Sean Axmaker

The result is rich, lush -- simply exquisite.

Ozon's greatest special effect is holding the camera in tight on the faces of Bruni-Tedeschi (one of the most expressive faces in French cinema) and Freiss.

Secret Ballot is an education hiding in a comedy, a parablelike portrait of the irresistible forces of modernization and democracy meeting the immovable inertia of tradition, culture and power relations written in the blood of the past.

A grueling and deeply affecting human drama.

There's not a smarter, more demanding American film from the past year.

Bujalski's gift for capturing the awkwardness of social relationships and the messy, unkempt details of everyday life is revealing.

The Dardennes's masterful casting and austere style amplify this simple but powerful parable.

Emitai (1971) remains Sembene's masterpiece and his most important achievement. [03 Aug 2001]

Sensitive and vivid response to the tangled issues of teen violence, race and self-esteem.

Achieves its social commentary through passion and poetry.

It's Treadwell's contradictions and controversies that fascinate Herzog the filmmaker, inspiring him to create this enthralling documentary portrait, his best film in years.

Though he's foggy on the specifics, Angelopoulos makes the tides of history felt through each painterly frame.

Oregon-born and Seattle-based director James Longley profiles three lives in his impressionistic portrait of Iraq's Sunni, Shia and Kurd communities.

Director Mohammad Rasoulof has fashioned the ultimate metaphor for a society adrift from its culture.

The most emotionally rich and cinematically thrilling film I've seen all year, a film that pulses with human life in all its terrible and beautiful irrationality.

Romantic, real and as generous as it is vulnerable, the art of conversation has rarely been so acute, honest and revealing.

While Look at Me at times falls into familiar plotting, it never offers false hope or false characters.

The young cast, all nonactors who developed their characters with Cantet and Bégaudeau, brings the weight of full lives to each of the students.

The most sensuous and intimate work of cinema of the past few years, a film that luxuriates in the immediacy of the moment. There is no guilt to the act, only exhilaration, joy and freedom. At least for the moment.

A celebration of the human spirit nothing short of sublime.

51 Birch Street, like the best of the recent wave of personal documentaries, is both a compelling story and an eye-opening bit of social history.

What begins as an introspective odyssey examining the effects of war on the young Israeli soldiers turns into a provocative exposé on the Sabra and Shatila massacre.

In the best Altman manner there are no real heroes and villains, only people trapped by their vanity and ambition and the straitjackets of classism.

Vital and alive. Frustration and malaise rumble through every richly textured frame, but behind it all is a restlessness and a desire for something better.

It's a chilly, lonely introduction to a man who has effectively stepped out of the social world of adult responsibility.

From the first voyeuristic peek into the ruthless world to the haunting, accusatory, unforgettable final image, it's a brilliant, stunning piece of work, perhaps not Assayas' best, but certainly his most fearless and impassioned.

It's unmistakably the work of aging cinema activist Loach, who wears his social-justice heart on his sleeve and pauses the story for lively debates among the characters, especially as Sinn Fein signs a treaty that many think betrays the cause.

Kurosawa leaves much of the explanation enigmatic but he fills the film with an eerie emptiness, where suicides erupt out of nowhere and mankind dissolves in an oily smudge of hopelessness, adrift between life and death.

The language and the landscape is French, but the sensibility and style is unmistakably Eastern European.

This beautifully sculpted poetic naturalism has more in common with the expressive use of words in the great screenplays of '40s and '50s than with modern movies.

The style is pure Hou: richly textured atmosphere, tiptoeing camerawork and long, languorous takes of scenes full of privileged moments of human activity.

The total effect is mesmerizing, an eye-opening tour of modern Beijing culture in a journey of rebellion, retreat into oblivion and return.

Densely layered, demanding and beautiful, Ruiz has found the perfect venue for his passions and created the most cinematically breathtaking film of the new millennium.

