Wesley Morris

One of Lee's unsung gifts as a filmmaker is his discovery of that place between eye-popping surrealism and wrenching Greek tragedy.

On screen something happens that goes beyond Monk's powers of description and Fanning's way of seeming 14 and 44 at the same time.

A movie loaded with strange delights.

At its core, Quinceañera, a modest but remarkably poignant comedy, is the story of a neighborhood.

There is no plot in Pen-ek Ratanaruang's exceedingly mellow situation comedy, and that's preferred, frankly.

A featherweight parlor-room French farce in need of an anchor to keep it from being blown away by the summer blockbuster gales.

Dunst is the realest, rawest thing in the film.

A bonanza of pop uplift. It wraps the up-from-nothing drama of ''Flashdance'' in the sassy, interracial pep rallying of ''Bring It On'' and the military romance of ''An Officer and a Gentleman.''

A sound piece of profiling that has miles of archival footage of the affable, pop-eyed Langlois enthusing.

The finest element in de la Pena's carefully assembled account is how she doesn't simply state the obvious, but lets the meaty facts speak for themselves.

The cast helps enliven what could otherwise come off as a treatise. All four actors played these roles during the play's off-Broadway run.

This stuff is clever, in the reflexively satirical, self-aware way that many animated films are. It's not until the dog is accidentally shipped off to New York City that the movie lets you in on an altogether more interesting idea: It doesn't want to be that cool.

The movie turns what could have been a tedious meta-movie exercise into a sincere dour farce.

The film Soderbergh's made is about promiscuous stargazing. And you don't need a brain for that, just two eyes and a mammoth appetite for heavenly bodies.

Argo is absurdly suspenseful for both of its hours. I've never been this stressed-out watching people shred documents.

Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey don't simply star in this movie; they tag-team it out of the Freddie Prinze Jr. --Julia Stiles puppy-love ghetto.

Aspires to the boundlessness of a kid's imagination.

The ballad as it turns out is a duet between a dad and his girl, who'd often rather accentuate the positive than exploit pain, quietly proving that she is her father's daughter.

The Signal is like a Romero zombie movie in which the zombies aren't dead, they're just really temperamental. Evil here is technology-born. Maybe our cellphones and satellite dishes are giving us all the crazy.

If this is an unusually sentimental outing for Jia, it’s also characteristically tinged with woe. He’s just added a touch of sweetness to these otherwise sugarless lives.

There's an unstable genius brewing beneath Mary Katherine's scarlet headband. As "SNL" women go, only Gilda Radner seemed as willing to rib so much of herself for our pleasure.

As formulaic, but occasionally outré multiplex-bound behemoths go, Gladiator is a foaming beast.

A sweetly acted and neatly executed social comedy.

Isn't as trippy, scary, handmade-looking, or environmentally aware as some of Miyazaki's pictures. But it shares their dreaminess. Even at its most ingenious, not even Pixar does that.

Waste Land is just what the film's website says it is: "stirring evidence of the transformative power of art and the alchemy of the human spirit."

Another gorgeous and immensely satisfying reminder that there are few better directors than Téchiné when it comes to capturing the vagaries of the heart.

I've never seen a movie like this. Not on purpose. Daniels isn't saying he's tasteful. He's just saying that his tasteless trash is as deserving of our attention as the tasteful trash we feel like we have to see. The whole thing's a crazy fantasy, like watching a porno dream it can win the Oscar.

A patient, suspenseful exercise in genre craftsmanship

For a studio so clearly willing to take risks with so many of its movies, this particular movie has a whiff of exploitation. Rowling wrote one epic funeral that Warner Bros. requires us to attend twice.

The idea is to share with us that this show happened. But gluttons for these artists and for music festivals in general might wonder, as I have, whether there's any way the filmmakers might share more of the remaining 123 1/2 hours.

The movie shouldn't work, yet it does.

A lot of the credit for what's right with 'The 40-Year-Old Virgin goes to the screenplay, which Carell and Apatow wrote. They like these characters and, when it matters, they dare to give them feelings, none truer than Andy's.

The movie sets Ferrell's assaultive and juvenile physical comedy in a less-combative playground, and the result might leave the Ferrell-intolerant exiting the theater on a high.

