Their attachment to the dog will serve as a test for their strength and love in this powerful and moving film.

Less a condemnation of technology than of its worshippers, MY UNCLE is simultaneously entertaining, intelligent, and technically inventive.

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.

The young actors are charming, O'Toole commands every scene he's in, the scenery is lush, and the animals are gorgeous.

Colossally entertaining.

Though W. Somerset Maugham's story could easily have been filmed as a turgid melodrama, director William Wyler's magnificent handling of the material and Bette Davis's taut and calculated performance converted it into enduring cinematic art.

The film's highlights are far and away the musical performances.

A musical boudoir farce, captivating at times, infuriating at others.

A bold, vibrant piece of filmmaking.

Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzman's powerful and sometimes triumphant documentary is not only an excellent overview of the affair, but serves as the perfect finale to his monumental trilogy about the coup and its aftermath, which began with "The Battle of Chile" (1978).

The second version of Graham Greene's sad and prescient 1955 novel about American involvement in Vietnam hews far closer to the book than the first, preserving the sophisticated ambiguity of his depiction of a tangled struggle for power played out on both personal and political fronts.

Unlike previous POW films, Wilder and co-writer Edwin Blum's script, based on the play by Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski, presents the prisoners not as paragons of patriotic virtue but as real, self-interested, bored soldiers trying to survive. Holden is magnificent as the heel-turned-hero, but Stalag 17 is full of wonderful, well-directed performances.

Tragically, the title of James Longley's beautifully shot 90-minute documentary refers to not only the state in which he found the Iraq during the two years he spent there shooting over 300 hours of footage, but the structure the violent factionalism that divides Iraqi Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds imposes on his film.

If he were a more subtle director, it would be a great film; as it is, it's an extremely good one, anchored by the subtly devastating performances of Penn, Robbins and Bacon. The supporting cast is equally good, and blue collar Boston's mean streets take on a beaten-down life of their own.

A searing showcase for a remarkable ensemble cast.

Violent, deliberately operatic, and makes ambiguous social statements.

The rare expert film bio. Coal Miner's Daughter features an Oscar-winning performance by Sissy Spacek as country music queen Loretta Lynn. Masterfully directed by Michael Apted, the film traces the famed country singer's life from her beginnings in a tumbledown shack in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, through her huge success, marital discord, and battle with prescription drugs.

A marvelous, deceptively simple accomplishment shot on grainy 16mm film and featuring a cast of mostly nonprofessional actors delivering loosely written dialogue.

Dracula fans will appreciate the witty ways in which Maddin has drawn Stoker's troubling racism and xenophobia to the fore, while making the most of the sexual ambivalence that helps make the story endlessly fascinating.

Moodysson puts it across with a sincerity that's genuinely heartwarming, and he sets it all to a surprisingly good soundtrack culled from the Swedish rock (who knew?) of the era.

The bleakest of Hitchcock's films, this stark, deliberate probing of a man wrongfully accused is almost wholly based on fact, creating its drama from a celebrated New York City case.

Though the film's deliberate pace is sometimes frustrating, it casts a quietly powerful spell and the memory of its images lingers provocatively long after they've flickered into darkness.

Charming, whimsical, and practically perfect, Local Hero reminds us of the great pleasures that British comedy used to routinely provide.

This truly terrifying film version of the best-selling Blatty novel is far superior to the book.

And though the new Little Princess is a far darker affair than the 1939 version, Mexican-born director Alfonso Cuaron doesn't make it anywhere near as drab and moody as Agnieszka Holland's more artistically and commercially successful The Secret Garden.

This exciting, ultimately bittersweet, film was shot cheaply on video, but is nevertheless filled with moments of artistry and invention.

His (Finkiel) ability to control economical dialogue with subtle but unusually powerful images -- haunted faces peering out from behind foggy bus windows; train tracks that once carried other passengers to a death camp -- lend this quiet, unforgettable film an uncanny power.

One of the best movies Hollywood has ever made about itself, a extraordinary meta-narrative that continually questions its own ability to capture human experience, disappointment and uneventful loneliness. It's hilariously funny.