A new version of the greatest psychological mystery of all: love.

It's Zahn's heartbreaking performance that drives Riding in Cars with Boys.

Like being jacked directly into Linklater's alpha waves, and the experience is bracingly new to movies.

High drama this ain't. And yet, anyone looking for a hearty banquet of gymnastic, kung-fu tomfoolery won't walk away hungry.

Amid the chaos of this marvelous, uncategorizable film squirms one of the year's best performances.

Mesmerizing entertainment, but it's also a cop-out.

The casting is sublime.

Basically one elaborate joke about male modeling and all the vanity, emasculation, and fatuousness that attend it. Fortunately, it's a good joke.

A funny, frenetic, and often quite touching microcosm of the Big Apple life itself, essayed by a pitch-perfect cast and boasting authentic urban flavors.

Liam is mostly an emotionally devastating chronicle of the disintegration of a family. The entire cast is superb, but Frears has cast two screen naturals in the lead roles.

The politicizing is intense, but the actual game footage is even more engrossing; Carlson uses both digital video and 16mm film to put us squarely in the midst of the gridiron brouhaha.

Not all of the jokes hit, but enough of them do that anyone who's ever filed, collated, or played Mixmaster DJ with the transcribing machine will find cathartic giggles in this breakout debut.

Together is unabashedly about people who need people. The film's satiric skewering of '70s liberalism works because it feels emotionally authentic.

The bubble-kid moms can whine all they want, but Bubble Boy is a liberated movie --liberated from tastefulness, of course, but also from logic, suffering, consequence, and temperance.

Allen's good with the material, but Hunt sparkles, repeatedly razoring her diminutive antagonist to shreds.

An outrageously silly movie that makes me laugh.

While both leads are appealing enough, it's the stuff on the sidelines that keeps All Over the Guy entertaining.

May not quite be more than the sum of its creepy parts, but as a reality-is-fear launch into workaday darkness, it clearly points toward the horror genre's best destiny.

Some moviegoers are bound to take issue with the trick, "Sixth Sense"-style ending (or cynically see it coming), but The Others is mostly spooky fun, and a strong calling card for Amenabar.

Goran Visnjic is such a sensitive, non-menacing gentleman that any woman would want him as her own personal blackmailer.

Too poignant and funny to be dismissed.

Oy, it's such a pleasure that you'll be begging for Rush Hour 3.

In spirit, 101 Reykjavík is so Almodóvar that it could melt the polar icecap.

Stomps the summer movie competition with heart and humor.

The results are both savagely funny and poignant for anyone who's ever had a friendship that felt like their only connection to the outside world.

Never takes off, and much of the time Pool seems lost herself, resorting to clichés, redundancy, and dead-end allegory.

A teenage movie that trusts its audience -- it sounds crazy, but it's actually quite beautiful.

Actually, it's a childhood "A Clockwork Orange," a reverent realization of the late Stanley Kubrick's final obsession.

There's nothing more incendiary than the reopening of a forgotten chapter of history --nothing more incendiary than telling the truth.

The results are far more real than MTV's The Real World.

Optimistically explores how vastly different people can come together, and how any journey is more about what happens along the way than simply getting from one place to another.

Confident, mature, deeply conceived, and convincingly inhabited, it's a surprisingly humane film -- despite the close-range shotgun spray.

A wide-eyed, action-adventure throwback to the era of Disney's magnificent adaptation of "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea."

Dares to substitute wit and warmth for the standard gay indie tropes in tackling its tale of an unconventional couple.

The flutes soar a little too often, but Yimou's film is genuinely moving.

Best of all is the supporting performance of The Jackie Robinson Steppers Marching Band, a real group of high-school musicians in which the three girls all perform.

This one's still worth checking out -- especially for the naturalistic performances by the feisty Touly and the rest of the young cast.

What sells Shrek is ultimately the full-bodied personality of its characters.

The film ends with a surprisingly upbeat coda. But Startup.com leaves us with a sense that our heroes' idealism will be forever lost.

The film is never less than a satisfying mix of compelling entertainment and social critique. The performances are uniformly superb.

Actually lighter, wittier, and more original than it has a right to be.

One of the year's best films, and certainly its most challenging so far: At more than three hours, watching it is less like consuming entertainment and more like living.

Ozon -- has finally hit a home run, and Rampling is his most remarkable RBI.

What matters is that the movie's a blast, right up until its protracted climax.

A meticulously mounted film that retains the author's ambiguous characterizations yet is still emotionally accessible.

Rises instantly above its genre merely by taking the time to develop its characters and scenario.

Moviegoers of any (or no) religious persuasion can share in the simple satisfaction of his tense, well-spun murder mystery.

Naturalistic, gritty, and unrelenting.

Dippy, funny, and fast-paced enough to be a guilty pleasure.

So breathtakingly textural, so empathic in its images, that it transcends its context and achieves timelessness.

Plays like a Chinese "Cinema Paradiso," full of feeling without succumbing to sentimentality.

A fast, funny film that goes down like a cyanide-spiked piña colada.

Though unflinching in its savagery, Amores Perros is always compulsive viewing.

