Stephen Holden

Even more amusing than "Super Size Me," the documentary that put Mr. Spurlock on the moviemaking map in 2004.

Gimme Danger is still plenty entertaining and includes many moments of foaming-at-the-mouth musical fury.

Although the thriller aspect of "La Sentinelle" doesn't quite add up, the film is still an absorbing, psychologically resonant portrait of French student life. As directed by Desplechin, the attractive young cast hardly seems to be acting.

This is synergy of a high order.

Has the feel of a clinical case study elevated into a subject of aesthetic and philosophical discourse.

The Magdalene Sisters would be too painful to watch if it didn't have a silver lining. Suffice it to say that it is possible to fly over this religious cuckoo's nest and remain free. All it takes is courage and the timely kindness of strangers.

With its intense chiaroscuro and meticulous manipulation of color that ranges from stark black and white to richer, shifting hues in scenes set in a metaphorical orchard, the film surpasses even Michael Haneke's "White Ribbon" in the fierce beauty and precision of its cinematography (by Martin Gschlacht).

Illustrates the underlying fear that when energies that should be directed toward warfare are diverted into passion, unity is impossible.

Despite holes in the storytelling, Ms. Swank and Ms. Rossum keep it real.

[A] small, likably sentimental film.

The entrancing visual imagery goes a long way toward filling in the screenplay's gaps in logic.

Remarkable for its seamless ensemble performances.

For all the talk nowadays about a revival of swank, nothing in contemporary fashion can compete with the glamour of upper-class English life in the 1930's as it is elegantly caricatured in Ian McKellen's updated Richard III.

If Cremaster 3 is an innovative artwork that has been credited with breaking down the distance between sculpture and film, is it also a great movie? Probably yes.

Working within the confines of the teen-age genre film, Pump Up the Volume succeeds in sounding a surprising number of honest, heartfelt notes.

Gonzalo Arijón’s documentary offers an incontrovertible argument for the necessity of team spirit in the face of catastrophe.

A gem of contemporary neo-realism, the movie offers a ground-level view of a poor but vital community where many residents survive by scavenging bits of recyclable steel and plastic.

If the title role of Gabrielle weren’t so fully embodied by its star, Gabrielle Marion-Rivard, this French Canadian movie about love among the disabled would fall on the condescendingly mushy side of the line between heartwarming and saccharine.

Where to Invade Next is a sprawling, didactic polemic wittily disguised as a European travelogue.

You may become impatient with the leisurely pace of The Invisible Woman and its occasional narrative vagueness, but its open spaces leave room for some of the strongest acting of any contemporary film.

While you watch the movie, it can seem ridiculously long-winded. But once it's over, its characters' miserable faces remain etched in your memory, and its cynical message lingers.

Powerfully gritty.

As much as the film is shadowed by a keen awareness of mortality, One Cut, One Life often pulses with an almost ecstatic vitality. In its vision of human existence, life is as messy and unpredictable as it is precious.

If the movie, loosely based on two books by Fatima Elayoubi, tells a familiar story of immigrants struggling to make something of themselves in an alien culture (Fatima speaks some French but reads only Arabic), it does so in a tone that is kindhearted but clearheaded, and the performances are low-key and believable.

Powerful sweat-stained swatch of Argentine neo-realism.

Albrecht brings out a side of Mr. Nolte rarely seen on the screen, and he gives a deep and touching portrayal of a haggard, beleaguered older man.

As operatic cinema, it ranks alongside the best of Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola.

The downbeat story unfolds in quick, incisive slashes in which the combination of minimal dialogue and gorgeous black-and-white photography lends the movie a chilly documentary realism.

Bigger, Stronger, Faster* left me convinced that the steroid scandals will abate as the drugs are reluctantly accepted as inevitable products of a continuing revolution in biotechnology. Replaceable body parts, plastic surgery, anti-depressants, Viagra and steroids are just a few of the technological advancements in a never-ending drive to make the species superhuman.

A quintessential American independent movie, Diggers isn't going to change the history of cinema. But it has integrity. It feels like life.

What makes the film bearable is the knowledge that a few people did what they could to hold the line against humanity’s worst instincts. The voices in Nanking speak for the persistence of good in times and places where a moral crevice opens to reveal a vision of hell on earth.

