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.