The endearing and cheeky ensemble works hard, and Ken Scott's script finds ways of wringing irreverence from the apparent good nature of the situation.

What Little Children understands so well, and so poignantly, is a kind of parental existentialism that hits 30- somethings with kids: How does having children make you such a less interesting adult?

This is a movie about the marriage between sound and image, and the sound is wearing the pants in the relationship.

With Dosunmu, African culture thrives in a demographically shifting but historically African-American part of town. If the idea is that Nollywood could work in Manhattan, this is the director who can show us how.

This is an action movie that nods to Hayao Miyazaki and those sleeky dumb European chase thrillers with guys like Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson.

It's also the first apocalypse-minded franchise that's earned its downbeat mood. The action, for starters, is post-Cold War, post-Chernobyl, post-perestroika. Darkness is so much a part of the Russian psyche it must be nice to see a local movie try to put its hand toward the Light.

Fred Claus sells you something you didn't know you wanted: a Vince Vaughn Christmas movie. Vaughn is not the hook. Neither is the holiday. The script, by Dan Fogelman, is smarter than that.

The best thing about Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone is that it really is the story of Fishbone. It's a hearty, thoughtful, smartly assembled, vaguely complete documentary about a rock band that, even by the standards of out-there musical acts, seemed out there both in the mid-1980s and even now.

This intimate, warmly made family portrait always feels true. The performances are particularly good.

An ecstatic sensory experience so overloaded it hardly matters that the narrative has been placed on a back burner.

Wattstax is a disorienting and ironic moviegoing experience. It's a film about the curative powers of rhythm-and-blues music that sets out to frustrate your sense of rhythm in its insistence on the blues.

It's also a message movie, about as weighty as Lara Flynn Boyle and twice as absurd. But I'd like to report that I had an excellent time.

The movie's sense of inspiration is realistic. It never implies a future of glamour, only hard-won success.

Harris, Heche make unholy twosome.

A warmly made, slightly offbeat movie about friendly devotion. It also happens to be a western, and every man in it is grizzled or wizened or both.

Brims with forboding, but it pulses with candy colors and the hum of neon signs.

Exists as a seldom represented American time capsule, and it's all good.

This is not “Death of a Salesman’’ or “Save the Tiger’’ (in the case of the latter, thank God). But how refreshing to see a movie about a mother’s struggles that doesn’t culminate in her lying on her back to make ends meet.

What's refreshing about the Danish movie is how direct the girls are.

Weirdly enthralling film.

Anyone looking for sleek futuristic action and production design should keep walking.

The closer you get to sorting out the truth, the less likely you are to believe it, let alone comprehend it. The latter half of this movie is as outlandish as a Mexican soap opera.

Director Wayne Wang and his screenwriters sometimes ape ''Pretty Woman." But Latifah's obvious forebear is Pearl Bailey, who was just as regal and straight-up.

Renders the juicy bits of the artist's life in two hours of pulsing highlights that suggest a man who never really had any emotional or psychic downtime.

Kennedy doesn't take the character any deeper than a caricature of rich, nonblack fans of hip-hop culture. But as a caricature, he's fantastic.

The surprise here is how thrillingly bad things get.

Where Never Been Kissed succeeds is in its unabashed refusal to stoop to choosing sides in the high-school hipness war.

Told in a serenely observational fashion.

This is a movie that feels in all its vividness, specificity, and honesty - and in its amateurish screenwriting, too - like something found from the early- to mid-1990s, when American independent moviemaking encouraged far more conversations about the sexuality of young, brown girls in movies like "Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.'' and "I Like It Like That.''

Has to be appreciated simply for doing its job, for being the only thriller I've seen recently that made me wonder how my knuckles ended up in my mouth.

In American movies, the iconic question usually is, can men and women be friends without the sex part getting in the way? Here it's, can a husband appreciate his wife as a woman? The movie's success in Italy is partly a matter of frustration: Women need their men to grow up.

The Brown Bunny is certainly about how vain Gallo is. Yet rarely has narcissism produced such a handsome work of cinema.

A film where suspense and exhilaration are incompatible, and a receding plot line is merely the platform for cars to fly through panes of glass.

