Michael Sragow

It's infuriating in more ways than one. Yet it's also somehow touching in its melange of melodrama and modernism.

With Joan Allen bringing a crisp intelligence to the sharp, unsentimental narration, it's both awful and fascinating to follow Hitler's warped growth from frustrated painter to self-appointed arbiter of Germanic art.

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

To top it off, the ending is a clumsy cheat. Of course, I was rooting for the news gal to expire and the film to die a quick death.

What proves the validity of Kandahar is that, by the end, all these scenes are human ruins of the same nightmare world.

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.

Nearly everything fresh and exciting about the 2002 documentary "Dogtown and Z-Boys" - the story of the Santa Monica-Ocean Park-Venice area misfits who revolutionized skateboarding in the 1970s - becomes studied and secondhand in The Lords of Dogtown.

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

Disarming, discombobulating and disappointing.

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

The shows themselves are extraordinary, especially Japan's Ichigei group, which has the all-out fun and athleticism of a vitaminized Twyla Tharp troupe.

The movie comes together like a nihilistic jigsaw puzzle - with a few pieces removed for that special, indefinable dash of pseudo-density.

The result is an exciting, infuriating, combative experience.

The ovation that Hudson wins from the movie's audience is one of those miraculous moments when a performer's artistry breaks through the screen and makes you feel part of a live audience. I haven't experienced anything like it since Barbra Streisand sang "My Man" at the end of her astonishing debut in Funny Girl.

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.

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.

Unfolds amid the mechanized carnage of World War I. Yet everything in it is personal. That's why it's a masterpiece.

The whole movie aspires to set an Annie Hall vibe, especially when Tom keeps trying to re-create, first with her and then with someone else.

Campbell Scott creates a new movie anti-hero -- the weak silent type -- and goes all the way with it in The Secret Lives of Dentists.

The union of thought and feeling becomes flesh and blood thanks to four brilliant performers in Iris.

Misplaced hero-worship and glibness get in the way of its amazing true story.