Ernest & Celestine delivers a sweet message that should prove delightful to young and old alike. Though the premise makes it sound like it could be preachy, this cute children's story is anything but.

Avoiding the hyperbole and condescension that sometimes make it easy for ideological foes to dismiss the likes of Oliver Stone or Michael Moore, Costa-Gavras relies on the sterling performances of his actors (including Irene Papas as Montand's widow), and was rewarded with a pair of Oscar nominations.

Brings you into a world you didn't know existed with a closeness that the movies almost never achieve. If that constitutes exploitation, then it's a crime which all works of art should aspire to commit.

Ultimately, though, it's hard not to feel like Hou is saying more explicitly and expansively in nearly two hours what Lamorisse managed to convey in only one-fourth as much film.

As unpleasant as so many of its going-on are, Wake in Fright works both as an early instance of "Ozploitation" cinema and as a harsh critique of Australian colonialism and the absurdity of trying to bring so-called civilization to this vast arid wilderness.

Not only does this film make you think, it makes you want to think. Few films -- few works of art of any stripe -- can claim that.

It's a relentless finale to the "Bourne" movie trilogy that raises the stakes, pumps up the action and develops old characters while introducing new villains

The excellent news is that Yates and company took their time adding visual depth to the film -- they shot it as 3-D -- and the result feels immediate and real and not at all slathered-on.

It's a movie about having a sibling and all of the pain, joy, love and anxiety that that entails: a movie, in other words, for almost everyone.

It's no wonder that Polanski, himself an artist who has survived a series of nightmares, should tell it so naturally and powerfully.

If Song of the Sea had had the promotional muscle of Disney or Dreamworks behind it, it may have won this year's Oscar for Best Animated Feature instead of merely being nominated. It certainly would have deserved it.

It's a sad story, and Asif Kapadia's documentary tells it without narration or commentary. Instead there's a brilliantly edited succession of interviews and performances and news footage that glides through her charmed, doomed life.

Akin is German-born but of Turkish heritage, and his films have often been concerned with the particular clashes and conflicts between those cultures. This film, though, does so in a much more oblique way than 2004's "Head-On."

The film has a dreary, worn quality; much of it is set in winter in Buffalo, N.Y., after all. You know before long that the best you can hope for is that these folks won't kill each other or themselves.

Movies don't get any more real than this.

With evocative performances, especially from the two women, and a nicely modulated sense of nostalgia, Ilo Ilo marks the emergence of a promising new cinematic voice.

It is, in its quiet, precise, classical way, nearly perfect.

Lebanon isn't as resonant as the haunting mix of autobiography and animation in "Waltz with Bashir," which dealt with the same war. Still, the film's fresh craft promises more from a director who turns the tiniest possible of settings into a sobering metaphor for the madness of a larger world.

A diverting, playful and puzzling documentary.

It is well-acted and written with a rigorous effort to skirt cliche, and it has the savor of real life throughout.

Within this simple structure, Panahi manages at once to celebrate and critique his nation's passions, sexual politics, sporting heritage, laws, morality and class system. It's a fictional feature but, like many Iranian films, it feels uncannily real, particularly in its final rousing minutes.

Alas, while the verbiage bubbles, the plot slogs. You feel that there's a big pile of deleted scenes waiting to appear on the DVD -- and that a good bit of what's here should have joined it. Funny is good, but it requires sharp if it's to rise to true greatness.

It isn't in the same league as the director's best work, chiefly because it lacks the bravura flourishes of cinematic craft that helped make his name. But it's so vital and bloody and funny and wicked and tense and unapologetic that it feels kin to those films, which little of the director's work of the past decade has managed to pull off.

Slight on personality but long on music; Janis Joplin elevates it to near-great concert-film status.

A smart and engaging entertainment.

Gosling, who was amazing in "The Believer" but hasn't yet connected substantially with a big audience, continues to impress.

Earnest, smart, handsome, well-acted and made with mastery.

We laugh, yes, but we're touched, too, a delicate balance that the film manages again and again, right through to its bittersweet conclusion.

John Huston's classic film noir, adapted from W.R. Burnett's novel, is a forerunner of dozens of heist movies, few of which surpass it. [26 Feb 1999]

Perhaps the most beautiful film to hit Portland movie screens this year.

Ladd's career had been declining and kept declining after Shane, but his minimalist, passive style was perfect for this character, a violent man who has grown thoughtful too late in life. This is his best work. [28 Apr 2000]

Heart of Gold feels like an ample slice of the real America, the one truly worth caring for. And it's such a rare thing in this benighted age that the simple clarity with which it's presented feels like nothing less than a miracle.

