To say this bone-chilling, gut-turning feature is "The Crying Game"-meets-"In Cold Blood." But this is a film - writer/director Peirce's first - that matches those pictures in power, in surprise, and in unnerving drama.

It's a beautiful, grim tale.

You watch a Miyazaki film with the pie-eyed, gape-mouthed awe of a child being read the most fantastic story and suddenly transported to places previously beyond the limits of imagination. It's quite a trip.

Beasts of the Southern Wild transports us to places that are peculiar and dangerous and magical, and makes us feel weirdly at home.

Let the Fire Burn does not glorify MOVE. What it does do is force us to consider why and how this surreal event - a city bombing its own citizens, leaving innocent children dead - occurred. And ask, could something like it ever happen again?

Fan's fly-on-the-wall perspective enables the viewer to empathize with all the players in the family drama, unlikely to have a happy ending.

A meditation on art, life, loneliness and the links between friends and strangers, the movie has a grace and humor that's wonderfully inviting.

At once guileless and profound.

This is a sad, passionate, beautifully wrought story, and Bardem's portrait of Arenas is at once daring and deeply moving.

Wake in Fright is essential viewing for anyone interested in the roots of male violence.

A smart, sensuous and sensory mind trip that caroms around a universe of thought.

Unstoppable fun.

Although not blessed with a cinematic eye, Yates, a sensitive director of actors, structures his movie like the final movement of a symphony. He reprises themes and characters from the previous films that swell in the epochal siege of Hogwarts and ends his films with an almost wordless coda that will wring tears even from Harry haters.

Take Shelter, which, it should be said, boasts haunting but seamless visual effects, is a movie for this moment in time, this moment in our lives.

A small but moving film that gets the details right (life in a sleepy burg, sidewalk chats between old high school pals) and gets at the heart of human longing for family, for love.

To the extent that movies bear the residue of their filmmakers' autobiographies, I found The Pianist particularly compelling.

Chuan's unsettlingly beautiful black-and-white, wide-screen account of those nightmare six weeks, re-creates that horror in ways that are at once allusive and lucid, mixing cinematic impressionism with documentary-like detail.

A transcendent work from Ireland's Cartoon Saloon studio that's almost wasted on kids.

Asif Kapadia's extraordinary documentary, Amy, is filled with similarly soul-stirring, heartbreaking moments.

The movie is near-perfect, suspenseful, heart-breaking, profound.

A movie of absurdist humor, brutal realism and dementia.

Disarming and unexpectedly poignant, An Education contrasts the knowledge learned in school with that learned from life.

Offers a view of war that is anything but epic. Instead of sweeping battles and swooping fighter planes, in Lebanon we are brought into the impossibly claustrophobic world of a lone tank crew.

Makes for the most thrilling action movie of the year.

A beguiling and subversively funny entertainment that considers art's worth from many angles, including that of guerrilla painters, gallerists, and seasoned collectors.

Kings and Queen, full of passion and humor, madness and grief, is close to a masterpiece. It's like life: messy, impossible, elating, unavoidable.

Baker's life, like his music, was as sad as it was beautiful. And Weber's movie - obsessed with Baker's image as much as with his songs - hits all the right notes.

Exhilarating, exuberant and drolly funny.

Heigl, a double-dip of praline with caramel, is so beautiful that initially you don't notice her comic chops.

Offers a sometimes lyrical, sometimes gut-turning portrait of war seen through the eyes of children.

It's a movie with a pulse. Sometimes, it flies off the chart.

Proves that the most local story is sometimes the most universal, the simplest tale sometimes the most complex.

Both a concert film and a more intimate thing: a fascinating, fly-on-the-wall (or fly-in-the-dining-car) glimpse of some clearly blotto rock legends talking, singing, hanging out. The fact that a good number of them are now dead makes it doubly memorable.

The animated French family film April and the Extraordinary World will have your imagination doing somersaults and cartwheels.

Even if you get lost - in the spyspeak, in the codes, in the comings and goings of grim-faced men with satchels full of documents they should not have - Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is worth getting lost in.