The documentary, which subscribes to the Great Man school of reverential portraiture, is not a biography but an interview (in French, simultaneously translated into English) conceived as a master class on art appreciation, with guest commentators augmenting Cartier-Bresson's own sparsely chosen words.

The movie's rejection of even a tinge of melodrama lends it a special integrity.

The Sessions is a pleasant shock: a touching, profoundly sex-positive film that equates sex with intimacy, tenderness and emotional connection instead of performance, competition and conquest.

There are many moments when what is on the screen stops looking like acting and becomes life itself, and you're watching real people change and grow before your eyes.

For a film devoted to celebrating intimacy and the breaking down of emotional barriers, Pop and Me is oddly withholding of information about the travelers.

Because the cinematography of The Governess is so richly panoramic, the movie forces you to contemplate the emotional power exerted by film.

A subtle, humorous, illuminating study of politics, power and social mobility.

As this powerful, minutely documented film reveals, the tragedy wasn’t caused by the failure of the Peoples Temple to realize its goals. In many ways, it was succeeding as a self-sufficient community.

A movie of extremes, and that goes for its aesthetics. As gory as the scenes of torture and self-mutilation may be, they are pitted against shimmering cinematography that lends the setting the ethereal beauty of an Asian landscape painting.

Makes a jolly absurdist stew out of its sources.

Very funny, extremely obscene movie spinoff from the popular animated Comedy Central series.

Lone Scherfig (“An Education”), the Danish filmmaker who directed the movie from a screenplay by Ms. Wade, has coaxed wonderfully nasty performances from a young cast.

Julie Gavras’s wonderful film, Blame It on Fidel, views its ideological conflicts through the eyes of a smart, willful child.

A political movie that, partly through the powerful lead performance of its star, the relatively young Yves Montand, transcends its own politics.

This movie, directed and produced by Dave Davidson and Amber Edwards, digs deeply enough into Mr. Giordano’s world to convey the drudgery and headaches of being a bandleader.

Calm, deliberate and devastating, Jessica Sanders's documentary After Innocence confirms many of the worst fears about weaknesses in the American criminal-justice system.

Mr. Garfield's performance makes Jack so endearing and vulnerable that as he takes his first wobbly steps, like a baby bird shoved from its nest, your instincts are protective.

A very funny for-kids-of-all-ages delight that should catapult Mr. Black straight to the top of the A-list of Hollywood funnymen.

Don’t Think Twice, which has a warm heart, could have been a much nastier movie. Yet its disappointed show-business hopefuls dreading their expiration dates make no bones about their insecurities.

Insurrection is breezily paced, and Michael Piller's screenplay has enough good-natured humor to keep things from bogging down into sentimental pomposity.

A powerful and disturbing reminder of how a civilization can suddenly crack under certain pressures.

Somewhere around its midpoint, Across the Universe captured my heart, and I realized that falling in love with a movie is like falling in love with another person. Imperfections, however glaring, become endearing quirks once you’ve tumbled.

Mr. Strathairn's complex, exquisitely nuanced portrayal of a man who goes over the line allows his character to be both hero and villain, sometimes at once.

Elling believes so fervently in humanity that it feels almost anachronistic, and it is too cute by half. But arriving at a particularly dark moment in history, it offers flickering reminders of the ties that bind us.

Brilliantly realized but bone-chillingly bleak.

This 2 ½-hour film, which is described by Mr. Tiravanija as "not a documentary and not a narrative" but "more of a portraiture," rewards concentration once you adjust to its glacial pace and its radically minimalist aesthetic. It has no screenplay or story line.

Documents of a flourishing below-the-radar culture, often involving older musicians who won't be around much longer, they are archival records as well as entertainments.

[A] quiet, devastating critique of the antiquated Indian legal system.

Their ordeal feels cruel, unnecessary and infuriatingly real.

If Mr. Shicoff ultimately comes across as a short-tempered, egotistical prima donna, the upshot of all the fuss is worth it: his Viennese performance is transcendent.

Drugstore Cowboy, Gus Van Sant Jr.'s glum, absorbing film about a clan of heroin addicts who travel around the Pacific Northwest Looting pharmacies of their supplies the way Bonnie and Clyde cleaned out banks, gives Matt Dillon the role of his career.

Above all, this beautifully photographed documentary is a poetic meditation on refined sensory perception.

What makes the pain of this film bearable is Daniel’s unquenchable decency, courage and perseverance.

