Sean Axmaker

Played by Lucy Russell with a defiant, unapologetic embrace of aristocratic privilege, Grace is a maddening yet fascinating character.

This collision of skate punk and pop-culture archaeology is the most entertaining slice of cultural history I've seen in years.

Even if you don't like the stories, the filmmakers seem incapable of finding a corner of Paris that is not photogenic.

Perhaps the most ingeniously imaginative element in Son of Rambow, a film exploding with imagination (some of it scrawled directly over the film in animated expressions of Will's private world), is its very conceit.

There's a real gee-whiz kick to the fantasy of being the brainiest kid on the planet, and a down-to-earth quality to Jimmy and his not-so-bright, but ever-so-stalwart best buddies.

Explores cloudy, discomforting realities of the Holocaust not usually addressed in such films.

He's (Carrey) a marvelous Grinch in this spirited, bustling and mostly faithful spin on Seuss.

Deftly weaves history, film and memory into an imaginative meditation on why the movies become a part of our lives.

In the world of comic-book movies, American Splendor is the real deal, the warts-and-all adventures of the most unlikely hero on the comic stands.

A beautiful and compassionate work, at once stark, sensory and spiritually grasping, that challenges us to forgive even the most monstrous sins.

A witty little comic gem with a heart and a soul.

Winterbottom's compassion transforms In This World from a political statement into an eloquent and involving human drama.

What gives the story resonance is the tenderness and sacrifice and even innocence del Toro reveals amid the savagery.

Joaquin Phoenix is as good as he has ever been in James Gray's Two Lovers, a discomfortingly honest drama about the frustrations of love and desire.

Long for an animated feature and too demanding for very young children, but it's also filled with delights.

Shooting with a respectful remove that captures an intimacy by sheer doggedness, Finkiel creates a rich atmosphere by simply looking, listening and peering past the surfaces.

A charmer of a film and a delightful piece of storytelling.

Beautifully observed tale of high-school kids in the projects outside Paris.

Surprise of surprises, it's a blast.

A delight, a vigorous, vibrant romantic comedy that mines emotional desperation and frustration for all its comic potential, but never at the expense of its temperamental heroine.

There's nothing messy or unkempt about the beautifully, quietly heartbreaking story of unconditional love and emotional sacrifice.

It makes for one of the best and most haunting of the recent Asian horror films.

It becomes a dreamy study in stillness broken by suicide fantasies, flashbacks, and the hired killers, but even the violence has a meditative even melancholy quality to it, as if it's all been processed through the eyes of its Zen hero.

Hot Fuzz is something all too rare in movie comedies: a story rather than a string of disjointed skits, with hearty characters behind its caricatures.

It's messy and unsettled, but Bellocchio's distaste for the cynicism and mendacity is potent and sincere.

A rousing celebration of a genuine people's hero and a timely reminder that a free press is the greatest weapon in the arsenal of democracy and freedom.

The impressive marriage of CGI backgrounds and traditional hand-drawn characters gives Oshii more tools to sculpt his vision in color and light.

The three stars communicate the fears and dreams and frustrations of teenage girls with subtlety, sensitivity and dignity.

Michell captures the awkwardness of real-world behavior with gentle, unforced humor.

A sports empowerment fantasy of the best kind.

It's smart, instructive political cinema that tackles complex issues of the globalization with practical examples and vivid images and presents its effects in immediate human terms.

Doyle's handheld camerawork is intimate and curious and his hazy colors radiate off the screen.

Think of this corrective to Kipling as "The Longest Yard" meets "The Seven Samurai" with cricket bats, choreographed dance numbers, romantic triangles and a rousing call to solidarity.

It's filled to overflowing with mischievous gags for kids and adults alike, tickling the periphery of the story and crammed into every frame with playful abandon. It gives potty humor a good name.

Danny Aiello is right at home as owner Louis, a paternal Italian father to all but his own son, reigning over the throng from his corner table like a benevolent lord and maybe underworld gangster.

