The ends remain loose in The White Ribbon.’ But that lack of closure is thrilling. Haneke lays his movie and its mysteries at our feet, leaving us to ask, “What in tarnation?’’

This movie catalogs a wealth of human ugliness. It’s even been made to look ugly, presumably to underscore the horror movie that is Precious’s life.

It’s a work of cruel comic genius, in some ways even crueler than “No Country for Old Men.’’

Writer-director Cristian Mungiu confirms the Romanian cinema renaissance while creating a paradoxical marvel: a bleak tale of illegal abortion that powerfully affirms one's faith in people.

A milestone of eloquent understatement that captures the daily life of have-nots as few American movies have.

The movie is also more extraordinary than a mere scenic slideshow.

Pan's Labyrinth is a transcendent work of art.

On the most basic level the new film is pure vaudeville: a loopy flyaway fantasy that's hysterically funny if only to keep the darkness at bay.

It's a performance (Giamatti's) so nuanced and so real in its everyday pain that it doesn't stand a chance of winning an Oscar. But it should.

There Will Be Blood" is anti-state of the art. It's the work of an analog filmmaker railing against an increasingly digitized world. In that sense, the movie is idiosyncratic, too: vintage visionary stuff.

The usual emphasis in a detective film is upended so that procedure, thrillingly, is more important than action. In its own way, this is one of the most intense cop movies you'll see.

I was much more disheartened leaving the movie the first time I saw it than I was the second. Its richness resides in its apparent objectivity. Without sacrificing a sense of hope, Cantet suggests that the school system is just like a certain vexing grammatical tense: imperfect but still fighting against irrelevance.

The Coens also understand the stark immediacy of this tale, and they visualize it with brilliantly judged details.

Both a staggering realist thriller and a jeremiad.

Ferguson's film is a clear-sighted counterpoint to the former secretary of defense's impression. As the title suggests, it's a seemingly infinite mess.

You may even feel like dancing in the aisles yourself. Sure, the real world doesn't always work this way. Have you forgotten that this is one of the reasons why we go to movies in the first place?

The best American film of the year to date.

This is an extraordinary artistic breakthrough from a Mexican director who was already fearlessly good to begin with.

Jane Austen's novel has been rejiggered into a jaunty romantic comedy that leaves us as incandescently happy as its characters.

The sight is magical and heartbreaking in equal measure. Look, the movie says: Where so many would fall, a man walks on air.

Once is the first rock musical that actually makes sense. People don't burst into song in this movie because the orchestra's swelling out of nowhere. The guy and the girl are working musicians -- or they'd like to be, if they could make a living at it -- and they're played by working musicians.

Ghobadi shows us a world where a village pond can hold both rare goldfish and unforgivable evil, and where every step is onto booby-trapped terrain.

Eloquent, bloody, and daringly simple.

More than "Unforgiven," more than "Mystic River," it is Clint Eastwood's autumnal masterpiece.

A subtle, often very funny, ultimately touching tragedy of royal manners and meaning.

Murderball is a paradox: a movie about quadriplegics that insists we look beyond their disability.

With impeccable skill, Akin has made a film roiling with cruelty but guided by tough political optimism. No, we can't all get along, but some us of are trying.

The Wrestler is a character study, no more and no less, yet it's open-ended enough to function as many things.

This is the most significant feature about poor black life since Charles Burnett's 1977 "Killer of Sheep."

In its unhurried fashion, Sugar can take its place with the best baseball movies. Where most focus on the grand slam, this one's about the life that surrounds the game and everything that comes after.

Not about crashing into walls or crashing into other people. It's about crashing into yourself and living to tell the tale.

A marvelous, uncommonly observant, and unexpectedly rousing group portrait.

It's an account of what helplessness does to a man whose philosophy of life has been founded on decisive action.

Exhilaratingly slow, which for many will simply mean SLOW... Those who can downshift appropriately, however, stand to be enraptured.