Builds into a moment of such gorgeous rocking that you truly lose yourself in some musical otherworld you never dreamed you'd reach in current films.

Because make no mistake: The Dark Knight is many things, some of them deliriously fun, some of them deeply impressive, and some of them puzzling and frustrating. But most of all it is dark.

The film's final scene, which manages to recontextualize everything we've seen so far with a brilliant simplicity that, if further proof were needed, establishes Farhadi as one of the best storytellers in cinema today.

Wilson's account is enormously self-serving and self-aggrandizing, but the film makes his ego a virtue and a running joke.

A handsome film, an earnest film, a film with taste in music and photography and a real sense of intelligence. But too often it feels like an exercise. And even when you're impressed by it, you know you're being played.

An extraordinary thing, and one that I shall likely esteem for a long time. Philosophically, though, it's still mired in the primordial ooze in a way that will, I suspect, forever make me hold it at arm's length.

This apocalyptic vision of London-as-Hell is a far cry from Leigh's earlier work, the relatively gentle social comedies, High Hopes and Life Is Sweet. But, working with the actors in his usual improvisatory style, Leigh dares to drop into depths he has never before explored. With its aura of horror and hopelessness, Naked is a very brave work. If you can take it, it's a film you won't soon forget. [28 Jan. 1994, p.AE13]

The Host isn't just a terrific monster movie. This South Korean box-office smash is also a laugh-out-loud comedy and a surprisingly angry political satire.

You can't help but share the feelings, many of them subrational, that coarse through the soldiers as they live a hellish year in a hellish place.

One of the best children's movies in years. Spunky, inventive and filled with life and wonder.

Like the bits of home life its pioneers have brought with them to an alien landscape, the careful craft grounds the film in a reality that is as much felt as it is observed.

As storytelling, it's extremely effective.

The longer it goes on, the more you're swept up into the jet stream of good feeling.

What makes The Last Days stand above the many similar films about the Holocaust and its survivors, though, is the fluidity with which Moll structures and passes through his material. In this, he's ably accompanied by Hans Zimmer's eloquent score and the crisp, simple photography of cinematographer Harris Done. [19 Feb 1999]

Perhaps the most disturbing fact in the film comes in the text at the end: Paragraph 175 remained on the books in both halves of postwar Germany until the late 1960s.

Aronson's intriguing, complicated and well-filmed documentary will keep you talking for days.

This combination of fatalism, nostalgia and willfully naive optimism captures something essential in the Russian soul.

Boyle, one of the premier stylists in the world fills "Slumdog" with ebullient energy and ceaseless invention.

Flopped on its initial release, and it is a somewhat decadent and overlong production. But Masina's performance is, as always, engaging, and Fellini's glee at launching into color filmmaking is palpable.

Van Sant has been quoted in recent media reports as being done with the type of filmmaking that these four movies represent. If that's true, then Paranoid Park is a fine summation of what he learned from making them.

It ends on a random note, making an awkward plea for better ecological stewardship of the Earth, which looked so small and frail to the astronauts regarding it from the moon. But otherwise it's a satisfying and heartening reminder of what a glorious thing a small group of men once contrived to do.

A typically heavy-handed Spike Lee film that makes up for it by being a typically passionate Spike Lee film. [16 Oct 1996, p.C03]

Children of Men has some magnificent moments of moviemaking and is thoroughly infused with just the atmosphere Cuaron has aimed for. But it's so streamlined in its storytelling and unvarying in its tone that it's more deadening than transporting.

The film continually explores surprising, rewarding territory; even an erotically charged subplot dovetails nicely with themes of vengeance, mortality and renewal.

But this is pretty honest and true filmmaking, nonetheless; try as you might, you can't detect the leer of the satirist.

Something in the simplicity of its vision gives The Man Without a Past a dimension of heroic grandeur -- and that effect, too, seems to tickle Kaurismaki's funny bone.

For those unschooled in Latin jazz, though, it might be best to just pick up the CD.

What director Chen Kaige and his superb cast give us are larger-than-life passions, betrayals, and sacrifices, unfolding before the canvas of history. [29 Oct 1993, p.AE15]

The characters and their situations, while perfectly credible and funny on the simplest literal level, surely add up to something like a subtly farcical apocalyptic satire. [18 April 1989, p.D4]

The story is ingeniously intricate but never gimmicky or implausible. As it develops, the suspense grows about what direction the story could possibly take next.

