With its ludicrous parallels and brisk, funny script (pardon my provincialism, but it sounds all the funnier in Danish), Italian for Beginners is full of larky charm while drawing its emotional vitality from urban loneliness.

Warm, playful and inventive, this tale of an elephant with a spirit as generous as his waistline comes juiced with the genially goofy animation of the folks who brought us "Ice Age" (and, less memorably, "Robots") coupled with a respectful doffing of the cap to Geisel’s exuberantly wacky visual style.

The film's best and scariest moments come when Miles is confronted with scenes that he translates into proof of the Wendigo's power.

Morris is a more talented filmmaker than he is an interviewer. Mean-while, McNamara is a subject so complex and so rich in nuance that he requires no cinematic embellishment.

British director, Roger Michell, strikes an assured balance between intense mood piece and Gothic chiller.

Deft, funny and intelligently scary.

Although much has and will be made of the film's sexual explicitness -- and, yes, it is a bit -- this less-than-perfect but deeply felt film is finally most daring for its hard-core insistence on our need for connection.

But if you go in knowing this, the payoff is considerable - the film delivers on its feel-good promise.

All but a silent movie, Frédéric Fonteyne’s strikingly atmospheric film - adapted by Philippe Blasband and Marion Hänsel from a 1937 novel - relies on the extraordinarily mobile face of Emmanuelle Devos to express the pain of a woman who has no language for her inner turmoil.

Startlingly raw and honest, playing at times like one of those blistering Donald Goines blaxploitation pulp novels, only with Jesus.

Had this idea been pursued to its conclusion instead of the pat, wishfully ready-for-TV ending we're fed, the movie would be a standout.

A sharp, upbeat, well-wrought meditation on love and race that kicks the new year in movies off to a terrific start.

The film is beautifully shot and filled with fine performances.

At its best, Behind the Mask offers some, um, cutting insights about mass-media blood lust and the cult of the serial killer, and in Baesel, who is by turns charming, manic and thoroughly scary, it has a gifted young actor who clearly relishes a role he can sink his pitchfork into.

One of the best part 3's ever made, and Rodriguez's knack for concocting the most imaginatively deranged children's entertainments since "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" remains unassailed.

A morally complex and emotionally satisfying drama about the vagaries of Catholic response to the Third Reich.

Well-acted, briskly paced and prettily photographed, the film is a mild-mannered family story with a caring heart, and that's ultimately enough to make its 104 minutes worthwhile.

The cast is brilliant, not least of all Reilly -- vaguely despicable, smooth as an oil slick and altogether mesmerizing in the most impressive screen performance he's yet given.

A superb, instructive portrait of an artist at work.

Their pain is our pleasure, for though occasionally Apted's bluntness makes you want to take a bite out of his neck, there's something immensely satisfying about watching the playing out of ordinary lives we've become attached to over time.

A nice counterpoint is the soundtrack, with psychedelic trip music and bottleneck blues by noted wild-ass guitarist Elliott Sharp. It’s good to hear people talking about openheartedness without irony.

This sensational documentary, which follows German avant-garde musician Alexander Hacke around the city with his mobile recording studio, crosses all kinds of bridges.

(Herzog's) tribute to Kinski doubles as a life-affirming monument to creation in all its variety.

Temple doesn't just highlight the contemporary relevance of Coleridge's liberated words and themes, he shows us how high they still soar.

Demme (Monument Ave.) brings a sure hand with pace and structure to the soft-at-heart script by Robert Ramsey and Matthew Stone, allowing Murphy, Lawrence and company to sit back and focus on the job at hand -- making us laugh.

The film is shocking, and, for better or worse, Portillo's refusal to offer solace kindles a potent rage that's not easily forgotten.

There is so much to admire and empathize with in Stephanie Daley that it feels almost boorish to quibble about whether the film needs to come packaged as a murder mystery.

Yes, this is another faux rock documentary, but one so dramatically and visually textured that it reinvents that decidedly worn genre.

A beautifully off-center movie.

Twohy moves effortlessly between conventions of the sub and horror genres, with long tracking shots and masterful sound design, shock cuts and mismatched mirrors and reflections.

Sarandon's motherly sexiness is appealing, but it's Hawn, in a warm and deep performance as the hapless but free-spirited Suzette, who walks away with the movie.

A smart, romantic, heartbreaking pleasure.

