Undeniably clever.

Munich is both astonishing and frustrating. It's not easy to tell how much of the tone comes directly from Spielberg and how much comes from Kushner, who was called in to polish the script after Roth completed it.

A tightly constructed drama that will keep you on the edge of your seat.

An odd and not wholly successful little comedy. Its pacing is slack, and although it has a gentle heart, it treads so gingerly across the minefield of potential offensiveness that it sometimes snuffs out its sparks of life as quickly as it throws them off.

Exhilarating and exhausting, the kind of picture you don't bounce back from immediately. Yet its elusiveness is the very source of its poetic energy.

If there was ever a testament to the resilience of actors, in the face of a flawed script and wonky direction, The Family Stone is it.

If The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada has some languid patches, it's also a work of uncommon maturity and remarkable poetry.

Watching The Producers is simply exhausting.

Director Ian Allen (a longtime playwright and stage director) has lovingly re-created the look and indeed narrative style of silent film -- and he's from Salt Lake City, so if he says Mormons are vampires with hypnotic powers, who am I to argue? I suppose this is a one-note joke, more in the style of '70s avant-garde camp than anything else. But, hey, at least it's a funny joke.

Jackson is far more interested in the relationship between the girl and the ape than he is in the power of special effects for their own sake. As big as King Kong is, its sense of intimacy is what really sticks with you. This is an epic Big Little Book of a picture.

It's perhaps most remarkable as a sweet, mysterious portrait of pre-flood New Orleans, which Almereyda not incorrectly portrays as a land of wandering, uncertain souls.

There's no life, no juice, in the picture. Instead of tempting you into submission, it merely drugs you. It's surprising that a filmmaker who gave us such a lively debut, "Chicago," could slap us with a picture as dull and worthy as this one.

Takes great pains to be a compassionate love story; but the filmmaking itself, self-consciously restrained and desiccated, is inert and inexpressive.

This is a shimmery beaded curtain of a movie, a slight, charming picture that's almost all facade. But what a facade!

There's nothing too clean or too overbright about it. It's magic, but not the loud, shiny kind: It has the texture of worn velvet, or a painstakingly hand-knit sweater stored away for years in tissue paper.

Never lets us forget that it's a nonmainstream story about a nonmainstream subject, when ideally, it should simply be a story about a person. The picture too often feels like a lesson in tolerance.

Ewing and Grady could have done a better job filling in each boy's back story, as well as explaining exactly how Baraka started and what its agenda is. But the film is clearly a labor of love, portraying the lives of its subjects with tremendous intimacy and passion.

I wasn't sure a movie musical could be worse than last year's styrofoam-and-gilt swan-boat travesty "Phantom of the Opera," but I'm afraid Rent proves me wrong.

Sloppy but cheerful documentary.

Clooney is the soul of Syriana, and his face is what you're left with long after the movie's obsessive plot details have sifted away.

Its look has the same grudging beauty that, once you get used to it, English weather does: It's so defiant in its grayness that you come to appreciate its conviction.

I suspect many Cash fans will think it's too conventional. But I think its conventionality is part of its power.

You can't imagine a soapier setup, but Gilles' Wife taken on its own terms is a spectacular achievement, a heartbreaking cinematic work that finely balances melodrama, family love story and devastating tragedy.

An extraordinary social comedy.

Blissful, blazingly intelligent adaptation.

The sharpest, most authentic portrait of Hollywood life made in the last several years. (As a movie about contemporary Los Angeles, it's approximately 617 percent better than the monumentally bogus "Shopgirl.")

The picture consists mostly of performance footage of Silverman, which, despite the fact that it's shot on grainy, anemic-looking digital video, is a pleasure to watch.

It's a strange and murky movie, at times a frustrating one, but I also found it profoundly moving in a way no regular thriller ever is.

The story of how La Sierra moves from a seemingly pointless war to an unexpected peace is a thrilling one, although the impact of seeing what becomes of these three kids is devastating.

This isn't Sheridan's most complex or richest picture, but there's lots of life to it: This is an unapologetically glossy pop product, powered by a strong, old-fashioned sense of B-movie melodrama.

Mendes doesn't care about people -- he's too busy making his art. And with Jarhead he pulls off, effortlessly, what so many pro-and antiwar individuals since Vietnam have tried so conscientiously to avoid: His movie is antiwar and anti-soldier.