Among the best of its kind, thanks in no small part to the utterly believable, vanity-free performance of Yolande Moreau in the title role.

Garfield is customarily strong and energetic as a desperate guy on the edge. Famous for her work in tight sweaters and halters, Turner was no thespian. But the combination of Garfield and Garnett, or something, fired a performance from her that is, in its way, perfect. [05 Mar 1999]

Trafic is a relative trifle but nevertheless delightful.

Though excellent in many ways, American Beauty is, finally, an uneasy mix of assured technique and simplistic satire.

Almost more valuable as a piece of foreign policy than as the highly accomplished work of cinema it is.

Far From Heaven would have been one of the great American films of the '50s; it is certainly the finest American melodrama of our time.

The film is one of the great portraits of the artist as impossibly gifted young snot. [31 Dec 1999]

Nguyen reportedly worked on War Witch for a decade, and it shows in both the immediacy and authenticity of his tale, and the meticulous craft with which it's told.

It's sometimes uneven, but it's glorious, too, with constantly churning invention and the guarantee that you have never seen anything like it before -- unless it came from Winnipeg and Guy Maddin.

The tension between the comely and comforting manner of the film and its undecided and beguiling content is, arguably, Haneke’s signature touch.

Filled with wonderful performances, especially by Hedaya and Walsh, Blood Simple remains a tight, beautifully ugly, neo-noir classic.

The slowness and stillness in the film are, actually, a slow boil, and in Lie's taciturnity there is pain and even horror.

While the third act inevitably bogs down a bit in gunplay and chases, there are more than enough moments of visual wonder and storytelling surprise to make it worth the trip.

Perhaps the most indispensable cast member is the Jacobs' dwelling, their residence since 1966.

The overall thrust of the story -- that downtrodden folks in desperate circumstances have the capacity for goodness -- is one too rarely seen.

In Volver, the latest marvel to emerge from his sharp and joyful mind, Almodovar blends autobiography, gossip, melodrama, music, the supernatural and the suffocatingly quotidian in a story about a woman -- indeed, a tribe of women -- struggling through a life of pain and disappointment.

There are ample opportunities for the film to soak in pathos, righteousness, farce, or pictorialism, and Payne manages to nod at those pitfalls without falling into them. In a way, it's just like Matt King's world: enviably plush but filled with the real pain of real life.

Here's a movie that's jam-packed with bizarre sci-fi concepts, political allegory, a fascinating international cast and some truly over the top set pieces. But for just about everything maniacally cool in the movie, there's a flaw, sometimes a near-fatal one.

It's a delicate and ingenious film that skewers modern life without ever baring its nails or turning sour. [17 Dec 2010]

Funny, irreverent and moving, the unconventional Shrek may mock fairy tales, but in the process, creates its own.

It's the best kind of complaint. You can see why the $50 million man refers to something he gave away as "the best single day of my career."

The film reveals itself to be not so much a historical allegory as an Iliad of the heart. It's sad and smart and beautiful and true.

Nominated for an Oscar for best documentary feature, it's deeply humane and even more deeply unsettling, in a way that most documentaries about Iraq, which tend toward the polemic, never manage.

Eastwood has crafted one of the most powerful American dramas in years.

It's an exemplary and incendiary instance of documentary filmmaking as real-world advocacy.

The halting dialogue, full of awkward pauses and restarts, seems improvised in the way that only carefully scripted material can.

It may not be the most memorable saga put on film, but as far as Miike is concerned, it doesn't have to be.

Henry Fonda's perplexity is palpable. [26 Jan 2001]

You have to experience the thing to understand its simultaneous recklessness and care, its humor and sadness in the name of failure, its playful but dismal take on formulaic Hollywood endings.

For all the ostensible immaturity of its form, Fantastic Mr. Fox is the most grown-up thing the director has done in years.

One of those should-I-laugh-or-cry satires.

Gorgeous and saddening, Osama makes the human-scale claim for the overthrow of governments ruled by the iron hand of religious fundamentalism far more persuasively than any of the rhetoric coming out of the White House or No. 10 Downing St.

The Salt of the Earth presents not just a passing of time through one man's remarkable life but a change of perspective.

One of the purest instances of indie cinema this year. "Pure" meaning that in every aspect of filmmaking and intent this picture is peerless, so truly real, funny, poignant and sexy that it almost feels like a watershed cinematic moment.

What matters in '71 is the action, and the look on O'Connell's face when he emerges from a shed into the Belfast night.

Such a treat for the eyes, ears and funny bone that you feel cheated that it clocks in at less than an hour-and-a-quarter.