Michael Sragow

The movie does work, spectacularly.

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

Best of all, Ponyo never ceases to be a genuine odyssey in short pants.

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

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.

Though I love McCarthy's movie, The Edge of Heaven - with its virtuoso narrative and frames packed to bursting with unruly life - has the potency of "The Visitor" squared.

Borat is a terrific, risky comic creation: a village idiot for the global village.

Without a single gunshot (and just one flick of a switchblade), it turns into an existential suspense film with the highest stakes imaginable: the survival of the human spirit.

The offhand wit and casual self-revelation of Johnston's best words draw you deeper into the mysteries of his character. Feuerzeig is a music-lover to his bones.

Roman Polanski's new movie may be the greatest historical film centered on an enigmatic character since Lawrence of Arabia.

Like "Hairspray," it's not just a spinoff but a wised-up family comedy that's spirited and inventive. It retains the farcical belligerence of the TV comedy but also heightens the series' oddball warmth and expands on its Hellzapoppin' slapstick.

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

Full of wit, charm and wonder. It's so hilarious, you might blow a gasket.

The enthralling documentary Crazy Love is about how a high-flying lawyer's obsession with a young beauty blinded her, metaphorically and literally.

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.

Nolte's gambler-bandit Bob Montagnet is a triumph of imagination, touched with electric existential poetry.

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.

The movie's triumph is that we experience the ending, in which the three girls go mostly separate ways, not as a defeat but as a transition still open to possibilities.

Russell's conviction is so total that it tingles the spines of the audience.

It leaves you dazed and sated. Compared to the fast food "eye candy" surrounding it these days, Metropolis is a gourmet 20-course meal.

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

Little miracles spring up throughout this picture.

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

It's like Chekhov with a British accent.

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.

Carol Reed's Odd Man Out is the rare movie classic that grows more relevant and compelling with every passing year. [29 Dec 2006, p.5C]

Dark Blue is one of those totally happy surprises that moves so quickly and curves so sharply that it leaves this era's hyped critical hits looking like beached whales.

A movie masterpiece -- thrilling, passionate and wise.

The unique, serious fun of this movie - and forbidding reputation aside, it is exhilarating - lies in the way that Wiesler, Dreyman and Sieland end up collaborating unknowingly on their own Design for Living (for a while, it's like Noel Coward for moral cowards).

Beguiling, moving and just plain fun documentary.

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

Overflowing with comedy and drama, The Boys of Baraka unfolds on the mean streets of Baltimore and in the wide-open spaces of Kenya.

If you didn't know that Martin Scorsese made The Aviator, the enthralling new adventure-biography of Howard Hughes, you might think it was the calling card of a neophyte visual genius.

This movie has a tone, look and mood all its own - it's a joyously bittersweet piece of visual music about isolation, melancholy and everyone's yearning for transcendence, through love, art or both.

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 an experience that blows your mind, clears it and educates it.

Thelma Schoonmaker, a Scorsese collaborator for over a quarter-century, did the bull's-eye editing. The moviemaking throughout is swift, unaffected, masterly.

As a writer-director, McCarthy, like the characters and the places that he suffuses with emotion, has poetry in him - and he knows how to let it out. He has a talent for demarcating those spaces in which characters can become whoever they want to be.

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.

Everything about Up is an up, in the most visceral and poetic ways.

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

The Class ranks with the very best films ever made about teaching, and it's unlike any English or American film about teaching ever made.

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.

The Hurt Locker redefines war-film electricity.

A vibrant emotional epic.

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

A marvelous picture and a highly unusual journey in and around the Holocaust.

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

There's no cheap uplift to their victory, no pop catharsis. What's great about United 93 is that you never feel it's just a movie - even though, as a movie, it's terrific.

You go to Good Night, and Good Luck expecting inspiration, and you get it. It's also unexpectedly subtle, tense, and challenging, complex both in its take on its subject and in its craftsmanship. So the movie brings you to your feet - and, at times, to tears.

Lumumba revives the tradition of Pontecorvo's "The Battle of Algiers" and Costa-Gavras' "Z" and "State of Siege." In substance and excitement, it joins their ranks.

