French movies are not so neatly resolved. In fact, the point of many French movies, such as this provocative one from director Laurent Cantet, is that some problems don't have satisfying solutions - or resolutions.

Must-see stuff.

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

This beautiful, unfolding film is an antidote to the high-velocity, maximum-volume world most of us find ourselves immersed in, offering a glimpse into a rigorously spiritual alternative. Its calmness, its reflection, is full of allure.

Filled with bleak, beautiful Hopperesque tableaus and strange characters whose lives intersect.

With its mix of Lewis Carroll and William Gibson; Japanese anime and Chinese chopsocky; mythological allusions, and machine-made illusion, offers a couple of hours of escapist fun.

Until a final conflict that more resembles a monster-truck jam than a superhero showdown, Iron Man is solid gold.

Eastwood and Morgan's movie, with its epic natural disasters (and a terrifying, man-made one) is optimistic. Hokey, even. But it's beautiful, too.

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.

Quiet, quirky gem.

Wondrously emotional film, one that sneakily dismantles your defenses and purges grief you didn't realize you had.

Fused with paranoia and almost unbearable suspense, The Hurt Locker is powerful stuff.

At once guileless and profound.

The Proposition, a beautiful, bloody meditation on justice, family, and the trap of retribution, is in every respect an artful addition to the canon of six-shooter morality tales.

If you enjoy visuals with substance as well as flash, look no further than this exuberant movie.

In the end, what the movie is about: time and life, and what we do with them, and what we regret that we didn't do.

It is not to everyone's taste. But if you like the lush film operas of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Douglas Sirk, or Luchino Visconti, this one's for you.

The script by Andrea Berloff is stunning in its simplicity and aching details.

This is magnificent filmmaking, and a magnificent film.

Cholodenko takes us inside a bohemian hive where everyone buzzes around the Queen Bee. McDormand is superb. Likewise Bale and Nivola.

The less said about the twists and turns The Illusionist takes, the better. Suffice to say, Eisenheim's masterful deceptions do not stop when he exits the stage.

It is the more satisfying of the two installments - less over-the-top, arterial-gushing violence and more investigation into character, motives, back-story.

An extraordinarily perfect little film: A bittersweet drama that explores sexuality and love, and their reverberations across the landscape of human emotions.

How I Live Now takes some frightening, gruesome turns. In tone and terror, it comes close to matching the jumpy dread of Danny Boyle's British Isles virus thriller "28 Days Later."

Impossibly charming and impossibly French.

While The Forgiveness of Blood lacks the narrative momentum of director Joshua Marston's previous film, "Maria Full of Grace" - it is nonetheless fascinating.

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

A movie of absurdist humor, brutal realism and dementia.

Bravo to Brooks for conceiving Mother and for giving Reynolds a role that required her to do something more than merely effervesce. Here Reynolds bubbles, she boils, she exhibits a complex geology of human emotions. Her Mrs. Henderson is the mother of all mothers, and Mother is the mother lode of all comedies. [10 Jan 1997, p.05]

Moodysson has an uncanny eye and ear for teen speech and attitude, and is able to capture it without the usual condescension and exploitation.

This is more than a movie: It's Almodovar's design for living.

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

A gut-punch of a drama.

Microcosmos is a Zen version of an old Disney True-Life feature: the hokum and phony palaver of those '50s pics supplanted by a wide-eyed sense of wonder. [08 Nov 1996, p.05]

A spectacularly satisfying reworking of the legend of Kal-El.

Resonant and surprisingly affecting.

As he's done in such otherwise diverse pictures as Lone Star, City of Hope, and The Secret of Roan Inish, in Limbo writer-director Sayles circles down into a community of friends, colleagues, strangers - and shows what happens when paths cross, and sometimes double-cross. [04 Jun 1999, p.03]

A startling, powerful biopic.

In Order of Disappearance has an utterly unique feel, a certain Scandinavian crispness that's impossible to duplicate.

Set against the backdrop of Montana's stunning wilderness, Certain Women portrays women at work and women in desire with the quiet confidence, simplicity, and directness of a true artist.

Pure, undiluted joy.

While it hits some of the usual sci-fi tropes, Creative Control's center of gravity isn't tech itself, but the relationships of those who use it.

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.

Beautifully shot, in long, fluid takes, The Beat That My Heart Skipped is that rare thing: a remake that improves on its source.

The Confirmation is a powerful directorial debut from 59-year-old writer Bob Nelson, who received an Oscar nomination for his first screenplay, Nebraska.

Brings home the complexities and contradictions of the man.

A smart, sharp, stirring adaptation of the H.G. Bissinger best-seller.

There are some terrifically strong scenes and terrific actors contributing to them.

Odd, and awkward in places, but its lyricism and power stay with you.

Francofonia is a brilliant meditation on art, on war - and what happens to art when nations go to war.

