Gradually, and with a kind of inquisitive generosity, the filmmaker's scope expands to take in Casim's parents and two sisters, whose public shame and private despair at having the only son move in with a “goree” - a white girl - is made palpably, wrenchingly real.

To the degree that ivans xtc. works, it's thanks to Huston's revelatory performance.

Bowman and production designer Wolf Kroeger do an excellent job of evoking a twice-baked England, while writers Gregg Chabot, Kevin Peterka and Matt Greenberg keep the script devilishly pitched just shy of preposterous (it's McConaughey who stumbles beyond).

The archetypal Townes Van Zandt song is a low-key ballad filled with sadness and failed humanity. Director Margaret Brown's documentary about the revered songwriter's songwriter (who died at the age of 52 on New Year's Day, 1997) keenly achieves the same tone.

Adds to the current crop of great kids' fare with a most-welcome old reliable.

It's a loving film, but Kushner's own characters are more richly textured than Mock's depiction of the playwright and the divided, divisive world he's trying to fathom.

Straight off the streets of Jersey City, writer-director Michael Tolajian’s affable debut charms with its scruffy characters and nuanced multiculturalism.

McGehee and Siegel's ornate structure and editing stay just this side of tricky, as does their borderline-goofy use of special effects to make us see the world (and the words) through Eliza's anxious eyes.

This unusually classical story from experimental Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai flows along, suffused in a quiet beauty flecked with sober foreboding.

A mood of anarchic spontaneity and freshness that thrills.

It's a setup so easy it borders on facile, but keeping the film from cheap-shot mediocrity is its crack cast.

This delightful riff on the identity crisis of a young Jewish Argentine man deserves both the Grand Jury prize and Best Actor awards it won at last year's Berlin Film Festival.

As sleek, clever and cocky as its anti-heroic protagonist, Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart), a hard-driving lobbyist for the tobacco industry who can turn the most unpromising PR quagmire to his own advantage with a few well-turned lies posing as rational argument.

My Life Without Me was produced by the studio of Pedro Almodóvar, and one sees the Spanish director's influence in the way Polley edges her Madonna with a touch of the reckless sensualist.

This loopy anime from director Satoshi Kon ("Millennium Actress") isn't a movie that's meant to be understood so much as simply experienced -- or maybe dreamed.

Little here will surprise cineastes but much of it will charm them.

If the plot comes off more like a reworking of Scorsese’s tales of Italian-American mobsters, Boursinhac nevertheless shows a sure hand with his story, lingering on the handsome, lost face of Dris as his world falls apart around him.

While it can't have been easy to find action points for a drama about vocabulary drills, Atchison comes up with a steady stream of plot-propelling business, including Akeelah's flair for jump rope, a skill that serves her beautifully in a clinch moment.

While Driving Lessons' writer-director, Jeremy Brock, sticks to the all-too-familiar template of such tales, he's given Walters her best role since "Educating Rita." Hamming it up with the precision of a master, she makes this somewhat plodding film a pleasure, as does young Grint.

First Snow has a fine sense of place and a small but terrific turn by veteran actress Jackie Burroughs.

A remarkably clear-eyed look back at a moment in which real revolution seemed possible - even probable - in America's streets.

Writer-director Darren Lemke's likable thriller shows surprising smarts for a low-budget debut, cribbing from all the right sources.

Rachel Boynton's painfully timely film is actually a full-court tragedy - the sorry tale of a battle won and a war lost; of a country decimated by 500 years of colonialism and poverty; of globalization and America's losing battle to export market democracy to the developing world.

The Tsuk children, with remarkable equanimity, evince the least surprise at their parents’ later actions. Hebrew speakers may be better able to appreciate nuances that the sometimes stilted, distracting subtitles seem to obscure. But those open, honest faces — the story they tell transcends words.

On its own, the story is tepid, and less than original. What draws us in is the way in which Gatlif sets it against a rich Andalusian backdrop.

Hickenlooper can't contain Bingenheimer's incredibly generous spirit -- so generous that, while obviously uncomfortable, he lets the director into his most private moments, including the scattering of his mother's ashes.

Andersson particularly delights in left-outs: the guy who can’t squeeze into the bus stop during a downpour; the natty little suitor getting his bouquet smashed in a slamming door. The sum total is the reflection of a worldview -- sad sack, bordering on “Everybody Hurts” black-velvet sad-clown bathos -- rather than any narrative.

For Conran, after they finished shooting pesky actors, the real fun began at the computer screen with his delirious imagination in free-fall.

The film might prove more illuminating and instructive if it examined more reactions to Kroc’s flowering from within the lifting world. Overall, though, Del Monte has crafted a warm portrait of the birth of a woman from a man who found that he had even more strength than he ever realized.

Director Derek Doneen opens hearts wide with his documentary The Price of Free, his tale of enslaved children working in factories in India. But he’ll also crush many of those hearts with the revelation that viewers are among the villains activist Kailash Satyarthi is fighting.

