Like Michael Haneke's "Caché," this effectively creepy little customer from Dominik Moll (With a Friend Like Harry) fires yet another shot across the bows of French bourgeois complacency, while throwing in a wink and a nudge about the perils of surveillance.

Grisbi is hard (new subtitles bring out the chill of the gangsters' argot) and gray: a meditation on what we are left with when life has let us down, played out in the haunted eyes of Jean Gabin.

Despite the fact that you can see every plot twist a mile off, director Tim Story keeps the script by Mark Brown, Don D. Scott and Marshall Todd rollicking with a jazzy spontaneity.

So tapped into its audience's giddy schadenfreude that beyond a kinkier-than-usual jolt of black humor and some clever red herrings, the formula remains rote.

As always, conversation is the constant threading together Rohmer's stately pace and episodic structure, the thing he uses to show us who his characters are and what their friendship entails.

The canniness of Bale’s performance (which may be the best of his young but brilliant career) is that he plays Dengler as a fundamentally kind and simple yet rather ingenious man.

All you really need to know, finally, from a consumer angle, is that it is not boring, and looks fantastic, and maintains the wit and spirit of the original, and that -- it takes care of the grown-ups first. There are obscure puns and cultural references for Mom and Dad, dog pee and monkey poo (metaphorical) for the kids, and fighting for . . . everybody!

As in "Sexy Beast", Mellis and Scinto’s rhythmically aggressive dialogue becomes arialike. But first-time director Malcolm Venville lacks the visual flair of Sexy Beast’s Jonathan Glazer -- a deficit that, combined with 44 Inch Chest’s wobbly final act, comes dangerously close to erasing the film’s uninhibited look at the measure of a man.

The formula, with its comforting arrangement of familiar elements, is what we're after, and The World Is Not Enough certainly comes through on that front.

It's not a great movie, or even a particularly good one, but it's spectacular. No expense has been spared. The technical crew reads like a roll call of Oscar-night regulars.

It's grim stuff indeed, but somehow the horror never quite overwhelms Nelson's sure-footed approach to raising all manner of frankly unanswerable questions -- in particular, what would or could one have done in such circumstances?

The irony is, it's his vulgarity, this mixture of the gaudy and the glossy, that distinguishes Lyne, that makes his work identifiable and, when the story's right, such a guilty pleasure.

By the time Leila's brow furrows in concern for the father, the film has absolutely earned its tug at your heart.

It's potentially strong material, but the film is so determined not to demonize the conservatives that it winds up being an inadvertent profile in the banality of bigotry.

Light on visceral thrills and heavy on the quotidian rhythms of life on the force, Xavier Beauvois' police procedural owes more to "Prime Suspect" and "Hill Street Blues" than it does to any film genre.

The true star of the film -- areas whose mind-boggling size and immense beauty are still too overwhelming to be fully captured by the supersize IMAX screen.

He Was a Quiet Man casts its own perversely funny spell thanks in large part to Slater, whose wonderfully shifty, beaten-down performance is easily his best in the 17 years.

If the movie is finally something of a failure as a romance, it's rarely less than a triumph of soulful imagination.

As you stagger out of the theater after 78 breathless minutes of Gamazon and Dela Llana's electrifying location shooting and disquieting insights into Christian-Islamic tensions, you may well feel that your eyes have been opened too.

Holds its potentially problematic ingredients together remarkably well, summoning outstanding performances from Morrow and Linney, while never dipping into sentiment or patronizing the ailment's sufferers.

Art School Confidential reaches its dementedly brilliant peak in the company of Jim Broadbent.

What sets this engaging little movie above the pack of glib, brittle or sickly-sweet teen comedies is the clear eye it casts on the suburban American family, while stoutly defending that battered institution’s elastic ability to adapt.

By cinematic standards, not exactly scintillating stuff: The mix of archival materials, talking heads and dramatic readings is strictly PBS 101. Filmmaker Peter Gilbert's great achievement lies in his integration of disparate historical threads and voices into one steadily paced, riveting tale.

