Sean Axmaker

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

Much of the film is oddly ambiguous, as if Tran used it to explore conflicts of tradition and modernity and never came up with any answers.

A slick, smart-alecky rat-a-tat crime comedy.

It's the warmth and resolve and humility of the young men that keeps us going. It may be more ennobling than introspective, but these three earn their nobility.

There are no surprises in this match, but director Fumihiko Sori makes the games visually thrilling.

Bright, bouncy, kooky and comically tone deaf, CJ7 is the most bizarre kids movie I've ever seen.

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.

Has moments of inspiration, but the scattershot spoofing never achieves enough momentum to get this flight airborne.

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.

It's more admirable than enjoyable, beautifully crafted and artfully unpleasant.

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

Beck wants to dazzle the audience. I'd settle for a story.

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

It's a romantic fantasy of the gangster brotherhood and their doomed lives, executed with Takeshi's unique mix of stoic ruthlessness and giddy energy.

Dark farce, a four-handed game of sexual trumps.

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

Director Bill Duke may believe the message but he never invests himself in the characters or their story, which becomes an illustrated lesson with reflective interludes and comic relief.

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.

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.

The film's greatest triumph, at least on a technical level, is the amazing texture of the water, which has never looked so dramatic or convincing in an animated film.

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

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

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

Does its job colorfully and entertainingly, as long as you don't lean too hard on such niggling details as logic, legality and the laws of physics.

Breiman brings nothing new or insightful or even all that clever, for that matter, to the familiar questions of love and sex.

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

Inkheart feels a little confused in its tone and direction, but only a little, and I appreciate the way it both celebrates the power of literature and reminds us that stories have a life beyond the page, even if they are only in our hearts and minds.

Though it's rarely dull, first-time feature director Yasuo Inoue has a better eye for intriguing and unusual imagery than dramatic staging, and he illustrates his points long before he runs out of un-endings.