With 2001, Stanley Kubrick proved that a sci-fi movie could be philosophical rather than pulpy, profound rather than pedantic.

Composed of relatively few events and scenes, it's often excruciatingly tense and never less than heartbreakingly human. And as much as I admire "Munich," Shadows leaves Spielberg's film in the dust in the moral-ambiguity department. Never before seen in the States, it's already on my year's ten-best list. (April 2006 Premiere)

Aquatic maintains its buoyancy throughout.

The whole thing works, especially for the non-comic audience. Plus, the music is perfect, especially the opening montage set to Bob Dylan's, "The Times They Are a-Changin."

Winslet deserves an Oscar for her amazing performance.

Burnett creates an insistently poetic, devastatingly ironic world and work.

Although this installment is a beautiful stand-alone thang (check out how its chronology-juggling storyline creates a perfect circle, structure-wise).

Brothers takes a scenario as old as Genesis – two jealous siblings spar over the affections of the same woman – and renders it fresh and immediate, by virtue of the warm, almost maternal, generosity director Susanne Bier shows her characters.

With My Flesh and Blood, Karsh finds a worthy subject in the constant day-to-day challenges facing a truly extraordinary family.

Three Burials is beautiful, authentic and brutally observant of human nature. With real Tex-Mex backdrops instead of the usual Monument Valley vistas and characters too complex to withstand simple white-hat/black-hat reductionism, Three Burials is a visionary portrait of the New West. This is the terrain of Eastwood and Peckinpah, saddled with the concerns of 21st-century life.

Just like the final performance by its deeply disturbed heroine, Black Swan is perfect.

How 49 Up differs from its precursors for the better is that it's the first to have its participants interact with Apted the filmmaker, no longer a one-sided interviewer.

I haven't been crazy about a lot of Van Sant's recent work, but what he does here is simply astonishing. [November 2003, p. 25]

Soars gloriously into fluency and magic.

This is as wonderfully realized an observation of female affinity as 1999’s great "The Dreamlife of Angels."

This film, a raw howl of outrage and pain, is proudly one-sided, allowing a generation of wounded men and women to scream their betrayal.

The plot is pretty convoluted, but Miyazaki has a very good handle on it and lavishes his customary heart, humor, and inventiveness on every situation he depicts.

Quantum, thanks to a deft blend of exotic escapism and bare-bones modernism, is more than strong enough to be judged on its own. In fact, it's the perfect Bond film.

There Will Be Blood is, in fact, not a historical saga; rather, it's an absurdist, blackly comic horror film with a very idiosyncratic satanic figure at its core.

To call Towelhead exploitative is to miss the point. What made Towelhead the novel so extraordinary was the honesty in Jasira's adolescent narrative voice, the genuine way she misguidedly, but honestly, conflates the sexual attention she receives with the parental affection she really needs. With the film, Ball, though he drops the book's first person narration, is faithful to that voice.

A giddy kick-out-the-jams entertainment. Diary takes a tack that's not exactly new, but is new to Romero, and as one might expect, the director brings a sharp and uncompromising new perspective to it.

One of Cronenberg's subtlest, most insinuating pictures, and one of the highlights of the year so far.

This is not a children's picture, although it touches on the imaginative powers and emotional resilience of children. It's another slice of Hou's distinctly poetic realism, and as such, also a kind of tribute to Paris -- the Paris of both today and of the older film.

Provocative, quietly erotic, deeply romantic, and slyly witty (a cameo by a giant of punk rock is funny at first sight, and funnier still when you figure out the joke it's making), Code 46 is a very effective antidote to summer blockbuster bloat.

For all its seeming simplicity, this is an emotionally and intellectually complex film that holds the viewer in a grip as tight as any classic thriller you can name.

A picture that certain Brits and connoisseurs of British colloquial English might call "a grower" … more moving and funny the more I think about it.

Letters from Iwo Jima isn't just the film that Eastwood wanted to make, but one that the film's producer Steven Spielberg had tried to make twice with "Empire of the Sun" and "Saving Private Ryan."

It's the stuff of not quite dreams, and it's rendered with such accuracy and hilarity that I am tempted to call Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters the most successful full-on surrealist film since Bunuel and Dali's 1930 "L'Age d'Or."