Unexpectedly moving documentary.

For Sokurov, the relationship between a father and a son surpasses physical, even human intimacy -- it’s something approaching the sacred.

Wittily manipulating scale to generate the requisite fright factor, the movie is stuffed with visual delights both lyrical (a squadron of ants hang-gliding on flower petals) and visceral (a battalion of bottle-blue wasps on the wing).

Momma's Man taps into that ambivalence, and those moments when all of us long to flee adulthood and sink back into being our parents' beloved baby birds, whether or not we ever were in the first place.

Pascale is the movie’s most defined character, and its most repugnant. Whatever sympathy we can muster for her boils down to Huppert’s richly layered portrayal.

The final revelation which, however anticipated, however contrived, stings just enough to make it feel like life.

Far from an embarrassment and a generally fine piece of work.

Like the best pulp, though, it gets its hooks into you faster than you can start to wonder why you should possibly care about what happens to any of its despicable characters, and, before you know it, you’ve been pulled deep into its Dantean vision.

Joyeux Noël finishes up as no more than a garden-variety tearjerker, neatly packaged for Oscar candidacy. It's not hard to see why the French chose this inoffensive weepie as their nominee for best foreign-language film, when they might have had Jacques Audiard's far superior, if more difficult, "The Beat That My Heart Skipped" or Arnaud Desplechin's "Kings & Queen."

Call Her Ganda works best when it’s focused on Laude and the case of her murder, an overwhelming showcase of empathy and persistence in the face of American racism and transmisogyny.

Fun, scattershot Hollywood spoof.

A passionately told tale.

Demands full attention, if only for the pleasure of watching great actors mine Shepard's harsh, beautiful language for all it's worth.

Maybe Brosnan is so shockingly good in this film because Kinnear gives him the sounding board and safety net that the actor never had in his sadly solitary spy-flick duties.

A rough but boldly imaginative first feature by British-Canadian writer-director Alison Murray.

Like "Wall Street" before it, The Bank never amounts to more than a glossy comic book, and first-time writer-director Robert Connolly stumbles with his plotting and his direction of Wenham.

Wright is a find, while Rowe may surprise those who dismissed him as a Brad Pitt look-alike when he first came to attention in "Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss." Here, Rowe displays new authority and confidence, as if lately he’s been looking in the mirror and seeing himself, rather than that other, more famous blond.

Morlang has surprises up its sleeve that even the seasoned genre fan may not see coming.

If you cut through Lucas' thickets of self-reflexivity, metaphysical mumbo jumbo and banal potshots at media violence, there are three ace performances here by actors who can elevate and enliven even as mediocre a piece of material as this.

Sandler crony Allen Covert, the star, producer and co-writer of this stunted-adolescence classic, hilariously explores a previously untapped nexus of stoner humor, joystick geekdom, elderly women and a martial arts-taught chimp.

The purest of horror films.

For the most part, the action, shot entirely on Hawaii's famed North Shore without blue screens or tanks, is awesome, all swirling turquoise tubes, thundering foam hammers and sleek, graceful riders.

Falters precisely because there's not enough stumbling, and far too much striding gallantly forward.

A screenplay that not only has a way with genre cliché, but manages to score some deviously witty political points

Manna from gearhead heaven, the third and most guiltily pleasurable Furious emits the crude thrills of a 1950s drag-racing cheapie, only with souped-up Toyotas and Nissans in place of gas-guzzling hot rods, and slinky Asian temptresses substituted for poodle-skirted teenyboppers.

In movies, the young are forever being taken back in time by the old, but what sets apart this low-energy yet ambitious debut feature by writer-director Rodney Evans is the complexity of the questions that journey raises.

What Lurie has made is "The West Wing" without the constraining niceties of prime time.

