Michael Sragow

It's an authentic, harrowing tale of heroism.

Plunges into an imaginative landscape as large as all creation - and never slackens its barreling pace or shrinks its panoramic scope.

Man on the Train may be a modest film, but it offers privileged glimpses of transcendence.

The genius of Garfield's performance is that he fills him with equal amounts of terror and wonder.

Holofcenere genuinely wants to make pictures that plug into an audience's need for intimate contemporary comedies. But she doesn't do enough to quench that thirst.

At its best, the movie combines the musical and psychological meanings of a fugue. Sons and daughters and mother take up themes of dislocation and identity loss, and deepen them at every turn.

Once you get past the movie's needlessly fragmented framing device and its protracted introduction to a xenophobic rural Minnesota town, the core story gains some traction in your mind.

Nolte brings this movie a piece of his heart, and grants us peace.

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.

Its knockout success is a testament to Gore's eloquence and humanity and to the dexterity of his director, Davis Guggenheim.

Brilliant, brutally poignant.

Few films combine a dense and tingling atmosphere with the headlong pacing and adventure of The Bourne Ultimatum.

The Dixie Chicks may never regain their prolonged eminence on the country charts. However, the art and entertainment value of this movie (and of their latest album) is off the charts in the best way.

The whole movie swings broadly from slapstick and mock suspense to song. But the film develops a strong amorous undertow; Kelly's script neatly allows for all the potential couples to get the fate or comeuppance they deserve.

There's no innocence left in Shrek 2. The helter-skelter story and throwaway gags emerge from a sensibility that confuses gossipy knowingness and jadedness with wit.

Instead of being supple and expansive like the book, this Little Children is heavy-handed and snarky.

Eastern Promises is intensely anti-dramatic.

Fantasy, not honesty, is the point of The Kid Stays in the Picture.

The giddy excitement of Startup.com comes from feeling as if you're inside the bubble as it soars into the stratosphere - and pops.

Critically lacks Highsmith's sixth sense for drawing you into the heart and soul of sociopaths, then jolting you with the realization that things are much worse even than they seem.

Experiencing this film is like hurtling down a verbal slalom.

By the end, Hamer's crisp, prickly compositions go soft.

Spielberg's inchoate attempts at cultural observation stretch the movie out and dilute the giddiness instead of adding a pleasurable spike. When the movie doesn't feel inflated, it feels soggy.

A down-home-exquisite musical dramedy.

It's hard to stomp on a movie that pulls together a rich lay-about, hippies, a punk girl and an Amnesty International worker in a sort of Peaceable Kingdom, but About a Boy shows the limits of affability.

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

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

The engrossing documentary Peace Officer looks at the militarization of police work from a fresh, provocative angle.

The movie is an inspired comedy-drama about artistic temperament.

Infuriating and funny, the film forges a disturbing diagram from the avarice and chaos of a slapdash, heartless system.

Falls victim to flimsy characters and a love story that strains reality.

Black Hawk Down, in the end, is a docudrama. But it's sensationally well done, and it opens up a battlefield that needed to be documented.

It's the pushiest film around - "in your face" is still in-your-face, even if the dancers are in white-face.

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

The Sea Inside brings us outside and inside ourselves, and takes us to brave new aesthetic depths.

Jumping off from the brilliant novel by Giles Foden and changing a key character entirely, it dramatizes and wrings humor from the way a white Western renegade can view a self-made Third World despot like Amin as a superman blowing fresh air into a fetid atmosphere.

As Laura, Rueda hits sublime notes of confusion, grief and wrath. She's sympathetic enough to make you root for her and complex enough to get you arguing afterward about whether Laura did anything to deserve all this.

Munich is so broad-stroke it cuts itself at every turn. It's also a thoroughly lifeless movie.

And the movie, likable for short stretches, ends up seeming worn and frayed, like Christmas decorations left hanging until spring.

Journey is weary, yet imaginative.

Darger made art as if the lives of his subjects depended on it. That's how Yu has made her movie.

This documentary (like the fact-based 2004 feature Miracle) demonstrates how powerful true sports stories can be when they delve into the mystery of leadership instead of falling back on nostalgia.

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.

Ragged and frenetic.

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

What makes the movie potent, though, has nothing to do with metaphor or parable. It's that the story provides Connelly, Kingsley and Shohreh Aghdashloo as Kingsley's wife with all the tools they need to resurrect, flesh out, revamp and criticize outmoded male and female roles.

This movie leaves 'em laughing - and gasping.

In The History Boys, as in all of Bennett's work, irony is what the characters live and breathe - and I mean irony in its truest sense, of using language to present opposite and often sly alternatives to accepted wisdom.

A Mighty Heart has the surface tension of a first-rate docudrama but neither the passion nor the vision to encompass its powerhouse subject.

The Duchess of Langeais is a romantic dance of death.

Because Bar-Lev fails to go the extra mile either as a filmmaker or a friend, My Kid Could Paint That is at best "documentary silver."

