For audiences, two things keep the tension from becoming too excruciating: the presence of the survivors in front of us and the knowledge that in the grip of Macdonald's humane, lucid filmmaking, we're in the best of hands.

The movie is emotionally tumultuous and evenhanded and serene. It celebrates the odd pockets of imagination and individuality that can be nurtured in middle-class suburbia. [2002 re-release]

Smart, funny and often viciously cruel, this is a romantic comedy for people who are too old to believe in fairyales but wise enough to accept a happy ending when that's what life gives them.

Spider-Man 2 offers one emotional or action-packed aria after another; at the end you feel like giving it a standing O.

Funny Girl is old-fashioned; it is also exhilarating.

A non-stop cinematic funhouse impossible to resist.

When it comes to the oft-doomed genre of seafaring adventure, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World is a spectacular throwback and a great leap forward.

Compulsion, self-deception and the slippery nature of evil are explored with fidelity and supreme control .

With a surgical saw instead of a hatchet, del Toro takes apart patriarchy and opportunistic religion as well as fascism.

In its entirety, Hairspray has the funny tilt that only a director-choreographer like Shankman can give to a movie.

It's both irrefutably concrete and irresistibly uplifting.

Strangers With Candy -- a perfect title -- is filled with straight-faced loonies. It's a nutcake you actually want to eat.

This film about fierce competition among classic video-game players is a comic action epic in documentary form. It captures fear -- and heroism -- in a handful of dusty video games.

Mirrormask is a gorgeous psychedelic cameo of a movie.

Even if you have no interest in Joy Division, this picture is worth seeing for the unsentimental empathy and passion of the moviemaking.

Wristcutters: A Love Story is a lousy title for a lovely-loony picture about an afterlife for suicides. It's an off-road "road movie" about people who off themselves.

It's not hard to imagine these characters in a straight-faced Hollywood blockbuster. And that's the source of Hot Fuzz's genius, pointing out the thin line that separates convention from farce when Hollywood starts throwing its special effects around.

A lovely, mischievous Casanova that will sweep you off your feet.

In a feat of performing imagination, Ferrell turns his usual extroversion inside out and his usual zaniness into precision, and makes it all work for him.

The only thing that tops Cave here is Cohen himself at the end, singing "Tower of Song" with U2.

Russian Dolls never resorts to sitcom moments as it explores the transformation of friendship into love. All the characters here are believably appealing and refreshingly three-dimensional, and the situations they find themselves in have the ring of truth. You leave this film wanting to know these people, wanting the best for them.

Ask the Dust is more than an amorous period piece. It's a strongly bitter, strongly sweet poem in prose and motion.

It's the whole constellation of relationships that Winick and company create in and around the barn that brings the movie its kaleidoscopic charm.

It's an authentic, harrowing tale of heroism.

Downey and Favreau and the special-effects team transform the trying-out of the armor and its powers into slapstick cadenzas. But equally entertaining is Stark's and Potts' recognition that they share more than a mere working chemistry.

It's a courageous, moving, organically funny picture.

This movie provides no phony catharsis or closure; it develops a vision of people growing in spurts from their most terrible mistakes.

Jumping off from the brilliant novel by Giles Foden and changing a key character entirely, it dramatizes and wrings humor from the way a white Western renegade can view a self-made Third World despot like Amin as a superman blowing fresh air into a fetid atmosphere.