Strong, evocative storytelling pared to the bone and braced with a sensibility perfectly matched to the material.

The familiar majesty of the Statue of Liberty and the New York skyline is replaced with anticipation and imagination. The sense of hope and wonder is the greater for it, and the sense of promise glows from the screen.

As empowering and triumphant a film as you'll see this or any year.

Some may find it slow. I found it utterly spellbinding.

Isn't about a May-December romance or a brief encounter in a faraway place. It's about being alone in a crowd and the power of unexpected friendships.

There may be no more sensual director in the world today than Hong Kong's Wong Kar-Wai.

In today's cynical cinematic climate, there's something beautiful in Miller's simple poetic justice.

Devastating, uncompromising and riveting.

Desplechin fearlessly dives into raw, bitter revelations and surfaces with hope as our heroes try again to get it right.

Beautiful, elevating and achingly sad.

It's a dissection of how the media found and fed and nurtured the story in their insatiable need for content to fill their news hours and talk shows, how it just as quickly turned on them and transformed the story from celebration to vilification, and how the public turned right along with them.

Giordana's redemptive vision provides a sense of discovery and a well of hope in the most devastating of troubles, and beautiful surprises in love, friendship and family.

A vivid, thoughtful, unapologetically raw coming-of-age tale full of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll.

Fascinating memoir of coming of age in Iran.

It's the most intense, unpredictable and thrilling cinematic experience I've had the pleasure to squirm through in ages.

True to the characters and their conflicts, the resolution is neither neat nor expected. True to Demme, it's honest and generous and very human.

A hauntingly poetic triumph.

Confronts the line between the celebration and the exploitation of innocence with an uneasy tension that is discomforting at best.

A sly, smart and very funny caricature of corporate politics and image culture.

Makhmalbaf's astounding and haunting imagery tells a story of devastation, desperation and poverty.

Tommy Lee Jones steps behind the camera to direct himself in the most impressive directorial debut the American cinema has seen in some time, a contemporary western both rough and poetic, laconic and passionate.

It's a rich work, lush and lovely and bustling with activity but paced at a contemplative stroll, like a time lapse recording in first gear.

Like the schoolkids in this adventure, from the opening images to the closing credits, I do, I do, I do believe in fairy tales.

It's a tender, tough, uncompromising film, photographed with a disarming directness and seeming simplicity that looks almost naked next to the dramatic constructions of most films. It just makes her precariousness all the more real.

For all the ephemeral pleasure of the company of old friends, there is a chasm between them and the dynamics shift from moment to moment. The beauty of the film is how director Kelly Reichardt brilliantly captures those moments with lucid simplicity.

A masterpiece.

Hou's first film made outside of Asia is his most emotionally turbulent, yet he remains, like the balloon, outside looking in, a compassionate but distant observer capturing it all with a graceful restraint and floating beauty that ultimately carried me away with it.

This bracing portrait of a woman who painfully accepts her responsibility as a citizen is a revelation.

Morris challenges us to understand what the pictures show and what they don't show, and to see them in context. And he confronts us with the most important question surrounding them: Do they reveal a crime, an aberration in the system or standard operating procedure?

The plot is often bewilderingly complex and the dense layers of subterfuge hard to follow, but by the climax the fairy tale has been twisted into a fascist fable of realpolitik mercenary opportunism.

There are two kinds of people, my friend. Those who love Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and those who resist the machismo and gallows humor of what is arguably the definitive spaghetti western.

Think of easy jazz or soft soul, with Rudolph's cinematic improvisations soaring and circling the melody while adding quirky variations.

A classic fairy tale with a contemporary sensibility and a spooky horror under the candy-house fantasy.

What's most devastating in Capturing the Friedmans is how Jarecki puts the sureness of justice into doubt as he shows Truth (with a capital T) at the mercy of perspective and perception, context and emotion.

Aoyama's monochrome images are filled with a simple shadowy beauty and his scenes are rich in tender sensitivity and empathy.