Urgent and stunning movie.

Jolting, suspenseful, full of twisted sympathy for its goons' row of characters, and wickedly amusing to boot, Killing Them Softly summons up the ghosts of "Goodfellas" and a whole nasty tradition of crime pics. And then it lets its ghosts go, whacking and thwacking away.

It's a charmer.

Quietly and keenly observed, Summer Hours nods to Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard" (a country estate, a family reunion, an impending sale). Assayas displays a lucid sense of how personal history and family identity are inextricably linked to a physical place - here, to a house that is still busy accumulating its memories.

This is Highsmith, and so things do not go as planned for her protagonists. The Two Faces of January - drop-dead gorgeous to behold - is not a merry tale, but a murderous one. Murderously good.

A funny, sad and absolutely lovely film.

A powerful and moving contribution to the cinema of the Holocaust.

So electric are the performances in The Crucible, so breathtaking is director Nicholas Hytner's darting camera, that it was fully halfway into Arthur Miller's screen adaptation of his legendary drama before I noticed something missing. Namely, a subtext. [20 Dec 1996, p.03]

Brian Cox is especially good, and slippery, as Menenius, a Roman senator.

Almereyda's smart, streamlined adaptation is full of such neat little ironies.

This time around, Julien Temple gets it right.

Not since Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" and Malick's own "Days of Heaven" has a movie been both so breathtakingly beautiful and so narratively abstract.

At a lean - and decidedly mean - 77 minutes, the suspense-horror hybrid Them by French writer-directors David Moreau and Xavier Palud is nothing short of revelatory.

If you've had enough of the loony tunes coming from Florida, this piece of absurdist serio-comedy is the perfect picture.

The Hoax makes the fakery of disgraced writers Jayson Blair, James Frey and Stephen Glass seem puny by comparison. Irving was the grand master, and Gere's portrait and Hallström's movie suggest why: He almost bought his own story, believed his own outrageous pack of lies.

Hong, who makes his feature debut here, has a masterful command of rhythm, beautifully weaving each strand of the narrative around that momentous opening scene.

Monaghan is stronger still. This is a performance that deserves to be noticed. She is crushingly good.

An epic docudrama - electric and raw.

How the film plays out, and what happens to the boy and the adults in his company, may prove a revelation, or a disappointment, or something in between. But getting there is thrilling and wondrously strange.

A darkly comic, piercing, and occasionally painful study of a young woman's quest for identity.

Exceptionally graceful and accomplished, Ozon's film challenges our received notions of normalcy, intimacy, and love.

It's a beautiful, grim tale.

An eco-mentary that's as passionate and persuasive an argument for change as "An Inconvenient Truth."

Leaves you feeling rich - and richly satisfied.

Glazer has a daring sense of story structure that ratchets up the suspense, and his sense for sardonic black comedy is unerring.

Throw bouquets at Marshall, who instead of dissecting it to death, neatly resurrects the Hollywood musical.

A rollicking tale of rehabilitation and redemption, rife with cool special effects, Hancock is smart and surprisingly raunchy.

The Dardennes are aces at these small-scale human dramas, and Two Days, One Night is almost without flaw.

Made in a forthright, unfancy style and utilizing a cast of born naturals, Washington Heights deftly draws parallels between father and son's complicated relationship and the tensions that pulse through this predominantly Dominican American community.

It's a feminist nightmare, the world brought to life -- in hard-hitting documentary style.

A masterful epic charting love's labyrinths.

Its deceptive simplicity makes A Better Life so emotionally profound.

Fear(s) of the Dark, a French production, interweaves the shorts, linking the segments together thematically, and narratively.

Giannoli's riotously funny and heartbreaking film follows Marguerite's attempt to stage a solo recital in a grand theater in Paris.

A spirited, smart-alecky look at the ongoing conflict between a government that wants to eliminate pot and a public that wants to smoke it.

Ergüven's film, beautifully shot and beautifully performed, cuts its storybook tone with starker, more brutal truths. Anger - aimed at a conservative social order and those complicit in maintaining it - courses through this sad, striking tale.

It's a celebration of the good times and bad times shared by a man and woman who found each other in the middle of some historic craziness, and it rocks.

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

The story of Donald Crowhurst is not one of remarkable courage or remarkable endurance. But it is remarkable.

Selma may be flawed, even spurious at points. But in its larger portrait of a man of dignity, purpose, and courage, and in Oyelowo's performance as that man, the film rings true.

It deserves to be more widely seen as a quite definitive exercise in mob psychology. [17 Apr 1998, p.16]

A riveting documentary.

A heartbreaking story of true love.

It's a coming-of-age story - blunt, mythic, gut-wrenching.

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.

A postfeminist valentine to the Paleolithic days of Woman Power when dinosaurs walked Manhattan in heels with matching handbags.

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.

Exhilarating, alternately funny and horrific film.