Owen Gleiberman

Marley was directed by the gifted Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland), who shows off his chops not by doing anything dazzling - the film is documentary prose, not poetry - but by treating Marley as a man of depth and nuance, of inner light and shadow.

Breathless and petite yet powerfully in-your-face, Fisher combines dizzy femininity and no-nonsense verve in the manner of a classic screwball heroine. She's like Carole Lombard reborn as a tiny angel-faced dynamo.

The film casts a hypnotic spell all its own. It artfully sketches out the events for anyone who's coming in cold, but basically, its strategy is to take what we already know and go deeper.

For nostalgia junkies, it's one from the heart.

The writer-director, Peter Sollett, cast the film with kids from his own neighborhood, who give themselves over to the camera with a spirit of improvised play that morphs into vivid, layered acting.

Does the movie, with its sock-puppet intros and narration by RuPaul Charles, mock Tammy Faye, sanctify her, or turn her into a flamboyant image of distressed womanly martyrdom -- the Judy Garland of televangelism? All of the above.

The result is something as original as it is unlikely: a study in grief that is flooded with happiness.

The baby-voiced costar of "Chasing Amy" proves an effortless filmmaker, turning Lucy’s journey into the awakening of a soul.

Turns the tricks of psychology into duplicitous high play.

Days after I saw The Artist, I was still thinking (and grinning) about it, because the movie's real romance is the one between us, the jaded 21st-century audience, and the mechanical innocence of old movies, which here becomes new again.

The movie also captures Thompson's tragedy: the haze of drugs and bad writing that consumed him for no less than his last 30 years.

It takes skill these days, if not nerve, to put a vital, happy nuclear family on screen and to invite us to share in every quiet tremor, every gentle jostle and smile of their steady, deep-flowing contentment.

A rowdy, richly offbeat biopic.

Deconstructing Harry is Woody Allen's naughty-boy confessional movie, a disquietingly candid and funny portrait of a pathological narcissist.

Romantic comedies usually strike one or two moods, but in Afterglow, the writer-director Alan Rudolph runs through rainbows of feeling in a single scene.

Moving and marvelous new cross-cultural family saga.

The one scene with a hint of the eccentrically detached brilliance that would come to define ”Stanley Kubrick Movies” is the climactic battle, in which marching blocks of Roman soldiers are mowed down by fire: It’s war as the greatest halftime show ever choregraphed. Until then, Spartacus envelops you in the sort of bedazzled hero worship Hollywood never quite managed to bring off this rousingly again.

There have, over the years, been a lot of terrific undersea documentaries, but if you want to know what distinguishes this new one, it comes down to a single word: technology.

The clever and infectious reboot of the amazingly enduring sci-fi classic, director J.J. Abrams crafts an origin myth that avoids any hint of the origin doldrums. That's because he rewires us back into the original Star Trek's primal appeal.

An Inconvenient Truth can't, of course, reveal a future that is still up to us, but by the time you're done watching, the real question is, Which way on God's green earth would you want to err?

Part of what makes One False Move so engrossing is the way the characters keep revealing new, darker sides. The movie is about hidden American links — between city and country, cop and criminal, and the black and white subcultures of the rural South.

The film defuses all preconceptions about the ''issues'' of transsexual identity to arrive at a place of tremulous human power.

Requiem is drawn from an incident that was also the basis for last year's demon-seed hit, "The Exorcism of Emily Rose."

A spectacular windup toy of a thriller -- a contraption made by an artist.

It's scary good fun.

It takes skill — a certain sly, even perverse nimbleness of craft — to make an homage to schlock movies that treats them as works of art.

The film may be bloody, but it's also bloody gorgeous: a grandly fetishized epic of cinematic aggression. It's a tale of vengeance that hinges on Tarantino's love of ferocity as spectacle -- his immersion in action and exploitation, his addiction to the jazzy catharsis of junk-film kicks.

The supersmart and rousing Moneyball, which may be the best baseball movie since "Bull Durham," is also about talk, but in a coolly heady and original inside-the-front-office way.