The director's key achievement is creating a convincing sense of daily life in the household and neighborhood. This is not a narrow drama that focuses on a few themes; it paints a whole style of life, the good times with the bad.

Ivan Reitman's direction and Gary Ross' screenplay use intelligence and warmhearted sentiment to make Dave into wonderful lighthearted entertainment.

Like Free Willy, The Secret Garden, Searching for Bobby Fischer and The Man in the Moon, this is a "family movie" that doesn't condescend. It takes its 12-year-old hero as seriously as he takes baseball, and nothing is "dumbed down" for the PG audience.

Wiig manages to make Alice funny as hell, endearing, sad and sometimes a little frightening. There’s not an ounce of condescension or preciousness in the performance.

Tenet reaches for cinematic greatness and, though it doesn’t quite reach that lofty goal, it’s the kind of film that reminds us of the magic of the moviegoing experience.

What adds boundless energy to Walk the Line is the performance by Reese Witherspoon as June Carter Cash.

Although it was not quite his last film, there can be little doubt that Limelight was Charlie Chaplin’s farewell. It is also probably his most personal, revealing film.

This is a smart movie about complicated people in search of something approaching inner peace.

On the basis of its scale, energy and magical events, this is the Hong Kong equivalent of a big-budget Hollywood blockbuster. But it transcends them with the stylization of the costumes, the panoply of the folklore, the richness of the setting, and the fact that none of the characters (allegedly) have superpowers.

With the ensemble cast doing superb work, The Blackening is a horror comedy that packs a serious punch.

The characters have a weight and reality, as if Almodovar has finally taken pity on them--has seen that although their plights may seem ludicrous, they're real enough to hurt. These are people who stand outside conventional life and its rules, and yet affirm them.

The Pillow Book, starring Vivian Wu, is a seductive and elegant story.

As you listen to his uncanny narration of Tupac: Resurrection, which is stitched together from interviews, you realize you're not listening to the usual self-important vacancies from celebrity Q&As, but to spoken prose of a high order, in which analysis, memory and poetry come together seamlessly in sentences and paragraphs that sound as if they were written.

Sarandon and Davis find in Callie Khouri’s script the materials for two plausible, convincing, lovable characters. And as actors they work together like a high-wire team, walking across even the most hazardous scenes without putting a foot wrong.

Mamet's dialogue has a kind of logic, a cadence, that allows people to arrive in triumph at the ends of sentences we could not possibly have imagined. There is great energy in it. You can see the joy with which these actors get their teeth into these great lines.

The movie gets the job done, and the actors show a lot of confidence in occupying that tricky middle ground between controlled satire and comic overkill. It's fun.

Clouds of Sils Maria is an expertly filmed insider’s look at the film business, the trappings of fame and the unstoppable, sometimes bone-chilling march of time. It’s complex and wickedly funny and dark, and it features the best ensemble acting of any film I’ve seen so far this year.

With God Forbid, Corben serves up a neon potpourri of slick visuals, quick cuts, clever re-creation techniques, needle drops such as “Jesus Piece” by The Game, the use of archival footage and sit-down interviews to tell the incredible but true story of one of the most stunning sex/religious/political scandals in of this century. (And let’s face it, that’s saying a lot.)

It was a feel-good story that turned horribly tragic.

One of the truest films I've seen about the ebb and flow of a real relationship.

Director Garret Price (“Woodstock 99"), who is clearly a fan of the music, nimbly weaves in current-time interviews with Christopher Cross, Kenny Loggins and various session greats and producers with archival footage.

For every sobering note, Becoming has a dozen uplifting moments.

The movie demonstrates the power of sports to involve us; we don't live in Odessa and are watching a game played 16 years ago, and we get all wound up.

Grown-ups are likely to be surprised by how smart the movie is, and how sneakily perceptive.

A ground-level documentary, messy and immediate, about the daily life of a combat soldier in Iraq. It is not pro-war or anti-war.

Every good actor has a season when he comes into his own, and this is Terrence Howard's time.

Jesus' Son surprises me with moments of wry humor, poignancy, sorrow and wildness. It has a sequence as funny as any I've seen this year.

Douglas Tirola’s Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead is a frenetic, rough-edged, unapologetic tribute to the Lampoon, featuring some amazing archival footage, nifty bits of animation and dozens of straightforward talking-head interviews that crackle and pop.