Stephen Holden

Combines pieces of an extended interview with this Canadian singer-songwriter, poet and author, now 71, with a tribute concert organized by Hal Willner at the Sydney Opera House in January 2005.

There is more raw vitality pumping through Romance & Cigarettes, John Turturro’s passionate ode to the sensual pulse of life in a working-class neighborhood of Queens, than in a dozen perky high school musicals. This is a movie in which a dirty mind is a good thing. Call it “The Singing Id.” Prudes, be forewarned.

A cinematic ballad of such seamless construction and exquisite tonal balance it transcends most of the pitfalls of movies that aspire to a classic, lyric simplicity.

It is impossible not to be fired up by Kurt Kuenne's incendiary cri de coeur, Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father.

Intimate, compelling film.

It infuses a too-familiar story with so much heart that you surrender to its charm and forgive it for being unabashedly formulaic.

In the knockabout world of animated movies, Piglet's Big Movie is an oasis of gentleness and wit.

For all its softening, The Good Lie, like “Monsieur Lazhar,” has a core of decency, humanity and good will that feels authentic. You won’t curse yourself for occasionally tearing up.

The movie's sense of emotional claustrophobia is underscored by a complete lack of interest in Middle Eastern politics, or in anything outside the troubled family unit.

A moving documentary that approaches the Holocaust from a fresh, intimate perspective.

As this movie, directed by Isabel Coixet, tracks the deepening friendship between people from different cultures and backgrounds, it acquires an unforced metaphorical resonance.

Because movies have become so invested in the unleashing of violent emotion and the escalation of hostility, that expressions of restraint, reconciliation and forgiveness can easily be read as corny cop-outs. Cry, the Beloved Country is not corny, and it doesn't cop out.

It places Basquiat's art in a cultural context with an enthusiasm and zest that make the many pictures shown come blazingly alive.

Pola X has enough fireworks to keep you in your seat. When it's over, you'll know you've had an experience.

The quiet humanity of the performances infuses the movie with a truthfulness that outweighs its flaws.

Famuyiwa's dialogue is easygoing and witty, and the warmhearted comic performances mesh beautifully.

There is not a decent (or even half-decent) male character to be found in Chaos, a gripping feminist fable with a savage comic edge.

With all its quirks, Gerry seeps into your pores like the wind-whipped sand that stings the faces of these disoriented hikers.

Mr. Paradot’s performance is so viscerally intense that there is no escaping its force.

Honey, the impressive debut feature by Ms. Golino, sustains a contemplative mood with undersaturated cinematography that evokes the world as perceived through a light mist.

The integrity of the film, whose directorial team has collaborated on numerous Belgian documentaries, extends to its sad final moments, in which nothing is left neat and tidy.

Jesse Wigutow's screenplay is one of those marvels of economy, idiomatic facility and well-chosen detail that knows exactly when to cut away from a scene without grinding it into your face.

Although Igby has its share of glitches and tonal inconsistencies, it packs an emotional wallop similar to that of another cultural golden oldie as beloved in its way as "The Catcher in the Rye": "The Graduate."

Ms. Rabe’s beautifully balanced performance reminds you that people never really grow up.

In portraying this threesome, Ethan Hawke, Robert Sean Leonard and Uma Thurman give the most psychologically acute performances of their film careers.

For all its harsh allusions to slavery and hardship, the film is an extended, wildly lyrical meditation on the power of African cultural iconography and the spiritual resilience of the generations of women who have been its custodians.

The movie uses the talent show Afghan Star as a prism through which to examine the fragmented tribal culture of Afghanistan as reflected in the backgrounds of four finalists (two of them women) and the public responses to their performances.

In its harshly realistic scenes... it stirs your blood.

Run & Jump is as real and messy as life itself.

A sleek, whooshingly entertaining update of the vintage television series.

The evenness of its emotional pitch almost incidentally helps the film become an unusually deep exploration of sports, machismo and the competitive spirit.

If this handsome, faithful, intelligent screen adaptation of the novel doesn't leave you devastated, its ominous sense of a rarefied moral and aesthetic world bending before the accelerating streetcar of history will leave you with a mournful sense of loss.

This gripping true story, directed in a cool, semi-documentary style by the German filmmaker Marc Rothemund from a screenplay by Fred Breinersdorfer, challenges you to gauge your own courage and strength of character should you find yourself in similar circumstances.

May be the first movie about a painter to transcend the gushy clichés found in movies that try to unravel the mysteries of artistic creation.

The man who emerges is a likable, unpretentious musical enthusiast and roll-up-your-sleeves problem-solver who apparently led a charmed life.

Definitive and engrossing documentary.

