It's the hypnotic long-form music video Smoke never got to make.

A work at once detached and thrillingly intense, an experience where intellectualizing turns to a raw emotion so overwhelming, unexpected in its power, that you sit in your seat as the end credits roll, unable to move.

A warm-hearted valentine to old traditions in China that are being obliterated by modern - and admittedly more efficient - technology.

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

The majestic pageant of images - no sylvan landscape has been this indelibly, dimensionally alive - is inextricably welded to the multifold spiritual / ecological questions about the future that Miyazaki is contemplating.

This is filmmaking of high energy and wit. What it adds up to is debatable. You can view it as a bright twist on the being-a-cop-is-lonely sort of police picture, or as a mini-anthology of quirky not-quite-love stories. If it's hard to say where Chungking Express arrives, the trip is still exhilarating.

Like a Les Brown tune, a really dry martini and a hug from a good buddy, Swingers makes you feel warm all over, baby.

Its brazen mixture of the comic and dramatic, the high and low and the emotional and intellectual is positively Shakespearean.

The least opaque of Antonioni's films, unburdened by stylishness and his imagistic inflammations.

Beautiful, wandering little love story that wants to break your heart and probably will.

Ryan has an edge that is extremely becoming…This is her best work yet.

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

A simple, serene and occasionally humorous film about a subject that is complex, emotional and usually treated with solemnity.

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

This movie is charming the way so few movies are anymore.

It's a more intelligent and dimensional epic than, say, "Anna and the King." Emperor is worth every single penny.

Funny and untouched by cynical, ironic bids to be taken seriously.

If nothing else, The Filth and the Fury is a searing, forceful, entertainingly biased reminder only that the English group mattered - as musicians and as anti-social curs.

Blair Witch forgoes a literal boogeyman in favor of the unseen, which, in this case, is as scarily bone-chilling as anything they could show you.

The first more-than-halfway-decent movie of a new millennium.

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

A work of strangely bold, distinctly American pop art - proud to be ashamed, ashamed to be proud, unafraid to ignore its commercial bearings.

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

A guilty pleasure and one of the best films of the year.

With its fine courtroom scenes, excellent performances, great writing and superb direction it reminds me more than anything else of Barbet Schroeder's "Reversal of Fortune."

An old-fashioned movie. It is simplistic, full of stock characters and easy solutions to difficult problems, and I absolutely loved it.

Soberly, deeply effective.

Broken Arrow isn't the ultimate fusion of Hong Kong surrealism and Hollywood realism, but it points the way to nerve-shattering possibilities.