On a more fundamental level this hilarious, disgusting, brilliant and circular psychotronic odyssey is a blast from the submerged past.

One of the most inventive and joyous movies of the year.

Isn't bold or daring, but it is delicately distinctive; it's the kind of picture that stirs subterranean rumbles of empathy in us rather than flashy, gushing waves.

What makes me respect The Man Who Wasn't There despite myself is the sense that the Coens want it to be about something that can't be described or defined.

As a piece of craft, and with the exception of "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban," it's miles beyond any studio film this summer.

It's the kind of movie we don't often encounter these days, and actually never did: A dramatically dense and morally complicated work, it's also a highly pictorial wide-screen entertainment with a dynamite cast, channeling the legacy of John Ford and Sam Peckinpah (and maybe Joseph Conrad too).

What comes through repeatedly is that questions of law and reason, or guilt and innocence, played no role in the case of Omar Khadr.

I'm sure some people will be driven mad by the deliberate ambiguities of Somersault, and by its characters' near-total inability to understand themselves or express themselves. But to me, that makes it uncannily true to life.

It's too convoluted by half, and turns what ought to be an idiosyncratic, delightful folktale-film into a baffling personal psychodrama with a nasty sting in its tale. Still, Breillat wouldn't be Breillat if she made movies that were easy to like, or to get your head around.

The sweetest, most sincere romantic comedy to come along in ages, and a luminous love letter to a great American city.

Whatever you think you know about Turkey, Crossing the Bridge will change your mind. With a dynamite album of music from the film in simultaneous release, I smell a "Buena Vista"-style crossover hit.

It's thrilling to see something this profane, mythic and, most of all, not bored with life, love and the possibilities of cinema.

What holds the movie together is its modest, sweet spirit.

The rigid distinction usually made between a terrific outfit movie and cinematic art is just another barrier washed away in the overflowing riches of The Wings of the Dove.

It offers some of the best Asian martial-arts choreography of recent years and an electric, claustrophobic puzzle-palace atmosphere that'll leave you wrung out and buzzed.

It's not a picture with tremendous drama, and the entirely nonprofessional cast is sometimes a little stiff, but on sheer charm, intimacy and the pictorial wonder of its setting in the wide-open Mongolian grasslands, it's one of the family pictures of the year.

I was thrilled and transported by it. It's a two-hour movie, and I'm only sorry it isn't two or three times as long.

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.

De Niro's performance works because it isn't exactly likable -- he's totally at ease with his own jokes, but he's not out to make us feel relaxed.

It may bore you to death or blow your mind -- and it's long and convoluted enough to do both -- but it holds nothing back.

Both here and in "The Orphanage," Bayona reveals himself as a masterful genre stylist of almost unlimited talent and a storyteller addicted to sentimental happy endings that feel a bit sardonic. Like, it's all OK now – but just wait till next time!

Super Size Me is exploratory, as opposed to being just numbingly didactic, and that's what makes it so engaging.

Much of the pleasure of the movie is the way its mood lingers with you afterward.

Dry, wry, difficult-to-capture comedy.

Heading South is a seemingly straightforward and simple picture that's really defiantly complex, sexually, politically and emotionally.

I'd put To's Exiled -- into the category of Hong Kong movies that even people who think they don't care about Hong Kong movies should see.

Daytrippers is so well-crafted that you may make it more than halfway through before wondering whether the story will sustain any lasting emotional power. It does -- but not in the way you think it's going to.

Cold Mountain is a romance, refreshingly free from the taint of any political realities other than the "War is hell" variety. It's also completely juiceless.

A sweet, modest snapshot of a long-lost time when a bold kid with a showbiz dream and a little luck could actually get somewhere, and if he could sing and dance to boot, his chances of success would be even greater. Zac Efron fits right into 1937; in 2009, he's a lost boy.

A powerful documentary.

A well-meaning little picture that's piercingly genuine in places and annoyingly affected in others.

It's still difficult to find accurate information about where and when Bill Haney's profoundly disturbing documentary The Price of Sugar will be opening commercially in the United States. Partly this is because the Vicini family, sugar barons of the Dominican Republic, have hired Patton Boggs, a major Washington law firm, to try to halt the film's release, or at least paint it as slanted and defamatory.