This warm, robust movie ultimately transcends the formulas with which it flirts to become a far more subtle and honest result than a machine-tooled tear-jerker like “The Theory of Everything.” When the film doesn’t try to build up the usual suspense found in movies about competition, you sigh with relief.

If there were more experimental films as entertaining as The Decay of Fiction, Pat O’Neill's luminous Hollywood ghost story, the notion of a thriving avant-garde cinema might not be so intimidating to the moviegoing public.

A skillful assemblage of newsreel clips, cartoons ridiculing the American interlopers, television commercials and interviews with power officials and ordinary Georgians. It gives new and darker meaning to that comfy adage "We're all connected."

Because the waves get progressively higher in Riding Giants, Stacy Peralta's historical surfing documentary, some of that thrill is sustained throughout this overlong but entertaining movie.

The narrowness of its perspective and its relatively brief 82-minute length disappoint. Yet Don’t Call Me Son still manages to be a fascinating, sympathetic portrait of a lost boy abruptly thrown to the wolves.

The movie maintains a refreshingly light touch in spinning a fable about individualism and conformity.

Whether or not you accept the tenets of Christianity, Last Days in the Desert, Rodrigo García’s austere depiction of the temptations of Christ, offers a quietly compelling portrait of the human side of Jesus.

Despite its ultimate lack of intellectual substance, Me and Isaac Newton is still inspiring. All seven of its subjects are fascinating, and most are extremely likable. Mr. Apted has done them all a huge favor.

This warm-blooded paean to globalization is just enough in touch with reality to keep your eyes from rolling. For Chinese Puzzle genuinely likes people. It overlooks the faults and misbehavior of its eccentric characters to express a lighthearted optimism that doesn’t feel forced or manipulative. It is in love with life.

A singularly depressing film. In the face of such unrelieved, grinding poverty, hope fades.

The voice casting and the visual representations of the characters the boy encounters on his journeys are superb.

Invites you to contemplate the symbolic vibration of every hue in its teeming, overcrowded canvas.

Skarsgard and Headey deliver perfectly meshed lead performances in a small, beautifully acted film that will make you squirm.

That it succeeds in being both stimulating and funny is a testament to the talent and open-heartedness of Ms. Dunye, who wrote and directed the movie and is its star.

It's about individuals, not about sensations. If the characters' backgrounds are not examined in detail, the movie still conveys an intimate sense of who they are and their emotional connections.

The vision of nature being lovingly tended in Rosie Stapel’s documentary, Portrait of a Garden, is remarkably evocative.

Tom DiCillo’s angry comedy Delirious subjects modern celebrity culture to a microscopic examination that shows the toxic virus of fame squirming and multiplying under its lens.

In their intensity, the actors’ incisive, impeccably coordinated performances are pitched slightly above normal conversation but not so much that “What’s in a Name?” shatters credibility.

An unblinking portrait of a complicated, solitary gay man who has outlived his working years.

Natalia Almada's eloquent documentary portrait of a sprawling graveyard in Culiacán, Mexico, in the northwestern state of Sinaloa. The rapidly expanding cemetery has become the burial ground of choice for the country's slain drug lords.

The movie rides on Ms. Abbass's serenely confident performance. As Lilia metamorphoses from a shy housebound widow into a woman calmly rejoicing in her body and her sexuality, Ms. Abbass marks her character's every blush and hesitation in the process of letting go with a winning delicacy and sweetness.

The players in this mouth-watering Gallic soufflé are so attractive, well mannered and comfortably grounded in the bourgeois world that you needn’t fear for their well-being, minor heartaches notwithstanding.

Reconfirms the filmmaker's talent as an acutely observant chronicler of upscale bohemian subcultures.

A small, finely wrought drama.

Breathe conveys an uncanny insight into the psychology of late adolescence, when lingering childhood fantasies can combust with burgeoning adult sexuality in a swirl of uncontrollable feelings.

I Am Divine doesn’t dwell on Milstead’s growing pains. It is an aggressively upbeat show-business success story that focuses on his self-reinvention.

The Witnesses may frustrate those who prefer movies that tell clear-cut stories in which hard lessons are learned. But in the director’s farsighted vision of life, the ground under our feet is always shifting. As time pulls us forward, the shocks of the past are absorbed and the pain recedes. In its light-handed way, The Witnesses is profound.

The movie is beautifully acted, and the chemistry between Ms. Devos, who is 49 (her character is 43), and Mr. Byrne, 63, is heated in a sadder-but-wiser, grown-up way.

This deliciously nasty French deconstruction of male pecking orders, directed by Bernard Rapp, should send a pleasant shiver down the spine of anyone who has ever obsessed about wanting to please a devious and manipulative boss.

In its dry and forceful way, it delivers the same message as Jiri Menzel's "Closely Watched Trains" and Danis Tanovic's "No Man's Land." While acknowledging that war is hell, it goes further to suggest it is ludicrous.

