L'amour Fou engages and moves viewers in two distinct ways. It engages us by showing us something we don't know about that's interesting. It moves us by showing us something we immediately understand, that has nothing to do with being a big shot and everything to do with being just another person at the mercy of time.

For all of its brutal flashbacks and heavy-handed devices, The First Grader works best when it works quietly.

Sometimes corny, often funny and just as often touching, their act has been wowing Kiwis for decades.

This isn't absurdity. This is nonsense - and it's as boring as nonsense.

An honest, fair and quite voyeuristic look into avatars and the real-life humans who control them in Second Life.

A must-see movie that could have used a sharper edge.

The story is painfully simplistic, and it becomes quickly apparent that the narrative is a crude cement to hold together the carnage.

Nostalgia for the Light is a strange and stunning work of art: a poem disguised as a movie about astronomers in the Atacama desert of Chile.

The movie's mixture of romance and noir, its air of menace and a certain occasional playfulness suggest the filmmakers have been thinking about Polanski and Hitchcock.

Hesher is about as awful as independent films get, a mix of ugliness and unearned sentiment, with a flat story, repellent and pathetic characters and dialogue that consists of lots of stammering and cursing.

There are too many somber interludes with nothing going on but an acoustic guitar echoing over the soundtrack, the spareness of the score suggesting the emptiness of the characters' lives.

A film of great hilarity, humanity, idiosyncrasy and grade-A, eyebrow-singeing raunch.

Skillfully made and offering moments of great power, the French Canadian drama Incendies nevertheless overplays its hand, piling tragedy on tragedy until we feel browbeaten with misery.

Art history lessons don't get much better: Cave of Forgotten Dreams presents the world's oldest paintings captured by one of film's great visionaries.

A crappy 3-D conversion job mars this otherwise competent, energetic and cheerfully hambone Marvel adaptation from director Kenneth Branagh.

Bottaro finds ways to dramatize chess, and the environments are fascinating throughout.

Dragons may have seemed less out of place three decades ago, but it would have been a bad movie then as well. It's filled with clumsy transitions and erratic performances, and tied together by an awkward framing device.

In style and structure, it mimics an old-style studio effort, a culture-clashing comedy of manners that's tinged with melodrama and filmed in a smart progression of medium shots.

Goodwin radiates probity and makes waiting almost look interesting, and so, for all the movie's awkwardness, it remains watchable.

This horror-slasher-thriller-tragi-romance is certainly going to leave some squeamish, but there's no denying that this is high-quality filmmaking.

It not only evocatively captures the Russian spirit and the yearnings of a generation, but it also masterfully chronicles the historic collapse of the Soviet Union and its complex aftermath.

Bursts with action, ideas and interesting characters.

As a runner, the robber is dogged; as a robber, the runner is efficient, explosive and fast.

Some movies are in-between and inoffensive and harm absolutely no one. Prom is one of those.

It is all thoroughly entertaining and even, at times, gripping.

The need for a sequel was zero - proved by the fact that the characters end the movie pretty much exactly where they started it.

It's a movie for audiences who think exuberance in movies is more important than sense or logic and who can laugh at a movie and like it at the same time.

The well-crafted 13 Assassins, a remake of a 1960s samurai film, is one of his best; it shows that Takashi could be a great filmmaker if he'd only slow down.