The result is a performance film that conjures a vision of American life as moving, funny and rueful as John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln.

A beautiful display of celluloid bungee-jumping.

Brilliant, brutally poignant.

It's cathartic and exhilarating.

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

Enraging and enthralling.

A down-home-exquisite musical dramedy.

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

Views war from the inside out and the outside in. It carries the shock of full disclosure.

It rises, all on its own, to the realm of masterwork.

You won't see a brighter, truer affirmation of the All-American messed-up improvisational family than Little Miss Sunshine.

I love Rabbit-Proof Fence as drama, as protest, as moviemaking and as poetry.

Samson Raphaelson's marvel of a script unfolds in six sequences that rise and fall with the surprising weight of mini-lifetimes; under Lubitsch's tart-tender direction, the emotionally transparent Stewart and the electric, conflicted Sullivan create an immortal comic courtship. [13 Feb 2004]

Twisted is an unusual forensic crime film because it's witty and sophisticated as well as taut and creepy.

What Phoenix and Witherspoon accomplish in this movie is transcendent. They act with every bone and inch of flesh and facial plane, and each tone and waver of their voice.

Deep Water is a movie that will connect to anyone whose private fantasies and creative plots have landed them in hot water.

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

A madcap milestone. Not since Disney's 75-minute Alice In Wonderland (1951) has an animator filled the screen with dazzling flights of random invention that manage to hook up into a swift, brief narrative.

It's still the Holy Grail of crazy comedy.

Seabiscuit revives the sweeping pleasures of movies that address and respect the mass audience, raising the common denominator instead of pandering to it. This crowd-pleaser rouses honest and engulfing cheers.

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

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

The movie's generosity of spirit and artistry swamps its flaws.

It's a topical, iconoclastic documentary with the warmth and pace of a first-rate personal essay.

Park's imagination is as fecund as the bunnies that bob up and down from their rabbit holes in every corner of the Tottington garden.

Hawks weaves brawny romance and humor and a man’s-man sort of heartbreak into his tribute to the ideal of vocation.

Uproarious, moving and thrilling.

Saved! is the audacious feel-good satire of 2004.

The tough beauty of the picture is that it lets each viewer weigh the costs and benefits to Gardner. It's a genuinely transporting inspirational movie because it's also a cautionary tale. It doesn't downplay the hero's occasional clumsiness or pigheadedness.

The Counterfeiters is in its own smart, trim fashion "The Bridge on the River Kwai" of concentration-camp sagas. Also based (like Kwai) on a real-life story, this movie starts small but becomes a miniature epic of overreach and moral drift.

No Country for Old Men is about the kind of amoral madness that can sweep across a country and redefine a landscape. It's so admirably lean and sinewy that it deserves not merely a rave review but a Johnny Cash song about matter-of-fact killings in shady hotels and sun-scoured landscapes.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly provides an ecstatic lift for movielovers, despite the tragic subject.

One of the favorite sayings of journalists and politicians is "You don't want to see how the sausage is made." Marsh's movie says you do want to see how a miracle is made, even if the details can be just as unsavory.

It's exhilarating in an authentic, pathos-streaked way to see Kearns, through Greg Kinnear's inspired characterization of a wary obsessive, representing himself during his trial against Ford Motor Co. for stealing his design.

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu runs the same 2 1/2 hours as "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," but what a difference a comic-dramatic purpose makes.

A great, lusty movie in the tradition of Bertrand Blier's "Going Places."

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

This Filthy World does many things, including transform tabloid commentary into comic art. But at its best, it shows that the child is father to the wild man.

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

A visual masterpiece about a scared little girl's breathtaking journey of self-discovery. All of the fun is getting there.

You'll never see a more tactile expression of the intimacy between artists and their instruments than in Davis Guggenheim's elating It Might Get Loud.

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.

The documentary American Teen is the most realistic movie you will see all summer.

A masterpiece.

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.

Killer of Sheep is a miracle movie because it's receiving its first theatrical release 30 years after it was made and because, as a movie, it's miraculous.

An exhilarating movie about sadness and renewal.