Wesley Morris

Like so much Iranian cinema, Blackboards is a work of lyrical propaganda. But its metaphors are opaque enough to avoid didacticism, and the film succeeds as an emotionally accessible, almost mystical work.

The movie captures a kind of tragedy of self.

Any optimism in 9, which is bound to try the fortitude of meeker children, feels hard-won. It actually ends in a bittersweet mystery.

The first more-than-halfway-decent movie of a new millennium.

Volver brims with personal and cinematic allusions, but no one hungry for a well-told tale from a master storyteller is required to understand them.

Almodovar imbues his Harlequin-novel-meets-Marvel-comic-book melodramas with something more than a wink and a smile, and it's beguiling.

The movie takes the ABBA jukebox musical that ate London, and is still eating Broadway, and turns it into a surprisingly sensuous experience.

A work of strangely bold, distinctly American pop art - proud to be ashamed, ashamed to be proud, unafraid to ignore its commercial bearings.

It's refreshing to see Gondry's moviemaking still possessed by the community spirit he caught a few years ago with "Dave Chappelle's Block Party."

The movie is the product of his (Friedman) big, shiny love of forgotten soul legends whom superstardom (and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I might add) has eluded.

I liked these characters, and suddenly not having them in my life anymore, simply because Denis has decided to start the closing credits, devastated me.

The film sends you home moved and in a tuneful mood.

The movie is a block of paper that, when Tsai's finished with it, becomes a chain of snowflakes. Loneliness doesn't often get such a gorgeously ornate tribute.

Writers Nicholas Stoller and Judd Apatow remake is more devilish, hitting its targets with the reckless glee required for a round of Whac-A-Mole.

Soberly, deeply effective.

A movie too smart and too urgent to be categorically awful. Clinically insane may be another matter altogether.

Eyes Without a Face, outre as it is, never tires as hypnotic, touching, ghastly fun.

This emperor verges on dementia, having no apparent clue how to function.

In Criminal Lovers, the "Bonnie and Clyde" model of killing-as-erotica gets a shrewd, funny, decidedly French workout.

Feels like it could go blow up at any time. It implodes instead, and the meltdown, though visible in one of the final sequences, is still corrosive.

The shenanigans have been pared into 84 minutes of transgressive, potty-minded farce, that is often Waters at his most cheerful and most thematically focused.

Another triumph of modesty from a master who deserves real, paying audiences, not just the adoration of besotted film critics.

Despite its ultimate nuttiness, has a quiet, consuming power that sneaks up on you and doesn't go away. This is something new and ambitious for Von Trier: a work of compassion.

Brilliantly, the movie becomes a double coming-of-age story. The parents' political awakening parallels their daughter's.

It's hugely entertaining.

Who knows what movie Lonergan was searching for in all that footage? But what emerges from the tinkering and legal skirmishes is an occasional marvel, a kind of everyday highbrow social X-ray, Paul Mazursky by way of Krzysztof Kieslowski.

The labor applied to Che is apparent, but it would be wrong to characterize the movie as laborious the way it was in, say, 2006's "The Good German," where Soderbergh took great pains to re-create 1940s Hollywood wartime glamour.

Through it all, Ozon supplies a sense of pathos that makes fun of its own soullessness, transforming a self-serious suicide note into an existential love letter.