When Riyadh's family jokes about the purple stain that marks them as resistance targets after they vote, the black humor speaks volumes about them as individuals, as Sunnis and as Iraqis with a dream of a better way.

Inspiring without sinking into sentimentality or cliche, Hearts of Atlantis is intelligent, heartfelt and genuine, a rare story of childhood for adults.

Like the folk tales from centuries past, Pan's Labyrinth is a dark odyssey with nightmarish visions and cruel threats, but coming through the sacrifice and suffering is the childlike belief in magic and imagination that for Del Toro represents the hope and optimism of a happily ever after in this cruel world.

With The Dark Knight, the cinematic superhero spectacle comes closest to becoming modern myth, a pulp tragedy with costumed players and elevated stakes and terrible sacrifices. It's the new gold standard for superhero noir.

The most imaginative and delightful computer-animated movie of recent years outside of the Pixar brand, Monster House is a Halloween ghost story by way of monster-movie adventure.

The story plays out in the sensuous textures and hypnotic rhythms as the rebellious youth Torres embodies eases into a serenity and acceptance that Montenegro brings so gently to her performance.

It's almost too devastating for words, yet never less than compelling and heartbreakingly affecting.

It's great to see action stars cast for their moves -- their grace in motion is thrilling -- but they also have the charisma to pull off the characters.

It's a bracing reminder that before Hitler took power, it was handed to him. The lesson resonates long after the credits roll.

There's no doubt that Kiarostami is giving us a lesson in social politics, but the education lies in the mosaic pieced together from conversations and situations.

A drama that embraces the ambiguities and contradictions of family ties and human nature in all its irrational glory.

Pitt won the Best Actor award at Venice for his Jesse...Yet it's Affleck who impresses most as the wary, skittish Bob.

The Divine Intervention of the title lies somewhere between hope and fantasy. In a world in which Santa Claus is assaulted in Nazareth, what do you have left?

A deliciously vivid adventure fantasy.

When it was released in the United States more than 30 years ago, its distributor hacked away 40 minutes of its precise structure. This rerelease restores every meticulous second of Melville's cinematic fantasy.

Energetic and inventive, it's a satirical, smart, grown-up thriller.

A bare outline of the plot reads like a space-adventure thriller with end-of-the-world stakes and a hint of celestial spirituality, and the haunted spaceship twist in the third act is pure B-movie madness.

He (LaBute) pulls the farce and the violence and the fantasies together with a deft touch and a sweetness rare in American films -- especially his.

Cements director's place as mob-movie master.

Yimou plays his images like a visual symphony, and turns a potential costume pageant into an exhilarating national myth.

The stripped-down dramatic constructs, austere imagery and abstract characters are equal parts poetry and politics, obvious at times but evocative and heartfelt.

The sudden turns of temperament are a treat after the smart-ass attitude of American horror flicks, and the film is full of minor surprises, squirming in unexpected directions without leaving the conventions behind.

In Wonderland, Winterbottom has found a script worthy of his passion.

Mehta's feisty, featherweight romantic comedy makes the case that even the most flamboyant cinematic conventions are as universal as they are exotic, especially when they conspire to produce that glow of happily ever after.

A film more textural than narrative, it's for viewers willing to lose themselves in a truly sensual jungle experience.

It's a volatile subject and Abu-Assad's thoughtful thriller stokes the debate.

Ultimately the ballet performances, and notably the work of Stiefel, a star with American Ballet Theatre, are the only moments that deserve center stage.

Despite the raw gut-punch of its direction, its power lies in compassion, not sensationalism.

It's a big enough film to hold all the contradictions. Green has an ego and a gift for stealing the spotlight with a wink and a grin. Yet his respect for the kids is genuine.

Faced with an artist defined more by his lyrics than his life story, Haynes delivers a song-cycle of a movie: vivid, exaggerated, contradictory impressions of a man who confounds a culture still looking to define him.