If Steven Spielberg's emotional intelligence matched his visual genius, his honorably flawed new film might qualify for one of the greatest-ever American WWII movies.

Politically shrewd, unexpectedly funny yet immaculately tasteful docudrama.

A scrupulously even-handed account, free of ideological or tribal partisanship, based on eyewitness accounts by survivors and the anonymous "Paras" themselves.

Has power not only as film scholarship, but as an inquiry into cinema's interplay with our collective memories and the nature of history itself.

It's our great good fortune, and Pekar's, that this movie -- which won the Grand Jury Prize at this year's Sundance Film Festival, followed by the FIPRESCI Award at Cannes -- is as true to the dyspeptic spirit of its source as anyone could have imagined.

At his best, Altman turns us into interlopers who have stumbled into a world that seems to predate us and persuades us it will continue to teem with life long after we leave the theater.

On a purely visual level, Finding Nemo is as gorgeous a film as Disney's ever put out, with astonishing qualities of light, movement, surface and color at the service of the best professional imaginations money can buy.

We never seem to be looking at actors, but at people; never at scenes, but at life unrehearsed.

It's a cheerfully deranged stunt, executed in a spirit of infectious lunacy that powers the resulting film to its strongest laughs, and weirdest depths.

The Incredibles creates so seamless a mood of exhilaration that we resent being pulled out of it.

Crowe has made a hugely entertaining, nearly pitch-perfect film about rock & roll.

Carrey is a genius at registering the rage behind television's sunny smile, while Laura Linney excels as his wife.

Once feels handmade in the best sense, an impressionistic feast for the senses cobbled together from lovely grace notes and a warm palette of reds and yellows.

It is the highest compliment I can pay Greengrass to say that he is a master of the mundane, the routine and the everyday.

Above all else, though, Capturing the Friedmans is a vividly personal, devastating story of a family that was hopelessly compromised years before it was scapegoated for crimes that two of its members may or may not have committed.

So daring, well-made and tirelessly inventive that I kept asking myself, “Why isn't this even better? Why isn't it moving me?” One huge problem is the hero... he's played by 42-year-old Jim Carrey, whose still-bottomless need to be loved invariably smacks of desperation and self-pity.

And like all great family sagas, The Best of Youth, while tipping its hat to the painful confusion of living life forward, reels it backward to give it the thrilling significance of time and place.

The Lives of Others wants us to see that the Stasi -- at least some of them -- were, like their Gestapo brethren, “just following orders." You can call that naive optimism on Donnersmarck's part, or historical revisionism of the sort duly lambasted by the current film version of Alan Bennett's "The History Boys." I, for one, tremble at the thought of what this young director does for an encore.

The most seamless piece of sensuous expressionism Zhang has created since "Ju Dou" (1990).

The movie survives beautifully both as an elegant thriller and as a study of the twisted infantilism that shapes the fanatic heart.

The overall effect of the film is a case study in how dispassionate leaders sow mistrust in their most needy citizens.

The gimmick is simple but devastatingly effective: Never once breaking character or acknowledging that he’s in on the joke, the Jew-fearing, grammatically challenged reporter ingratiates himself with his unsuspecting, average-American victims before uproariously turning the tables on them.

Unfortunately, fulfilling an apparent need to assert absolute control over his early successes no matter the cost, the director has gone ahead and loused up his 1979 masterpiece of gothic sci-fi horror.

Why Capote liked the movie so much (or said he did) isn't entirely clear, for though it's a gripping piece of American Gothic, it's as thematically timid as it is formally flamboyant.

I’m Going Home is as much an ambiguous poem to Paris as it is a study in artistic and physical mortality, and an elegy for a more decent past as it gives way to a brassier, more corrupt new century.

The film is artfully made, its occasional excesses of style moderated by the plain force of the content and the passion of the testimony.

The triumph of Capote is that it both grants and shares with him that twisted brew of obsessive identification and monstrous detachment that is the fertile burden of the artist.

To fall in love with Bradley Cooper’s A Star Is Born is to embrace its paradoxes and, to quote a song Lady Gaga sings in the film, go “off the deep end” and submerge oneself “far from the shallow.” My advice? Submit. Suspend yourself in the charms and romance of this melodrama.