Shawn Levy

It's a dark, brooding, moody film that follows a grim narrative to a logical inevitability and is nonetheless fully infused with a spirit of humanity.

It's the type of film that may be forgiven its imperfections when they are compared with the vastness of its accomplishments.

A fascinating and frustrating film in turns, created out of scorching passions and built around a fascinating performance but rambling and choppy in the telling. It can overwhelm you and puzzle and repel you, sometimes within moments.

Stunning in its violence and fascinating in its ironbound focus.

One of the most alluring and bizarre shapes that Godard's itchy search for truth and meaning took in those heady long-ago days. In comparison, most Hollywood movies are like tiddlywinks.

A stultifying bore.

Beautiful, poetic, mournful, at once rich and spare, Brokeback Mountain takes a daring conceit and creates of it an overwhelming work of art that should speak to anyone capable of love.

With all this raw material, it's a puzzlement and an annoyance that Parker feels so obligated to interpose fantastic elements and comic action sequences and other tacky touches. As a result, while this "Earnest" is lively fun, it never quite feels sufficiently important.

Swell when it purrs, when the three top stars are in full form, but it spits and hisses and screeches too often to take full hold.

Because make no mistake: The Dark Knight is many things, some of them deliriously fun, some of them deeply impressive, and some of them puzzling and frustrating. But most of all it is dark.

A work of incompleteness, might-have-beens and moral subtleties befitting a filmmaker named Gray.

Working toward its refreshingly light but utterly apt ending, the film teems with insights into the human condition revealed by an unusually smart script and a wonderfully committed cast. It's a truly fine work.

A film of curiosities and asides, it deliberately eschews plot in favor of character quirk, which is fine in theory and even commendable. But the quirks are lame, the ultimate conflation of story lines is clumsy.

The tension between the comely and comforting manner of the film and its undecided and beguiling content is, arguably, Haneke’s signature touch.

It's a movie, finally, that feels longer than its exquisitely brief source material, which is a crime of sorts.

A nearly perfect piffle in an age when hardly any movie seems to know how to play the light notes well.

A sweet and wise little film.

As slapstick, as satire, as sheer gut-busting comedy, Borat is top notch.

Isn't a particularly good movie if what interests you is the art of film -- cinematography, editing, screenwriting, staging, little things like that. But if you're chiefly interested in turning off the upstairs lights and relaxing with a few laughs, you could do a lot worse.

There's so much to impress and delight you that the time flies by.

As it unwinds, What Lies becomes both masterful and preposterous.

It's raw, visceral stuff that precious few movies are capable of equaling.

A grueling film in both technique and subject matter.

An entertaining and fascinating film.

It’s a story that begins in an ancient riddle and ends, perfectly, in the rumble of an oncoming storm. It’s about life, A Serious Man is, and it’s as close, I think, as any American narrative movie of recent vintage has come to touching on the uncanniness of it.

Fiercely acted but made with indifferent craft and no palpable feel for its subject matter, Trucker takes you on a ride from intrigue to indifference.

Alas, Robbins is far more interesting than Cruise, and you wonder what the film would have been like if their roles were reversed -- if Robbins were the loser in search of redemption and Cruise the agitated freak in the basement.

It's not a question of agreeing or disagreeing with this film's point of view to say that it isn't as often convincing as it is convinced.