It's a performance that will make you cringe - with despair, with empathy - as Gosling's Dan takes one self-destructive step after another.

A gorgeous operatic tale of obsession and madness.

Few American directors drive this wedge between mind and gut as masterfully as Michael Mann.

Whether or not Street Fight wins the Academy Award Sunday night, Curry's picture is must-see fare for any and every observer of the curious world of American politics.

A quiet, heart-rending masterpiece, one with an actor's turn that people will remember, and rediscover, eons into the future.

Its stars - especially the photogenic Leung and Cheung, fresh from Wong Kar Wai's jazzy romance In the Mood for Love - are wonderfully charismatic. And wonderfully athletic.

Among lovers of the genre, Shane is surely among the top five westerns ever made. [14 Jun 2003, p.D01]

At the film's intimate best, it gives a guitar's perspective of the troubadour. He plucks his instrument as he plays our heartstrings. It's movie and music bliss.

Like many a good documentary, Honeyland takes us to a faraway land and culture in a way that reveals what is distinctive and what is universal about people.

This drag-queen melodrama, like its star, perseveres.

Shakespearean but overlong, The Dark Knight is two hours of heady, involving action that devolves into a mind-numbing 32-minute epilogue.

Linklater, drawing from his own experiences as a baseball player at Sam Houston State University, looks back with affection, a knowing wink, and maybe the beginnings of an apologetic shrug at the jerk behavior, the locker-room pranks. These guys smell freedom in the air - and maybe some pot smoke, too.

Hopped-up and electrifying. The soundtrack is wall-to-wall and propulsive.

In the end, Atonement sorts truth from fiction as it delivers a shattering kick to the solar plexus.

Still, somehow, The Tree of Life - impressionistic, revelatory, elliptical - works.

Alexandra never depicts the soldiers in combat, but Sokurov nonetheless shows how war can break down the social structure, break down family, break the human soul.

Like Johnny's rants, Naked is a revelation, a parable of spiritual homelessness and the terror it engenders.

A wonderful, witty mix of horror and social satire, The Host takes its simple, time-tested premise - menacing creature terrorizes the populace - and runs with it.

According to this courageous, you-are-there documentary, the platoon took enemy fire almost every day, perhaps the longest exposure to combat the U.S. has engaged in since World War II.

I wanted to like Meek's Cutoff more than I did. Reichardt and her writer, Jonathan Raymond, bring a quiet, watchful sensibility to their work, allowing the actors room to reflect and riff. But the stilted language and rectitude of the times don't always mesh with the acting.

It shows us the everyday pressures and problems, the joys and pleasures, experienced by someone moving through life. And then that BART train pulls into Fruitvale, and the rest is history.

Jonathan Demme's superb rule-bending, heartrending and family-mending drama - ends with a wedding, it resists conventions as brazenly as does the bride's sister.

An unforgettable and profoundly inspiring film. [05 Mar 1999, p.04]

Quiet, rageful indictment of a two-tiered Islamic society.

At turns funny, sweet, sad, trenchant and telling. It's a gem.

Far too good to be watched in one sitting.

It doesn't happen often, but when it does, look out: a movie that rocks and rolls, that transports, startles, delights, shocks, seduces. A movie that is, quite simply, great.

Roiling with laughter, tears, drunken confessions, revelatory soliloquies, pain, sorrow, hospital visits, and various kinds of love, A Christmas Tale is a smart, sprawling, and sublimely entertaining feast.

The fluid film cinematography of Christopher Doyle and Rain Kathy Li, intercut with grainy Super-8 shots of park regulars, tracks the skaters in their free-flying, free-styling and free-falling grace. In these privileged moments, the film is close to transcendence, defying time, space and gravity.

Quite simply, a revelation.

A film that returns the director to the blunt and cutting honesty, pungent observation, and sharply targeted humor that made him so appealing in the first place. [16 Oct 1996, p.D01]

One of the rare rock films that produces the effect of a live concert: After each number, the audience erupts into applause.

