1. In Holy Motors director Leos Carax demonstrates that playful can be profound, bewildering can be meaningful and randomness can have precision.
2. Never before has being so confused felt so enjoyable.
3. A mischievous sense of fun permeates throughout Carax's fifth feature, which proved welcome relief at this year's Cannes Film Festival.
4. Holy Motors quite literally takes us through the looking glass, but its most magical achievement is fooling us into forgiving and forgetting the fakery of it all.
5. A circus of a film themed on death, that is all at once drama, comedy, tragedy, mystery, thriller, farce, erotica and even a musical. There is a tour de force performance by the eminently mouldable chameleon Denis Lavant
6. Full of references that are vaguely aligned (at least in his mind) with the ethereal fantasy of the afterlife as a place to borrow ghosts for re-enactment of certain scenes, usually dramatic or deadly
7. The audience member never wonders what is happening, though we may often wonder why, or under what laws this reality operates.
8. Weirdly - and probably for entirely the wrong reasons - I couldn't take my eyes off it.
9. ...Viewers are along for a ride, wild and surreal.
10. The most brilliant and exhilarating film of the year.
Consensus: Mesmerizingly strange and willfully perverse, Holy Motors offers an unforgettable visual feast alongside a spellbinding -- albeit unapologetically challenging -- narrative.
1. The payoff to the mysteries isn't nearly as interesting as the setup, and the ending of the movie is disappointingly squishy. But while it's riding a hot streak, The Hangover is a rush.
2. If The Hangover sounds like a hybrid of Bachelor Party and Dude, Where's My Car, its kind of is. It has its share of both laugh-out-loud and WTF moments, but also contains scenes that deflate the comic momentum.
3. I'm going to say, at the risk of doing time in the blurbitentiary, that The Hangover is the Citizen Kane of bachelor party movies.
4. Every summer needs at least one silly, dirty comedy, but The Hangover may end up being one of the few to actually get the mix right.
5. Much smarter than it needs to be and darker than you'd expect, The Hangover seems destined to be the big comedy of the summer.
6. There are people who will not find this film amusing. Amish elders. Infants. An Iowan farmer named Burl. And that should cover it. The rest of you: bring a change of underwear.
7. It's a non-stop laugh riot that's destined to become a comedy classic.
8. There is a sort of perverse brilliance or brilliant perverseness to be found in this story of a bachelor party gone terribly wrong.
9. The movie smells like a hit, but honestly: Helms excepted, did it need to be quite so blandly cast, or quite so lamely raunchy?
10. It's a dizzying array of bawdy set pieces buoyed by a eclectic cast.
Consensus: With a clever script and hilarious interplay among the cast, The Hangover nails just the right tone of raunchy humor, and the non-stop laughs overshadow any flaw.
1. A fearless, challenging film with terrific performances.
2. As tough as it is to take in, and perhaps even tougher to contemplate, Mysterious Skin demands serious consideration and appreciation for Araki's evident maturity. He's a grown-up, finally.
3. Heim wrote a killer tale with Skin, but in giving it to Araki, the power of the words has been dissolved into mush, or, in many instances, simple shock cinema.
4. The film has a weird buoyancy.
5. Gregg Araki shows skill in adapting another's work and he marshals his youthful cast with a deft hand.
6. Starts to play like dada.
7. You're likely to be bruised by its truths. To his credit, Araki has made that a risk well worth taking.
8. An exploration of child abuse that reflects grim, unrelenting intelligence.
9. Of all the recent films about child abuse, Mysterious Skin stands out as the one that most directly and eloquently addresses the emotional toll of the experience.
10. Just another trashy look at America as the land of imbecilic perverts.

Consensus: Bold performances and sensitive, spot-on direction make watching this difficult tale of trauma and abuse a thought-provoking, resonant experience.