Gunnarsson masterfully weaves these strands into a bold, multilayered tapestry surrounding a powerful story.

It could be more involving, but it's funny enough that you won't care.

Mühe's performance is brilliant, communicating more turmoil and pain with the droop of a lip and a flicker of the eye across an otherwise intently passive face than all the emotional storms of the cast.

Captures the overwhelming and uncontrollable emotional assault of loving and living through captured moments and sensuous images.

It's the warmest, most generous portrait of American hospitality you've seen from a European movie in some time.

Despite the cat-and-mouse games between cop and criminal, this is less a battle of wills than one man's battle for his own soul. Nolan bravely treads where few American films dare to delve -- into the world of ambivalence and ambiguity -- and emerges with a compelling portrait.

One of the most hilarious and engaging films from producer Judd Apatow's often inconsistent comedy factory, thanks to inspired dialogue, dynamite chemistry between Rogen and Franco and perfectly pitched stoner gags (undoubtedly the result of copious research).

An honorable and often enticing piece of personal filmmaking.

While Margot's casual cruelty and the scenes of squirmy discomfort are sometimes painful to watch, the rendering of this disastrous family reunion is seriously, savagely droll.

An inspirational documentary that treats thinkers (so often the villains of our entertainments) as heroes.

Hammer filmed on location with local nonactors. Their lack of polish is evident -- Smith's inexpressiveness, though part of his character, is simply blank at times -- but their conviction can be just as powerful.

It's not really scary, but it reaches a level of insanity so unhinged and dispassionately wretched that it defies description. Inspired, but not for all tastes.

The social commentary isn't subtle, but Romero delivers the goods so effectively that many won't even notice.

Deliciously dark tale of insidious seduction.

Fumbling characters find that survival is not a matter of economics alone, it's also a matter of hope.

The restrained drama both punctures the mythic ideal of the samurai culture (trained as fighters, they mostly serve as clan bureaucrats) and spins a romantic portrait of one man who values principle over protocol despite the cost to his reputation.

The filmmakers piece it together with almost clockwork perfection and deliver it with masterful misdirection, creating the most ingenious, eccentric and brazenly jaundiced psycho-thriller to come along in years.

Underworld opera of the bravura kind, this is driven, like most Hong Kong action, more by emotion than logic.

The song may be somewhat familiar, but Sach gets understated performances from his entire cast and finds interesting harmonies as they play out their clashing duets.

Varda sees herself as a gleaner as she searches for the people and cultural activities missed by the rest of the media.

Fresh, vibrant and vital, this interpretation reminds us why Shakespeare is timeless.

Sweet, sexy, and unexpectedly enchanting, Yana's Friends is the little feel-good comedy that could.

The ironies and contradictions that give the first half a dark humor give way to gravity and respect as soldiers are killed (off camera).

Anderson is a hopeless romantic in a cynical world, and for a brief moment he makes the case that true love is the only power that can crack time and space.

The funniest thing I've seen this summer.

It's a fantasy of a crime epic, to be sure, but it's a glorious fantasy in which the unspoken bonds of brotherhood bathe every shootout and sacrifice in the light of myth.

Ceylan has an unerring gift for camera placement, and his slow, measured scenes can be as hypnotic as they are lovely -- at times, too much so, with the characters constrained by his poetic perfection.

Both blunt and complex, Sauter's illustration of economic Darwinism at its most primal and unforgiving is a harrowing vision of human life as collateral damage in the modern global economy.

It is passionate and angry and rousing where you might expect it to become numbing and depressing.

This is no Disney fable and the apocalyptic vision isn't for everyone, but science-fiction fans and adventurous filmgoers will find this ingenious explosion of retro-cyberpunk a compelling dystopian vision with a gleam of hope.

These are mortal souls and unglamorous bodies and Ferran explores their affair in its earthy, physical and fleshy reality.

Lin energizes the grungy palette with stylistic zing, a hopped-up pace and understated humor. His cast carves out vivid characters and the open-ended aftermath takes stock of the moral scarring without moralizing.

