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.