Scott Foundas

Scaled like an epic but possessing the narrative simplicity of a fable, The Warrior unfolds over a brisk 85 minutes of screen time, keeping dialogue to a minimum as it celebrates the power of stories told through handcrafted, CGI-free images.

Like two of the year's other standout American films, Kelly Reichardt's "Old Joy" and Ryan Fleck's "Half Nelson," it's a movie of ideas in which the ideas flow effortlessly out of the material instead of being plastered on top with a heavy cement roller (as in "Crash," "Babel" and "Little Children").

What emerges, finally, is an urgent distress call from one of America’s many, predominately black inner cities cast adrift by decades of municipal neglect and institutional racism.

Razor sharp and funny as hell, Incident at Loch Ness is the harpoon hurled into the hot-air balloon of “reality” entertainment.

Snakes was the most exuberantly trashy delight of this summer movie season or last.

In the post-Columbine era, Koury's film has its finger on something particularly potent.

A low-key but sharply observed work that benefits from real local flavor and a gift for lyric image making.

Outside of "Grindhouse," it may be the most bang for your buck to be had in a Los Angeles movie theater this season.

If nothing else, Mistress America confirms Gerwig as one of the great, fearless screen comediennes of her generation — a tall, loose-limbed whirligig who careers through scenes with the beatific ditziness of a Carole Lombard or Judy Holliday.

The Puffy Chair is the funniest, saddest and most emotionally honest "romantic comedy" to come along in years, even if I've yet to encounter many over the age of about 35 who like the film, or even get it.

What emerges, finally, is a film that gives an urgent, original voice to a people too frequently marginalized in both movies and society at large.

The haunting final image suggests how quickly such stories can be lost...which makes Beyond the Hills, above all else, a powerful and necessary act of reclamation.

Big Trouble in Little China is a far more enjoyable mash-up of classic Westerns, Saturday-morning serials, and Chinese wu xia than any of the Indiana Jones movies, with Kurt Russell in full bloom as Carpenter’s de rigueur hard-drinkin’, hard-gamblin’, wise-crackin’ loner hero—a bowling-alley John Wayne.

It's the director's most complexly ordered film to date - a labyrinth of ids, egos and alter egos waiting around blind corners - and may be the movies' most deliriously inventive narrative spiral since "Adaptation."

The result is a glorious low-tech pleasure that may be the most lyrical, phantasmagoric boys' adventure story since Joe Dante's Explorers.

A superb, eye-opening and often absurdly funny deconstruction of the myths and realities of global terrorism that is marked by a balance, broadmindedness and sense of historical perspective so absent from many recent political-themed documentaries.

A superior all-ages adventure pic made by a filmmaker who knows more than a thing or two about the genre.

It’s the sort of buoyant, all-ages entertainment that Hollywood has been laboring to revive in recent years (most recently with Hairspray) but hasn’t managed to get right until now, and the glue holding it all together is the incomparable Adams (an Oscar nominee for 2005’s Junebug), who gives the kind of blissful screwball performance that seemed to go out of fashion after "I Love Lucy" left the airwaves.

Mann has done something transformative with Farrell: The Irish actor has never had this much charisma and natural authority in a role, and as he navigates that gray area between Crockett's real identity and his fabricated one, revealing subtle fissures in the character's cocksure facade, he's fascinating to watch.

It’s a classic espionage plot shot through with a typically heady mix of art and literary references: Klee and Velázquez, Bach and Haydn, Bernanos and Musil.

Matthew Barney delivers his masterpiece in Cremaster 3, unquestionably the 35-year-old sculptor-performance artist-filmmaker's most linear, most narratively inclined work to date.

Because Petzold is such a gifted storyteller, with the lean, driving narrative sense of the film noir masters, he also keeps those twists and turns chugging smoothly along, building to a climax so expertly orchestrated that one imagines he started with it in mind and worked the rest of the movie backward from there.

Snowpiercer has been brought to the screen with the kind of solid narrative craftsmanship, carefully drawn characters and — above all — respect for the audience’s intelligence rarely encountered in high-concept genre cinema.

Melanie Laurent brings a sure, sensitive hand to tonally tricky material and draws superb work from relative newcomers Josephine Japy (“Cloclo”) and Lou De Laage (“Jappeloup”).

At every turn, we can sense what’s going on behind Kumiko’s doleful, downcast eyes; Kikuchi pulls us deeply into her world.

One of the year's most imaginative and uniquely exciting pieces of cinema.

Quite possibly the most buoyant, exuberant film ever made on such an unpleasant topic.

Tim Burton has taken a hallowed classic of the modern musical theater, hemmed in the narrative from well over two hours to well under, cast confessed nonsingers in the principal roles, and somehow managed to make something magical out of it