Life-affirming story of love, kinship and sacrifice.

This quiet yet jolting meditation on love, obsession, loneliness, friendship and fate has the quality to entrance you through a first viewing, and compel you to take its themes and characters home with you for further consideration.

The whole system was sadistic and indefensible, and the church, looking the other way as long as profits rolled in from the laundries, deserves the scorn that Mullan and his fine cast heap on it.

The story is compelling, but Metropolis is such a visual masterpiece, it's easy to get lost within its seemingly endless layers of graphic complexity.

A riveting rock documentary.

One of the most inventive, funny and ultimately tragic coming-of-age movies in years.

Haneke has made a masterly, disturbing movie.

An audacious, snappy visual and emotional feast of dishes both familiar and fresh. It's the first really good movie of 2001.

The action is tightly focused and well-paced.

The same audience that loves "March of the Penguins" will eat up this beautifully told, gorgeously shot story of a grieving boy trying to return his pet cheetah to the wilds of South Africa.

This is Guest's fourth ensemble parody of showbiz subjects, and though his sketch-comedy style and acting troupe are now familiar, this is his most accomplished movie.

The effects in "T3" are spectacular, and the action sequences -- particularly the fights between the good and bad terminators -- are exhilarating.

A movie that is pure escape and good, clean, unadulterated fun.

Feels like an old-fashioned movie in the way it deals with bold sacrifices made in the name of love, while its setting and chary view of the era's political machinations mark it as distinctly modern.

Gently hilarious comedy.

It has the most beautiful ending of any American film in years, a coda of reconciliation and remembrance set in a gentle L.A. rain.

This mercilessly intense movie is definitely not for the faint of heart. The atmosphere remains highly charged from beginning to end. There’s no letup, nary a suggestion of humor to break the tension. The viewer remains as stunned and repelled by the action as the movie’s well-bred narrator, an idealistic young volunteer (played effectively by Charlie Sheen) who naively expects to find himself by sharing the mud with the mostly poor and uneducated grunts.

It's a deceptively simple tale that tackles, serenely and with surprising humor, issues of gender, power, custom and change.

"I write 19th-century stories; they're supposed to affect you emotionally," says Irving, explaining why Tinseltown keeps knocking at his door.

What follows is an extreme case of reverse courtship, which begins at conception and works backward toward getting to know each other, and then moves forward to one of the funniest birthing scenes ever filmed.

If the structure is a tad out of whack, "No Country" does not lack for action or suspense. Some of the scenes of Chigurh's stalking of Moss are nearly unbearably tense. Bring your worry beads.

A small miracle of comic social portraiture, a sometimes affectionate, sometimes ironic study of a specific group at a specific moment. His work is deeply evocative and enjoyable.

A delightful and endearing romantic comedy with the shape and resonance of a Jane Austen novel.

In Wide Blue Road, his (Montand) character and the wages of desperation are much more complex. Here is the real lost Atlantis.

This stirring children's movie about separation anxiety is swimming with comic references only adults will catch, thus greatly expanding the potential audience.

Seeing the splendid new version of Pride & Prejudice can be hazardous to your health: There's a very real danger of swooning.

Passes like an evening spent with friends.

School of Rock may be to Black what "The Nutty Professor" was to Jerry Lewis, or "Groundhog Day" was to Bill Murray - that rare, perfectly tailored opportunity to play against one's broadest impulses. Not to neutralize them, necessarily, but to tame them and turn them into something very human and charming.