A stunning technical accomplishment that virtually bursts with noise, ideas and references, but it's fundamentally a gracefully crafted movie that's about human beings and not images.

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.

What makes Boynton's film stand out amid the current crop of political documentaries is its rigorous reportorial fairness, and its refusal to simplify material in order to score facile ideological points.

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

It's a classic gal-pal movie, perfect for daughters, sisters, moms and the guys whose asses they kick.

There were half a dozen occasions, maybe more, when I roared out loud with laughter. This just may be a filmmaker with great things in him; this one's pretty damn good.

Don’t get me wrong, I like trash just fine, and the twisty-loo, triple-abduction plot of Prisoners certainly kept me watching to the end. (You’ll figure out some of screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski’s plot twists, but not all of them.) It’s the imitation-David Fincher pretentiousness that gets on my nerves.

Year of the Dog is an enjoyable, patchy, rambling affair, a series of bittersweet comic sketches strung together with thin wire.

It's an unapologetic dazzler, which is why it's never overwhelmed by its themes.

The problem is that the charm and good spirits of Amélie feel calculated rather than natural.

If this Hamlet weren't so perfectly conceived visually, it would probably stand solidly on the basis of its acting alone.

Needs much more energy and kinetic flow -- less dolor and more dolomite.

It's also possible, I suppose, that a movie as deranged and grotesque and spectacular as Álex de la Iglesia's near-masterpiece The Last Circus, an overcooked allegory that's been dialed to 11 in all directions, simply doesn't appeal to you. But if you like your baroque sex and violence with a side dish of heavy-duty symbolism, and if the idea of an unholy collaboration between, say, Guillermo del Toro, Federico Fellini and William Castle appeals to you, then put The Last Circus on your must-see list right now.

While this does not strike me as the most urgent element of Standard Operating Procedure, Morris makes a persuasive case that many of the Abu Ghraib photos don't show us what we think they do, and that some of the episodes depicted were staged specifically to be photographed (and might not otherwise have occurred).

Rudd's timing has always been good, but in I Love You, Man he gives the finest performance of his career, breaking his comic beats down into weird and wonderful fractional increments. It's as if he's invented a new comedy dialect.

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 Walk is much less than the sum of its parts, except when the parts are so good you can’t ignore them.

Which would all be well and good, if only Arcand's approach weren't so deliberate and stupefyingly superior.

There's some good acting in this mess.

The direction of Joe Carnahan, who also wrote the script, is stylish without being overbearing, the actors look comfortable in their roles and the modest twists unfold at a pace that doesn't seem ridiculous. The film would probably make a good episode of "Homicide: Life on the Streets."

Even though it has some amusing moments, Swimming Pool crawls entirely too slowly toward -- well, toward nothing much.

Undeniably pleasant, but British actress Samantha Morton quietly explodes it: Her performance is like nothing I've seen in recent years.

Thankfully, this information arrives via a graceful and frequently humorous film that captures the idiosyncrasies of its characters and never hectors.

It's literally difficult to believe that the person who made this picturesque, clueless, oddly misanthropic picture also made "Annie Hall" and "Crimes and Misdemeanors."

The picture throws off an aura of wistfulness, which may be Mann's acknowledgment that of course he can't re-create the past. The best he can do is to honor the idea of it, storybook-style, and to remind us that before there was gangsta, there were gangsters.

An explosive wide-screen vision of the street life of Soweto, bursting with music, danger and vitality, and the extraordinary story of a ruthless young criminal known only as Tsotsi.

A terrifying and highly effective documentary.

To sum it all up, The Nice Guys is basically “Chinatown” remade by Quentin Tarantino and starring foulmouthed, updated versions of Abbott and Costello, as played by two of the most recognizable male stars of our time.