In the case of French actress and director Valérie Donzelli's striking and imaginative film Declaration of War, the autobiographical element is so strong that the movie's virtually a docudrama – but a dazzlingly strange docudrama with musical numbers, choreographed interludes and prodigious cinematic verve.

In some ways it's not a very good movie... tries to mix comedy and tragedy...but the movie has an exciting subject -- a true story.

Although his (Eastwood's) intentions are good, he simply isn't capable of the wry, wistful blend of humor and sadness this story desperately needs.

Though I admire much of what Cuesta does in L.I.E., the film didn't give me much pleasure. I didn't find it unpleasant or repulsive; it's just that I felt he was too much outside the story.

The GoodTimes Kid has a whimsy, a passion, a sophistication and, above all, a vigor that's mostly drained out of Amerindie cinema over the last decade or so.

It’s certainly not Wong’s greatest work; it may be a masterpiece that evades the mass audience or a beautiful failure with moments of greatness. All I know is that I got lost in it, and that I would still have loved it if it were twice as long with half the action.

The truly remarkable thing about this modest little movie is the revelation of how much change is possible within a relatively short time.

Until Gran Torino starts rumbling headlong toward its tone-deaf, self-serious ending -- the script is by Nick Schenk -- it's often enjoyable, satisfying and funny.

After its own unexpected and light-hearted fashion, Results is as subversive as Bujalski’s other films. Yes, I called it a rom-com, and that’s accurate enough, but it’s a love story full of twists and turns, one that tempts us toward incorrect conclusions and deliberately avoids revealing its true heart.

Cars is an elaborate concoction all right. But it feels soldered together from a scrap heap of tired ideas.

Akhavan turns out to be a distinctive and oddly charismatic performer with exquisite comic timing.

Surely one of the canniest and most accurate films about American working-class life ever.

The picture is beautifully paced, with an exhilarating, comically violent opening, a halcyon middle section where, in what could be viewed as a sideways homage to "Rebel Without a Cause," our rootless wanderers share a brief respite in an empty, lavish mansion, and a finale filled with light and color and movement (as well as piles of vanquished zombies).

This quiet French thriller gets to the heart of motherhood, and then pays off with comfort and calm.

A sweet and sexy celebration of real women's real bodies.

Katzenberg may or may not have stolen his idea from Pixar, but it's obvious in the film that he spent significant time at Disney. The plot of Antz is pure Disney pastiche:

So refreshingly straightforward that at first you may not know what to make of it.

Both a wrenching journalistic exploration of real life and something close to great cinema.

This is a love story of uncommon loveliness and simplicity.

The Hangover is a shaggy-dog tale that's actually, when you step back from it, perfectly shaped.

Arguably, A Girl Cut in Two is more fun around the edges, as an assemblage of bizarre supporting characters and throwaway comic bits, than it is down the middle, as a classic French morality tale.

One of the most intriguing tangents in Mea Maxima Culpa involves the Rev. Gerald Fitzgerald, founder of the Servants of the Paraclete, a Catholic congregation established to help priests who were struggling with celibacy, alcoholism and other personal issues.

No other film captures more accurately what it’s like to be dead inside during the end of the Cold War, the height of MTV and the invasion of concerned but impotent parents.

The most exciting action flick of the year, by a huge margin.

It's not badly made, but it's a drag. Leconte's virtues can't overcome the plodding glumness that prevails.

Robert Altman's surpassingly beautiful ballet movie feels lighter than air -- but in fact it's the great director's most tender and memorable film in years.

What Ray does right, combined with its generosity of spirit, makes it the most satisfying American movie of the year.

Gibney's immensely funny and sad new motion picture Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson -- the "Dr." was a mail-order divinity degree -- is principally intended to rehabilitate Thompson and introduce his work to a new audience.

Mechanical plot that seems dull even before it laboriously clanks and screeches into motion.

This is like a Tony Scott movie on quaaludes: Words and pictures are matched up in counterintuitive ways, and although the cutting is much slower than in Scott's hyperactive showboating, it makes just about as much sense. The movie's leisureliness is aggressive; the picture is artfully designed to make you feel that if you're bored, it's your own damn fault.

Not exactly blazing cinema, but intellectually riveting.

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

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.

An irresistible fable of reconciliation and forgiveness.

