Sean Axmaker

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.