For all its disorganization and lack of an ending or even a sense of direction, Appropriate Behavior is alive. The screenplay is packed with smart remarks, clever and unpredictable turns of phrase that knock you off balance.

Mr. Brodsky's final screen performance in one of his richest roles finds overlapping layers of humor and pathos.

It is the unusual film comedy in which the humor springs as much from character as from situation.

For philistines mystified by the value attached to so many artworks that to an untrained eye look worthless, Mr. Cenedella comes across as a reassuring voice of sanity.

I can't recall another thriller that has maintained this kind of velocity without going kablooey and losing its train of thought.

In the words of Mr. Kramer: "The government didn't get us the drugs. No one else got us the drugs. We, Act Up, got those drugs out there. That is the proudest achievement that the gay population of this world can ever claim."

Reel Paradise is a deliberately untidy, open-ended, thoroughly absorbing chronicle that lets the lives of its characters spill across the screen without editorializing.

By treating the genre as a joke, this satire, whose title plays off George A. Romero's 1979 golden oldie, "Dawn of the Dead," yields ironic dramatic dividends.

The author's fantastical world of wonders and the director's tender-hearted compassion mesh into what is easily the finest film realization of an Irving novel.

Does an impressive job of relating the complicated history of the war and of filling in the background.

The role of Jimmy is one of Mr. Jackson's scarier characters, and this brilliant actor inhabits all four corners of his jittery, avaricious personality. When he and Sydney finally clash, the movie makes its darkest, cleverest turn into film-noir nightmare.

If you love to hate the superrich, The Valet, a delectable comedy in which the great French actor Daniel Auteuil portrays a piggy billionaire industrialist facing his comeuppance, is a sinfully delicious bonbon.

Like a deathbed dream it leapfrogs through Arenas's life, reconstructing crucial moments as a succession of bright, feverish illuminations.

Stylistically brash, pulsing with life.

Its portrayal of impoverished, careworn people barking at one another and protecting their territory in a daily struggle is bracingly hardheaded.

A witty, sociologically astute reflection on the attraction between opposites.

For the most part, Paul Laverty's screenplay and the strong, naturalistic performances lend it a specificity that sets it apart.

Transcendently dumb but very funny comedy.

The movie is truly a tree-hugger's delight (I confess to being one such hugger) that makes the most of its metaphors without straining toward supernatural schmaltz.

Ms. Benoit’s screenplay is unapologetically schematic in its depiction of a cross-section of Haitian exiles, but each story forcefully registers.

Two Days in the Valley lacks the humanity of ''Short Cuts'' or the edgy hipness of ''Pulp Fiction,'' but it is still a sleek, amusingly nasty screen debut by a film maker whose television credits include an Amy Fisher docudrama.

The physical beauty of Li’l Quinquin tells me that beneath what could be interpreted as contemptuous misanthropy is a bedrock of stern compassion.

Eddie Miller (Robert Forster), the stolid protagonist of Diamond Men, a small, finely acted slice of American life, is the sort of character the movies normally shun like the plague for lack of glamour.

Junebug envelops us in texture of a world the movies rarely visit.

A breezy, informal history of the Black Bear Ranch, a long-running California commune begun in the summer of 1968 and still in existence, offers the fascinating spectacle of observing people then and now.

Because federal indictments for conspiracy to murder have yet to be handed down, the documentary is necessarily discreet about naming names and detailing its evidence. A sequel would go a long way toward solving the documentary's many unanswered questions.

No matter how serious it becomes, however, La Moustache never forsakes an underlying attitude of high-style playfulness that recalls Hitchcock's cat-and-mouse romantic thrillers.

In a director's note Mr. Espinosa describes his fascination with "the idea of thief's honor" and with portraying criminals who, from their point of view, "are trying to do good through their own ethics." And this soul-searching quest lends Easy Money a depth rarely found in gangster films.

The movie gets the music, the clothes and the tone of the teen-age culture of that era exactly right.

Love & Air Sex has a spontaneity and cheeky attitude... along with spirited naturalistic performances that infuse the standard rom-com formula with a zany vitality.

This sentimental but riveting film has no qualms about playing on our emotions.

Sparked by the actors' powerful performances, Arnold's moral absolutism and Furtwängler's lofty aestheticism make for a dramatically compelling clash.

Without standing on a soapbox Stephanie Daley suggests a tragic gender gap between men who judge and women who feel.

The rainbow connection is a smooth, unbroken arch.