Rodriguez has made a movie for kids, and the most and least that can be said about it is that parents, while hardly being catered to, will experience profound relief that the movie knows how to entertain and does so.

For a modest film, however, Too Much Sleep is a modest surprise.

Marred by an unconvincing love triangle and an insincere dénouement, it's a story that nonetheless resonates as much as "Saving Private Ryan does."

Nolan's engrossing, backwards-ticking noir will run you so thoroughly in circles that you'll need to see it at least twice for maximum enjoyment.

A disarming helping of Capra-esque corn served up by writer-director Rob Sitch.

An elegant, haunting folktale.

Boasts a fine cast and makes enough cogent points that it rises above standard cop fare.

A delicacy for mature filmgoers who are able to derive as much pleasure from a perfectly, sympathetically crafted essay as from a well-spun yarn.

Smith and Fitzgerald are funny, feisty, poignant, and altogether realistic. Will they end up lovers, friends, side-by-side corpses? Their sharp performances make Series 7 as frighteningly addictive as crack, or even "Survivor."

The plot that propels them (Pitt, Roberts) along separate story lines is both unusually character-driven and a hoot.

Maddin's movie is, frame for frame, the densest and most spectacular (albeit cardboard-cheap) film playing anywhere.

Accomplished, middlebrow costume-drama entertainment. It's not so simple that it could be mistaken for the work of, say, Lasse Hallström, and yet it's not so sophisticated that audiences of "Chocolat" would be mystified.

This is what Woody Allen movies might be like if they were not ruled by narcissism, pretentious point-scoring, cheap observations, and Woody's peculiar speech patterns.

Offers up keys and cakes and plunges its characters down a deep rabbit hole.

Her (Cheung) gorgeously sad face and slow, lithe frame are the movie's hammer and chisel. One shot of her walking away from a rented room down a hallway is, all by itself, twice the movie of anything else currently in theaters.

Nico and Dani merely retells a not uncommon tale without significantly enriching it. It's just too familiar to play as poignantly as it would like to.

Hark! A Christian thriller about the Last Days that doesn't (totally) suck. That's got to be a sign of the times.

If you're in the mood for a helping of lite cheesecake, you ought to find plenty of reason to shake your pom-poms.

As a snapshot of Hungarian history, Glamour's watchability trumps that of "Sunshine" — the droll absurdity of the former leaves a much deeper impression than the latter's bruising moralism.

Faithless, filmed mostly during Sweden's endless winter, will chill you to the bone.

This is slight stuff, but the legions of budding Scorseses and Kevin Smiths might actually learn a little something, and they will certainly enjoy a chortle or two -- even if it is at their own expense.

Works best as a mood piece — the mood, however, is grim.

Though far from a sophomore slump, Snatch, like "Smoking Barrels," is such a grab bag of other influences that it's tough to figure out what, if anything, about Ritchie's style is uniquely his own.

Unfolds like quietly engrossing short fiction, reminding us that there are few things more pleasurable than being in the hands of a good storyteller.

A superb, wise, and witty Taiwanese film about being single and what to do about it.

Proudly wears its heart on its sleeve, but it never becomes so swoony that you'll reach for your hanky.

Might be the most original film of the year.

Traffic is a riveting, semi-documentary drama, and yet calling it that is a disservice to just how suspenseful and stylish an entertainment it is.

Assiduous, temperate, and a lot more honest about government and politicians than any other Hollywood film of the last few decades, Thirteen Days is nevertheless too little, too late.

It's such a sensory experience; in its best moments, the film washes over you like a fever dream.

How well you respond to this handsomely mounted, cold-blooded tragedy will depend on your feelings toward Gillian Anderson's highly theatrical lead performance.

A 25-minute third act is far too short to suffice, especially when the previous two hours are as astute and technically impressive as they are here.

For all its originality, O Brother doesn't seem to have a point, or enough spark to distract us from the lack thereof.

A warm, glossy holiday fable that hits some surprisingly sweet notes.

The execution is crisp and the fundamentals are solid. Like its protagonist, Finding Forrester got game.

The real revelation, however, is Keanu Reeves. His character is something of a caricature — a violent, white-trash wife-beater — but Reeves' portrayal is joltingly authentic.

It's so easy to be mesmerized by Chocolat's brilliant indulgences that one abandons reason altogether.

The dilemma is simple: Living, making art, and then dying does not constitute much of a story.

This joyous romp is no mere new groove, it's a live wire -- 110 volts of pure holiday cheer.

A shell of a film. It's a stripped-down and blown-out thriller than can only be measured by the sum of its action sequences.

Proof of Life won't hold your heart hostage for very long after it's over, but here's looking at Russell Crowe -- he's the real deal, sweetheart.

Whenever Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon resorts to flying fists or soaring sword battles, the Force is definitely with it.

It's a pleasure to watch these unhurried, character-driven vignettes when such great actors are anchoring them.

A literate, dialogue-driven treat delivered by a cast that truly savors the script's wicked wit.

Seems truncated, incomplete -- mostly because the patented Shyamalan twist is revealed in the dénouement, not the climax.