First-time feature directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor play with speed and sound to effectively recreate the buzz of an over-caffeinated all-nighter, delivering one of the year’s best pure junk-food entertainments.

Taut and well-acted, faltering only when the filmmaker loses faith in the power of his story.

Ultimately a triumph of redemptive ideas that DiCaprio ­-- God bless his celebrity -- may finally succeed in transporting from the environmental fringe to the mainstream moviegoing audience.

At once playful and thorough, the documentary is also stacked teased-hair high with wicked performance footage.

An entertaining tour of this endearing, infuriating absolutist's life and legacy, guided by talking heads more pro than con, prominent among them the former Nader's Raiders who split over their leader's disastrous insistence that there was no difference worth talking about between Democrats and Republicans, yet retain enormous affection for his wit, integrity and incorruptible sense of mission.

Exchanges overheard in bars, crisp dialogue between characters and a wistful tone underscore both modern isolation and the age-old need for connection.

It's not easy to spend the better part of two hours with your heart parked in your mouth, but this roaring battle epic is worth the risk of your palpitations.

Beautifully acted film remains deeply intelligent and always fascinating.

Profound and joyously silly at the same time.

Hartnett's pitch-perfect sexual panic can be hilariously funny.

A melancholy valentine to broken hearts and lost innocence.

The five interwoven narratives in this visceral but disciplined and beautifully acted movie show to devastating effect how ordinary men and women -- and especially vulnerable boys desperate for masculine role models -- get caught up in the seductive violence and are ruthlessly destroyed by the network's hardened henchmen.

Writer-director Alex de la Iglesia's bouncy, swaggering satire of ethics-deficient, survival-of-the-fittest free enterprise, peopled by broad grotesques and hysterical caricatures, adds Chabrolian callousness to a cartoonish worldview reminiscent of Frank Tashlin or Joe Dante at their most frenzied.

Turns out to be that rarest of Hollywood creatures: a sequel that one-ups the original…These two smart, happy movie stars prove that silliness doesn’t have to be moronic.

Not only are the action sequences well-paced and witty, but Gray neatly draws out the comic high spirits in Wahlberg's ensemble of crooks.

A very good new Dogme by Danish director Susanne Bier, begins with several lives in excellent working order, and proceeds by way of domestic tragedy to a full-court emotional train wreck.

One of the most haunting, viciously honest coming-of-age films in recent memory.

Animation fans, no matter their stylistic preference (computer-generated, claymation, old-school hand-drawn), will find much to sate their appetites in this collection of award-winning and critically acclaimed work. There’s not a dud in the bunch.

Yet the pride and sympathy McNally brings to his characters reminds us how far gay film has progressed from the long, self-lacerating whine of "The Boys in the Band".

To watch Joplin, Rick Danko, Jerry Garcia and Mickey Hart, all massively wasted, giggling and jamming, is a delight tempered by the knowledge that Joplin would be dead just months later, with the rest but one following after.

By crafting its message in mostly understated strokes, The Syrian Bride touches your heart, which you might not even fully realize until its deft, wordless final moments sweep by you.

Certainly the movie is one of Schrader's most accomplished, and most entertaining, but there's something cold and unforgiving about his vision, delivered with a severity that only a bred-in-the-bone Calvinist could muster.

Hectic, lyrical, swooningly romantic and almost unwatchably brutal, Purple Butterfly deploys a modern Asian gangster-movie aesthetic to tell a love story of Shakespearean dimensions.

The Wayanses can be crude beyond crude, but they're so clever that their inventiveness takes the place of taste.

Bergman's collaboration with Ullmann began when he directed her in "Persona" (1966). Here, with the roles nearly reversed, she shows herself as great an interpreter behind the camera.

Infamous is the better Capote film, yes, but also the less easily digestible one, the more eccentric one and -- yes -- the gayer one.

Satoshi innovates not by pushing off into more extreme realms of adolescent fantasy, but by using all the resources of animation to tell complex dramatic stories, resources that in his hands seem almost limitless.

Born Into Brothels will break your heart, then warm it up and leave you with that 7-Up longing to know what happens next to Zana's kids.

What makes Sunshine unique, what rewards a first viewing and lives in the mind long thereafter, is that Szabo has attempted to place Judaism and Christianity on a continuum that is both historically truthful and highly personal.

A witty, well-crafted comedy that combines primal slapstick with sharp satiric banter to keep children and parents laughing together.

