Wesley Morris

Segues from the merely quirky into the bizarrely unthinkable.

More often than not the film casts an infectious, evocative spell.

It's the rawest, most hot-blooded, provocatively audacious, dangerous movie to come of out Hollywood this year.

Hysterical-depressing, vividly sobering.

Imbued with infectious pluck. It's also a lucid, competent, titanically entertaining movie loaded with workable gags.

The word bears repeating, so everyone from Andrew Weil to Stephen Hawking to Mikhail Gorbachev is here to speak the still-inconvenient truth. The filmmaking, however, is far more relentless than in that Oscar-winning Al Gore slide show.

Madhouse satire manages to disarm the second you realize it's laughing with you - and sometimes harder.

A riveting and sobering way to spend a Saturday afternoon.

Dennis's film attempts something few documentaries have: to inhabit the psyche of its subject.

The film quickly becomes one of the most powerful, carefully researched investigations of the moral-legal side effects of current American military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. It's terrifying in a way that sneaks up on you.

Bernal, with his sweet man-boy looks, makes Padre Amaro's portrait of corruption all the more flabbergasting in its irony.

Staggering, gorgeously ambiguous.

The beauty of Let the Right One In resides in the way the horror remains grounded in a tragic kind of love.

If there's a granddaddy of breezy situationalism, it's probably Buñuel.

No-fat filmmaking aided by Berri's muscular formalism that, here, occasionally assumes the gritty focus of a taut, action thriller.

Her face is as much a part of her comedic form as her observations are. It's an amazing slapstick instrument, creating a scrapbook of living mug shots.

Kurt and Mark's trip to those hot springs is a figurative return to Eden. Anyone who's had a disillusioning reunion with a moony old friend knows what Mark discovers: They're too old to stay that innocent. None of this hit me until after the movie ended. But it hit me hard: You can't go home again.

The arrival of closing credits feels like a trap door. The film is over, and, suddenly, we have to leave these people. The directors make no guarantee for their futures, but the strength of their filmmaking inspires you to hope for the best.

If the second hour or so isn't as strong as the first, it's because the filmmaking fails to rise to the injustice that's befallen its subjects since their exoneration. It can't, really.

Wendy Carroll is a character we rarely see in movies anymore, a woman left alone with her thoughts. That a moviegoer would care what she's thinking testifies to the power in Williams's brand of solitude.

In ''Trials,'' Hitchens is almost endearing, stalking Kissinger from one event to the next like a bleary-eyed Michael Moore.

Cooper gives the performance just the right lunacy and doubt.

It’s imperfect, but it’s daring, bold, and from a director who isn’t scared of anything.

This is a modest marvel of grace and framing that unfolds with the patience of a cloud and is driven more by wonder than pure emotion. It doesn't have the exuberance of Francois Truffaut 's "Small Change." Instead, it's that movie's antonym, yet just as wondrous.

If Keane is a downer, it's a stupendously well-conceived one.

The film has the perverse intelligence of Cronenberg's other movies. It's not his best, but it is certainly his most accessible, least stagy work, obeying the laws of chronology and serving up characters whom we recognize as people.

The movie Quentin Tarantino has written and directed is corkscrewed, inside-out, upside-down, simultaneously clear-eyed and completely out of its mind.

That commendable sense of balance, which Dolgin and Franco use to approach this family reunion, ultimately makes the finished product devastating.