Like Max Cady in "Cape Fear," the prototypical prole-stalks-bourgeois thriller, Sy is employed simply to scare the family members silly and, in so doing, make them stronger. Call it an exercise in threat management.

The triumph here is a matter of craftsmanship rather than art, but it's rare enough even on that level for a film to be worth celebrating.

A Spanish dinner-theater comedy, this intermittently hilarious contraption by the husband-wife team of Dominic Harari and Teresa de Pelegri heaves Jewish-Palestinian conflict onto a prop-room table already groaning with loaded guns, impromptu sex toys, a wounded duck paddling in a bidet, and a brick of frozen soup that doubles as a sandbag for unlucky pedestrians below.

With the supremely gifted Rudd as his point man, Peretz is often ruthless in depicting Americans abroad as deluded cretins; by film’s end, however, he finds their optimism useful for re-firing the defeated hearts of his characters, even the hope-leery French ones.

The sort of movie that you'd see on Lifetime if that channel actually respected its viewers' taste and intelligence, Jacques Thelemaque's feature directorial debut has been kicking around the festival circuit for five years, and now finally comes to theaters in a leaner cut that jettisons an extraneous subplot to get to the core of its human story.

Director Becker and his sharp screenwriter, Bernd Lichtenberg, come less to bury communism than to hurl darts at the Western commodity culture that floods East Berlin.

Though Baran is more forgiving of the Afghans' Iranian hosts than they may deserve, writer-director Majid Majidi ("The Color of Paradise") handles his unassuming material with surpassing delicacy, and the poetic eye for the rhythms and routines of hard labor that has become the hallmark of Iranian film.

The sort of movie you like in spite of yourself, Scary Movie 4 is obvious and dumb, but it possesses such a giddy, good-hearted spirit that even its terrible jokes (and there are tons) get by on something resembling charm.

The movie surely owes something to Polanski, Cronenberg, et al., in its use of an apparently placid, upper-middle-class setting as the background for perverse horrors, but De Van's fearless, high-wire performance is uniquely its own.

With the possible exception of Neil LaBute, I can't think of a filmmaker who can divide an audience as efficiently as Solondz.

This is a sick flick. Sick, but satisfying. A cartoonish parable in the mode of Cronenberg's "A History of Violence."

Dog Days is in fact a bleak but deeply felt humanism -- a yearning that we might all learn to better love our neighbors and, perhaps more importantly, ourselves.

Kopple and Peck went on and off the road with the band for the three years of waffling, agonizing and defiance in between Maines’ mouth-offs.

While Stiller and De Niro can play hilariously off one another, the film -- despite its happy ending -- feels unresolved.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the jollity that reigns in this household, one wants to ask the Mia Farrow question: Why does this woman keep surrounding herself with others who are completely reliant on her?

Intelligent, moving film.

Diaz leaves us unsure about whether we should pity or revile Imelda, a woman alternately charmingly childlike, shockingly remote and, ultimately, as she stands over the waxed corpse of her husband, pathetic.

Dazzles with rare performance footage.

Blaustein's journey seems not to have shaken his convictions; he still embraces pro wrestling, warts and all.

The movie starts to drag near the end and feels longer than its 90 minutes - but that's cool. It's a love letter to the faithful in the first place.

Niccol gives audiences a very amusing puzzle about authenticity, fraud, and the uses and abuses of technology. That is a fine and funny feat. The very folks responsible for our obsession with celebrity will likely love it. And in loving it, they will no doubt let themselves off the hook.

The Roost advances a nifty man-vs.-nature scenario that harks back to Fessenden's own "Wendigo" and provides a nice chaser to a summer movie season populated by cuddly penguins and benevolent cheetahs.

The pleasure of La Moustache is that it doesn't feel the need to explain itself at every turn. Part absurdist comedy about the institution of marriage, part paranoid Kafkaesque fantasy, it's a minor-key reverie on the way our own lives can sometimes feel alien to us.

It's whiz-bang, techno fun, with a touch of Latino flavor.

Itself an observational relationship comedy, Cold Weather's underlying tension is reminiscent of an old-fashioned comedy of remarriage.

It's a finely tuned Motor City engine: The action, including a nighttime car chase through a blinding snowstorm, is fast, brutal and efficient; the Motown soundtrack never cuts out; and as a gangster called Sweet, the British-Nigerian actor Chiwetel Ejiofor gives an electrifying performance.

Under Mangold’s sure if uninspired hand, the new Yuma is reasonably exciting and terse, and, like its predecessor, built around a memorable villain of ambiguous villainy.

The film sniffs mightily at Milos Forman's "Amadeus," but even if you found that film over the top and off the wall, you might find yourself wishing for a little more "Volfie" and a little less Saint Wolfgang.

Slight but charming comedy.

May be scant on character and plot development, but it’s rich with affection for daydream believers

Free of the disclaiming jokey sneer that defaces so much of contemporary neo-noir.