A mix of the poetic and the polemic, the film is oddly abstract and untethered.

Yedaya is respectful and sensitive of everyone in Or's life and creates a beautiful, complex and rich relationship between mother and daughter, loving and protective of each other, but not of themselves.

There's plenty of ammunition here for liberal conspiracy theorists, which surely will limit the audience to those already in Jarecki's political camp. Which is too bad, for it is a sobering history lesson as well as a political polemic on foreign policy and the growth of war into America's biggest business.

It's all about the sheer visceral rush of mega action.

A punch in the stomach of a movie. It is as ugly as it is beautiful, as full of peaks as of lows. It's a character-driven movie about people on an emotional edge who are ridding themselves of the things that can no longer work without inflicting damage.

The sensuality is never salacious, merely curious, and the message is empowering ... at least within the confines of the insular community.

It's both innocent and bizarre, with a mischievous sense of fantasy marked by simple but striking cinematic magic.

Cruise is a man whose youthful cockiness has aged into self-assurance and cool confidence. It's a masterstroke of casting. The dynamism of Collateral, however, comes from Jamie Foxx.

The entire film is shot in split screen. Each of the unnamed characters is photographed separately in their own slice of space, the images sutured together with a purposeful imperfection, with occasional overlap and rare moments of union. It gives them the appearance of dancing around one another, almost touching but never getting past the years of emotional scar tissue, even as they work their way to her hotel room.

The most pure of Mamet's works to come to the screen.

Singer deftly crafts a sleek, unusually tight film that balances comic-book adventure, pulp opera and the fear of being different.

An engaging and generous profile of the fascinating folks who have chosen to live at the end of the world.

It's all about Guevara's education as a revolutionary and his development as a leader in the jungles and in battle.

Scott owns the film from scene one.

The poetic justice strains the verisimilitude of a film otherwise grounded in a tough reality, but there is a guilty satisfaction to it all.

Bruckner's restrained performance reveals a girl drowning in her own lack of self-esteem. When she finally comes up for air, she shatters the surface with a force that, in the hands of a less thoughtful director, could send her spinning down the melodramatic road to ruin.

Delivers the expected adrenaline-driven thrills with a fresh eye and a refreshing attitude.

Cronenberg's most disciplined exploration yet of that shadowy realm: the world refracted through the prism of a schizophrenic mind.

The camera drinks in the angles, curves and textures, and the way it all shapes the light as if it's yet another of Gehry's non-traditional materials, and Pollack creates his own video sketchbook of Gehry impressions.

In the face of intolerance, Two Family House lovingly celebrates the triumph of love and acceptance over prejudice.

It's bloody brilliant.

You don't have to be a teenager to appreciate the raunchy humor and the uninhibited overkill of Seth's porn-obsessed chatter, though it probably helps to be a guy.

Looks simultaneously ahead of its time and delightfully quaint, a simple romantic comedy that revels in the dreamy artifice of a meticulously re-created fantasy Las Vegas.

Pleasantly modest, endearingly etched and briskly set to a pounding beat.

A playfully offbeat, willfully wide-eyed tale of lonely, inarticulate people looking for connection in a disconnected world.

An alternately angry and sad portrait, passionate in its presentation and moving in its portrayal of individuals who sacrifice their love for the tenets of their religion.

What it lacks in melodramatic punch it makes up for in unexpected shadings in the characters, predator and victim alike.

Ararat is less about history than the necessity of dialogue and debate, and the devastating effects of stifling dialogue.

Mamet is more respectful than exciting as an action director, but his fascination with how things work, be it the mechanics of designing and promoting a big pay-per-view event or battling a world-class Jiu-jitsu master, makes it all quite mesmerizing.

It has a tendency to overextend its outrageous arias, but this pop-art confection both spoofs and celebrates the crazy conventions of movie melodramas and genre cinema with pure affection.

Jia's compassion for the drifting souls struggling to create a life for themselves in such a transitory existence makes the metaphor resonant.