It features truly monstrous bogeymen in the Reavers, cannibalistic renegades who, legend has it, went to the edge of the universe and were driven mad by the abyss.

Weerasethakul mixes fact, fiction and filmmaking into a blend that's intriguingly obtuse, yet surprisingly revelatory.

Harsh and unsparing, Dumont's all-too-believable film charts with breath taking precision the distance between the unencumbered beauty of moving through space and the agony of inexorably falling to earth.

The supporting cast is uniformly strong, with Simon McBurney standing out as an oily representative of the British foreign service.

This is no film for the squeamish.

A tongue-in-cheek nod to gumshoes Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe.

A meditative film by visionary Soviet filmmaker Tarkovsky that lures viewers into its mysterious, mystical world and completely envelops them for a two-hour stretch.

The filmmakers know the tropes of spooky movies: Glowering shadows, squeaking playground equipment, eerie storms and half-glimpsed forms, but the film rests on Rueda's subtle, intense performance, rooted in every half-articulated anxiety that ever gnawed at a parent's brain.

Barak Goodman and Daniel Anker have done a tremendous job of sorting the facts from a tangle of fictions, and include perspectives from a wide variety of experts and testimonies from a surprising number of surviving eyewitnesses. Together, they do the whole, horrible episode justice, something awfully hard to come by in the state of Alabama in 1931.

Makes for a great story.

"There is no antidote for the human bomb," one Sri Lankan official flatly states, but Ziv's film offers a number of important insights into a phenomenon that's only gaining momentum.

Sure, like cotton candy: It doesn't do a thing for you, but it's wickedly sweet as it melts on your tongue.

What begins as a sorry exercise in cynical seduction becomes a case of amour fou.

Though occasionally repetitive, Gramaglia and Fields' admirably evenhanded documentary gives the Ramones the respect they deserve: Fans will be grateful and the uninitiated should listen and learn.

More reminiscent of Hitchcock's progeny than of the master's own films, Cedric Kahn's intelligently menacing thriller combines Brian DePalma's sexy style with the ice-cold cool tone of Claude Chabrol and the sense of mounting panic George Sluizer exploited in "The Vanishing."

Maguire and Douglas are extraordinary (though Douglas feels a little old for his role, which seems to have been written for a man in his early 40s); even Downey Jr. delivers a sharp, understated performance.

It's an ideal collaboration: A stylish director desperately seeking substance transforms the first, somewhat flat novel of a promising young writer into powerful and brutally honest film about a highly controversial subject.

SMOOTH TALK is trying to talk to a 1980s generation by using 1960s dialog. Faithfully adapted from a 1970 Joyce Carol Oates short story, the film's attitudes are better suited to that era than to the present. Dern (daughter of Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd), however, is the one element that makes SMOOTH TALK.

There isn't a one-note character in the mix, and they respond with haunting, subtle performances that feel utterly natural and unaffected. It's a striking debut for Estes, and a remarkable showcase for the cast.

Despite the frequent and elaborate sex scenes, the film's overall tone is both melancholic and alienating, suffused with the sad certainty of Claudine's impending death in Venice.

Very nearly a classic, this Americanization of Akira Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai does a good job of mirroring the major themes and attitudes of the original while re-creating that monumental film in an occidental setting.

While rich in ethnographic detail, the film ultimately recalls nothing more than pulp fictions like Robert E. Howard’s "Conan the Barbarian," which validate their worship of ubermensch-ian brawn by way of sad tales of childhood victimization.

Unlike this year's earlier Tibetan-themed biopic, "Seven Years in Tibet", Martin Scorsese's quietly devastating film really IS about the Dalai Lama.

The thorny heart of Steven Spielberg's sober, fact-based political thriller about Israeli retaliation for the murder of 11 Olympic athletes by Palestinian terrorists is the knowledge that vengeance is a self-perpetuating murder machine that drags successive generations into a mire of tit-for-tat bloodshed.

Harrowing, psychologically astute drama.

This cheeky fable rests on the slender shoulders of Etel and McGibbon, and the lovely, natural performances Boyle elicits from them are the film's real miracle.

If you've never seen a martial arts movie, this is a great place to start.

Pfeiffer is a revelation in her part, almost stealing the film. Her relative stillness, masking internal unrest, makes her character seem more authentically "period" than her co-stars, who have adopted no formal period mannerisms.