Before I Forget is, in the broad sense, "gay-themed." But it's also one of the loveliest, most direct and most devastating pictures about aging that I've ever seen.

The way those things come together in this strange tale of a small-town newcomer and his crazy dream — it’s like “The Music Man,” except really, really depressing — illustrate a different problem that is not easy to pin down.

This is a remarkable work of pure documentary cinema, and a mystical accomplishment on the order of Wagner's "Parsifal" or Tarkovsky's "The Sacrifice." That's hardly anybody's thing these days -- it's not often mine. But the effort, in this case, is worth it.

The whole experience of watching casts of talented and over-eager actors try to make sense of his (Allen) nonsensical scripts becomes increasingly strained and bizarre. I’ve felt that way about recent Allen movies I mostly enjoyed, like “Midnight in Paris” and “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” and it goes double or triple for Blue Jasmine.

Fontaine and cinematographer Caroline Champetier create many subdued and unexpected moments of simple humanity, or of what a more generous Catholic than the Mother Superior might call grace.

Poetic, funny, darkly romantic and beautifully structured -- is a very different picture from "Pan's Labyrinth." But there's no doubt that it springs from the same cathedral.

The most disturbing and effective thriller I've seen in many moons. Rarely, indeed almost never, is such high-wattage brainpower coupled with pitch-perfect acting and an exquisite, unfakable sense of cinema.

Creates such memorable images out of squalid surroundings that I sometimes wondered whether I was being distracted from the devastating stories of these kids by the beautiful cinematography.

The grandest and most vigorous movie he's (Frears) made in at least a decade. Like Okwe himself, it rises above its limitations, and it's just a little bit bigger than the landscape around it.

The soul of the film, in some ways, is singer Vuyisile Mini, a songwriter and anti-apartheid leader who was hanged in 1964. Amandla! (it's the Xhosa word for "power").

Something we haven't seen before: a manic-depressive romantic comedy that aspires to the soul of a musical. It's a new-fashioned love song.

The Thin Red Line, either by incompetence or willful perversity, dispenses with plot, characterization, dramatic structure and emotional payoffs in favor of the sort of painstakingly composed pictorial diddling that invariably gets critics frothing about the director's "indelible" images.

What feels at first like a quiet, straightforward picture builds into one of the richest and most satisfying of the year so far, in any genre or any language.

If The Dark Knight Rises is a fascist film, it's a great fascist film, and arguably the biggest, darkest, most thrilling and disturbing and utterly balls-out spectacle ever created for the screen. It's an unfriendly masterpiece that shows you only a little circle of daylight, way up there at the top of our collective prison shaft - but a masterpiece nonetheless.

It's a nifty little Irish summer vacation.

It’s a brilliant, slow-burning American revenge thriller that hardly puts a foot wrong, a work of startling violence and profound conscience that announces the arrival of an exciting young director.

Anguished, beautiful and desperately alive, Oldboy is a dazzling work of pop-culture artistry.

A work of astonishing delicacy and force, a tone poem about the Frankenstein jolts that all of us, at one time or another, have to live through.

The most beautiful magic in it is left unseen. And still, it emerges with absolute clarity.

Guest revels in the eccentricities of dog lovers everywhere, but there's kindness at his core. He's a mensch among mutts.

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

Eve's Bayou treads across a fragile and complex emotional landscape, and Lemmons is exceptionally adept at creating characters who are simultaneously despicable and lovable.

Homemade as it clearly is, and first-drafty as it often feels, Whedon’s Much Ado will reward repeat viewings, for the adroitly paced dialogue, the debauched humor of the extended party scenes and the offbeat visual jokes.

A powerful Czech drama with comic flourishes.

This explicit movie about a sexually insatiable 19th century courtesan emerges like an erotic dream.

The visual originality of The Saddest Music is deceiving: Narratively and spiritually, the movie is bankrupt, even though it's so packed with stuff (including a set of shapely prosthetic glass legs filled with dazzling, fizzy beer) that you can hardly bring yourself to believe that it all adds up to nothing.

Pitch-perfect social comedy.

None of the characters in Magnolia feel as vividly imagined as the porn stars and filmmakers and hangers-on of "Boogie Nights."