While it would be accurate to call the film a comedy, the Duplasses are trying to wrestle something closer to Chekhov than to farce out of the lives of these semi-likable, highly recognizable people.

Turns a hysterical night of African-American humor into the hottest little picture of the summer.

Smart, tightly coiled.

This new picture will reach only a few devoted American spectators. That's too bad, because once you get used to the apparent flatness and emotional reserve of this picture, it's a sad, slyly comic tale of family trauma and reconciliation that packs a wallop.

Extravagant in movie terms but stingy in emotional ones, it embodies all of Spielberg's bad impulses and almost none of his good ones: It's a grand display of how well he knows how to work us over, and yet the desperation with which he tries to get to us is repulsive.

Immediately leaps near the top of the list of greatest baseball documentaries.

A brilliant and gruesome work of cinematic invention as well as a passionate and painful human love story.

It's a fascinating, haunting, unintentionally gruesome spectacle with, as Perry has said, echoes of Shakespearean tragedy.

Most famously, Belafonte ignited immense controversy both within and without the black community by repeatedly suggesting that Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice were the "house slaves" of the George W. Bush administration.

Amalric and cinematographer Christophe Beaucarne structure much of The Blue Room around Julien’s bewildered and increasingly disheveled face, as he tries (and fails) to understand the people around him.

Feels like a movie that keeps wishing it were something else: an award-winning play, a grand novel, an epic poem, anything but that populist thing we call a movie. Mendes makes movies as if he hates them.

Contrary to what you may read elsewhere, Climates is not a masterpiece, a word that gets pompously thrown around a lot at pictures few paying customers actually want to see. It is, rather, a meticulous study of a crumbling relationship, marked by many luminous small moments and a startling interruption of violent eroticism.

Ben Affleck is smart about setting the scene -- he's even better at it than Clint Eastwood was in another Lehane adaptation, "Mystic River." But he's less adept at defining individual personalities, at making us care about the characters who deserve our sympathy -- or, maybe more important, the ones who don't.

Magic Mike is a fascinating film, one of his (Soderbergh's) best in recent years.

A sprawling, overstuffed, formulaic but highly entertaining story of pop stardom.

As sad stories go, this is a happy one.

Nasheed has traveled the world describing the Maldives as the Poland of global warming - meaning, of course, Poland in 1939. If his country cannot be saved from rising sea levels, he maintains, then there may be no saving Tokyo or Mumbai or New Orleans or New York.

I'm recommending that you rush out and see it, but not altogether because I think it's so totally great and completely works. Quite a bit of it is great, and most of it works, and the stuff that clicks is outrageously entertaining and funny, sometimes with surprising depth. But I also want you to see it so we can argue about what works and what doesn't.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is absinthe in movie form, a white chocolate space egg of a picture that has a giddy hallucinatory quality in some places and an overcalculated glossiness in others. But for better or worse, it's fascinating.

It's an engaging, sweet-yet-sad neighborhood slice of life, anchored by pretty cinematography and a couple of nice performances.

What Stone Reader offers that's new is its portrayal of reading not as a supremely civilized and soulful activity but as a lonely, thwarting and sometimes painfully embarrassing one.

Mike Leigh returns to the council flats of London -- and delivers a richly Dickensian masterpiece about working-class family life.

What's the point of setting up a historical fantasia around an invented character if you're only going to make her part of the scenery?

It's a deluxe vacation for adults with all frills included: glamorous settings, glamorous clothes, glamorous sex.

This is an important film. It's amazing that it exists, and the events it recounts are still more amazing. Everybody should see it.

Westfeldt and Juergensen keep Kissing Jessica Stein bright and funny and loose.

A consistently engrossing piece of work.

It's deluxe and handsome and has no soul.

A clanking, old-fashioned period drama infused with almost unbearable grief, Claude Miller's film A Secret has an enormous significance in France that it can never possess elsewhere.

There's nothing in Earth that's as moving as the sight of the mother penguin "grieving" for her chick in "March of the Penguins." You can applaud Earth for not jerking tears. On the other hand, an occasional tear isn't such a bad thing.

If Thalbach's fiery performance is the heart of Strike, her costar is the vast and impressive Gdansk shipyard itself.

Superman, born in 1938, is still very much alive in 2006. The Man of Steel has so skillfully bent the bars of our imagination that he seems real to us. And in a sense, he is.