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.