Andrew O'Hehir

The first Holocaust movie that's actually about another Holocaust movie, and in some peculiar way it brings us closer to the terror and tragedy of the original event.

This is a muscular and accomplished work of kinetic cinema built around two tremendous acting performances, and it’s really about teaching and obsession and the complicated question of how to nurture excellence and where the nebulous boundary lies between mentorship and abuse.

You either like this kind of ambitious, brave, borderless experiment or you don't, and I think it's absolutely magical and tragic.

My Joy has a bleak, grotesque, near-perfect poetry in its soul.

Skyfall is a push-pull between the past and the present, an effort to drag a symbol of maleness as iconic as the Union Jack bulldog on M's desk into a world of approximate gender equality and approximate acceptance of sexual difference. I'm not sure how sustainable that is over the long term; this is a smashing entertainment, but also one that feels over-engineered and constrained by its origins.

McDonagh walks a hazardous tightrope from scene to scene, from amiable comedy to black-hearted farce to heartbreaking tragedy, often trying to strike all those notes within seconds. It doesn’t all work equally well, but the cumulative effect is powerful.

Terrifically choreographed, violent and amoral, but never wantonly cruel, Miss Bala is a knockout.

What we see in Stanley Nelson’s urgent and necessary documentary The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution is the story of an organization that meant many different things to many different people, and that changed so dramatically during five years or so in the national spotlight that it could almost be described as reshaping itself month by month and putting forward a distinctive face at almost every moment.

Although Cutie and the Boxer is one of the most unsentimental and unstinting portraits of marriage ever brought to the screen, there’s considerable hopefulness and love in it, and it illustrates the adage that whatever you can survive will ultimately make you stronger.

This film never feels like copycat Americana to me. Its vision of the bleak, ruined, urban-cum-rural landscape of Naples and environs is distinctively European and postmodern, redolent of the spiritual and physical desolation Antonioni captured so memorably in "Red Desert."

This is a rigorously crafted film steeped in the French tradition, but it's meant to be a sensual and emotional experience, not a verbal or analytical one. Most of all, it's a spectacular eyeful.

Extraordinary.

A dark and mesmerizing immersion into a distinctive world.

Turns a hysterical night of African-American humor into the hottest little picture of the summer.

A sprawling and adventurous tale of teen alienation, might just be the movie that pushes the Japanese new wave out of the film-geek ghetto.

An intimate, gorgeous and wrenching portrait of a working-class marriage in what may be a state of terminal decay.

A distinctive achievement, a World War II movie unlike any other and one of the few films ever to address a topic that makes almost everyone want to look away: What happens to women in wartime.

Creates such memorable images out of squalid surroundings that I sometimes wondered whether I was being distracted from the devastating stories of these kids by the beautiful cinematography.

Crisply and competently filmed, Tell No One is an intriguing sample of new-school French cinema at the more commercial end of the spectrum.

Great cinema? Hell, I don't know. But one of the most satisfying movies of the holiday season, that much is for sure.

Dark, sleek, funny and creepily infectious, the genetic-engineering horror-comedy Splice is a dynamic comeback vehicle for Canadian genre director Vincenzo Natali, who made a splash a few years ago with "Cube."

A highly unusual combination of craft, emotion and integrity.

The GoodTimes Kid has a whimsy, a passion, a sophistication and, above all, a vigor that's mostly drained out of Amerindie cinema over the last decade or so.

It's both happy and sad. That's exactly the way to describe Hou's marvelous film as well.

It's a carefully and almost classically balanced combination of ingredients, blending dirty-faced realism (so much more damning because it judges and condemns no one) with mystical fable of quest and homecoming.

Of course the films and the books each have to stand on their own, but Grisoni's stripped-down narrative definitely offers advantages, throwing some of the story's archetypal themes into sharper relief.

A stylish and muscular thriller with some nifty twists and turns, a wicked sense of humor, several terrific performances and not one or even two but three of the best car chases in recent action-flick history.

In the long and fraught history of Franco-American cultural relations, this movie is more than a peace offering; it's a loving, goofy, joyous French kiss.

Fontaine and cinematographer Caroline Champetier create many subdued and unexpected moments of simple humanity, or of what a more generous Catholic than the Mother Superior might call grace.

Safe is both a slavish imitation of cinema gone by and a movie for our time. I found it wickedly entertaining and perversely refreshing in its total lack of contemporary piety.

If this willfully peculiar and daring Cymbeline isn’t to all tastes, it brings back the blood, the thrills and the sense of moral discovery to a long-neglected work.

Gray's peculiar accomplishment here is to turn this story into an intense emotional drama, beautifully photographed and profoundly ambiguous, suspended somewhere between realism and psychosexual allegory.

What a handful of patient moviegoers may find in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, however, is a subtle, gorgeous and mysterious allegory that may be Ceylan's masterwork to date.

Features an astonishing pair of lead performances and one of this year's most impressive directing debuts. If this movie isn't quite the contempo-Greek tragedy it wants to be, it's still a powerful, unforgettable meditation on fate, cultural collision and the morality of renovating a house that isn't really yours.