The film’s appeal is at once sentimental and perverse: It’s not every day that you get to see a 92-year-old woman soloing on “Should I Stay Or Should I Go.” Not surprisingly, a feature remake is already in the works.

The movie belongs quite rightly to Wendy, the most enchanting little girl in English fiction, and to the untrained actress, Rachel Hurd-Wood, who plays her.

This impressive - and utterly depressing - feature debut is another in the current rush of testaments to the power of the new corporation to suck the goodness from its employees and all who have the misfortune to enter its orbit.

Moll ratchets his suspense with impressive mastery, wringing a maximum of excruciating terror out of the humblest everyday materials.

The film arrives at a familiar conclusion -- that war is hell -- but the getting there is made uniquely unsettling by Dumont's relentlessly anti-psychological disposition.

Seldom have form, content and cultural sensibility been so excitably aligned as in this fascinating, exasperating film about the unholy marriage of power politics and global business.

Like almost everything in this clever, brutal and strangely soulful movie, the time and place are accomplished by suggestion.

This filmed record is a musical bliss-out.

Signals the real end of the party, charting a denouement that arcs from blissful ignorance to violence and its ever-present threat to a final retreat.

Secretary's treatment of female sexuality is as matter-of-fact as its handling of self-mutilation, and the key to both is Gyllenhaal's remarkable performance.

The story is bound together with gaming set pieces that are strange, inventive and mesmerizing.

Dark, wickedly funny tale.

Nunez is a master at rendering emotionally complex, ordinary folk into the kind of unassuming heroes that don't much appear in American films anymore.

Despite his (Jeremy Irons) showboating turn and Dench's lascivious energy, it's Annette Crosbie, in her quiet way, who gives the most commanding performance, as the sister who sees all too clearly what's coming.

It's a sweet chamber piece, beautifully played.

The first half of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a brilliant blend of the best of Burton and Dahl, with some unexpected input from Charles Dickens. In the second half, the contraptions take over, drowning whatever story remains...But it falls frustratingly short of the masterpiece it might have been.

A career best for the daughter of Charlie Chaplin.

Designed neither to warm your heart nor shelter you in the comfort of liberal guilt, the movie does what so many style-conscious, "subjective" documentaries have long forgotten how to do. It shows you a world, and stays the hell out of it.

Performances that are natural yet weighted with history and frequently heart-wrenching.

As Dardenne films go, with their slow, minutely observed journeys from despair to faint hope, L'Enfant is a horror movie of sorts, and for a few minutes at least, a kind of thriller.

Both funny and furious -- on why black people are different from white people.

It becomes clear that all this man-child craves is to be loved and, thus, saved.

Whereas "Nine Queens" was a movie of clockwork precision and blindsiding reversals, El Aura is more internalized and digressive but no less striking, in large part thanks to Darin's mesmerizing performance.

This is writer-director Hilary Birmingham's first film, and it's a lovely thing, as reserved and unfussy as its characters and, like them, full of surprises.

Kurt Russell is adorably self-mocking as the cluelessly enthusiastic dad in his dorky superhero uniform, and even the spiffy effects lack self-importance. "The Incredibles" it ain't, but Sky High will do nicely.

It's Walken who's most impressive.

Dean Parisot's direction of the funny, affectionately satirical script by David Howard and Robert Gordon is crisp and assured.

A marvelous tribute to a heady age.

A beautiful and exhilaratingly clear-eyed new film by the equally celebrated South Korean director Im Kwon-Taek.

Levin crawls into America's woodwork to ferret out anti-Semites of all stripes, then rushes at them with Socratic reasoning -- a futile and often hilarious project, since they prove immune to thought reform, however rational.

The film offers an impressive melding of quietly radical images and ideas with, yes, an old-fashioned, crowd-pleasing holiday tearjerker.

One's laughter builds on such a rising curve that memories of its flaws burn away.

Penn's own gifts as an actor seem, in turn, to bring out the best in Nicholson, as well as the rest of the cast.

Writer-director Niki Caro, who adapted the screenplay from the novel, has crafted a script replete with both crowd-pleasing touches and subtle but powerful insights into all the characters.

It's clever, vulgar and fully committed to making us howl with laughter. If only all sequels were this much fun.

The protracted final sequence, which involves balletic swordplay worthy of the famous scene in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," will take your breath away.