Michael Sragow

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.