The performances are crucial, because all of these characters have so completely internalized their world that they make it palpable, and themselves utterly convincing.

A powerful but quiet film, constructed of hidden thoughts and secret desires.

When a film telling three stories and spanning thousands of years has a running time of 96 minutes, scenes must have been cut out. There will someday be a Director’s Cut of this movie, and that’s the cut I want to see.

This movie is NEW from the get-go. It could be your first Bond. In fact, it was the first Bond; it was Ian Fleming's first 007 novel, and he was still discovering who the character was.

What a thoughtful film this is, and how thought-stirring. Marc Forster's Stranger Than Fiction comes advertised as a romance, a comedy, a fantasy, and it is a little of all three, but it's really a fable, a "moral tale."

Very nice. I like Borat very much. I think it is, as everybody has been saying, the funniest movie in years.

It is refreshing to see Cruz acting in the culture and language that is her own. As it did with Sophia Loren in the 1950s, Hollywood has tried to force Cruz into a series of show-biz categories, when she is obviously most at home playing a woman like the ones she knew, grew up with, could have become.

The documentary shows what a tight-knit group the Chicks are.

Kristen Dunst is pitch-perfect in the title role.

Eastwood’s two-film project is one of the most visionary of all efforts to depict the reality and meaning of battle.

Christopher Nolan's The Prestige has just about everything I require in a movie about magicians, except ... the Prestige.

It is intriguing to wonder what Scorsese saw in the Hong Kong movie that inspired him to make the second remake of his career (after "Cape Fear"). I think he instantly recognized that this story, at a buried level, brought two sides of his art and psyche into equal focus.

I am not British, was born 14 years before the subjects, and yet by now identify intensely with them, because some kinds of human experience -- teenage, work, marriage, illness are universal. You could make this series in any society.

The Queen is a spellbinding story of opposed passions -- of Elizabeth's icy resolve to keep the royal family separate and aloof from the death of the divorced Diana, who was legally no longer a royal, and of Blair's correct reading of the public mood.

Bahrani, as director, not only stays out of the way of the simplicity of his story, but relies on it; less is more, and with restraint he finds a grimy eloquence.

Unlike "Saving Private Ryan" and other dramatizations based on D-Day, Overlord is an intimate film, one that focuses closely on Tom Beddoes (Brian Stirner), who enters the British army, goes through basic training and is one of the first ashore on D-Day. (Reviewed in 2004)

Meryl Streep is indeed poised and imperious as Miranda, and Anne Hathaway is a great beauty who makes a convincing career girl. I liked Stanley Tucci, too, as Nigel... But I thought the movie should have reversed the roles played by Grenier and Baker. Grenier comes across not like the old boyfriend but like the slick New York writer, and Baker seems the embodiment of Midwestern sincerity.

When the hero, his alter ego, his girlfriend and the villain all seem to lack any joy in being themselves, why should we feel joy at watching them?

You could think of Larry Clark's Wassup Rockers as "Ferris Velasquez's Day Off."

It's not just sad, it's brutal. There's an undercurrent of cold, detached cruelty in the way Michael uses the magical device.

Lin takes an established franchise and makes it surprisingly fresh and intriguing. The movie is not exactly "Shogun" when it comes to the subject of an American in Japan (nor, on the other hand, is it "Lost in Translation"). But it's more observant than we expect, and uses its Japanese locations to make the story about something more than fast cars.

Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties is actually funnier and more charming than the first film.

What I respond to in the movie is its fundamental romantic impulse.

It takes some doing to make a Jack Black comedy that doesn't work. But Nacho Libre does it.

The film is made with a lot of style and visual ingenuity.

I wouldn't have thought that even in animation a 1951 Hudson Hornet could look simultaneously like itself and like Paul Newman, but you will witness that feat, and others, in Cars.

What a lovely film this is, so gentle and whimsical, so simple and profound.

Sports movies have a purity of form. They always end with the big game, in triumph or heartbreak. So does The Heart of the Game, although the lawsuit still hangs over the team after the final free throw.