Darger made art as if the lives of his subjects depended on it. That's how Yu has made her movie.

A madcap milestone. Not since Disney's 75-minute Alice In Wonderland (1951) has an animator filled the screen with dazzling flights of random invention that manage to hook up into a swift, brief narrative.

It's still the Holy Grail of crazy comedy.

Seabiscuit revives the sweeping pleasures of movies that address and respect the mass audience, raising the common denominator instead of pandering to it. This crowd-pleaser rouses honest and engulfing cheers.

A scary movie that's also funny, touching and good for you.

A movie that will endure.

Takes a chaotic moment in the long history of "the Troubles" and turns it into a keening, air-clearing epic.

The movie's generosity of spirit and artistry swamps its flaws.

A big, fat old-fashioned gush of passion as drawn through a post-modernist prism that makes it less easily comprehensible but more beguiling.

It's a topical, iconoclastic documentary with the warmth and pace of a first-rate personal essay.

Park's imagination is as fecund as the bunnies that bob up and down from their rabbit holes in every corner of the Tottington garden.

Uproarious, moving and thrilling.

Saved! is the audacious feel-good satire of 2004.

The tough beauty of the picture is that it lets each viewer weigh the costs and benefits to Gardner. It's a genuinely transporting inspirational movie because it's also a cautionary tale. It doesn't downplay the hero's occasional clumsiness or pigheadedness.

The Counterfeiters is in its own smart, trim fashion "The Bridge on the River Kwai" of concentration-camp sagas. Also based (like Kwai) on a real-life story, this movie starts small but becomes a miniature epic of overreach and moral drift.

There is not one word, one scene in the whole thing that doesn't ring the bell of truth, and anyone seeing it should emerge from the theater with a sense of satisfation rare in the movie-going experience. To put it simply, Marty is great. [18 Jun 1955, p.4]

It is a striking, ironical tribute to the vanishing glory of the silent screen, and a lively reflection of present-day conditions in Hollywood. [15 Sep 1950, p.14]

A crackerjack thriller, laced with labyrinthine mysteries, moral quandaries and unspeakable evil.

No Country for Old Men is about the kind of amoral madness that can sweep across a country and redefine a landscape. It's so admirably lean and sinewy that it deserves not merely a rave review but a Johnny Cash song about matter-of-fact killings in shady hotels and sun-scoured landscapes.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly provides an ecstatic lift for movielovers, despite the tragic subject.

It remains one of the best-written and best-performed American films of all time.

One of the favorite sayings of journalists and politicians is "You don't want to see how the sausage is made." Marsh's movie says you do want to see how a miracle is made, even if the details can be just as unsavory.

It's exhilarating in an authentic, pathos-streaked way to see Kearns, through Greg Kinnear's inspired characterization of a wary obsessive, representing himself during his trial against Ford Motor Co. for stealing his design.

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu runs the same 2 1/2 hours as "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," but what a difference a comic-dramatic purpose makes.

A great, lusty movie in the tradition of Bertrand Blier's "Going Places."

Well-acted, lovingly put together and heartbreakingly honest.

Affliction turns the sound on with sudden, crystalline clarity, and echoes with the haunting power of a suppressed truth that has finally been released.

Its knockout success is a testament to Gore's eloquence and humanity and to the dexterity of his director, Davis Guggenheim.