Michael Sragow

Even if you have no interest in Joy Division, this picture is worth seeing for the unsentimental empathy and passion of the moviemaking.

Wristcutters: A Love Story is a lousy title for a lovely-loony picture about an afterlife for suicides. It's an off-road "road movie" about people who off themselves.

A lovely, mischievous Casanova that will sweep you off your feet.

In a feat of performing imagination, Ferrell turns his usual extroversion inside out and his usual zaniness into precision, and makes it all work for him.

The only thing that tops Cave here is Cohen himself at the end, singing "Tower of Song" with U2.

Ask the Dust is more than an amorous period piece. It's a strongly bitter, strongly sweet poem in prose and motion.

It's the whole constellation of relationships that Winick and company create in and around the barn that brings the movie its kaleidoscopic charm.

It's an authentic, harrowing tale of heroism.

Downey and Favreau and the special-effects team transform the trying-out of the armor and its powers into slapstick cadenzas. But equally entertaining is Stark's and Potts' recognition that they share more than a mere working chemistry.

It's a courageous, moving, organically funny picture.

This movie provides no phony catharsis or closure; it develops a vision of people growing in spurts from their most terrible mistakes.

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.

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.

Thanks to Hallstrom's slaphappy artistry and a sparkling ensemble, Hoax is a hoot.

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

A masterpiece of psychological suspense.

Emily Dickinson wrote, "Hope is the thing with feathers." When Woody Allen published his second collection, he called it Without Feathers. Guest is as sharp and original as Allen, but he hasn't lost hope. For Your Consideration -- disillusioned but also fresh and ticklish -- is a thing with feathers, too.

It sheds the series' famous and influential pastel look and plunges its cast of villains and warriors into the 21st century.

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

So far in this year's cartoon feature sweepstakes, Shrek the Third rules.

Shine a Light has two maestros, Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger, and once they begin to mesh, around the third or fourth song, they put on a display of showmanship that erases the line between art and entertainment.

The impact is hypnotic.

A Big Sleep with underage bozos, a Maltese Falcon where the stuff that dreams are made of rests in the lockers of a well-worn high school, Brick is a remarkable oddity, audacious and engaging.

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

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

Stays true to the spirit and characters of the book while embellishing it to overflowing.

For 45 minutes, it zings along on perfectly pitched overstatement.

The rousing new Western 3:10 to Yuma has the sweep of an epic and the economy of a stopwatch.