This wonderful, one-of-a-kind movie hops from Taiwan to France, from tragedy to deadpan comedy and, in its mysterious conclusion, from the worldly to the otherworldly.

As brilliantly shot as it is brutally single-minded, this is a war movie shorn of all its usual accouterments: the battle is the plot.

A fine, well-groomed entertainment, but the road it takes has already been well paved.

I respect it enormously, but it feels like an art film in search of a movie.

Has a quiet sense of community, a wry, unsentimental sweetness, that grows on you. It's a patient movie for impatient times.

Too facile to resonate deeply. Shouldn't a movie celebrating Nash give you some idea what his mathematical work is about? Fishier still is the suggestion that the cure for paranoid schizophrenia is love.

I staggered out of this shameless, interminable movie feeling as if I'd been force-fed a ton of mealy, artificially sweetened baby food.

The Movie Works. It has real passion, real emotion, real terror, and a tactile sense of evil that is missing in that other current movie dealing with wizards, wonders and wickedness.

In the antic, melancholy comedy The Royal Tenenbaums, the singular Wes Anderson (“Rushmore”) abandons his native Texas for a storybook vision of New York.

It has a timely resonance. While it doesn't have that transcendent quality of Majidi's earlier work -- the implied bleakness from across the border puts a slightly darker hue on the proceedings -- it does tell a story worth telling.

This time out the versatile Soderbergh has cast himself as a sleight-of-hand artist. He's made deeper films, but this carefree caper movie is nothing to sneeze at.

The compositions, the editing, the lighting, the sound, the music: everything seems meticulously considered, conjuring up a hushed intimacy that instantly sucks you in.

Entertaining but farfetched, Spy Game might have looked less meretricious a few months back. But the real world has sabotaged its pretense of authenticity. Enjoy it for what it is, a fleet, handsome fantasy of globe-hopping blond demigods.

Columbus's Harry Potter has many delights, but the magical alchemy that the book seemed to achieve so effortlessly eludes it.

A terrific piece of work: smart, inventive and executed with state-of-the-art finesse.

A fanciful, featherweight, mostly charming concoction predicated on the old romantic myth that there is one true soul mate out there for us all.

Slightly soggy.

It’s too bad that at the very end L.I.E. settles for an easy, melodramatic resolution; it flies in the face of everything that makes this perceptive, original movie so special.

The actors attack their roles with commitment (Hartnett’s understatement is impressive), but their fervor can’t hide the movie’s implausible, often confusing storytelling.

Has an almost perfect-pitch grasp of those messy, idealistic, vibrant times, when everyone was trying to reinvent himself from the ground up.

Every role is miscast. Whose idea was it to have the boyishly British Bale play an illiterate Greek peasant, or the elegant Hurt a gruff-voiced country doctor? Cruz’s run of bad luck in American movies continues.

Has its flaws, but at its best it’s a fleet, fun action movie -- and certainly one of the cooler blockbusters that Hollywood will cough up this godforsaken summer.

This shamefully underpromoted, gloriously silly romp made me laugh harder than any other movie this summer. Make that this year.

Resoundingly so-so.

In the hearts of losers, Zwigoff’s found a real winner.

If this Popsicle of a movie melts long before it's over, the first half has more good laughs than all of “Sweethearts.”

Ferocious and sometimes creepily funny, Bully is a raunchy suburban "Crime and Punishment."

Vertical Ray slows our rhythms and heightens our senses: it's a shimmering, tactile experience.

More sweet than savage, this amiable farce creates laughs with old-pro efficiency.

The result is fascinating -- a rich, strange, problematical movie full of wild tonal shifts and bravura moviemaking.

Goes on too long, and much of it is hooey, but it’s hard not to have a good time.

Couldn’t have arrived at a better time: movies have been so bad lately that audiences are positively starving for something mediocre.

A demonstration of bravura acting.

Nutty paranoid thriller.

Ninety minutes into this massive movie the attack commences, and the spectacular images come hurtling like fireballs. This is, let's be honest, what we're here for, and what most Jerry Bruckheimer-produced movies serve up best: the poetry of destruction.

Hilarious and captivating.

Luhrmann has raised the level of his game, deconstructing the Hollywood musical -- a genre all but left for dead -- and reassembling it with a potency that hasn’t been seen since “Cabaret.”

Maybe you have to be 14 to find all of this terribly clever.

She's (Zellweger) so disarming and so deeply Bridget -- gliding between mortifying slapstick and pathos -- that she's entirely won you over by the time the credits have rolled. The opening credits.

Hilariously unhinged, but also desperate and confused.

When George’s fortunes start to go from bad to worse, so does the movie.

He’s (González Iñárritu) conjured up a dark, brutal vision of urban life that sticks to your skin like soot.

A gripping, utterly unexpected noir, glinting with bits of poetry and a hard, deadpan humor.

The comedy gets better, and more unpredictable, as it goes, and so do the performances.

Whether Series 7, filmed on digital video for less than $1 million, is reactive or prescient doesn’t change the fact that it’s a dead-on parody of the form.

A tired, confused romantic comedy/noir thriller with all the suspense of an infomercial. Buy the poster; skip the movie.

A very funny movie, full of eccentric, deadpan little moments. What's more, it resonates, and has subtle, tender and acute things to say about romance, art, class and -- why not? -- interior decorating. It's a winning tribute to the flighty Aphrodite.

