The fiction, ultimately, is the thing. The Artist, in the best possible sense, is more of a movie than a film. It's played for laughs and tears; it switches from action to tenderness; it's got a really funny dog.

The Artist is simply a pleasure to watch, if only for just two hours in time.

Michel Hazanavicius' black-and-white, mostly silent comedy The Artist is a gorgeously made curiosity -- a film that functions as a testament to its own obsession with other movies.

It isn’t easy to get modern audiences to engage with a film that looks like it was made a century prior. Yet, that’s precisely what director Michel Hazanavicius manages to do.