At a little over two hours, there's a lot of Langlois to digest. But cinephiles won't mind a bit: Richard includes tons of great anecdotes and clips from classic films that wouldn't exist if Langlois hadn't saved them.

Film works best as a soberly witty commentary on the workplace and makes an interesting companion piece to "Mondays in the Sun."

Novice filmmakers Arin Crumley and Susan Buice's charming homemade movie is a surprisingly successful experiment in collaborative creativity that sprang from a larger artistic project: their own real-life relationship.

The film avoids theorizing about why the bridge should exert such a hold over the imaginations of suicides all over the world, but Steel's dramatic cinematography, particularly the distorted telephoto shots that make the bridge loom even larger than it already does in life, provide one answer.

Together Cates and Hammond take a thrill-a-minute trip through the San Francisco underworld and along the way develop one of the 1980s' more interesting cinematic buddy pairings.

First-time director Mark Milgard displays enormous promise and a surprisingly sensitive touch with this beautifully rendered tragedy.

The result is a raucously funny and poignant love letter to standup comics.

Though absurdly criticized for being too "white" to play Mariane Pearl, Jolie gives an excellent performance. She portrays Mariane as gutsy, smart, passionate and highly efficient.

It's as laceratingly entertaining as its predecessor.

Lewis is only slightly awful, and he and Depp have a nice rapport; Dunaway gives a particularly juicy performance; and Taylor is simply amazing, seemingly able to transform herself physically for every role she plays.

A mesmerizing odyssey through the mind of a uniquely talented performer, as well as through one of the gorier chapters of modern history.

Never the most optimistic of poets, Sokurov does suggest the possibility of dialogue on the individual level, and the hope that by asking difficult questions of one another, these mortal enemies can find answers and reach an understanding everyone can live with.

May be the best film to date about the humanitarian and environmental impact of China's enormous Three Gorges Dam project.

A courageous and serious film that explores the limits of the mythic American virtues of persistence, inventiveness, and rugged individualism.

A great movie is something more than the sum total of all its parts, and here, the elements all come together to form a feature that speaks a universal form of optimism that isn't likely to get lost in translation, no matter where it screens, or who is watching.

Although the film plays a little too heavily on this patriotic theme, its simple boy-and-his-horse story is beautifully effective.

Amazingly, not all of the witty and wise barbs are Wilde's, and any confusion between the old and the new is probably the highest compliment one could possibly pay to screenwriter Howard Himelstein's tart screenplay.

Driven by Edward Norton's and Evan Rachel Wood's riveting performances, writer-director David Jacobson's tense drama samples bits of cinematic Americana from sources as diverse as "Shane," "Badlands" and "Taxi Driver."

The accolades are typically gushing - Bono likens Cohen to Byron and Shelley.

The true star of this nerve-racking family crime drama, shot with a minimum of fuss by Ron Fortunato, is playwright and first-time screenwriter Kelly Masterson's deft script, which carefully develops each fatally flawed character and tells their stories in achronological flashbacks that seamlessly fit together like a jigsaw puzzle.

Besides its exhilarating style, the well-acted film works as an effective translation of the classic Greek myth into a Brazilian romance. (Review of Original Release)

Filmmaker AJ Schnack's hauntingly beautiful film is a bold and successful attempt to recover the human being who disappeared under the heavy mantle of "face and voice of a lost generation," and whose life has been increasingly overshadowed by his sensational early death in 1994.

With a screenplay from first-time screenwriter E. Max Frye and superior performances from his principal cast, Demme has created a unique and likable film.

While Parenthood crosses the border into schmaltz a number of times, the movie runs the gamut of realistic emotions, and one scene or another is bound to hit home with the parents who see the film.

Svankmajer has crafted his finest live-action feature to date.

It's a high-energy blast.

It's a defining true crime story for the Internet age.

So if you're looking for the next stop on the Shockingly Experimental Comedy train, don't get off here -- this ride is strictly for laughs.

Rarely do movies portray the elderly with such admiration and respect.

The result is flashy -- first-time directors Larry and Andy Wachowski never miss an opportunity to show us red, red drops of blood against brilliant white -- but pretty good fun, especially if the thought of Tilly in a succession of thigh-high bandage dresses makes you sweat.

A rare treat for cinema lovers starved for the days when scruffy newspaper reporters fearlessly sniffed out corruption, State of Play delivers the kind of conspiratorial thrills that would have made Pakula proud.

Wood is excellent, but this is a career highlight for Douglas. His depiction of the manic Charlie stays surprisingly grounded and prevents the story from being a naive celebration of mental illness as a kind of freedom that it so easily could have become.

