphere, you will leave exhilarated.

This film teaches the rewards of patience for directors, for actors and for audiences, too. The compelling reality of Juliette's plight comes from how subtly and gradually she emerges from her carapace.

The outcomes of all the mini-dramedies are too messy and equivocal to produce morals; that's just as it should be in a farce about confusion. Co-directors Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath are most intent on completing the circle of comedy.

One genuine small triumph of American Splendor is that the title isn't ironic. The movie is a splendid, inventive piece of urban Americana about that hardboiled original, Harvey Pekar.

It's sometimes said that the greatest test of a chef is cooking something cheap and simple, like a piece of chicken or a hamburger. In a movie that testifies to simple pleasures, Taylor and company pass that test again and again.

The results are often as surprising as they are funny.

There's great action moviemaking here: You learn what it means to "carve" a pool, as you learn what it means to "close off" the boxing ring in Ali.

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

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.

The astonishingly versatile Kinnear proves note-perfect as a huckster who slowly rids himself of slime.

Without proclaiming itself a wake-up call for the West, In This World cries out for some new method of achieving international trust.

This picture is jagged and exciting; it tells several plots imperfectly, yet makes them add up to a great American story about integrity challenged and triumphant.

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

Isn't an act of expiation but a gift of understanding.

The movie never undercuts his brilliance and his unexpected charisma. No matter how high his degree of malevolence, he cuts a bigger figure after you see the movie than he did before.

The movie is supremely nonjudgmental and balanced.