A film that delights by confounding expectations.

It is surprisingly timely.

Although seeds of hope are woven into this tapestry of rage, sorrow and disbelief, the inability of government at almost every level to act quickly and decisively leaves you aghast at what amounts to a collective failure of will.

True Adolescents, like most indie movies related to the mumblecore school, is a delicate piece of machinery. Its truth lies in the tiniest details: the pauses, the stricken looks, the false bravado, the pathetically redundant slang (so many "dudes").

Find Me Guilty, Mr. Lumet's first feature film in seven years, catches him near the top of his game.

Although this documentary has a powerful political subtext, it is best described as a conceptual art piece about confinement, attached to a dual biography of the artist and the prisoner.

An intrepid sleuth, Ms. Snyder seems to have left no stone unturned in her search for answers.

Deeply whimsical beneath its poker face, The Princess and the Warrior has the structure of an elaborate mind-teasing puzzle.

As much as Mr. Levitch's voice grates, you can't help but admire the zest for life of this heroically independent but impossibly self-centered crank.

Mr. Cusack demonstrates once again that he is Hollywood’s second-most-reliable nice guy, after Tom Hanks. Devoid of vanity, with no hidden agendas, he never strains to be likable. Good will, integrity and a native common sense ooze out of him.

The characters in Alamar may be playing versions of themselves, but the writer, editor and director Pedro González-Rubio has constructed a film in which the journey has an overarching mythic resonance that evokes fables from "Robinson Crusoe" to "The Old Man and the Sea."

The Mouth of the Wolf will haunt you.

As the film's images accumulate, the movie becomes a sustained and ultimately refreshing meditation on surrender to the idea of temporality.

The glorious cinematography, by Robbie Ryan, sharply illustrates the disparity between the rugged majesty of the landscape and the savagery of its outlaws and adventurers, who resemble vermin scuttling through the underbrush of a perilous no man’s land.

This entertaining movie is content to be something a bit more modest: a pungent period folk tale that teases you until the very end.

For all its quirks and tangents, Declaration of War feels entirely alive. This story of two people who transform fear into action is inspiring.

Even in the throes of grief, Mr. Cave retains his mystique as a rock shaman.

Yes, we've seen it all before. But The Relic proves that the hoariest cliches, when stirred together with enough money, shaken vigorously and artfully lighted, can still make the adrenaline surge.

What makes this Cherry Orchard different from almost every other interpretation (and makes it essential viewing for lovers of Chekhov) is Ms. Rampling's extraordinarily rich portrait of Ranevskaya.

Like a giant balloon painted with Day-Glo colors, however, the whole gaudy mess wouldn't inflate without the force of Mr. Myers's comic genius. It's his baby, baby. And after three editions, it's still flying high.

Ms. Ullmann, now 65, and Mr. Josephson, 81, have a supreme mastery of the Bergman style. Their performances are spiritual and emotional X-rays.

For all the hardship they endure, this intimate dual portrait, directed by Lynn True and Nelson Walker, with Tsering Perlo, suggests that their lives are neither more nor less fulfilled than those of any highly stressed upper-middle-class Americans.

The screenplay bluntly faces anxieties of aging that are rarely voiced in the movies, and it is too hard-headed to offer comfy palliatives.

Daydream Nation hopscotches forward and backward and in and out of the surreal; its abrupt tangents are announced by chapter headings. In the most complicated sequence the film tracks three characters simultaneously. The cinematography is darkly lush in an ominous "Twin Peaks" mode.

An obscene, misanthropic go-for-broke satire, Pretty Persuasion is so gleefully nasty that the fact that it was even made and released is astonishing. Much of it is also extremely funny.

Mr. Burns shuffles this dense material with the dexterity of a card shark. The pace, although swift, is never rushed. The writing and acting give you vivid enough tastes of the characters - there are seven children, two parents, and assorted spouses, lovers and friends - so that each registers as a singular flavor.

Words and Pictures has a host of flaws, but the performances by Mr. Owen and Ms. Binoche have a crackling vitality, and the screenplay’s strongest moments set off the kind of trains of thought that dedicated teachers hope to spur in their students.

An indelible and ultimately moving vision of humanity buffeted by the elements and by international political tides.

As technically innovative as it is emotionally unsettling.

Exudes a throbbing flesh-and-blood intensity so compelling that it's impossible to avert your eyes.

Although the movie, adapted from a book by Doris Pilkington Garimara, pushes emotional buttons and simplifies its true story to give it the clean narrative sweep of an extended folk ballad, it never goes dramatically overboard.

The characters have enough dimension to avoid appearing to be symbols of a social tragedy, and the movie’s relative gentleness makes the harsher realities of Brandon’s world all the more distressing.