Sean Axmaker

As dazzling as they come, a visual pageant of strange undersea creatures hunting and scavenging and floating across the screen.

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

Imagine Warren Beatty in "Shampoo" by way of a Jewish Rambo.

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.

Scratch could use some of the wit and jagged energy that defined "Hype!"

He (Chan) still can turn a silly little action comedy like this into a high-spirited, butt-kicking good time.

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.

Sivan makes it all quite beautiful with verdant imagery and tastefully melodramatic direction, but at the cost of emotional and social ambiguities, not to mention living, breathing characters.

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

An excellent documentary equal parts extreme sports and social anthropology.

The disingenuous attempt to give the tawdry story some kind of social import only makes the tinny caricatures more insincere, while his erotic display of 15-year-old girls isn't a satire of a sexualized culture, it's just dirty.

It's bloody brilliant.

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

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.

The new parody from the comedy troupe Broken Lizard, takes another swipe at the corpse armed with the same old weapons. This time, rigor mortis has set in.

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.

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

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

A handsome documentary on a brutal subject.

It's more than simply a well-crafted piece of fake history.

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.

The orderly and clean drama is more like theater than history come to life.

Unusual even for Japanese animation.

The rough, exposed emotional candor of Cheung's singing voice carries into her performance.

An airless, mannered mess.

It's a gloriously baroque vision and Leconte believes in his sequin and sawdust fantasy with such unabashed enthusiasm that he makes it work even through its most absurd moments.

Given the possibilities it's not particularly inventive, but it is nice to see a comedy so affectionate with the conventions it spoofs.

At more than two hours, Kippur is something of an ordeal.