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Geoff Pevere, Toronto Star

1. Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer 2010 It's the coolness of Gibney's account of the possibly systematic sabotaging of Spitzer's career, perpetrated by a strangely camera-friendly cast of enemies-cum-conspirators, that makes it such transfixing viewing. full review
2. Countdown to Zero 2010 At least it makes you scared again. There's nothing more frightening than what we've learned to live with. full review
3. Black Snake Moan 2007 Despite its considerable unwholesome appeal, the movie gives us the feeling it has been chained up as well and that chain won't let it go any farther than a single outrageous idea. full review
4. Freedom Writers 2007 Freedom Writers confounds its own claims to veracity by coming across as a veritable textbook in itself -- a textbook of earnest, liberal, white-woman-in-the-blackboard jungle cliches. full review
5. Lars and the Real Girl 2007 Lars and the Real Girl remains suspended somewhere between perversity and pap, with only Gosling hinting at the mingling that might have been. full review
6. Curious George 2006 Despite eerie narrative parallels with King Kong, the most curious thing about Curious George is how gentle it is. full review
7. Klimt 2006 Klimt comes across as a lovely but unfathomable object, and an inadvertent case study in the argument for the ultimate integrity of Klimt's art. full review
8. Nacho Libre 2006 The film's sheer lack of everything that customarily passes for comic fuel -- energy, wit, character, fun, a plot -- renders Nacho Libre a torturous patience tester of the first order. full review
9. Slither 2006 The problem with making a smart horror parody -- and James Gunn's Slither is a smart horror parody -- is that it's kind of like doing a virtuoso performance of 'My Way.' The skill of execution tends to be eclipsed by the tedium of the material. full review
10. The Wind That Shakes the Barley 2006 ... you can feel the panic, rage and fear of the participants, and there's a rare sense in the movie of history being less recreated than relived. full review
11. World Trade Center 2006 If duty is the operative attitude here, inevitability is the inescapable result, and World Trade Center ultimately finds itself as pinned down as McLoughlin and Jimeno are. full review
12. Coach Carter 2005 No one will be surprised to learn that Jackson's Coach Carter is a shining slab of steel-rod charisma. full review
13. Conversations With Other Women 2005 Mostly it works because this is about two people desperately trying to do the impossible: to reconcile the past with the present, reality with fantasy, and desire with responsibility. full review
14. Four Brothers 2005 Most distressing, however, isn't the movie's high tide of bogus gangsta posturing, but its genuinely idiotic and irresponsible glorification of precisely the attitudes that Boyz n the Hood once depicted as vapid, self-replicating and suicidal. full review
15. Karla 2005 You can call it guilty of exploitation, tastelessness or insensitivity if you like, but its greatest failing is a certain deadly pointlessness. full review
16. Land of the Dead 2005 Land of the Dead not only leaves you wishing Romero and his zombies might come back to feast once more, but that they'd take their time. full review
17. Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man 2005 As a movie subject, Cohen has proven equally electrifying and elusive. full review
18. The Lost City 2005 Turgid, lumpy and almost unwatchably dull. full review
19. My Summer of Love 2005 Pawlikowski doesn't spend much time explaining his characters or telling us why they do what they do, and that's exactly why they remain so compelling. full review
20. Old Joy 2005 The real resonance of Reichardt's at once lean and profound little movie is that, without saying anything directly, it can seem to say so much. full review
21. Sophie Scholl: The Final Days 2005 Offers the rousingly cathartic spectacle of a young woman who stood up and did what the country has been accused for 70 years of failing to do: to its face, she told Hitler's Third Reich to shove it. full review
22. The Forgotten 2004 It's the central casting of the remarkable Julianne Moore that gives the movie both a core and a heart, particularly when Di Pego's script starts making its way further and further out along the limb of credibility. full review
23. The Passion of the Christ 2004 What graphic sex is to the use of the body in hardcore porno, graphic violence is to destruction of the body of Christ in this Passion. full review
24. The Puffy Chair 2004 The irony is, it's a journey with no escape. full review
25. 21 Grams 2003 This is cinematic storytelling of a very high order, and the clear work of a moviemaker who has almost instantly established himself as a force to be reckoned with. full review