The new film lives up to expectations and, indeed, pushes past them into virtually unmapped territory.

What's most shocking about The Passenger 30 years later? Seeing Jack Nicholson at the lean, sardonic height of his youthful powers? Finding a Michelangelo Antonioni movie with an actual plot?

This is a movie from the past that's also eerily of a piece with the film culture of now and tomorrow.

It's an altogether satisfying drama -- the sort of movie some people complain they don't make anymore. So here it is; what's your excuse?

Maurice Bénichou does the most heartbreaking work in the movie, playing a friend of Georges's. It's a character and a performance I'll have a tough time getting out of my dreams.

Enigmatic as it is, The Intruder dares us to see movies as visual marvels tethered to humanity.

The New World is something I don't think I've ever seen before on a movie screen: an epic lyrical dialectic. Self-indulgent, gorgeous, maddening, grueling, ultimately transcendent, it's a Terrence Malick movie all the way, and possibly the director's most sustained work since 1972's "Badlands."

The movie they've assembled is in the vein of 1973's "Wattstax," but it's much more than a concert documentary. It's a jubilant, civic-minded lollapalooza.

It's one of the small, pitch-perfect treasures of the movie year.

A watchful, winding-down tragedy of a movie that delivers what it promises. As commentary, it's grim. As filmmaking, it's a powerfully disturbing odyssey through the Bucharest health care system.

The results bear witness to a time when sacrifice was bleached of everything but itself.

It's a thrill to watch Posey incorporate, at last, some true emotion into her exuberant screwball wit.

The documentary any American with an opinion on our involvement in Iraq owes it to his or her conscience to see.

No matter their wealth or social status, these people share disappointments and elations and a sense that life, in the end, may be what life is about.

A comic put-on of awe-inspiring crudity and death-defying satire and by a long shot the funniest film of the year. It is "Jackass" with a brain and Mark Twain with full frontal male nudity.

It's one of the great movies on the vicissitudes of love, commitment, and attraction.

Fast Food Nation has the dramatic flatness and willful lack of personality of some documentaries -- or at least how Linklater thinks a documentary should be. The movie nonetheless feels like both a work of investigative journalism and an immense human-interest story, veering into muckraking, horror, teen comedy, and what passes for "Twilight Zone" science fiction.

As demonstrated in his previous film, a plangent snapshot of subsistence called "Waiting for Happiness," Sissako is a poet, and the filmmaking in this new picture is stuff of a deserving laureate.

One of the transporting film experiences of this or any other year.

It's so hypnotically breathtaking, you don't realize you're not breathing. By the final shot, you don't realize you're crying either, but there go the tears.

An eloquent ecological warning.

As its title implies, This Is England isn't a hyperstylized head-trip a la "Trainspotting" but a straightforward calling to account.

Compact, nasty, and altogether wonderful, a tale of brotherly greed and New York comeuppance that shows an old dog dusting off old tricks using new technology.

The strangest thing about Todd Haynes's new movie isn't that he cast six actors to play the various faces and phases of Bob Dylan. It's that he needed only six.

In his masterful and haunting documentary Up the Yangtze, Yung Chang shows the old China drowning helplessly under the weight of the new.

For a film about a gaggle of slackers, Beautiful Losers is remarkably polished; with its quicksilver editing and fastidious mise-en-scene, it's as tight as the artists are slack.

With at least nine primary characters and running two and a half hours, it's a big, fat novel of a movie - a domestic epic that fuses bitterness and forgiveness in completely satisfying ways.

By nearly every measure, Milk is a beautifully made, far less conventional movie biography than most.

One of the most hopeful and heart-rending movies I've seen this year.

You can count on the fingers of one hand the number of works in any given year to which one is moved to apply the word ''masterpiece.'' Raul Ruiz's Time Regained is one of them.

The sly and subtle Minus Man is a wicked little sidewinder of a black comedy.

Riveting tale of family dynamics packed with as much drama, conflict, and poignancy as the best feature film.

