Stephen Holden

Throughout We Were Here there is not a hint of mawkishness, self-pity or self-congratulation. The humility, wisdom and cumulative sorrow expressed lend the film a glow of spirituality and infuse it with grace.

It succeeds at showing how one man's psychic wounds contributed to an art that transmutes personal pain into garish visual satire.

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

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

It is Mr. Sabzian's poignancy that makes "Close-Up" much more than a clever reflection on film-versus-life as an endless hall of mirrors.

A pictorial tone poem of astonishing visual intensity and emotional depth.

In juxtaposing two extraordinary personal histories, it ponders in a refreshingly original way unanswerable questions about memory, imagination, history and that elusive thing we call truth.

A Summer’s Tale has room to focus on Rohmer’s brilliance at revealing human nature through articulate, multidimensional characters, perfectly cast, who in some ways seem to exist outside of time.

This candy-colored movie, whose soft hues match the colored cereal loops that Alby devours at his mother's house, is a post-Freudian fable that wants to be a kind of anti-"Wizard of Oz" for a culture inundated with toys and toons.

After Life becomes a quiet, extraordinarily moving and sometimes funny meditation on the meaning and value of life. It intimates that whatever happiness we may find in life comes from within and is self-created.

A film that has the sweep and esthetic power of a full-length ballet.

The film's passionate insistence on remembrance lends it a moral as well as a metaphysical weight. Mr. Guzmán's belief in eternal memory is an astounding leap of faith.

A crude but scathing portrait of suburban life.

If the movie had more courage, it would lay waste these people as hilariously as Robert Altman's film "A Wedding." But as its bad vibes accumulate, Cheerful Weather exhibits all the energy of a disgruntled wedding guest muttering complaints under his breath.

Extraordinary labor of love.

A virtuoso ensemble piece to rival the director's "Nashville" and "Short Cuts" in its masterly interweaving of multiple characters and subplots.

My Perestroika gives you a privileged sense of learning the history of a place not from a book but from the people who lived it. Watching it is a little like attending a party in an unfamiliar city and discovering the place's secrets from the guests.

The humor bubbling through Finding Nemo is so fresh, sure of itself and devoid of the cutesy, saccharine condescension that drips through so many family comedies that you have to wonder what it is about the Pixar technology that inspires the creators to be so endlessly inventive.

Forever stumbling over itself and breaking its own spell.

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.

May be an expertly manipulated exercise in psychological horror, but that's all it is. Don't look for the kind of metaphoric weight you'd find in a movie by David Lynch or David Fincher.

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.

Gives you the steady pulse of life in a beautiful city viewed through the eyes of a character who, in spite of tragic loss and increasing decrepitude, knows in his bones that he is one of the luckiest men alive.

Recoing's performance is a sensitive portrayal of a man in the throes of an excruciating spiritual crisis.

In this sweet, funny wisp of a movie, Mr. Allen shucks off his fabled angst and returns in spirit to those wide-eyed days of yesteryear, before Chekhov, Kafka and Ingmar Bergman invaded his creative imagination.

Ms. Barkin is almost unrecognizable as this bedraggled bundle of rage and disappointment. Exploding from deep within, her devastating performance hijacks the film.

As for the man who invented it all, he remains a mystery in the film, living out his days in sybaritic bliss.

When My Neighbor Totoro, which was written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki, is dispensing enchantment, it can be very charming. Too much of the film, however, is taken up with stiff, mechanical chitchat.