Footnote has two of the best performances I've seen in world cinema over the past year: One from Shlomo Bar Aba (apparently best known in Israel as a stand-up comic and stage actor), playing the aging, bitter philologist Eliezer Shkolnik, and the other from Lior Ashkenazi, one of the country's best known movie stars, as his son and rival, Uriel.

A moving, surprising and provocative baseball flick that rises immediately to No. 1 with a bullet on my personal list.

Absolute dynamite.

It's an electrifying, suspenseful film, full of street-level political drama.

A chilly, fascinating thriller at odds with itself.

Full of imaginative, outrageous and egregiously insulting 3-D gags.

Foxcatcher is another strange and compelling anthropological drama from Miller, a director with evident expertise at enabling Oscar-worthy star performances.

This movie may not have the highest production values you've ever seen, but it's the work of an artist, one whose view of America, history and the awkwardness of human life is generous and deep.

The Great Beauty is an ironic and passionate near-masterwork, like a nine-course dessert that makes you entirely forget the meal.

A haunting, beautifully told tale about a genuine American original.

Citizenfour is both an urgent tale torn from recent headlines and a compelling work of cinema, with all the paranoid density and abrupt changes of scenery of a John le Carré novel.

With this sober, mournful, gorgeously mounted and marvelously acted drama, Miike connects himself to the greatest traditions of Japanese film and to the period of historical self-examination that followed the debacle of World War II. And he also crafts one hell of a fable of heroism.

It's a tight, taut, expertly crafted thriller from a director to watch.

What makes Ida remarkable is how much Pawlikowski is able to accomplish in just 80 minutes, with a pair of mismatched female characters, a handful of wintry and desolate locations, the square-format cinematography of Ryszard Lenczewski and Lukasz Zal, and a soundtrack that combines modernism, Soviet-bloc pop music and a haunting performance of John Coltrane’s “Naima” that seems to capture all the emotional possibilities the characters cannot express.

Force Majeure is a prickly moral comedy for grown-ups, full of sharply observed moments, spectacular scenery and masterfully manipulated atmosphere. This is very much a work of 21st-century global culture, but also one that draws on the great cinematic tradition of northern Europe, with hints of Ingmar Bergman, Eric Rohmer and Michael Haneke.

Applause may present as gritty European realism, but the struggle inside Thea is almost theological in scale, and worthy of Milton or Kierkegaard.

This is a solid, spellbinding drama based closely on real history, which along the way offers a not-so-subtle commentary on the diverse, immigrant-rich society of contemporary France.

The Kids Are All Right ranks with the most compelling portraits of an American marriage, regardless of sexuality, in film history.

Although Josh Olson's script was originally based on a graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke, it has now unmistakably become a Cronenberg movie, and one of his finest.

I’m saying that King has fearlessly forged into unexplored territory — that being the African-American stoner comedy, with an adult audience in view – and the results are profoundly hilarious, occasionally heartbreaking, often brilliant and entirely devoid of political piety.

A gripping, mysterious use of no-budget cinema at its finest, and an intimate character study with surprising emotional power.

Mr. Turner is a rich, ruthless and profoundly compassionate study of life and love and art, for those who find themselves on its wavelength, but it also presents itself as a challenge.

A wonderful adventure film that's no less thrilling for its modest scale, and a film whose emotional power and intelligence sneak up on you.

To sum it all up, The Nice Guys is basically “Chinatown” remade by Quentin Tarantino and starring foulmouthed, updated versions of Abbott and Costello, as played by two of the most recognizable male stars of our time.

May well be the most exciting documentary of the year so far. I guess it took a British director, David Sington, to capture the story of the dozen American men who walked on the moon -- the only human beings in our species history yet to visit another celestial body.

If this actually were 1968, the pipe-smoking sophisticates of "Esquire" and "Playboy" would be proclaiming I Served the King of England a nettlesome masterpiece. For whatever good it does this film today, I'll stick my pipe in my mug and agree.

A surprising, puzzling and in many ways brilliant work.

Southpaw is a tremendous accomplishment of mainstream cinematic craft, a near-perfect match of director, material and star.

A magical and supernally beautiful meditative drug-trip head-space picture (a full-fledged ZZM, q.v. above) for which all Euro-film masochists should rearrange their schedules. It'll be out on DVD soon, and that's great. But Garrel's films are almost never seen on the big screen, and this one's worth it.

An imaginative and largely intact retelling of this gory, troubling, uniquely sweet and uniquely dark vampire tale.

A tightly structured thriller with a brilliantly moody performance by Jeanne Moreau, and depending on your point of view, it's either one of the few genuine French noir films or an early entry in the New Wave.

A remarkable accomplishment, a swirling, choral sea of humanity that forces us to confront that a man who does terrible things can also be a loving father who gives his infant daughter a bath.

It's an expertly constructed thrill ride with wonderful atmosphere and tremendous good humor; if its heart of gold is artificial, that won't stop you from enjoying the heck out of it.