As in many of his films, Jaglom establishes a striking intimate rapport with his female subjects, and as the funny and bitter revelations pour forth, an activity that many men may view as something done strictly out of necessity takes on unforeseen narcotic, romantic and therapeutic dimensions.

In a film that quickly reveals itself to be a love letter to Wu, some of the best moments have nothing to do with that legendary hip-hop collective: Sage Francis taunting the unruly, increasingly tense crowd with his cerebral, political performance-art hip-hop; Redman playfully admonishing his young son to be good and then giving the boy a kiss when the paternal command wounds.

Selected as Italy's entry for best foreign film at this year's Academy Awards, Private was disqualified for not being predominantly in Italian. A pity, since this meticulously nonpartisan film, even as it makes the case for passive resistance, shows what devastating lack of appeal the strategy has for young Palestinians.

By not romanticizing its despairing yet humanistic outlook, The Motel presents a moment-by-moment emotional recap of almost anyone's formative years while simultaneously issuing a stinging reminder on the impossibility of fully outgrowing adolescence's uncertain searching.

This paranoid thriller has all the failings we expect...but Enemy of the State also has enough wit, talent and narrative thrust to mostly transcend those flaws, at least until that ludicrous finish.

When a movie opens with the diner scene from "When Harry Met Sally" as performed by cadavers, and later proceeds to sex scenes involving scalpels and needles, the actual plot is inconsequential. Fans of hard-R exploitation will love this; everyone else will likely be appalled. Screw 'em.

This winning confection, from a director (Heavy, Cop Land) not known for the lightness of his material or his touch, shows a fine understanding of what the screenwriters of the '40s instinctively grasped, that good screwball is about dialogue and chemistry.

The depraved, desperation-trumps-morality, circle-of-life denouement is foreshadowed a little too heavily from the beginning, but with its hypnotic, singular aesthetic, Redland still casts a spell that's hard to shake.

There’s a lot to like in writer-director Ray Yeung’s low-key romantic comedy, once you get past its overly enunciated identity issues, which were, according to Yeung, the film’s raison d’être.

It's a shame that this English-language cover of an excellent Spanish shocker will eclipse the original, at least in U.S. theaters -- but even those who despise remakes will have to admit that director John Erick Dowdle's furious retread is scary as hell.

Vahina Giocante oozes a killer blend of purring, lascivious innocence and little-girl-lost vulnerability as Lila.

The air of self-imposed misery can dampen the film's humor, but Muccino never stays still long enough for the emotions to become leaden, and the strong cast carries the film to its striking, bittersweet conclusion.

Small Time Crooks is definitely minor Allen that, nevertheless, offers a welcome riposte to the current national obsession with getting rich.

The rewrite went well, and the crew did a fine job; but you insult us, Mein Disney, serving up leftovers on such expensive china.

The hardware explodes just fine, all the right people die, and Pierce Brosnan, suave and likable as ever but no Sean Connery, not in a million years, gets the job done.

This genial comedy is as unambitious and, at times, as funny as its high concept.

Genuinely scary, especially when it strays from its lame plot to orchestrate some beautifully chilling set pieces, including one in the world's slowest elevator that'll raise the hairs on the back of even the most weary genre fan's neck.

The characters are well-observed and mercifully unrepresentative of their home countries. (Kevin Bishop is laugh-out-loud funny as a clueless British visitor who shows up to offend more than one national sensibility.)

The stop-motion animated puppets in Tatia Rosenthal’s beguiling first feature look like clay-mated slabs of glazed meat, at once unreal and hyper-real.

If Friends With Money is about the meaning of success in a town obsessed with wealth, it is also, more universally, about our defining incompleteness, and the sad, uproarious inconclusiveness of life.

Cruise is probably the most graceful physical performer to occupy the screen since Burt Lancaster, and in this sort of action role, he's just about peerless...He may not be a great actor, but to find a greater movie star would be a nigh impossible mission.