Does find a spot closer to the middle than most.

All that matters is if it's funny -- and it is.

Neil Armfield's film hits hard because it sensitively shows how life on drugs can never be about anything else, and how the real horror of addiction is not what users do to themselves, but what they do to each other out of loneliness and despair.

The film's prestige is a doozy, both dazzling and preposterous, but if you're watching closely -- as Cutter advises in the film's first few minutes -- it's flawlessly set up.

A remote, Israeli desert town is the setting for this droll, endearing comedy about an accidental cultural exchange that very quietly says some very important things about contemporary Arab-Israeli relations.

With Mifune's tongue-in-cheek performance and the wildly stylized battle scenes featuring mallet and pistol-wielding samurai, YOJIMBO may just be the first post-modern samurai film.

Schroeder's film is a fascinating character study in contradictions and in the end Verges remains loathsome, oddly charismatic and willfully enigmatic.

Rude, rough, tasteless, but often hilarious.

The picture as a whole benefits not merely from the excellent performances, but from its warm emotional core and its infectious love of people, topped off by a mature (though not jaded) sobriety about human limitations that thoroughly validates everything preceding it.

Mohammad Rasoulof's heartfelt and darkly comic second feature proves beyond any doubt that Iranian film is still alive and well, despite waning Western interest in one of the world's richest contemporary cinemas.

The film is a shattering experience fueled by Jentsch's electrifying performance.

Francis Ford Coppola's lavish version of Bram Stoker's classic novel is a visual cornucopia, overstuffed with images of both beauty and grotesque horror.

Whether you conclude that this project is a brilliant hoax that exposes how the rapid transition from communism to a free market economy has created an ad addicted, consumer-mad culture in the Czech Republic, or simply a cruel joke, one thing is undeniable. It's a fascinating account.

Miike's goofy, gallant, action-packed fantasy deserves to become a classic family film.

McCarthy's flawless casting may be the film's greatest strength: Veteran character actor Jenkins and his costars vanish into their characters -- their performances are so subtle and unforced that they don't feel like performances at all.

It's a lavish entertainment that revels in lurid colors and yet more lurid emotions.

The result is hypnotic.

On the surface, True Lies is an affectionate homage to James Bond movies, ratcheted up to meet the action/adventure expectations of today's audiences.

It may sound as if first-time director White is having his fun at the expense of introverted, asocial people who prefer the company of cats and dogs and gravitate toward animal-rights activism because the very idea of dealing with human problems requires an empathy they can't muster. But empathy is exactly what makes the film work.

Features more than enough thrilling wirework, slow and agonizing deaths, and blood-spattered faces to please even the most discriminating fans of the genre.

Groning's approach gives the viewer a rare chance to really listen to what water sounds like when it drips from a tin bowl, or the watch what patterns raindrops make when they fall on a shallow puddle -- purely sensual, cinematic experiences. In such moments we sense the point of view of a patient, sensitive filmmaker.

Testosterone-driven entertainment with a moral, sleekly directed by James Foley.

Lawrence delves deep into the moral dilemma at the heart of Carver's deceptively simple tale. By deliberately making the young woman in the river aboriginal, the film also opens up yet another dimension in the reaction to the men's inaction: Would they have acted any differently had the murder victim been white?

A first-rate production full of nonstop action and inventive special effects but what truly makes Robocop spellbinding is a superior script.

British actor Timothy Spall gives a shattering performance as Albert Pierrepoint.

Casually paced and filled with telling detail, Yamada's delicate drama with swordplay (there's not much, but what there is packs an emotional wallop) transcends its specific setting in its depiction of Katagiri's internal struggle.

Spike Lee's newest is really a surprisingly vivid dramatic study of an aspiring actress in moonlighting hell.

It all comes down to Nolot's marvelous performance: His Pierre is sulky, morose, self-centered and curiously likeable, and Nolot leaves you wanting to know a bit more about just where this odd figure might be headed.

A gripping mystery and an ever-timely reminder of the terrible power of repression and silence.

Techine's unwillingness to soften his characters reflects a rare honesty about human nature that's rarely seen in movies, particularly movies about fatal illnesses, and his film is an engaging and particularly French character study.

Unlike so many other recent youth-oriented independent efforts, it takes on difficult, even impossible, issues with genuinely astonishing results.

Through the hard-won experiences of these families, Karslake shows that Scripture and homosexuality are not mutually exclusive, and with the help of a number of academics and theologians, shows how the Bible has been misread, particularly during the 20th century.

As the film makes pointedly clear, ALS is what is considered an "orphan disease," meaning drug companies aren't willing to devote their resources to finding a cure because they feel too small a percentage of the population suffer from it to make an effective drug profitable.