You may feel lost or bewildered at times in 2046 (and I certainly did), and you may feel that Chow is suffering from self-inflicted wounds. But every new adventure with every new girl vibrates with possibility, and the filmmaking is so stunning that you may not care that this is less a movie with a plot and characters than a hermetically sealed universe of romantic regret.

This bloody celebration finally gives the American Revolution the epic it deserves.

Stop Making Sense is so beautifully choreographed that in some ways it's more like theater than a rock show. [Review of re-release]

A potent and well-executed drama.

Even these ludicrous notions illustrate the real point of Room 237, as I see it, which is that “The Shining” is a disturbing, complicated and highly unusual creation of pop cinema that works on many levels, and whose slow-acting toxin continues to spread through our cultural veins more than 30 years later.

While "Ballplayer" is certainly unsettling, must-see viewing for baseball fans - a nonfiction follow-up to Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck's outstanding 2009 feature "Sugar" - it's a vibrant tale, alive with color and texture, that's far more than a sports movie.

Though it definitely requires a strong stomach, Ravenous may be the best cannibal tragicomedy ever made.

It's a tantalizing case study that suggests ordinary people still have the power to steer a course between faceless bureaucracies and greedy capitalists, but only just - and only if they can find a way to overcome their differences and work together.

Carrey provides one of his most whacked-out and enjoyable performances.

Fascinating quasi-documentary about Norma Khouri.

Reconstruction has a poetic sensibility, as well as an old-fashioned Continental appetite for romance, that makes it distinctive.

Captain America is exactly what the third week of July needed: a curiously fun, surprisingly imaginative and unashamedly old-fashioned yarn of skulduggery and adventure.

Kostic, a Bosnian actor who has done quite a bit of British film and TV, and the Sarajevo-born beauty Marjanovic make a combustible screen couple, and Jolie knows it. Despite the film's generally somber tone, there's more than a hint of "Night Porter"-style perversity to their relationship, which at different times is platonic, therapeutic and highly erotic.

An enjoyably off-kilter romantic comedy with a touch of madcap farce and just a hint of darkness.

Frequently beautiful and intermittently haunting and could be called a meditation on aging and mortality, an intimate study of a peculiar variety of fame and a portrait of a genuinely remarkable person.

Most of the movie's subterranean emotion is found in the unsettled relationship between Solo and William, and in the extraordinary performances by the two leading men.

Once you get past the question of why someone would make a movie this artificial in the first place and move on to the answer (purely for the hell of it), Sukiyaki Western Django is a blood-drenched, dynamite, often hilarious and uniquely weird big-screen entertainment.

If Land of Plenty isn't always elegant, it has the inexpressible aura of mystery and wonder that exemplifies his best work. Fans will feel echoes of both "Paris, Texas" and "The State of Things" here. Like those movies, this one is less an angry critique than a sad meditation on the American dream, something Wim Wenders understands well and has never been able to resist.

The tremendous power of Aronofsky's filmmaking -- its omnivorous omnipotence, if that makes any sense -- has the curious effect of diluting its emotional impact.

This is a daring, audacious and sometimes terrifying movie -- purely as a thrill ride, it's probably the summer's best offering so far. That doesn't mean it left me feeling entirely satisfied. There's an emptiness at the soul of Salt -- again, meaning both the movie and the character -- that's extremely disturbing, maybe on purpose.

In this classy, taut white-knuckler – largely shot inside a real-life decommissioned Soviet sub – Robinson asks us to consider more than the hypothetical possibility that the world nearly ended in 1968. He reminds us that we have no idea how many other near-misses may have happened in the behind-the-scenes history of the modern age and also, more troubling still, that long after the Cold War has faded into memory we continue to have difficulty telling the crazy people from the sane ones.

An engaging entertainment that packages its thought-provoking ideas in a combination of political thriller, comic adventure and romantic triangle.

Not a major Herzog work or one that will draw a large audience, but a must-see for those who suspect (as I do) that he's one of the greatest talents now working in this medium.

Something like a cross between a torn-from-the-headlines docudrama, a Middle East conflict rendered in miniature and Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard," this latest film from the terrific Israeli director Eran Riklis revolves around the amazing lead performance of Palestinian-French actress Hiam Abbass.

The summer season's most surprising and thought-provoking documentary.

It's one of the year's signature film experiences.

Honeydripper offers a leisurely, atmospheric production with lots of time to appreciate his largely African-American cast, along with rocking musical interludes and just the faintest wash of spirituality.

No single film or book can dispel the cloud of enigma surrounding Kurt Cobain, but simply sitting in the dark and hearing him talk to you for 90 minutes, while the dreary gray-green beauty of his home state moves through your eyeballs and into your brain, goes a pretty long way.

It's a fascinating, haunting, unintentionally gruesome spectacle with, as Perry has said, echoes of Shakespearean tragedy.

This new picture will reach only a few devoted American spectators. That's too bad, because once you get used to the apparent flatness and emotional reserve of this picture, it's a sad, slyly comic tale of family trauma and reconciliation that packs a wallop.

This is Gondry at his most liberated and inventive. You simply can’t grab hold of Mood Indigo in its early scenes, and you’re better off surrendering to its crackpot energy and enjoying the ride.