26. Bad Boys II 2003 Hulk plays like Three Sisters in comparison; T-3 is a talky thinkfest and Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle a model of restraint. full review
27. CSA: Confederate States of America 2003 By slyly nudging both history and the language of television, this mock documentary about an America won by the Confederacy ... manages to be both shocking and strangely banal in equal measure. full review
28. Gigli 2003 It is an exquisitely bad movie: One to be savoured, marvelled over, shared with friends and generally appreciated in a state of awestruck wonder. Gourmet fromage. full review
29. The Hunted 2003 Friedkin is in his element. full review
30. Identity 2003 Assorted examples of artificially flavoured humanity ... proceed to panic, bicker and run with the customary perversity that characters in situations like this do toward their gory destinies. full review
31. The Machinist 2003 Smacks of a movie made by people who've spent a lot more time watching movies than absorbing them. full review
32. The Missing 2003 At once racially fearful, and anxiously apologetic, patriarchal and post-feminist, pacifist and trigger-happy -- The Missing is engaged in one big, long desert showdown with itself. full review
33. Mona Lisa Smile 2003 [Roberts] is an anachronistic pop-feminist on a mission. full review
34. Once Upon a Time in Mexico 2003 It's at once busy and lacklustre, intricately plotted yet indifferently paced, handsomely mounted but made from plastic. full review
35. Tears of the Sun 2003 If you ever wanted a reason to root for a righteous invasion, this sequence -- like My Lai but improved because it's perpetrated by the bad guys -- provides it. full review
36. Ayurveda: The Art Of Being 2002 A film that takes you inside the rhythms of its subject: You experience it as you watch. full review
37. Bloody Sunday 2002 Greengrass (working from Don Mullan's script) forgoes the larger socio-political picture of the situation in Northern Ireland in favour of an approach that throws one in the pulsating thick of a truly frightening situation. full review
38. Changing Lanes 2002 Although dampened by intermittent preachiness and an unconvincingly pat and uplifting resolution ... Changing Lanes nevertheless taps into emotions so convincing it elevates the movie above its own shortcomings. full review
39. The Hebrew Hammer 2002 full review
40. Irreversible 2002 At once overwhelming and inconsequential, harrowing and banal, gimmicky and humourless, overheated and undercooked, this mega-hyped French movie may represent the ultimate triumph of cynicism in the global trade in non-English-language movies. full review
41. The New Guy 2002 There's no getting around the fact that this is Revenge Of The Nerds Revisited -- again. full review
42. Windtalkers 2002 Although too simplistic, overly melodramatic and psychologically underdeveloped to be a great movie, Windtalkers is a perfectly good one. full review
43. XX/XY 2002 With its talky and theatricalized depiction of cruelties mutually inflicted by financially comfortable good-looking young white people on each other, XX/XY at times recalls a slightly more full-blooded Neil LaBute movie. full review
44. The Animal 2001 A lunkheaded, sorta gross-out comedy that manages to be likeable and funny. full review
45. Atlantis - The Lost Empire 2001 The characters and story are mere narrative lubricant to get us from one digitally goosed sensory assault to the next. full review
46. Children Underground 2001 Heartbreaking, urgent, unsentimental and unflinching. full review
47. Pootie Tang 2001 A pretty inspired and consistently witty satirical skewering of three decade's worth of macho black pop cultural cliches. full review
48. Session 9 2001 The movie's misplaced psychological emphasis is matched by its stubble-scraping visual style. full review
49. Shaolin Soccer 2001 Catnip to those familiar with the conventions of Hong Kong martial arts movies. full review
50. Tape 2001 If Tape's claustrophobia doesn't get to you, and if you've got the intestinal fortitude to spend nearly 90 minutes in intimate proximity with two equally unlikeable guys, the movie does exert a certain propulsive fascination. full review
51. Beautiful Creatures 2000 Bloody and profane. full review
52. Maybe Baby 2000 If ... you can still imagine that this might be just the kind of movie for you, please stay tuned for the forthcoming article about my resignation. full review
53. Memento 2000 Memento's boldest stroke is its ingenious synthesis of structure and theme. full review
54. Sordid Lives 2000 A movie that, while robustly performed ... has the strange effect of not so much opening up a play for the screen as closing it in. full review