There's something about this story, and this war, that brings out the stripped-down conceptual artist in her (Bigelow): Against blank canvases of desert sand and rubble, explosive wires are linked to nerve ends, and everything that matters depends on the twitch of a muscle or a finger on a button.

This is like no movie you've seen before, a haunting mixture of horror, history and fantasy that works simultaneously on every level.

A simultaneously realistic and absurdist examination of police work.

The story may stretch credibility until it's ready to pop its seams, but Patel conveys the simple confidence of a prodigy who has learned everything important in life, except how to lie.

At heart, though, every moviegoer can recognize a love story, no matter how unusual the context.

The adjective "inspirational" doesn't do justice to the quality of Schnabel's film.

Mixing Chaplinesque delicacy with the architectural grandeur of a Stanley Kubrick film, director Andrew Stanton recycles film history and makes something fresh and accessible from it without pandering to a young audience.

Funny, fascinating, utterly unclassifiable film.

Dreamgirls is one of the best movie musicals in memory.

As refreshing as it is to find a movie that leaves you smiling, it's something much rarer to discover a film that makes you think about what a commitment to happiness really means.

It's one modern film worthy of being called a contemporary classic.

Poised, delicate, powerful, hovering between poignancy and pealing laughter, it is a feast formed by skill and serendipity.

There's a giddy, absurd charm to the story, in which the strange setting only enhances the comfortable familiarity of the narrative and characters.

Once in a rare while a film comes along that is boldly original, communicates an important idea in an elegantly simple fashion and happens to be highly entertaining. Such is the case with Moolaadé.

Eyes Wide Shut still towers above most of the movies out there, immersing the viewer in a web of emotional complexity, at once raw and personal and, at times, theatrically overcooked.

The best Canadian beer movie since "Strange Brew," and the best 1930s musical of the year, The Saddest Music in the World is the kind of exhaustingly delirious film that only Winnipeg director Guy Maddin could make.

A great film about a good man.

If nothing else can be said of Dogville, it's a film that is like nothing else.

Dive into a masterpiece.

A preening terrorist for the Me generation, his primary drive was vanity and his main professional asset an absence of empathy.

Extracting big drama out of small events is Mike Leigh's forte, and with his latest little masterpiece, Another Year, the English director pushes himself to the extreme.

Relentlessly dark but expertly rendered, it shares its cinematographer and quality of aggrieved compassion with another recent Romanian art house hit, "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu."

That's not to say that There Will Be Blood isn't something exceptional; it's just that the movie is jarringly erratic, ranging from moments of delicacy to majesty to over-the-top bombast.

A French rat as a master chef? Absurd. But a brilliant French chef with an American accent? C'est grotesque!

A film rich in paradoxes. Much of the film's style is dreamy, from the snow-covered Ontario landscapes suggestive of a blanket of forgetfulness, to Julie Christie's pale, intoxicating beauty, to the ambient musical score.

Both the most bewildering of the three movies and also the most brutally compelling.

The first 20 minutes of the South Korean film The Host represents one of the most entertaining movie openings in memory. It's the same kind of pop-culture thrill provided by Steven Spielberg's "Jaws," with the same sense of astonishment, fear and pleasure at something genuinely new.

Ultimately, Potter's fable is about how a catastrophe forces us to ask what we believe and why.