Funny, passionate, full of compassion for its just-pubescent protagonists, We Are the Best! is a total charmer.

The delightful G-rated film has a story line simple enough for pre-schoolers to follow and comic sensibility complex enough for adults to savor, with an emphasis on howlingly bad (by which I mean good) puns.

Always, murmuring just beneath the surface, there's a political undercurrent to Farhadi's films, a gentle whisper of a critique aimed at the weight of Iran's combined cultural and political intransigence.

An honest and personal and unblurred examination (even through that druggy blur) of a tricky voyage into womanhood.

Never mind a few misguided casting choices; Lincoln is exceptionally good, elevated by a preternatural star turn, and by the energy and invention its director displays in telling a story that doesn't rely on action and special effects.

There is incredible tension in this ordeal, this effort to survive, to find rescue, and Redford - an icon of the American film experience for more than half a century now - makes that tension deeply palpable.

One of the things that distinguishes Love & Friendship from the multitude of Austen adaptations - the worthy and the less so - is its heroine. Lady Susan Vernon, a widow of devilish charms, is as frank and fearless a character as Austen ever imagined.

Riley's film brings the American icon's career back into sharp focus.

By recording this all too commonplace and dehumanizing process, Puiu's film shows the sick old man and the strangers who deal with him to be all too human - extraordinarily so.

Moreno, with her wide, watchful eyes, owns the camera - and the film. Her performance is perfectly natural and profoundly moving. Maria Full of Grace is a remarkable picture, full of suspense and discovery.

McNamara, a robust conversationalist, is so lively that he bursts out of what is essentially a talking-head documentary.

While Gyllenhaal has playful puppy eyes and energy, his performance as Jack is a blur of mustaches, sideburns and spurs that never achieves the weight of Ledger's.

It's the powerful emotional punch their films deliver - and this one is no exception - that elevate the game, that make them so satisfying, so worthwhile. The Kid With a Bike grabs at the heart.

Caouette's fractured history is imbued with heart-crushing sincerity.

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]

Like Hitchcock, only creepier, Haneke slowly cranks up the suspense.

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

Funny, furious, and full of front-office drama.

One of the great things about this unpredictable, exhilaratingly goofy fable is how it shows that even the clueless - and the tragically morose - have a shot at redemption.

What's up in The Duke of Burgundy is a straight-faced homage to 1970s European erotica, full of soft-focus nudity and soft-core kink.

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

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

Baker gets great, sly, unforced performances from his two leads, but it's not all a rollicking good time: There are moments of quietude, inquietude, moments when a sense of wariness and loneliness settles over the women.

Bar-Lev tells Tillman's story "Rashomon"-style, incorporating multiple perspectives on Tillman's politics (left-liberal), religion (atheist), and personal relations (he married Marie, his first and only girlfriend). Still, it is a documentary with more details of how he died than how he lived.

Amazingly - and this movie is amazing - Room is a story of hope, of possibility. Sure, your stomach will be in knots, your fingers clenched, your heart racing. But it will also fill that heart with a sense of the goodness, the courage, the enduring love that is out there to be discovered - and to be held onto with the fierceness of life itself.

Nebraska is not a breakneck, screwball farce - although it has its moments, like the comical heist of an air compressor from a farmer's barn. Payne's film is loping. It's deadpan, poignant, absurd.

Ozon has crafted a near-perfect film, a mournful, moving kind of cinema poetry.

That's exactly why Heavenly Creatures is the small masterpiece that it is: because the film roots so deeply and eagerly into the psychology - and pathology - of its characters. It takes us to a lush place, defined by passion and imagination, where reality intrudes with surprising, gruesome results. [25 Nov 1994, p.03]