The rare ecological documentary that doesn’t nag us to run out of the movie theater and change the world.

A big, silly party.

If Millennium Mambo is the only chance to see Hou Hsaio-hsien's work at a movie theater, you'd better take it.

We are treated to the riotous, almost David Lynchian moment in which Ferrell runs around a motorway in his undies screaming that he's on fire. He's not. Actually, come to think of it: He is.

This sounds like a fairly standard debut. But Wong smothers the story with tremendous style. Some directors give you a healthy ratio of mashed potatoes to gravy. Wong seems not at all to care for the potatoes.

The ideas are generous and inclusive rather than divisive: Zinn wants history to be seen and to be experienced from every possible perspective.

You can feel the movie building away from the whiny comedy and toward something more emotionally raw then something sexually weird.

For an anonymous Saturday afternoon, it's the best lump of coal Hollywood can jam in your stocking.

There must be nine or 10 thwacks to the neck throughout Sleepy Hollow, and Burton finds a different way to make the resulting severed noggin fall as though you'd forgotten the last one.

Loaded with priceless encounters that would seem incongruous in any other movie but play here as low-comedy facts of some parts of black life.

The film, which is as economically made as it is primitively animated, ambles from adventure to adventure, taking nothing seriously, not even itself.

Slightly more mature and better assembled, Road Trip goes one better on "American Pie" by teasing out the idiosyncrasies in four guys existing in a personality grab bag.

The resulting film is nobly ridiculous and ridiculously noble, doing everything in its power to subvert the dross it's fooling around with.

Thompson adapted the screenplay from Christianna Brand's "Nurse Matilda" books, and she and director Kirk Jones balance the slapstick and levity with darker enchantments. At its most enjoyable the film feels like Roald Dahl's idea of "Mary Poppins."

Devor's sympathy for both the men and the animals is humane, yet his movie is palpably sad. A sense of shame cuts through all the ambiguity. You know less about what you've watched when Zoo is over than you did when it started. And that's what makes the movie so hard to shake.

Part Marxist social drama and part Michael Moore corporation-needling, with fed-up residents trying to outsmart the big, bad naive company to keep their lights on for free.

The film is quick, painless, and more than a little brave: not since John Travolta, Jamie Lee Curtis, and the aerobicizers in "Perfect" has so much Lycra been so abused for our pleasure.

With "Dogtooth," the point was: Don't try this at home. Now, the expanded lesson is: Don't try this anywhere.

Like a Sally Field movie by Vittorio De Sica: Zhang wants to affect you with the subtle sting of his politics.

Like the great Iranian filmmakers, Rasoulof has no use for the artificiality of heightened drama.

This is the first, smallest, and most essential planet in the Van Sant solar system. The seediness of "Drugstore Cowboy " started here. So did the one-way crushes in "My Own Private Idaho " and the gorgeously epic longueurs of "Last Days. "

The movie, though, is nonsense. At its most credible, the story evokes fond memories of the adult drug narcs hiding among American high schoolers on ''21 Jump Street."

As art, the movie is neither shallow nor profound, just inconsequential. Yet Coppola is too clever a filmmaker to dismiss the movie out of hand. If her film is mostly surface then she skims with style.

Clearly, there's a story here. The documentary The Other Dream Team tells it in a smart, lively, if somewhat hectic fashion.

There’s no reason a conspiracy this outlandish should work twice. But it’s so hilariously within the realm of plausibility that it does.

A lovely , old-fashioned farm romance quietly doubling as a comment on immigration and American identity.

I don't think I've seen an actor do more with deadpan expressions than Mara does in this movie. Her face doesn't move but, whether she's tasing a man or standing in front of a mirror watching a cigarette dangle from her mouth, we respond to her.

The film itself is also a beautiful work of art, exquisitely framed and precisely envisioned.

Rothemund gives us his sophisticated filmmaking only in the finale, which is devastating in its briskness and fury.

Zahedi's search for fulfillment is depleting, like throwing good sex after bad. The more we learn about the hole in his soul, the more vivid his misogamy becomes.

The filmmaker doesn't exactly let anyone off the hook.

There's something touching about the way Goldfinger obeys his moral compass. He doesn't seem at all happy with that luxury. It's a burden by a more extravagant name.