A chase movie, a spy movie, a futuristic thriller full of colorfully bizarre characters and deftly choreographed stunt work, Children of Men works on multiple levels - as action and allegory.

A slow-burning, character-rich study in desperation, grief, vengeance, loyalty, and love. It's the sort of arthouse entry - in German, mostly - that gets you thinking about an English-language remake.

It's never entirely clear whether Borchardt is also an object of ridicule for documentarian Chris Smith.

A dour-faced but sublime comedy about the kindness of strangers -- and about the strangeness of people who find themselves in oddball moments of grace.

There is a lot to like here, a few things to love. Like the fact that someone in Hollywood can still assemble a cast this large and impressive — someone who does not work for Marvel.

The usual complaints and caveats about Anderson - he's precious, his characters have no grounding in the real world - can be made about Moonrise Kingdom, but so what? This is his seventh feature, he has been working with a gang of collaborators in front of the camera and behind, and his worldview gets richer, and more revealing, even as the view from his lens gets smaller, closer, almost two-dimensional in its oddball tableaux.

Trueba's movie is nearly undone by its shapelessness. Because the filmmaker imposes little in the way of form (or drama) on his subject, his film is a good listen without being a particularly good watch.

Steeped in quiet despair, Lantana is a psychological thriller that emphasizes the psychology over the thrills. It's a smart, heart-twisting picture.

The rare movie that manages to convey the inner soul of an artist.

Mendes nonetheless works this screenplay like a jazz virtuoso plays with a familiar theme such as "Mary Had a Little Lamb."

Like this diabolically designed weapon of war, Tanovic's film is coil-sprung to explode on the unsuspecting.

The movie is, start to finish, candy-colored angst.

Ghosts haunt Heart of a Dog - but so, too, does love.

A funny, freaky, often profound animated adventure that is certainly the best movie ever made about a spork.

Ann Savage, the femme fatale from a slew of old Hollywood noirs, is savagely funny as Maddin's beauty-parlor proprietress mom.

Unlike "Caché" and "Code: Unknown," where Haneke's investigations into societal and spiritual despair resonated with poetic force, The White Ribbon doesn't resonate at all.

It is an exploitation picture disguised as a hipster comedy.

The Witch is a stressful movie to watch, and that's meant as the highest praise.

Late in Looper, when a highly telekinetic kid starts levitating things, it really does look like Christopher Nolan had wandered onto the set and taken over.

If you want to expose your children to a work of art with real soul, you could do a lot worse than Kubo and the Two Strings.

Insightful and involving.

What this unclassifiable story may lack in decibels, it has in emotional depth. At once a mystery, a family drama, a snapshot of children at risk, Ballast is an unusually perceptive character study more eloquent in action than in dialogue.

Funny as it is fierce, breathtaking as it is life-affirming.

Clooney has never been better, subtler, more deeply rooted in a performance than he is in The Descendants. And he's funny, too.

Swinton is delightful in a twisted turn as Wilford's enforcer, a Margaret Thatcherian dragon lady who adores watching her men torture miscreants who have defied the train's No. 1 rule: Know your place.

Stays with you like great movies tend to do. It asks you to examine the inner mechanisms of human beings, cheerful and miserable alike. It's not about looking at a glass half empty or a glass half full. It's about drinking down what's in that glass and letting it fill your soul.

The humor of the script constantly confounds expectations, and yet Shrek still manages to say all the right things to children.

Ain't nothin' but a party, y'all.

Underlines the nightmare of entrapment so vividly captured in The Day I Became a Woman.

A film full of a sense of impending danger, betrayal, seduction and destruction. Quite simply, it's great stuff.

So incrementally does Eastwood's film build toward what seems like an inevitable resolution that when it concludes, you're sucker-punched. You haven't been watching a police procedural, but a Greek tragedy. You haven't been watching a drama about the catharsis of vigilantism, but sitting vigil for a community diminished, and permanently damaged, by violence.