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

This is the kind of unusual but involving picture that's ripe for a Hollywood remake - but while you're waiting for the Sandra Bullock-Ethan Hawke edition (it's a good post-movie game: coming up with your own casting ideas), Read My Lips is well worth checking out.

Clean, director Olivier Assayas' spellbinding study of a junkie trying to get her life in order so she can reclaim custody of her child, avoids the pitfalls, brilliantly.

This long (nearly three hours), revelatory movie is both a thrilling adventure about endurance and survival, and an elegiac examination of centuries-old tribal culture, fast-fading in the new millennium.

Through Herzog's eyes it is a desolate, strangely beautiful frozen Edenish hell where the planet, having shaken out its pockets, lets the loners, fanatics and cosmologist-crackpots fall to bottom.

[Chaplin] has done for comedy what Victor Herbert did for "jazz." [22 Sep 1925, p.8]

After Clooney, who gives a sterling performance as a tarnished figure, the standout performance belongs to Wilkinson, a geyser of manic eloquence. Also quite fine are Swinton and Sydney Pollack.

Quiet, watchful, out for himself, Sorowitsch is a complicated figure - neither hero nor villain, and certainly no fool. The Austrian actor Markovics is riveting in the role; he is wiry, anticipatory, his eyes darting with intelligence and worry.

It's transformative.

ILYM is the comedy that Rudd lovers have been waiting for since he first charmed us silly in "Clueless." It explores both the dweeby and heartthrobby sides of this guy whose crooked smile fails to mask his social anxiety.

It's pretty much impossible not to love Sing Street's young hero as he stumbles around Dublin, dumbstruck and smitten, at turns clueless and confident.

A fine, inventive '70s period piece about friendship, first love, and growing up to face the hard lessons of life.

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.

Brevity is the soul of wit, lingerie and Ridicule, a keen and silky costume drama set circa 1783 in Versailles. [06 Dec 1996, p.03]

It does a masterful job of capturing a specific time and place while reminding us how timeless the abortion dialogue is.

A small, beautiful film exploding with big ideas.

What's most refreshing about Real Women Have Curves is its unforced comedy-drama and its relaxed, natural-seeming actors.

An eerily quiet, bracingly bloody, and expertly laid-out adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel.

A sweet but unsticky comedy from Norway that was one of the five foreign- language nominees at this year's Academy Awards.

Nim is as unforgettable as the treatment of him is unspeakable.

The relationship between Chris and his diminutive namesake is at the core of the film - the determination to be there for his son, no matter what; the mentoring, the pair's goofy, lovely banter. And Smith and his bright-eyed boy pull it off brilliantly.

The Cooler is small-scale moviemaking about small-scale lives. But it's big in all the right ways.

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

You can feel the world closing in, which, I would venture, is exactly how Fassbinder wanted you to feel.

A triumph. Unapologetically old-school, in both the literal and metaphorical meanings of the term, Debaters overlays the story of social underdogs onto the familiar template of the stand-and-deliver saga, the staple of sports inspirationals like "Rocky," "Invincible" and "The Karate Kid."

A richly observed coming-of-age drama about two teenage boys who are drawn to each other with a complicated mix of attraction, repulsion, tenderness, and aggression.

The film is more than laborious eye-blinking - it's also dazzling visually, its potent imagery conjured by cinematographer Janusz Kaminski. But finally, Diving Bell is about something imperceptible: consciousness.

The film's save-the-world scenario may be the stuff of crusty cliff-hangers, its imagery may be borrowed, and its jaunty dialogue anything but deep, but there's something exhilarating going on here. It's darn sublime.