Mesmerizing and unforgettable.

Implicitly acknowledges and celebrates the glorious chicanery and self-delusion of this most American of businesses, and for that reason it may be the most oddly honest Hollywood document of all.

It isn't often that lives of quiet desperation are served up with such pearly restraint.

Films that achieve the dimension of seraphic embrace achieved by 'Innocence, as it explores a return to first love, are the rarest of the rare.

Simple, but loaded. It celebrates the humanity and humanism at the heart of Iran's remarkable flow of films, but it's also more of a rebuke to materialistic values than any ideologue could ever hope to be.

A gorgeous autumnal period piece that catches a vanishing proprietary class on the eve of its extinction in Ireland in 1920.

Few, if any, films this year will approach, let alone equal, Autumn Tale in its subtle sparkle.

Quiet, powerful, contemplative, respectful of stillness, Eureka is the first film this year in which there is obvious greatness.

Deeper and richer in humanity than all but a handful of the American films released this year.

The story is spun forth ravishingly, tenderly, and urgently, with a captivating mix of beauty, spare sophistication, and profound humanity.

One of the year's most winning performances, Logue's Dex will grow on you as he stumbles toward emotional fullness.

Foreign intrigue is raised to an art form.

A film noir? A backstage musical? A whodunit? A comedy? In truth, it's all of the above -- plus a kinky love story, an absorbing melodrama, and a mordantly jaded snapshot of postwar Paris -- and all of them are wonderful.

It's terse, atmospheric, fatalistic, with vertiginous camera angles and edits offsetting its gray documentary flatness.

We're in a golden age of comedy, and one of the reasons is Margaret Cho.

Reflective, haunting, hilarious documentary.

Butler's approach is subtle: His documentary allows the story to unfold elegantly, without embellishment, and it is more powerful for that restraint.

The impact of this stunning film - and the lessons to be learned from it - are as remarkable as when it was first released 30 years ago.

Roberts and Erin Brockovich have Oscar contender written all over them.

Slly, sublime, buoyant mischief that is virtually without parallel in 20th-century art, much less 20th-century film.

Stillman has become a master at escalating the laughter by waiting an extra beat and then understating something devastatingly funny, as when someone looks Chris Eigeman's club manager, Des, in the eye and says, "I consider you a person of integrity - except, you know, in the matter of women."

The Joy Luck Club is "Terms of Endearment" in quadruplicate, aimed at the heart and right on target. [24 Sept 1993, p.47]

Quiz Show, Robert Redford's strongest movie yet, has contender written all over it. Swinging from the heels, it connects solidly, powerfully and probingly with the event that triggered America's loss of postwar innocence and erosion of public trust. [16 Sept 1994, p.59]

It's all we ask of a film but almost never get, as it first makes us squirm, then makes us cheer.

A deep, exhaustive, and moving piece of do-it-yourself detective work.

Unfolds with the serenity of a fable but underneath it draws intelligent, deeply troubled connections between the personal, political, and spiritual.

So clear-eyed and three-dimensional that it makes the recent ''Pearl Harbor'' look like a bunch of kids playing dress up. Aspects of the film have dated, but in the important things it's more mature than anything proposed lately by modern Hollywood.

A sweet screenful of quirky chaos.

In a crisply restored print, it's as joyous as ever. We loved them - yeah, yeah, yeah. Now we can love them all over again.

Moves like hot mercury, and it draws a viewer so thoroughly into its world that real life can seem thick and dull when the lights come up.

It's my favorite movie...Chinatown is a complex reminder of how movies were made when filmmakers held the cards - before product placement, marketers, and agents assumed control of the business. Before movies had to be sold to studios on the basis of zippy one-liners. I dare say that the movie wouldn't stand a chance of getting the green light today unless Julia Roberts was interested in playing Jane Gittes. [5 Nov 1999, p.D5]

Music for the eyes. That's why it has become a treasured classic. That's why we'll see it again and again. [2002 re-release]