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.

Range has a marvelous feel for the clichés and conventions of TV-news documentary, and the tone of mournful elegy he strikes here is both convincing and -- believe me, I'm shocked to be writing this -- moving.

An exhaustive, exciting and ultimately exhausting history of how that white powder, and the Colombian crime lords who imported it by the hundreds of kilos, transformed the culture and economy of Miami, for good and for ill.

Absolute Wilson changed my views of Wilson as a person tremendously, and at least gave me some useful context for his art.

I still have unanswered moral questions about the film -- unanswered because unanswerable, I suspect -- but it's a beautiful, wrenching, horrifying work of cinema, unlike anything I have ever seen or will see again.

Not a major Herzog work or one that will draw a large audience, but a must-see for those who suspect (as I do) that he's one of the greatest talents now working in this medium.

Coppola captures the luxe insularity of Marie Antoinette's world in a way that leaves no doubt why the revolution had to happen. The picture's final image is a moment of devastating stillness that wouldn't be out of place in Luchino Visconti's end-of-an-era masterpiece "The Leopard."

Baldwin brings so much lumbering weariness to his role that we can't help feeling something for his character

The flaws in Flags of Our Fathers are at least partly attributable to Eastwood's attempts to do too much. Still, even when he overreaches, he somehow hits the mark.

The Prestige is a trick box with too many false bottoms. Ultimately, the last one simply gives way -- leaving us with a hole, and a little residual darkness, but not much else.

I can't imagine anyone not being both horrified and fascinated by Stanley Nelson's Jonestown: The Life and Death of People's Temple.

Requiem, the new film from German director Hans-Christian Schmid, is absolutely astonishing. See it if you possibly can.

It's winsome, sentimental and lovely in a minor-key way.

Block has made a sad, delightful and half-accidental movie about his own parents.

It's a comedy, a political thriller, a love story: Barry Levinson's Man of the Year tries to be all things to all people and fails on every count -- a little like the generic, ineffectual politicians it's pretending to excoriate.

The misanthropic nadir of the director's crash-and-burn career.

It's an unholy mess, simultaneously too Gothic and too sarcastic, that preaches liberation and delivers only puritanism. It's a craftsmanlike but robotic imitation of "interesting" filmmaking, only in patches, and by accident, the real thing.

Scorsese didn't need to remake "Infernal Affairs," but what he has done with it is a compliment rather than an affront to the original: The Departed reimagines its source material rather than just leeching off it, preserving the bone structure of the first movie while finding new curves in it. The story has been clarified; the ellipses of the original have been filled in with just the right amount of exploratory shading. This is a picture of grand gestures and subtle intricacies, a movie that, even at more than two hours long, feels miraculously lean. It's a smart shot of lucid storytelling.

The latest riveting, heartbreaking chapter to one of the supreme creations of documentary filmmaking, the "7 Up" series.

Black Gold is more an Al Gore-style message of hope than a total downer.

The sex is the most unremarkable thing about it. What surprised me most about this gentle-spirited sprawl of a movie, set in post-9/11 New York City, is what I can only call the friendly, Midwestern quality of the filmmaking.

Many years in the making, Freida Lee Mock's documentary Wrestling With Angels paints an intimate and detailed portrait of playwright Tony Kushner, in the years since he became the most important living American dramatist. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that this is something of a booby prize.

This is a conventional political documentary with a conventional view of what happened in the Buckeye State and why, but it's no less fascinating for all that.

Mirren's performance is glorious: Rather than impersonate the queen -- which would have been all too easy to do -- she reaches deeper to locate the buried, calcified thoughts and feelings that might guide this deeply inscrutable woman.

As a story of courage and personal growth, The Guardian is perfunctory, a saga of character building that could (and may, advertently or otherwise) serve as a Coast Guard recruitment vehicle. But it's far more interesting as a tale of two faces: Kutcher and Costner have a kind of visual chemistry that's just as elusive as the other kind. And the connection and contrast between them remind us that Hollywood isn't as forgiving of older male actors as we like to think.

I suspect this guy can make a good movie if he learns the right lessons; he's made about half of one here. But the praise heaped upon A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints is way too much, way too soon.

This is a wonderful, horrifying performance: Whitaker doesn't take the easy way out by playing Amin as a killer clown, a treacherous buffoon.

Both the performance and the movie around it are virtually incomprehensible.