Where Peter was yee-ha giddy with the discovery of his newfound powers in the first film, he's crushed by the weight of responsibility that comes with them in its far superior successor.

Its tone has elements of Jim Jarmusch and the Coen brothers but without Jarmusch's self-conscious artiness or the Coens' hip snottiness.

The performances are uniformly remarkable.

It's painful, it's real, and it's probably the funniest thing you'll see this year...a teen sexploitation classic.

This infusion of warrior philosophy is the gas in Ghost Dog's tank, and Jarmusch pumps it up for maximum octane throughout.

This is the breakout role for Sigourney Weaver, whose iconic presence still propels this ride beyond the scores of substandard imitations that followed. Why see it on the big screen? Because it's bloody brilliant.

Ryan's performance burns with a rare and passionate veracity. The other half of the delight comes from director Jane Campion, whose sensualist eye and scabrous heart infuse In the Cut with guts and glory.

The central theme of the movie is the pure joy the cartoon takes in childishness.

Kubrick's comic gem sparkles with enduring relevance.

It was Melville's second-to-last feature, and it shows him in top form, with a more generous dose of humor than usual.

Herzog is primarily interested in Treadwell the filmmaker, but you'll likely be fascinated with him as a human being.

Lasseter and Stanton and the rest of the animators and gagsmiths use the computer with staggering imaginative freedom.

May be the most wrenching, profound and perfectly made movie nobody wants to see.

Meandering but reasonably charming.

The Dreamers is a real humdinger, at once an intimate romance, a glimpse into a rather unconventional friendship and a beautifully focused celebration of cinema itself.

The singing and dancing in this Chicago are uniformly splendid, right down to Gere's tap dancing. The high wit and dark eroticism Marshall brings to the famous "Cell Block Tango" number are matchless.

A riveting movie that's as entertaining as it is socially and politically important.

At the heart of it all is an entrancing lead performance by the teenage Kilcher.

The final product is great populist entertainment and may even leave audiences with a feeling of comfort, however fleeting, in the knowledge that corrupt corporations don't always win

Spielberg can never top this. Period.

The directing's a bit obtrusive, but the script and the acting gets to the heart of Mamet's glorious obsession with macho B.S.

The first exceptional drama of 2004, The Mother feels like life itself, sharpened to its finest points.

It gracefully defies the usual categories, gets under your skin in ways you cannot anticipate, then works its way straight toward the heart. It's far and away the bravest and best movie of the year.

The zingers come so fast and furious that if you miss a few (and even the most alert viewer will the first time), there are always more.

He (Spielberg) commemorates the soldiers in that vast Normandy cemetery in the most absolute and honorable way possible.

This film is a miracle, an extravaganza equal to its predecessors and in some ways more stunning. It is a profound testament to the extraordinary power of moving images and sound.

What makes About Schmidt so extraordinary is how ordinary its tale is; it's a gray picture about gray people looking for some kind of meaning in their gray lives.

Whatever else it may be, this movie is not like anything you've seen this year, and those weary of Hollywood norms owe it to themselves to seek it out.

Treacherously funny and wrenchingly sad.

No one can blend melodrama and heightened emotion with laugh-out-loud wackiness the way Almodóvar does.

Writer-director Greg McLean, who has many shorts and commercials under his belt, makes a significant feature debut here, with unapologetic horror that doesn't compromise.

Tokyo Godfathers just might be the equivalent of "It's a Wonderful Life" or, to be hip and new-millennium about it, "Elf."

Feels like something entirely brand-new; such are the gifts of Kaufman and Gondry, inventors and magicians.

Wong weaves a spell that no other director could create.

In this bolder, longer new cut, characters are allowed to finish scenes previously left as DVD extras, effects are creepier, and the theories of "the Tangent Universe" are explored in greater depth. Friends and neighbors, this is a Great American Movie.

Overlong, but with moments of greatness.

It's not easy to pull off a good morality tale. That's why Moolaad, the new film from 81-year-old Senegalese writer-director Ousmane Sembene, feels like such an exceptional success. Its moral center is painfully clear, but so is its humanity.

It's best appraised as a strong ensemble piece, a darkly dreamy slab of social commentary and definitely one of the year's best films.

He's (Hanson) never before generated the kind of heat inside a picture--and out of it--that he has with L.A. Confidential.

It's a work of art for sure, but a sadistic one. Oldboy is one of the year's best; it just isn't for everyone. If you're still interested, go for it.

It isn't your typical scary movie--there are no "boo!" moments--but it may gradually creep you out and perhaps even more after you've seen it.

The original retains its dark tone and deadly serious anti-war message. For today's moviegoing audiences, this may not be your daddy's Godzilla movie, but chances are your granddaddy could teach you a thing or two about the context.

If not the best superhero movie ever, it's definitely in the top 3. Reeve will forever be Superman to most of us.

Turns out to be more than simply a near-miracle of filmmaking, however; it is also an astonishing work of art, a historical epic that drifts through one's consciousness like a reverie.

A masterful film about the magic of performance and the foibles of the artists behind it.

So enchanting it takes your breath away.

Brilliant.

The cast is full of cool cult actors past and present, and the movie is great at what it does. It's also brutal as hell, and not everyone will have the stomach for it.

This astonishingly gritty film maintains its strong niche between Roberto Rossellini's "Open City" and Paul Greengrass' "Bloody Sunday" as a pinnacle of war-torn neo-realist drama.

How often does one see a masterpiece about a masterpiece?