In a boom time for movies about the scars of the battlefield, Half Moon reminds that the unending strife and religious fundamentalism of the Middle East kills not just people but culture too.

It requires nothing more of a viewer than quiet complaisance, which is rewarded in turn by pleasant scenery, a few mild laughs, and the dependably involving presence of Weaver and, especially, Neuwirth.

Although the dialogue initially flakes with awkward exposition, writer Ruth Epstein and director Harvey Kahn have fashioned a riveting thriller full of good scares and learned, muckraking insight into the global labyrinth of oil and politics.

Excellent performances.

Surprisingly enjoyable, even if you'd hesitate to call it a complete success. Indeed, Figgis expects you to sit back and roll with the pleasurable moments.

Niftily shot and edited, The Grace Lee Project isn't just a witty unpacking of stereotype. It's also a welcome freshening of the old documentary saw that there's no such thing as an ordinary person.

Stellan Skarsgård's deceptively low-key performance as the beleaguered musician -- furtive, indignant, drowning in self-pity blended with a kind of ruined nobility -- pushes the emotional temperature to a quiet fever pitch.

The results are charming if rarely thrilling, with outstanding performances from Joan Allen and William H. Macy.

It does pry much deeper into the band’s unexpectedly complex and contradictory personalities.

This is a small, funny movie drawn from the radical notion that a love born of late-night lust can survive the glaring light of day.

Immensely moving.

Smart, witty look at the human cost of free-market reforms and globalization.

Election is finally, necessarily, as much about sex as it is about politics -- wanting it, getting it, losing it.

A witty exploration of cultural mythology, while simultaneously contributing to that mythology.

Grotesquely violent, horribly funny.

This is the umpteenth movie I’ve seen this year about guys in their 30s who aren't quite sure what they want to do with their lives, and it's the only one that strikes a real chord, because it's neither an exaltation nor a condemnation of slackerdom, but rather just a sweet little fable about how sometimes the life that you think could be so much better is actually pretty damn good already.

The rueful ghost of François Truffaut hovers over writer-director Yann Samuell's wonderfully capricious tale of Gallic lovers with no idea of when to say finis.

Ardant gives in this film the performance of her life, lip-synching to the voice of the real Callas.

Maquiling offers us the unexpected pleasures of taking the side streets in a film about how even minor-key adventures can make a life stuck in low gear something to look back on.

So many documentaries about genocides play art-house theaters that it can be easy to get jaded, but combining one with tour footage from the most innovative metal band in the world is genius, banging the viewer's head before he realizes it's being filled with awareness too.

O'Donnell's directing is assured and glossy as befits a former maker of television commercials, and Jeffrey Caine's exuberant script sidesteps cliché -- just.

Having built his cast from friends and family, the director is left with some stilted acting, but that's easily outweighed by the film's infectious enthusiasm.

Narrated with surprising empathy by John Waters, is a historically thorough and thoroughly hysterical examination of the big, smelly desert lake's formation.

Midway through, the plot pulls itself out of its doldrums with a sudden, heart-twisting turn. Ruben still knows how to cut a sequence for maximum jolt, and, ultimately, he and DiPego manage to summon up some of the B-movie paranoia that fueled "The Stepfather," turning in a pleasantly nonsensical roller-coaster ride.

A profession of faith, made with the confident disrespect of a true believer.

One of the most fascinating and least documented tributaries of the Jewish experience in World War II.

All of this looks great on the giant IMAX screen -- most things do -- but the filmmakers can't shake the sense that this is an inflated TV special.

The movie's pleasures draw on old-fashioned Italian neo-realist simplicity.

There are so many good ideas at the visual level that you can't help wishing the narrative elements had been more cleverly worked out.

Writer-director Richard Day, whose debut feature, the drag comedy Girls Will Be Girls, was shamefully neglected by critics and audiences alike, proves again that he's the new master of the catty one-liner, and he's also becoming a striking visual stylist.

Wordplay offers a running tutorial in how crosswords are created - lessons that are enhanced by the onscreen graphics of designer Brian Oakes, which, come tournament time, allow moviegoers to see the clues and grids the contestants are working on, theoretically allowing us to solve the puzzles along with them.

Watching this interesting, well-acted debut feature from writer-director Russell Brown, one begins to reason that what Nathan and Maggie have in common, besides desire, is a need for a partner who's not completely kind.

The film has the unpolished charm of a diamond in the rough, and it boasts a richer inner life than most of the teen movies currently bouncing off the assembly line.

The performances are revelatory.

A refreshing breakaway from both idolatry and cynicism.

Leuchter is such a riveting, disturbing and finally pathetic character that his story hardly needs embellishing with Morris' fancy visuals and ominous mood music.

Neveldine and Taylor’s spazzy (but coherent) action scenes rely mostly on blood spurts instead of feats of badassery, but their dystopia is inventive and their visual schemes diverse.