Washed in a honeyed 1950s glow, Waitress has a mildly puckish way with outlandish baked goods and pert dialogue, but the movie is memorable largely for the contrast between its innocent sweetness and the savagery of its maker's premature death.

There are scenes here that fill one with rage or bring tears to the eyes.

Rigged toward a sentimental conclusion and overpopulated with cutesy touches (including a curtain-call finale), but there are many remarkable sights along the way.

An enjoyable ride.

Far from an arthritic exercise in hippie nostalgia. There is a seasoned richness and vivid specificity to these lives, for all their hurts and losses. Yet the movie is shot through with an undeniable note of elegiac wistfulness.

Karen Black gives her sharpest performance in years as Bambi LeBleau, a roadside-dive karaoke hostess who invites the kids back to her house for a night of booze and lounge classics.

This nastily efficient thriller from British newcomer John Simpson offers a low-budget, high-tech expression of the idea that just because you're paranoid doesn' mean they'e not after you.

A film whose story movingly outfoxes any number of shopworn expectations on its way to a singular, heart-rending outcome.

Winstead is wildly funny (and spot-on) doing the impressions in Nina’s act (especially of Björk ordering a smoothie) but also proves uninhibited and candid when Nina doesn’t have jokes to hide behind.

Stickler goes straight to the source, combining terrific archival footage with interviews of Tony Hawk, Stacy Peralta and others who knew Rogowski back in the day.

Cocaine Cowboys' pulpy entertainment value merely lures us into a grim, kaleidoscopic look at how one city was both destroyed and, ironically, eventually saved by some of the worst human beings to walk the Earth.

Guest begins -- but doesn't end -- with caricatures, then peels away at our preconceptions until we see the heart and soul beneath.

Grisman's warm, loving home movie in the guise of a documentary.

The movie isn't particularly tasteful or finely crafted -- but it grabs you by the jugular, and only during an overcooked climax does it finally relax its grip.

Lurie manages, despite these obstacles, to inspire Redford to give one of the most layered and interesting performances of his career.

Elevated by fantastic performance footage of Sa and his young protégés singing, dancing and rhythmically banging on cans, plastic bottles or anything else that can be fashioned into a drum -- and a cultural revolution.

Even an advanced case of critter fatigue shouldn't stop you from rushing out to see this delightfully cheeky animated tale.

A small revolution tucked inside clichés and willful artistic ineptitude.

Special effects master Tom Savini did the makeup for this overlooked gem (actually, his fingerprints are on a few of the films on this list), and some of the kills are downright ugly (or beautiful, in horror jargon).

If King Arthur is as magnificently ridiculous as any Bruckheimer picture, its thuggish charms, which owe as much to Monty Python as to Sam Peckinpah, more than pick up the slack.

Director Ryuhei Kitamura (Versus) is a bit weak when it comes to storytelling, but there are few who could so enthusiastically stage a butcher fight amid hanging human carcasses in a subway car.

Though Lifshitz's attitude toward sex and sexuality ranks among the most progressive in contemporary movies, he doesn't belabor it; seen through his eyes, Wild Side is a love story in which love is unrestrained by matters of gender or sexual orientation or even the number of lovers.

A very cynical exploitation of the current Hollywood vogue for things queer. Still, the film is a must-see.

If director Scott Elliott falters, it's only in the spots where he tries to comment on her (Alice's) persecution without being complicit in it.

Characters make choices that are incredibly stupid, even wildly offensive, but also recognizably human, and as the night spirals out of control Cannon demonstrates a strong hand in controlling the mayhem. He also sets himself up as a filmmaker to watch.

On the plus side, The Company is directed by Robert Altman, who's clearly drawn in by the rare opportunity of putting ballet on film, and who responds brilliantly...The rest of the time, the film fails to catch us up in the workaday intrigues of its characters (most of whom are played by real Joffrey dancers) the way Altman can when he's working in top form.

A film we hereby proclaim the finest fertility comedy ever made, in the faint hope that another will not be attempted.