Stephen Hunter

Sumptuous, warm, continually amazing, it's a completely enjoyable couple of hours at the flickers.

One of the year's best films.

He gives these characters the time to develop, to display their nuances, to establish their relationships with each other, to talk out their destinies.

Huge, sprawling, and utterly absorbing.

Genuine, amusing and, best of all, humanly scaled and humanely oriented.

Laurent's crime is really the crime of being European and conquering people of color. That understood, Cache is brilliant.

It gets at something exquisitely human, so human that even movie stars feel it.

The next worst thing to being there. That's how real it feels.

Charlotte Rampling takes you so far inside the pain of Marie Drillon it leaves you stirred, shaken and a little in awe.

It's not the sort of film one can be said to enjoy, but it is the sort of film that has the clarity of a dream and lingers for hours.

The interplay between Glass and Lane is riveting and rigorous.

Witherspoon's simply terrific, and it's amazing how quickly and easily she sheds speculation that she was too modern for the role.

It begins by scaring you to death by evoking a monster, and by the end it has seduced you into caring for him.

Straightforward, droll, brutally honest and arresting.

It's a brilliant, profound movie, but it's almost no fun at all.

Gibson may not be much of a deep thinker, but he's a heck of a storyteller. Apocalypto turns out to be not a case of Montezuma's revenge but of Gibson's: It's something entirely unexpected, a sinewy, taut poem of action.

The longest, hardest sit of the season -- you are stuck there, a single tube of puckered muscle, waiting for the extremely ugly violence to occur -- but it is driven by performances of such luminous humanity that they break your heart.

You may not want to hang with the haunted Caouettes, but the movie is so compelling, it doesn't give you a choice.

There are complications, extremely cleverly worked out. Jones is in just about every scene in this taut, provocative film.

Nuanced, exquisite and predictable.

The genius of the film is its utter commitment to the Pekar point of view.

In its insistence on the centrality of the war to the collective consciousness of mankind, it's of a piece with "The English Patient," rather than "Saving Private Ryan."

The movie avoids sensationalism. What it requires and what it delivers is performance.

It feels so real it hurts, and it's the perfect antidote to all those movies where all sorts of stuff blows up.

A character so real and poignant (yet hysterically funny), she'll linger for months or years.

It takes the rock movie into regions it has never been before.

Isn't much of a movie, but it's a whale of a story.

It's sad, funny, shocking and completely unlike any movie in a dozen years.