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.

Though the film's subject matter is grisly, the electricity between Foster and Hopkins during their prison tête-à-têtes could power every maximum-security prison in this country.

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.

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

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

It's the sum of things not spoken, things too painful to express, that's the heart of this quietly moving drama.

Disturbing, powerful essay on one aspect of the rock and drug culture at the end of the 1960s.

What evolves among them is a kind of realistic fairy tale, sustained by the sweet gravity and guttural, deadpan minimalism of Thornton's performance.

For two hours and 35 minutes it is absolutely riveting.

Stomps the summer movie competition with heart and humor.

Bird's movie neither panders to children nor sneers at them, and it beautifully, lucidly captures the giddy adventurousness of childhood.

Naturalistic, gritty, and unrelenting.

Brilliant, mind-boggling.

A must-see for avid fans and a welcome primer for nascent hip-shakers everywhere.

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

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

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

It's a disturbing film in the best sense.

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

Election is a bracingly intelligent adult comedy that shrewdly captures adolescence.

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.

Leaving Las Vegas may not be a top choice for an upbeat outing, but there's something oddly poetic about the simplicity of Ben's mission and Sera's acceptance of it.

The film's technical brilliance and sentimental kick seduced many viewers unsuspecting of its polemical intent.

Not only one of the best films of the year, it's one of the best films of the decade.

For the discouraged filmgoer, Erice's tone poem will be a ray of hope itself.

Especially timely in light of the current escalation in Palestinian-Israeli aggressions, but this is one sad story that would pack a staggering punch in any political climate.

Russell has combined pathos, terror, and black comedy with a dollop of Hollywood feel-good patriotism to make one of the best studio efforts this year.

There are only a handful of great music documentaries ... but Temple's film deserves a place in the canon.