Tim Merrill

Filmmaker Ron Mann and actor/activist Woody Harrelson have followed up their hilarious 2000 documentary "Grass" with the equally amusing Go Further.

A gripping experience, and often downright sickening.

A gorgeous and poetic meditation on fate, honor and life in the Old West.

The result will stand as one of the most intense, in-depth, warts-and-all rockumentaries ever made.

Aspires to a backwoods North Carolina Woody Allen quality that it often comes close to achieving. But sadly it’s just never quite funny, touching or insightful enough.

Serves as more proof, as if any were needed, that Allen desperately needs to devote more time to polishing his scripts, and less to heedlessly banging out one film a year, year in and year out.

Starts out as a first-rate chick movie and winds up a second-rate guy movie. But if this somehow proves to be a formula for the perfect date movie, then Kidman is even more brilliant than we thought.

Music fans of every stripe should kill to see this film, one of the very best music documentaries in recent years.

Anyone with a weak heart or a queasy stomach should stay away. In fact, most everyone everywhere should stay away. But if you still want to see Irreversible, be prepared to see images that will upset and disturb you for a long, long time. Be prepared to be shaken to the very core.

Frida favors us with plenty of color, a feast of eye candy. As food for the soul, however...there are always her paintings.

A courageous film, especially from a first-time director, and deserves all the audience support it can attract. It’s a People Story, and it’s About Something. However, it’s also something of a heavy sit.

On the whole this is pretty standard shoot-‘em-up fare. Bang, crash, boom -- yawn.

We have an authentic Old Master working in our midst, and Gosford Park will at the very least remind everyone how masterful a helmsman Altman can be.

As a piece of acting, The Quiet American represents a fitting capper to Caine’s illustrious career; his portrait of a jaded sybarite whom history nudges into conscientious action is among the year’s most moving.

Medem's astonishing, magical-realist love story Sex and Lucía is easily the best Spanish film since "All About My Mother." But such a statement actually undersells the beauty of what Medem has created, which in many ways rather defies description.

Fast-paced, at times even a bit frantic, Under the Skin of the City is above all a mother-and-son story.

Even if you have no idea what French philosopher Jacques Derrida's theories are about, allow your mind the chance to be teased and twisted by the unique new documentary.

Fascinating, horrifying and hilarious.

Encircles the viewer in a comforting, open-hearted humanism. It’s a quiet, modest piece of work, but no less lovely for it.

Particularly wrenching in its depiction of the father-son relationship.

Call it a horror movie, a psychological thriller or a feminist splatterfest, but this sort of story is tough to get right. May gets it more than right.

Simply a two-hour rave, an acidic, ecstatic trip through the not-too-distant past in a world called Manchester.

It’s a true endurance test, far too grim to be considered exciting, but not really informative enough to enlighten us about the effect of our presence in Somalia in 1993.

So maybe the entire right wing should just shut the f--- up, and accept that Michael Moore is going to have his say now.

The story goes on and on, endlessly fascinating to the last - the sensational trial, the convictions, the revelations, the recriminations.

Once again, though -- almost in spite of Haynes' rigorous post-ironic efforts to bring Sirk back from the dead in any and every way he can -- it ultimately comes down to Moore -- and Moore is simply...wonderful.

A film to savor and to be thankful for.

There are pleasures to be had early on in Crush, but they get fewer and farther between. Nice while it lasts, the glow wears off all too quickly.

Works on so many levels that it must be reckoned with. It certainly feels unique, and sets itself apart from most American gangster films in its stark refusal to paint the lead gangster as likable or indeed anything other than the vicious socio-psychopath he is.

Rarely interesting, always confounding.

It may appear clichéd in the telling, but Chick has no use for the glib irony and rampant pop-culture sampling which has already dated "Reality Bites" and its ilk.

Any romantic comedy that lacks Meg Ryan can’t be faulted too hard.

Tom McCarthy’s film is never more than small, and that’s how it should be. It is about treasuring life -– sometimes even cheating death -– and it manages to warm hearts in its own uncompromising way, rarely cheating and never belittling.

Devilishly clever and boasting a killer finale, Intacto is this year's "Memento" -- only Spanish.

Maybe How to Draw a Bunny itself is really Ray Johnson's final testament, created with a mischievous wink from beyond the grave. After watching this extraordinary documentary, one has no doubt that such an act is well within Johnson's creative powers.

In 30 years’ time it might seem as incisive a document of its time as, say, “Don’t Look Back” or “Gimme Shelter.” As a study of how the current corporate idiocy impacts one man’s art, it’s priceless.

Aided enormously by Jeremy Renner, his astonishing lead actor, Jacobson has created something we haven’t seen since “The Silence of the Lambs”: a sensitive, non-exploitative serial killer movie.

When Braff keeps the tears and the kookiness in check, he takes us into some unusual, interesting areas of the human psyche. And makes us laugh a good deal while he's at it.