Wesley Morris

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."