Sean Axmaker

A grueling and deeply affecting human drama.

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

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

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

A masterpiece.

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

Burger is so respectful of the trio that he never gets under their skin. Apart from the generosity of strangers who pay tribute to the soldiers with little acts of kindness, you get the same generic observations of any road movie.

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

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

The faces of its inarticulate characters tell the story, and Majidi has put some amazing faces on the screen.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Ball's snide humor and cynical arrogance undercut his message at every turn.

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.

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.

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.

First-time director Billie Woodruff, a music video veteran, busts his moves in the dance scenes while the movie throbs to the beat of the wall-to-wall soundtrack.

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.

Fascinating memoir of coming of age in Iran.

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 film of minor pleasures.

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.

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

Oliviera's mastery is a joy to experience and his bittersweet comic touch adds a loving absurdity to what could have turned maudlin or morose.

It's bright, colorful and udder-ly unmemorable.

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

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

Beautiful, elevating and achingly sad.

What it lacks is an intensity, a passion at the center...It is, nonetheless, a lovely and often powerful film.

It's all about waste and destruction, and not just the toxic waste -- illegally dumped in landfills -- that is poisoning the farmland and the aquifers in the region.

Neither clever nor heartwarming, Four Christmases is the coal in the stocking of holiday movies.

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

Ingeniously engineered, self-consciously clever and directed with snazzy style, it's played as a violent black comedy with often-gruesome punch lines.

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.

Devastating, uncompromising and riveting.

A hauntingly poetic triumph.

A celebration of the human spirit nothing short of sublime.

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.

It's more ambitious and passionate than thoughtful. Singleton is better at criticizing than understanding, and he leaves too many characters lacking a legitimate voice.

Rock Star roars to life with a promise of something inspired and inventive whenever Wahlberg leaps onstage. Offstage, however, even he can't breathe life into this same old song.

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

It's as much conceptual art as dispassionate survey of the bloodless assembly line nature of the modern food industry, all process and work, automation and repetition.

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

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.

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

Under Schnabel's direction, it becomes stilted and static, if not simplistic.

I'd like to think it's all a joke, that far from a dream this is actually Linklater's idea of a nightmare.

The humorless and self-important execution attempts an operatic scale but only succeeds in sinking the remnants of the story's integrity. By the time it makes landfall, this incoherent production has blown itself out.

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

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

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

The texture and intensity of the odyssey makes it spellbinding.

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 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.

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

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.

Sautet lets the film wander from Ventura's desperate odyssey, but when the irresistibly charming young Jean-Paul Belmondo enters the picture as an unflaggingly loyal ally, his wandering is forgiven.

It lacks history, background and cultural roots, but it's undeniably infectious.

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.

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's a twisted but beautiful love letter to a city, not factually correct but emotionally true.

It's hard to believe that five different writers took credit for this feeble story and script. Who says failure is an orphan?

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.

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.

Achieves its social commentary through passion and poetry.

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

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

Has the modesty of a savvy, smart drive-in movie with Hollywood studio polish and a movie buff's loving care.

At once an elegy for the communal experience of cinema-going and another quintessentially Tsai portrait of loneliness and isolation.

The film half-heartedly paints their actions as rebel-chic heroism even when it has all the integrity of tomcats spraying outside their yards, and it ends up just as confused as the characters.

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.

Too hip to play it straight and too cool to resort to an actual story, Hartley turns the whole rambling spy game into a puzzle box where every certainty is thrown into doubt, every character has a hidden motive, and every clue is contradicted.

It's a pleasure to see mature portraits of adult characters who put their vulnerabilities on the line. I enjoyed my time in the company of these strangers.

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

Cements director's place as mob-movie master.

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

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

Its one saving grace is Godzilla himself, the James Bond of giant monsters.

The restraint of both director and actor makes this steely gangster drama reverberate long after it ends. This kind of mystery is rare in a film culture that demands answers before the credits roll.

Herman's intentions are admirable, but his results are unsettling in the worst ways.

The script is as sloppy as Song's unkempt cop, sprinkled with intriguing ideas and imaginative details that, like the investigation, simply get lost in blind alleys.

Venus is the second film from director Roger Michell and writer Hanif Kureishi to explore the sexual lives of folk that the movies treat as sexless -- the elderly. But where "The Mother" was a cold film of sexual greed and emotional pettiness, this robust yet delicate comic drama finds a kind of dignity in the old lothario whose vital life force struggles against a failing body.

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

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.

Linklater powers the film with the energy and attitude and beat of his soundtrack.

Movie magic is only as powerful as the imagination that casts it. Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki's imagination is the most creative in animated filmmaking.

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

It's a little long and dissipates some of its power in an unfocused subplot, but the skewed sensibility of the film is both innocent and feral and offers a smart and satisfying reworking to the familiar genre. An American remake is already in the works.

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.

Director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo creates the same world of devils and innocents that grounds so much of Spain's modern, seeped-in-Satanic-evil horror, recast in a secular cinematic vocabulary.

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.

Steel and Morris are simply a couple of ordinary citizens who stand up for their ideals and their rights in the face of intimidation. Which is what makes this underdog story matter.