Strikingly devoid of suspense. It’s not always clear who’s the protagonist and who’s the antagonist. Nor is it scary—at its most intense moments, it’s merely yucky.

Those who haven’t seen “Lock, Stock” will probably get a bigger kick out of Snatch than those who have. The second time around, what seemed spontaneous can sometimes feel strained.

Traffic doesn’t quite come to a full emotional boil at the end. Soderbergh is too knowing to offer easy solutions. But what a journey it takes us on: disturbing, exciting, completely absorbing.

Keeps you hanging on every twist and turn of its wilder-than-fiction plot.

A movie of arresting pieces that don't harmonize into a satisfying whole.

This powerful, lyrical meditation on Arenas's life achieves a kind of hallucinatory urgency as it leaps and twists through his life.

It’s sad to see such stunning work self-destruct. You walk out haunted by the movie that might have been.

What charm, quirkiness and warmth the movie possesses is due largely to them (Cage and Leoni).

Has its heart in the right place, but its funnybone is out of joint.

Pollock can be clunky and TV-movie-ish. Still, Harris gives a fiery, convincing performance.

This is a fleet, funny family entertainment that should tickle parents as well as tykes.

Chocolat is a seriocomic plea for tolerance, gift-wrapped in the baby blue colors of a fairy tale and served up with a sybaritic smile.

There is one reason, and only one, for anyone to check out Vertical Limit. The hanging-by-a-fingernail mountain-climbing sequences are spectacular.

This slick, handsomely produced thriller only gets the pulse half racing.

At once elegant and sublimely silly, contemplative and gung-ho, balletic and bubble-gum, a rousing action film and an epic love story, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is one bursting-at-the-seams holiday gift, beautifully wrapped by the ever-surprising Ang Lee.

Ultimately, Quills descends into overwrought melodrama. But at its bright and bawdy best, it bubbles with subversive wit.

This time out, Shyamalan the writer lets Shyamalan the director down badly.

Few films have explored the complicated bonds of love and resentment between brother and sister with such delightful honesty.

If you harbor any fond feelings for the original, stay far away from this mess.

If this is what Hollywood considers serious, important filmmaking, maybe the movie industry should stick to the low road.

This delightful film, with its surprising depth charges of emotion, has the feel of a movie that's going to lodge itself in the public's affections for a long time to come.

Silly as it is, The Contende has a lurid zest that keeps you hooked, and a rambunctiously good cast.

One of the year's best: a rich, funny, enormously humane portrait of a middle-class Taipei family in the throes of romantic, economic and spiritual upheaval.

Director Jay Roach ("Austin Powers") has a keen sense of comic timing, and the script keeps finding clever new ways to mortify our poor hero.

It's as smart, quiveringly alert and fleet of foot as a purebred pointer on the scent of fresh game.

Bjork gives what may be the most wrenching performance ever given by someone who has no interest in being an actor.

Though acid is dropped, groupies are bartered like poker chips and rock-star egos flare like fireworks, what comes through is the relative innocence of that era.

There are inspired moments in this edgy, unstable comedy.

The movie itself, like these guys, is defiantly old school -- confident, relaxed, professional.

What was a ragged but often hilarious charmer has been genetically altered into a deafening and desperate mutant.

A disappointingly slack, hackneyed comedy.

A slick but surprisingly empty genre movie that builds to a not particularly shocking shock.

For diehard fans, X-Men is full of in jokes and sly references -- For everybody else, there's the thrill of the unknown.

But if the endpoint is a homiletic given, the journey itself is more charming, and less sentimental, than you might suspect.

Impersonal Hollywood filmmaking at its most paradoxical. It keeps you glued to your seat, and leaves no aftertaste whatsoever.

There's no denying that Emmerich's film, though a good half hour too long, keeps us watching.

This is a farfetched premise, and the movie pays a price for it.

It starts quietly, introducing its splendid gallery of fowl, rats and humans, then builds and builds until it achieves full comic liftoff.

Lively, likable and refreshingly unsensationalistic about the drugs and sex that come with the territory, this techno-propelled mash note to the rave spirit sticks to the surface.

Labour teeters on the edge of the amateur. Yet it's hard not to root for its moonstruck spirit, or to succumb to the panache of the pastiche.

Fascinating but repetitious, Better Living Through Circuitry nevertheless does a good job describing the scene.

The end is predictable after the first five minutes (two, if you're smart), but the film sucks you in all the same.

The dialogue is inane, the acting wooden, and Roger Christian's directing choices are a lesson in sci-fi film cliché.

New York City has never looked so slick and shallow as it does in Hamlet, an innovative, contemporary adaptation.

The fight scenes are dynamic, intricately choreographed, and downright exciting.

Brims with youthful exhuberance, it just needs to cut to the quick a little quicker.

It is an intense study of the human condition, and man's relationship with God, aka the Big Kahuna.

A touching thriller, a movie that's particularly hard to resist if there are things you never said to your own dad because you didn't have the chance, the inclination or the right ham radio.

Sort of like a Jennifer Lopez video: pretty to look at, easy on the ears, but ultimately completely vacuous and lackluster.

You may leave the theater with a bit of a headache, but you'll feel amply compensated by the sense of having seen a master inventor at work.

Unfortunately, the strong ensemble cast is not able to hold together this often wayward and meandering story.