Bagdad Cafe is a visually exhilarating and consciously modern film, more concerned with projecting an atmosphere or spirit than with telling a story. It's hard not to fall in love with this comic fable about the magic that develops at the meeting of two cultures.

A bracing cover of Ian Tyson's "Four Strong Winds," performed by no fewer than seven acoustic guitars, rounds out the set, but be sure to stick around for the credits.

As Jim, Bale delivers a stunning performance; he appears in virtually every frame and truly seems to grow over the course of the film from a coddled rich child to a calculating, almost feral creature who will ally himself with whoever wields the most power in a given situation.

Songwriter Jack Johnson's collection of laid-back, sunshine pop tunes unobtrusively support the sweet and surprisingly touching story line, rather than the other way around.

That the film should have the look and feel of a classic teleplay by, say, Rod Serling, is probably no accident -- the style is one more reminder of just how regrettably short of Murrow's vision we've fallen.

Lopsided comedy turned tearjerker, saved by excellent performances.

Danny Boyle's effective psychological thriller.

SINGLES is funny and well-observed and, most notably, plays to its audience's intelligence rather than its libido.

The film rests entirely on Poupaud's shoulders, and he rises to the demands of a complex, deeply unsympathetic role.

It shifts the focus from Charles and Sebastian's youthful idyll to the stronger, more provocative relationship between Charles and Julia, wherein lies Waugh's concerns with materialism and velvet-gloved dual grip of family and religion.

Ambitious, stylish, and ideologically confused, The Year of Living Dangerously falters in its attempts to succeed simultaneously as thriller, romance, and political tract, while also encompassing director Peter Weir's penchant for half-baked mysticism. Still, it's a gripping film.

The theme song, a wonderful Portuguese version of Bread's soft-rock classic "Everything I Own," is by Dinah, a long-forgotten Brazilian singing sensation of the 1970s who deserves to be better remembered.

Controversial filmmaker John Waters finally hits his commercial stride in this film, parlaying his keen social observation and great compassion for society's outsiders into a colorful and engaging comedy full of dancing, music and heartfelt nostalgia.

The Man with Two Brains, which never ceases to amuse, is at its best when most outrageous.

This tribute to old-fashioned hard-boiled detective fiction is laced with Hollywood satire and snappy, lightning-fast dialogue.

An offbeat and in some ways, more daring variation on vampirism

If there's pleasure to be derived from the misfortunes of others, then Julian Fellowes' wickedly entertaining adaptation of Nigel Balchin's nearly forgotten 1951 novel is a barrel of fun.

It's intriguing stuff, but Curtis overplays his hand when he underplays the existence of any real threat (Madrid? London? Amman?), proposes that Al Qaeda is a fiction and risks undermining the credibility of an otherwise compelling argument.

A heartfelt sleeper from screenwriter Joe Eszterhas and director Guy Ferland.

The movie is thoroughly engrossing from the opening frame to the end credits, and it’s a beautiful viewing experience.

Boon's film is both funny and heartbreaking, a supremely confident mix of political satire, free-floating paranoia, fractured family dynamics and the kind of comedy that regularly reconfigures itself into tragedy.

Wonderfully droll, Cannes Camera d'Or winner.

You may end up wishing for a little less show and a lot more substance.

This might be the only documentary that will appeal to punks and Mormons alike.

The movie is a genteel, witty soap opera designed to make everyone feel the better for having not only seen it, but having had a bit of fun.

Australia goes for the absolute limit in terms of scope. And let's not be coy -- size may not matter, but it still helps.

Clever, fast-moving and unobtrusively self-conscious.

Grand Canyon successfully recreates the random, haphazard ways in which individual lives intersect, and captures the sense of menace and disintegration that permeate contemporary urban life.

Told mostly through haunting, often chilling visual fragments, this handsomely mounted and unusually gripping account amounts to an important exercise in biography: It faithfully restores Spielrein to her rightful place as a crucial contributor to the fields of child psychology and psychoanalysis.

Tsai finds great beauty in streets of Kuala Lumpur particularly at night, making this gorgeous film one that should be seen on a large screen in the total darkness of a theater.

Zombie delivers a scary horror movie immediately recognizable as his own -- something that will come as a welcome relief to fans who've diligently sat through seven "Halloween" sequels in hopes of one day reliving the original's terrifying magic.

Labyrinth packs enough surprises to captivate an audience of children and provides enough wisecracking to keep adults laughing.

The film unfolds with all the heart-stopping suspense of a true-crime expose that sheds light on the twisted policies of Kim Jong-il's strange and secretive nation.