Wonderfully evocative, funny, sad, complex, and essential passages from a man's childhood and adolescence.

A wise, wistful study of hope and dread.

OK, first off, anyone who shares his or her life with a dog, or has done so in the past, go see My Dog Tulip.

Paolo Virzi's film looks at school as the microcosm of society and at fathers too self-absorbed to be there for their daughters. He combines the themes played in "Mean Girls" and "Look at Me" and makes them vibrant.

Never mind Hollywood's big-star, big-budget hand-wringing about Africa - Bamako is the real thing.

At once a deeply personal film and an important historical document, The Man Nobody Knew leaves us with an incomplete portrait of a man. Did Colby have a moral core? Did he know what was truth, and what was a lie? Did he sanction assassination plots? Did he love his family? Was he even capable of love?

Jafar Panahi's Taxi looks onto a world where the social order and the spiritual order are at odds, in flux, where the conversations are sometimes cutting, sometimes comic, sometimes troubled, sometimes profound.

Andre Techine creates living characters instead of sociopolitical symbols.

Bold, ambitious -- and ambiguous.

Rosamund Pike is adorable, if a little too ethereal and flighty.

A truly refreshing break from the Hollywood humdrum, the film is a perfect vehicle for Rock's range of talents, giving him plenty of breathing space to launch into his trademark stand-up riffs while grounding him in a story as moving as it is funny.

This beautifully taut and terrifying thriller is faithful to its source in just about every way that matters.

A macabre mystery for children and a cautionary tale for their folks, Coraline is a yarn - twisty, knotty, taut - about a perennially bored girl whose parents are too preoccupied with work to pay her much mind.

Vibrates with exuberance and erudition.

There's a fine line between bag lady and belle of the ball, and Apfel instinctively knows it. Her sense of style is uncanny.

We know how the story ends: Nordling persuades Choltitz to back down. Yet, the film somehow maintains a razor-sharp sense of suspense throughout. And it ends with a delicious plot twist that makes one rethink Nordling's moral superiority.

Bielinsky's movie builds like a poker game in which the players, having invested everything, cannot afford to fold.

A love song to the new Europe (Klapisch's original title: Euro Pudding) and a snapshot of a polyglot gang on the cusp of kind-of-reckless youth and responsibility-burdened adulthood.

Emotionally engaging and unhampered by dialogue, Boy & the World will appeal to children with its deceptively simple story and its visual splendor.

It's oppressive and claustrophobic, confused and scary in there. But it's also compellingly real.

It is the kind of film that enables adults to get in touch with their inner child - but more important, gets children in touch with their inner adult. [14 July 1995, p.03]

A beautifully strange movie.

A pepperpot bubbling with pungent insights and sharp wit, Spanglish is about how people, like cultures, are more alike than not.

Holofcener writes with an ear for the rhythms and ridiculousness of real life, and her cast - to a man, and woman - embraces her words with subtlety and certitude. Friends With Money is gimmickless, and great.

Refreshingly gritty and hard-nosed.

An intimate epic of infinite grace.

This small story that tells the much bigger story of the New Economy's bubble and burst is less a documentary than it is breaking news.

The film...has an amazing quality of life, animation and hope. [07 Dec 1962, p. 27]

Here are five gifted actors at the top of their games as five characters in search of what makes a family.

So jaw-droppingly out there, so bracingly bizarre, and, much of the time, so fall-over-funny that even its flaws don't matter. Easily the oddest movie of the year, it is also one of the best.

Touching the Void is, indeed, about living, but not the exhilarating kind. It's about survival -- raw, real, by force of will.

It's the stuff of soap opera, infused with a nonchalant, David Lynch-like surrealism and a nutball Canadian humor. Beer - because of the baroness, and because this is Canada - flows freely.

Although its tone is generally genial and jovial, Good Hair touches on some tricky issues, at times complicitly.

Set exactly a century ago, The Last Station is a droll tragicomedy starring those battling Tolstoys, whose family is unhappy in its own way.

Remy, the little rat who stars in the big, beautiful, funny Ratatouille, isn't gross at all. In fact, he's adorable.

A movie every American should see, although parts of it are close to unwatchable - notably an operating room sequence in which a pair of surgeons performs a gastric bypass, or "obesity surgery," as they like to call it, on a dangerously overweight patient.

With an attention to the telling detail that one finds in a great short story, Kiarostami guides Takanashi and Okuno - and then Kase - through the mischievous and melancholy tale. It is quiet. It is lovely. And it will stay with you for a long time.

If you're a fan of the indomitable Canadian rocker - high-pitched voice, proto-grunge guitar, total immersion in the music - then you want to see Neil Young Trunk Show on the big screen, for sure.

An ingenious blend of sci-fi and mystery.

By the end of their arduous journey, Lore and her siblings are changed. But it's the kind of change that will take years, perhaps generations, to understand, to heal.

An elegant survey of the origins of the information revolution and a shrewd analysis of how the internet has reshaped the world. It's one of the director's best docs.

A rich, beautifully detailed espionage thriller that captures the bygone days of Shanghai - and 1940s Hollywood noirs' romantic evocations of same - Lust, Caution is also one of those rare movie experiences: Its scenes of the trysts between Yee and Mak, from their rough-stuff first encounter to the long, tangled love-making sessions of subsequent meetings, are truly erotic.

The most challenging obstacle encountered by reformers like Canada and Michelle Rhee, the embattled chancellor of education for Washington, D.C., are the unions extending tenure protection to teachers who underperform.

The Green Prince is an extraordinary achievement. It has all the suspense of a great espionage yarn, but it's also a powerful moral document that calls into question the tactics of terrorism.

Enchanted and thrilling film.

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

Terrifically satisfying film.

