Andrew O'Hehir

Intimate, terrifying and positively riveting documentary.

It's a dark and dazzling spectacle.

Battleship Potemkin is first and foremost an action drama, a work of straightforward emotion and pulse-quickening tension.

It's by far the funniest and warmest movie Araki has ever made, with much less juvenile angst and much more command of his craft.

It's the most ambitious and impressive Coen film in at least a decade, featuring the flat, sun-blasted landscapes of west Texas -- spectacularly shot by cinematographer Roger Deakins -- and an eerily memorable performance by Javier Bardem, in a Ringo Starr haircut.

A work of tremendous passion, daring and delicacy.

An inexpressibly beautiful and moving film, even though (or because) it seems to be about someone unimportant doing something irrelevant, perhaps something silly, in the face of insurmountable odds and a world that doesn't care.

This is a fine example of British commercial filmmaking at its highest level of craftsmanship.

I can't imagine anyone not being both horrified and fascinated by Stanley Nelson's Jonestown: The Life and Death of People's Temple.

A haunting and riveting work, unlike anything else you can see at the movies and as such an explicit challenge to the unambitious, anesthetic character of most contemporary cinema. But is it easy, or delightful, or fun? It is not.

Dore does not gloss over the ideological excesses or internal quarrels of feminism, but more than anything else she captures the excitement of that era, the growing sense of solidarity as more and more women discovered that their dissatisfaction was not an individual matter.

A masterful accomplishment...teems with its own sense of life, crackles with daring, walks the tightrope between satire and pathos with a rare assuredness.

Nightcrawler executes its ideas with tremendous craft and cool, and the courageous and counterintuitive pairing of its leads — Russo is 60, and Gyllenhaal 33 – produces two electrical, interlocking performances and undeniable erotic chemistry.

Both a wrenching journalistic exploration of real life and something close to great cinema.

Spike Lee's explosive, near-masterpiece media satire balances between brilliance and incoherence.

A wrenching, funny and wise little picture, with a diva-like junior star at its center.

Most famously, Belafonte ignited immense controversy both within and without the black community by repeatedly suggesting that Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice were the "house slaves" of the George W. Bush administration.

It's a funny, strange, sad and wonderful picture, packed with delightful performances by Hollywood stars and made by a director with a startling facility for the form and an expansive cinematic imagination.

For a loose-limbed spoof with no real plot, “What We Do in the Shadows” is startlingly effective at creating characters we care about, which testifies to the fact that Clement and Waititi have created a world with clear governing laws (albeit ridiculous ones) and never violate those parameters.

Almost as exhilarating as it is depressing. Puiu's filmmaking technique is remarkable, and all the more so because it's almost invisible.

Not only does this film gloriously fulfill the potential that Ira Sachs has tantalized movie-lovers with for years, it also help explains what took him so long. Out of lost love comes a terrific work of art; it's the oldest story in the world, but it always feels new when it's done right.

Above all a cracking good yarn that earns its laughter, its wonder and its tears.

I suppose the perfect ending to the chapter would be to report that The Beaver is a masterpiece. It isn't quite, but it does offer an astonishing and resonant performance by Gibson, who spends most of the movie playing two simultaneous characters, often in the same shot.

What feels at first like a quiet, straightforward picture builds into one of the richest and most satisfying of the year so far, in any genre or any language.

It’s a career-capping performance by Dern, who is so convincing as an addled, drunken, embittered and probably dying man that he doesn’t appear to be acting, but Forte is just as good playing a preoccupied, emotionally constricted man-child.

All I can say about Timberlake's performance as the thoroughly odious, desperately seductive, textbook-case metrosexual Parker is that he brings so much reptilian fun that he unbalances the movie, almost fatally.

In the case of French actress and director Valérie Donzelli's striking and imaginative film Declaration of War, the autobiographical element is so strong that the movie's virtually a docudrama – but a dazzlingly strange docudrama with musical numbers, choreographed interludes and prodigious cinematic verve.

It's a difficult film to follow and at 172 minutes is maybe a half-hour too long. But simply as a sensory experience The Fast Runner is amazing.