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.