Lovett's film is a finely balanced and loving work of history, which never tries to sugarcoat elements of the explosion of gay sexuality three decades ago that may seem excessive or disturbing to some contemporary viewers.

The cut-rate colossus didn't just ride the tide that sucked industrial jobs out of our towns and cities and spat out low-wage service-sector jobs in the sprawling exurbs -- it helped create it, and at the very least drastically accelerated it.

The picture is almost shamefully entertaining, bold and self-effacing at once: Its intelligence reveals itself as a devilish gleam, not a pompous layer of shellac. Why can't more Hollywood movies be like this one?

Now that Woody Allen is no longer making acceptable Woody Allen movies, it's surprising we're not seeing more comedies like Prime, a slight but well-meaning picture that strives for the same kind of pleasurably neurotic sophistication that Allen, at his best, used to give us.

There are moments when Cage (with his perpetually worried eyebrows) and Caine (with his inherent emotional elegance) carry the picture admirably enough.

A marvelously compressed and immaculately constructed work.

As sad stories go, this is a happy one.

Paradise Now isn't a comfortable viewing experience, but it isn't meant to be. Inevitably, people's reactions to this subject matter -- and this filmmaker's handling of it -- are all over the map. All I can say is that I found it a tremendously compelling existential thriller that kept me up late the night I saw it, and it has resonated in my brain ever since.

In casting Jack Nicholson as the jaded Anglo-American journalist who abandons his previous life during a trip to Africa and adopts a dangerous new identity, Antonioni was working with a more powerful and charismatic actor than he has before or since. The result is something like a glamorous thriller or a disaster film in slow motion.

It's a profoundly optimistic and delightful movie, for balletomanes and neophytes alike. It made me happy for days afterward.

There's so little sexual chemistry between the actors in this film that it seems like a kind of accomplishment. I've seen shows on C-SPAN that were hotter than this.

Forster and Benioff are able craftsmen who apparently thought it might be interesting to seal themselves into a narrative box with no way out. Sorry about that, guys -- I hope it was a growth experience.

This is the weirdest film I've seen all year, or at least the weirdest good film. It's also among the most powerful.

A charming comedy with a philosophical undercurrent that provides a fascinating glimpse of Jerusalem's ultra-Orthodox Jews, who live in a realm almost literally sealed off from outsiders. But the most remarkable thing about the film is that it exists at all.

The picture is an exercise in exploitation joi de vivre, and your enjoyment of it will depend on your tolerance for shameless, reckless, unredemptive violence with relatively little artistic or spiritual value. After all, there's a time and a place for everything.

Elizabethtown is a sprawl, perhaps the victim of a kind of ADD of the heart.

The problem with Seitzman's script is how predictable almost all of it feels.

If Land of Plenty isn't always elegant, it has the inexpressible aura of mystery and wonder that exemplifies his best work. Fans will feel echoes of both "Paris, Texas" and "The State of Things" here. Like those movies, this one is less an angry critique than a sad meditation on the American dream, something Wim Wenders understands well and has never been able to resist.

It doesn't sacrifice craftsmanship and elegance at the altar of its strong convictions.

The movie works neither as a comedy nor as a lame melodrama -- its entertainment value is embarrassingly feeble.

A potent and well-executed drama.

Has so much going for it -- including intelligent performances that mesh beautifully, and a keen understanding of how seemingly small moments can rattle the foundations of families -- that you walk away from it feeling it should add up to more.

So much modern animation is technically brilliant and yet comes off as cold and indifferent. But Wallace, Gromit, and the people and creatures in their world always look warm to the touch. Someone made, and moved, all those bunnies by hand. It's impossible NOT to believe in them.

The film's strange blend of tragedy and surreal gore, à la Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci, is surprisingly effective. For the right person, and you know who you are, this one's a must-see.

Serenity is a trim little picture of epic proportions.

While the filmmaking overall suffers from a kind of tasteful, low-key blandness, Philip Seymour Hoffman's portrayal of Capote keeps the blood coursing through it. He's the bright, chilling spot of color at the center of an otherwise beige movie.

Even though Prize Winner ultimately asks us to swallow that golfball-size happy pill, Anderson and her not-so-secret weapon Moore are actually clawing their way toward something deeper and far more complex than a cheerful, embroidered slogan.

A compelling family melodrama somewhat in the manner of late John Cassavetes or early Robert Altman…the film combines high production values, terrific acting and a distinctively American lyricism in a combination you hardly ever see these days.