When the action sequences work, they work well; the climax cribs heavily from 1989's "Batman," but improves on Tim Burton's finale.

It makes it clearer than ever before that these films are comedy. Granted, the sick kind of comedy that involves laughing at stupid people being ripped in half, but we know there are plenty of you out there.

It would be a masterpiece in any language.

A superb and piercing documentary.

The movie's scares are intense, but the notion that the Terminator would move on to politics is even more frightening.

Fargo is a concert performance--an illuminating amalgam of emotion and thought. It glimpses into the heart of man and unearths a blackly comic nature, hellishly mercurial and selfish, yet strangely innocent. If it weren't so funny, it would be unbearably disturbing.

One of this year's best films--a classic, even, like a C.S. Forester "Hornblower" story on steroids.

The result is a vivid anthropological document suffused with plenty of emotion and a touch of ancient magic.

Winterbottom has never before done such potent work; he's created a fiction film about the siege of Sarajevo that bristles with the raw, unnerving textures of a battlefield documentary.

Its exquisiteness can overwhelm in a single sitting.

A gorgeous, emotionally rewarding masterpiece that invites compassion, reflection and, at least from this reviewer, a great deal of admiration. It's no wonder that it won 12 Japanese Academy Awards.

It is a remarkable achievement in filmmaking, a beautiful and brutal work.

[Coppola] understands the crisp, oblique horror and wistfulness of Eugenides' narrative, plunking down five enchanting princesses into an environment that is anything but magical.

Feels mostly like an audacious prank.

Smart people will relish its temerariousness, average people will smile awkwardly and comment that it's "kinda different," and dimly lit people may mistake it for the Elmo movie and drool quietly in the back rows. It's a movie for everyone.

Spinal Tap is still on the right side of the fine line between stupid and clever.

Director Barry Levinson has given this swift, sure-footed film a matter-of-fact, improvisational look and feel. To appreciate its brisk, confident, wild comedy, all you need is a funny bone and a BS meter.

It's the best thing Wong has done in years--perhaps ever.

If, in its groundbreaking assault on the mythology of the American West, Brokeback Mountain gets a lot of people into a furious lather, so be it.

The movie has tremendous scope and charge and a dense period fabric, along with a volcanic performance by Djimon Hounsou, the West African actor who plays Cinque.

This roaring crowd-pleaser also boasts hilarious bits of business, insightful observations into the human condition, and geysers of kitschy computer-generated blood.

It respects its characters, its source material, and its audience, and its inherent melodrama is ennobled by the scrupulous intelligence of its director.

Amazingly, almost every note of every performance in Bloody Sunday rings true.

Virgin is astoundingly astute but also wondrously clever, written with more care and joy than any hundred comedies to come out of Hollywood in years.

The acting is remarkable across the board, undoubtedly a combination of a strong script, gifted actors and exceptional direction.

Despite moments of gritty greatness that rival Scorsese's best, the movie is severely hampered by please-everyone syndrome, especially in the editing and choice of music.

There have been other films dealing with the Jewish ghettos during the Nazi occupation of Poland -- some very good -- but The Pianist, the latest feature from Roman Polanski, may be the best.

In short, Just Say Yes.

Craven's other accomplishment here, besides resuscitating the genre, is the way he keeps things scary even when they're at their funniest. The grand finale, while thoroughly bloody and tense, has some genuinely hilarious shtick.

There's a lot of imagination at work here; too bad just a little bit of it couldn't have been channeled into the creation of a better narrative.

A fluent, intelligent piece of work whose sex and violence are anything but gratuitous, and exactly the kind of highly personal, no-holds-barred vision of life on the ragged edge that independents always aspire to but rarely have the goods to achieve.

As is common in a Frankenheimer picture, the plot lines get a bit tangled in Ronin, but the atmosphere is tense, the style impeccable.

The writing-directing team of brothers Larry and Andi Wachowski has chosen as its filmmaking debut a tightly constructed, stylishly (but rarely self-consciously) executed, gripping little noir parable that couldn't be more firmly grounded in American movie tradition if the filmmakers created a wacky romantic farce about mismatched paramours.

In the end, what Minghella has wrought is a nearly perfect drama of love and war (still the great subjects, after all), an epic that's fluent, frightening and beautiful all at once, that lifts the heart and dashes our dreams in about equal measure.

A six-year-old masterpiece, never-before widely seen in the U.S., is still a masterpiece.

Not just great fun but high art.

Sling Blade is perhaps the year's most impressive debut because it is an uncompromisingly told tale with a minimum of frills.

That he (Hetfield), and his band, still lives is astonishing enough; that you get to see how and why in a movie so painfully intimate is nothing short of extraordinary.

Happily, North Country is not all social-realist grit or straight sermonizing. Not only is Theron achingly real, the fine supporting performances here lend even more dramatic reach and human scale.

What makes Crash so gripping--so terrifying in spots, so moving in others, and even a little funny at times--is how nothing happens as we think it will.

In this modest but brilliant little movie, we find ourselves immersed in life itself.

It's difficult to imagine a more eloquent tribute.

For the most part, Sideways is a great movie--impeccably written, directed and acted--that takes its characters on a journey toward something new.

Radford has made a gripping, highly cinematic adaptation of a gorgeous work of theater.

Revelatory and disappointing.

Sure, it's amusing, but it isn't much more.

A gentle, beautifully realized tale of love and intimacy...It moved me to tears.

One of the most remarkable things about Murderball, which is easily among the year's best movies, is how little of its time is filled with the playing of the game.