This is a supreme example of how a filmmaker can make a work of fiction based on fact that, without didacticism or heavy-handed moralizing, leaves us feeling more connected not just with history but with what makes us human in the first place.

I have to hand it to Hardwicke: I was a lot less bored by The Nativity Story than I feared I'd be.

It sometimes produces moments of unexpected power. It also produces a bizarre and fatally uneven movie, veering from black comedy to utter stupidity to maudlin religiosity, which seems to have been made in total defiance of both narrative conventions and emotional logic.

It's nice to see a bit of intimate, offhanded moviemaking that focuses on actors, as opposed to stars.

It's a compact and symmetrical picture with all its plot points in the right places, but I never found it convincing in the slightest.

Not many documentaries about poverty in the developing world are so hopeful; you can't help wondering what Brabbée's camera will find among the Bachara in another decade.

This is a teasingly complex political thriller, but it's also a sort-of romance.

To believe Déjà Vu, or even to pretend you can actually follow it, you'll need heavy-duty gear -- harness belt, spelunking helmet, a great deal of rope, PowerBars for sustenance. A little coffee wouldn't hurt, either.

The material has crackle, but its vibrancy feels far off and muted, like a fireworks display going off in a neighboring town.

This is Bond as we've never seen him, more naked, alive and mysterious than ever.

With its intelligence, compassion, human terror and sheer loveliness, Candy is a winner despite the well-worn path it treads.

The movie is designed to stir up controversy. (Linklater and Schlosser have admitted as much.) But can you really stir up controversy with a lesson plan?

So few filmmakers even know how to make an entertaining trifle these days, and For Your Consideration is that, at least.

Just when you think you've got a handle on the central characters in Bobby, yet more of them appear: The thing is a little like the stateroom scene in "A Night at the Opera."

This is a tremendously atmospheric movie full of moody mystery, and it'll keep you on the edge of your seat from beginning to end.

So truly and exceptionally fine, a spiny and dispassionate little masterpiece of a marriage movie.

Ridley Scott's A Good Year is a bonbon made by a mechanic, a well-intentioned diversion put together by someone who clumsily adds the right ingredients in the wrong proportions at the wrong time. But sometimes, if you get the sugar level close to right, you can do OK, and A Good Year offers some pretty basic pleasures that movies often fail to give us these days.

The picture is an overworked trifle: There's so much going on in it that it becomes hard to care about ANYTHING that's going on in it. The story in Stranger Than Fiction is stranger than fiction. But what good is it if it's unreadable?

Alone among the works I've seen and read about Iraq in the last three years, Iraq in Fragments captures the tremendous complexity and variability of the country, offering neither facile hope nor fashionable despair.

This Diane Arbus, as she's portrayed by a tremulous Nicole Kidman, radiates warmth and empathy that's nowhere to be seen in the work of the real Diane Arbus. Fur is intended to be a tribute to Arbus, but it's more a fancifully embroidered tapestry of wishful thinking.

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.

Copying Beethoven has an ace up its sleeve: the wonder and drama of the Ninth Symphony itself (heard here in Bernard Haitink's tremendous 1996 recording with the Royal Concertgebouw).

It's essentially a mishmash of random ingredients, not very systematically presented and skewed to flatter its audience's presumed enlightenment.

Borat is an astonishingly entertaining picture, and it's a testament to Cohen's gifts that he can pull off a feat as extravagant and as fully realized as this one is.

Part noir-comedy, part ghost story, but it's mostly a potent reflection on how where we come from shapes us, in ways we can't understand until we've been away for a long, long while.

If Christensen's conventional plot is somewhat at odds with her downbeat realism, the idea that these characters are willing to fight like cats and dogs, and destroy each other and themselves, to avoid confronting their intense attraction to each other is totally convincing.

Amid the dozens of documentaries made about various aspects of '60s society and culture, Commune stands out for its ambiguity, honesty and sheer human clarity.