It's a heartbreaker of a coming-of-age tale, even if there's a string of exsanguinated corpses to be accounted for.

A steady, soulful film experience. It's got poetry to it - the poetry of humanity.

Marion Cotillard has made her share of unremarkable, if not remarkably bad, films. But when the French star, who won the Academy Award for her unearthly reincarnation of Edith Piaf in "La Vie en Rose", gets it right, the result is magic.

A political drama, a personal drama, a sharp-eyed study of how the media manipulate us from all sides, No reels and ricochets with emotional force.

And how can you not reflect about time, and change, and physical and spiritual being, when confronted with such a stunning visual record of human existence?

A taut, understated minimalist masterwork.

With deft and subtle performances and an uncomplicated but savvy script, Autumn Tale gets to the inner lives of its characters.

It's the stuff of nightmares.

The film is a sharp, funny, touching tale.

Side Effects, chilly and noirish, and boasting a wily performance from Catherine Zeta-Jones as a therapist who worked with Emily earlier in her adulthood, is, Soderbergh says, his swan song.

It is a damning indictment of the individuals and institutions who made money while customers lost their shirts.

Amirpour clearly studied their films and listened to some Sergio Leone spaghetti Western scores while she was at it. The music in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night pulses with a late-night Persian vibe, reverby and twanging, soulful, hypnotic.

That this purposefully twisting exercise takes place amid the sun-burnished cypresses and towns of Tuscany - where ancient statuary is as commonplace as pasta and wine - only makes this playfully enigmatic meditation the more pleasing.

If there's a more passionate love story out there, then I haven't had the privilege of seeing it.

Shaft is still enormously involving. It's popcorn, but very fresh.

Although rough, it's a gem.

Year of the Horse is an appropriately edgy, ragged salute to a rock-and-roll band that refuses - happily - to say die. [31 Oct 1997, p.04]

Doesn't overdo it on the 1950s period charm -- lots of tweed, old cars and bikes, great woolly sweaters and painted rowhouses -- and the performances never get out of hand, even when the plot does.

Wildly ridiculous and thoroughly entertaining thriller.

If you're going to take another stab at this tale of a taunted, traumatized teen who exacts fiery revenge on, well, everyone, then Kimberly Peirce is the director to do it.

The footage is spectacular, the colors electric, the life aquatic trippier than anything you'll see in even the most wildly imaginative animated fare.

This sparrow's flight lifts the heart.

And tell me if I'm nuts, but another distraction: Doesn't the BFG bear a striking resemblance to George W. Bush?

A seven-word review: Very good performances. Much too much weather.

Moretti knows how to orchestrate a good laugh when it's needed, but he can plumb more soulful, sorrowful depths, too. In Mia Madre, with its self-doubting director and wild-card American interloper, Moretti works a palette of shifting moods. Triumphantly.

Bringing a wily, slow-burn energy and a southern accent to the role of Lyle, Dennis Hopper adds just the right touch of warped malevolence to Dahl's film. [29 Apr 1994, p.5]

A deadpan delight.

As entertaining as it is exasperating.

As soon as it's over, and you find yourself back in the harsh light of the workaday world, you'll be hard-pressed to remember what happened. Except that you'll remember enjoying yourself - immensely.

If Emmerich had any sense, he would have ceded the direction of the battle scenes to his star.

There's a playlike quality to Complete Unknown (Marston's cowriter, Julian Sheppard, has extensive credits in the theater). That's not a bad thing: The talk is smart. The actors doing the talking are easy to like.

While this charmer about a canine James Bond does not pack the emotional punch of "WALL-E," it's frisky fun to see the white shepherd get a new leash on life.

An impressive, not entirely successful exercise in minimalist filmmaking.

What began as a bold and thrilling story descends into Hollywood cliché. But Crowe and Connelly's work rises above the mush. They make A Beautiful Mind go.

It's a view filtered through a prism of memory and emotion, but one well worth investigating.

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

You don't have to be a fan of the TV show to enjoy watching this dog chase his shtick.

It's fun, exciting, freakish filmmaking.

This is a quiet, meticulously plotted chamber piece, not the booming, lightning-paced orchestral affair we know as the contemporary action film in the Age of Ludlum.

While there are similarities to the hardscrabble saga of "Angela's Ashes," Frears' film avoids the mawkish pitfalls of Alan Parker's screen adaptation.

Not everyone's cup of tea, but a strong, heady brew.

A Kiwi nerd love story and loopy portrait of Down Under underachievers, Eagle vs. Shark offers a deadpan take on family, friendship, obsession and self-delusion.

A "small" movie. But in its keenly observed examination of strangers who become intimates - and of family members who remain, in part, strangers - it has big things to say.

Swing Vote is messy and its targets are relatively safe. But its aim is true. And Costner's performance hits the bull's-eye.

Tokyo! is a must-see for the Gondry segment, and a strange, diverting pleasure for the rest.

Ajami brings its audience into a world where the cultural conflict is fierce, emotions run high, yet the hopeful vision of peaceful coexistence shines through the cracks.

It's not impossible to address grown-up issues of commitment, of responsibility, of love, and have some fun, and some profanity, while you're at it.

Schütte's film, which began with the cooperation of Zappa's late wife Gail and has the blessing of Ahmet and his sisters, Moon and Diva (but not Dweezil), lets him speak for himself.

For the first 100 minutes of his 117-minute film Spielberg holds the audience in a grip of fear. When Ray and Rachel take refuge in the storm cellar of a survivalist (a miscast Tim Robbins), the director's grip relaxes only a bit, but the film never recovers from this excursion into the Gothic.

An accomplished and compelling film by writer/director Josh Mond, James White is also pretty much a bummer.

Callan McAuliffe, a handsome Australian youth, looks right as the perma-press Bryce.