An exercise in edgy tedium, and even though it's only 90 minutes or so, it seems to last longer than an actual transatlantic flight. If you bring an eye mask and a few sleeping pills, you should get through it OK. A magazine or book wouldn't hurt, either. It'll be over before you know it.

It's not merely that Dear Wendy was shot on Danish and German locations that don't look quite right; it's that almost every decision made by the production designers is wrong, or at least discordant.

Although Josh Olson's script was originally based on a graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke, it has now unmistakably become a Cronenberg movie, and one of his finest.

This is that rare movie version of a great novel in which watching IS reading.

Proof isn't just a movie about mathematics; it's a mathematical movie. The scenes may as well have been laid out by diagram.

It's desperately lifeless.

Lord of War skims along like a dance routine. Political morality doesn't usually get such fleet choreography in the movies.

Snaps to life too late. But at least there IS life in it. It doesn't hold together as a piece of filmmaking, but there's no doubt it comes from somewhere close to Schreiber's heart.

A lush, modern valentine to old-fashioned sentiment, and to old-fashioned moviemaking, too.

It's a deeply flawed film but also an important one.

It's a gorgeous and resonant work, full of the memorable images and passages of pathos the director's fans expect. It's also a painful, unforgiving film, the kind of thing that sharply divides audiences from critics.

The picture is outrageously predictable and somewhat poky, but there's also something admirably bold about the way it so adamantly demands we swallow its hokum.

A finely balanced piece of comedic machinery.

That a movie can run on empty and still be so obscenely enjoyable is a pretty slick stunt in itself.

Weisz has never been better: She's joyously expressive and alive, but there's gravity beneath that milkmaid complexion. She's grounded even when she's being flirtatious. And Fiennes has never been more moving.

Almost utterly defeated by its subject's sardonic stonewalling.

Although The Brothers Grimm is partly an inventive fantasy, it's also a cluttered, jangly action picture, and there's too much noise and commotion for Gilliam's subtler ideas to really resonate.

Wonderfully acted and energetically filmed, and in fact it partly echoes a real-life pedophilia scandal that rocked Belgian society to its foundations in the '90s.

An important human and artistic testament -- a calm meditation on something no one can consider calmly.

This is a superb, delicately calibrated comic performance: Carell never allows the character to swerve into excessive cuddliness.

When Craven says "Jump!" we all do it at once, and giggle at how easily we've fallen under the spell. The key is that Craven is laughing with us, not at us.

El Crimen Perfecto is a joyride that leaves you feeling drunk and dizzy and swearing that you haven't touched a drop.

But if the storytelling is murky, the filmmaking is stunning and, more important, the passion for this city -- its people and landscape -- is pure.

A vital documentary in the truest sense.

No director yet has found the best use for Hudson, the role that will tap those terrifying and thrilling reserves that are just lying in wait. But Softley comes closer than anybody has.

Gripping: Even when it wobbles off-track, it has some juice to it.

It's one of the year's signature film experiences.

Herzog wants us to see a deluded nobility in this quest. Treadwell's flawed dreams were, in the end, all too human.

If the resulting film doesn't work equally well at all levels, Wood (who starred in "Thirteen") gives an astonishing performance that pushes it most of the way there.

Cheung is one of the finest actresses working today, an expressive, lustrous beauty capable of plumbing a boundless range of emotional hues. This is the greatest performance she's given to date.

The whole thing seems so perfectly good-natured that you settle in for some harmless, silly fun. But Dukes runs out of gas early on.

Well-meaning but remote picture.

You may feel lost or bewildered at times in 2046 (and I certainly did), and you may feel that Chow is suffering from self-inflicted wounds. But every new adventure with every new girl vibrates with possibility, and the filmmaking is so stunning that you may not care that this is less a movie with a plot and characters than a hermetically sealed universe of romantic regret.

Intelligent, visually rich filmmaking.

Among the most depressing films ever made...It's a stomach-turning tale of globalization at its very worst, though what any of this has to do with Darwin is unclear to me.

It's ostensibly about adults, but there's nothing remotely adult about it.

The picture itself is so ebullient and celebratory that it practically beams with perverted innocence.

This is one of those movies where you either give yourself up to its rhythms or give up entirely. It took me a few minutes to get used to it, but I found Tony Takitani absorbing and loaded with emotional power.

A prodigious, almost spiritual experience, a luminous, challenging art movie out of the Tarkovsky school that happens to be about a real war and its effects on real children.