The movie is magnificent and stunning the way few spectator events are.

Almodovar imbues his Harlequin-novel-meets-Marvel-comic-book melodramas with something more than a wink and a smile, and it's beguiling.

A weird, wonderful and funny work that stands as a true original. As if that weren't enough, director and co-writer Anderson has given Bill Murray his best role in years.

Kiarostami's genius is elusive. His films may be unknowable, but they are undeniably hypnotic, charismatic.

Minghella is an artist and he has painted himself a masterpiece.

The light and heavy flow with equal ease and expertise from McKellen's enchanted kitchen.

The only film sequels in history that just keep getting better.

I'm not sure all of this works out as convincingly as Anderson intends in the movie's somewhat unsatisfying ending, but getting there is a wickedly enjoyable journey.

A momentously, shockingly moving fit of shape-shifting by a filmmaker grown tired of the macabre.

It is by far Bogart's most successfully playful role.

Half snappy, sardonic and incisive and half slow-moving, goofy and dense.

Nobody's Fool belongs to that hoary but no longer frequently seen genre, the slice of life. And for at least some of its duration, Benton - creator of more oleaginous cuts of celluloid, like Places in the Heart - slices keenly and artfully. We get a good sense of the nature of existence in snowbound North Bath, N.Y., where the advantages and shortcomings of small-town life are sometimes hard to tell apart.

If you know Federico Fellini's "La Dolce Vita," you'll be unable to watch The Great Beauty without thinking about it. This gorgeous Italian movie, like its predecessor, balances pungent satire and a more melancholy mood in portraying the dissolute world of the upper crust in contemporary Rome.

Boys Don't Cry's intensity sneaks up on you like a snake.

Timeless, and as fine a depiction of human folly as you're likely to see at the movies.

Past, an inestimable collaboration by Tourneur and Mitchum, is not just one fine noir film among many. It has been a guage for the genre, even a template, over the last 50 years.

I can't help thinking, though, that maybe Thornton was too ambitious in trying to wear three hats.

A meticulously assembled dramatization of a grossly controversial moment in TV history.

Soberly, deeply effective.

In 80 minutes, the film accumulates a staggering gravity.

Out of Sight needed the energetic and stylish hand of "Get Shorty" director Barry Sonnenfeld. Instead, a sad-sackish Soderbergh ( "sex, lies and videotape") comes at this material looking as if his mind was on something else, something much, much more depressing.

It's a glimmering hunk of fractured brilliance riddled with Orwellian paranoia encased in a production design seemingly pieced together from the shared dreams of Franz Kakfa and Salvador Dali, and shot from cruelly low angles.

Get On the Bus might just be Spike Lee's best work yet.

Hysterical-depressing, vividly sobering.

A satire whose dead aim stops wounding - and starts making - stereotypes of white middle-classness.

Easily one of the best documentaries on any subject ever made. It is also one of the most cinematically influential.

It's the boys' most immediately gratifying movie: The goods are delivered in a hearse.

Unlike so many other movies of literary provenance, it is clear from the start that this one is going to be entertainment, not homework. Lee serves up this sweetmeat without fuss, without the super-seriousness of filmmakers awed by their literary material.