The movie is supremely nonjudgmental and balanced.

Sin City is a seedy tribute to rugged masculinity disguised as a rogue's gallery, all the better to please college boys who like their sentimentality slicked with grunge.

The sensuousness of Lemon Tree is its glory.

In every important way, Breach isn't just a solid thriller; it's also an ambitious and engrossing piece of narrative journalism.

The glory of Japanese Story is that even after a daringly abrupt plot turn, the cast maintains its empathy and lucidity without interruption.

Surprisingly moving and intellectually satisfying.

A genuine odyssey: a journey to self-knowledge.

With everything this film has going for it - humor, intelligence and a splendid ensemble - Richard Linklater's nightmare drug movie, A Scanner Darkly, should be continually compelling. But it loses its fizz after a strong series of pops.

Near letter-perfect.

If any man should be more than the sum of his parts, it's an artist. But Todd Haynes' I'm Not There makes Bob Dylan less than the sum of his parts. It's like a tony art-school parlor game.

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.

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

The Son's Room is the anti-"In the Bedroom." I mean that as a compliment.

Isn't serious enough to fulfill its ambitions, or funny enough to compensate for its failures.

The result is not a first-class film noir but a top-grade acting class. You admire it without enjoying it.

When the cast and their director are really cooking, they conjure a bipolar sense of high school-age emotion -- and use it to fuel outrageous fantasy.

Spurlock's movie is the real-life slapstick record of a kamikaze Mac attack. Schlosser's book is the contemporary equal of Upton Sinclair's classic meatpacking muckraker "The Jungle."

Heading South is a hydra-headed love story, as dangerous as it is heated and complex.

Forget any hope of raffish adventure if you think of seeing Flyboys.

The result is a flabby, episodic phantasmagoria.

Burton's movie is more like Chris Columbus' first Harry Potter movie. Nearly everything that's supposed to be magical falls flat; nearly everything that's supposed to be mundane is magical.

Fresh, funny and unfailingly observant, Rocket Science is a mood-swinging movie about adolescence that lifts audiences' spirits even when its hero is down in the dumps.

The blend of chic histrionics and ultra-bright daylight imagery make much of the movie resemble a network soap opera with an on-location interlude. It looks as cheap as life is held in Medellin.

In America is the most unexpected and personal triumph yet from Jim Sheridan.

It's no compliment to say a movie is "all of a piece" if the piece is all worn out. For all its surface harshness, this movie is a star vehicle at once rickety and cozy.

Roos suffers from fallen archness in his interminable new movie Happy Endings. He wants to be mischievous and ambitious and "human," all at the same time. He ends up with delusions of tragicomic grandeur that leave an audience fed up and dissatisfied.

Lasseter's inclusive, utterly distinctive sensibility makes Cars all that it can be. His embrace of the comic-dramatic friction between innovation and tradition infiltrates every aspect of the movie - the look, the characters, the story.

The way Frank structures and directs this film, it's too predictably "unpredictable."

In an age when light-and-easy racial farces have become mainstream hits, he remains a tough-love comedian.

The Hangover is like an infernal comedy machine. Surrender your soul to its foul mesh of cheap cleverness and vulgarity. and you howl like a delighted demon. Resist, and you feel all sense and sensibility being crushed in its cogs.

Cheeky, brass-knuckles British crime film.

Director and dancers catch the audience up in a web of imagination.

It's one nutty holiday fruitcake that is appetizing and tasty.

Despite its haphazard rhythms and longueurs, The New World achieves an emotional payoff unlike anything else in Malick's work. It's all you think his movies are, and more.

A moral, not a moralistic, movie. It's also a bracing aesthetic achievement, creating a fictional version of a factual case that illuminates as it entertains.

Forget what Tom Cruise does outside his movies: What he does inside his movies is more than enough to wreck them.

Notes on a Scandal isn't humorous or witty enough to sustain black comedy, and it isn't insightful or deep enough to suggest a contemporary tragedy. All it does is put an eloquent veneer on petty meanness.

The unearned air of moralism that wafts through 15 Minutes pollutes its entertainment value.

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.

In the strongest scenes, Ben Affleck gets his lead actors to extract the bitter juice from Lehane's wood-alcohol prose. The movie has its horrifying Gothic twists and turns, but it's never better than when it takes these two into places where the underclass goes to forget or be forgotten or get lost.

Uneven and affecting movie.

This chick flick never should have made it out of the incubator.

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 film's strengths can't be separated from its shortcomings. Despite its heavyweight supporting cast, Stone Reader mostly pays tribute to the enthusiasm and purity of the amateur.

An exhilarating movie about sadness and renewal.

Shallow and one-sided.

Webber's film offers painstaking reproductions of the town of Delft circa 1665 in all four seasons. That's just the problem: you feel every pain he took. Girl With a Pearl Earring is an art movie in the worst way.