Ann Hornaday

Baumbach judiciously calibrates fantasy and realism throughout While We’re Young and winds up sharing impressions about parenthood, friendship, ambition and aging that viewers themselves most likely have harbored, whether they admit it or not. Even at its most confected, this is a film that tells the truth.

It gets under your skin and into your head, and you don't want it to leave.

The mystical and the mundane come together with captivating force in Last Days in the Desert, Rodrigo Garcia’s thoughtful, intriguingly layered interpretation of the Gospel stories of Jesus’s confrontation with the devil while fasting and praying in the Judean desert.

Hubris, narcissism, tabloid spectacle and massive self-deception collide with the mesmerizing inevitability of a slow-motion train wreck in Weiner, an engrossing, almost shamefully entertaining documentary.

Without a note of music or any other extraneous narrative device, Emitai plunges the viewer deep into the lives of the Diola, to the point where the subtitles translating the Diola and French languages are almost superfluous. [02 Feb 1998]

Has its share of surprises, especially in the performances of its two main players.

Late Marriage is a closely observed, somewhat funny, ultimately very sad movie.

If Fighting for Life is propaganda, it's the best kind, largely avoiding editorialization and instead focusing on simple human drama.

Riveting, gracefully constructed film.

Even the most forced, artificial episodes in Funny People ring oddly true, because George's life -- the obscene wealth, the loneliness, the fame -- is odd. Perhaps not since "Sunset Boulevard" have the wages and eccentricities of celebrity been depicted with such tough, almost perverse honesty.

May be most valuable for its depiction of the strength of democratic ideals, even in the most precarious and contradictory of circumstances.

From its sepia-toned palette to the Motown hits that drive its terrific soundtrack, Glory Road is utterly authentic. But most astonishing is an unrecognizable Jon Voight as Adolph Rupp.

Visually dazzling, epic in its sweep and deeply romantic in its sensibility, The House of Sand is one of those films whose images and ideas linger long after the lights come on, having been burned into the viewer's consciousness.

That rare movie that manages to be not only an adroit, carefully observed study in character and suspense, but important.

The three leads deliver funny, convincing performances in a film that wears both youthful callowness and intellectual sophistication lightly. Mutual Appreciation is the kind of movie whose dialogue mostly hews to the rhythms of "like, you know, whatever" but then occasionally throws in a word such as "puissance." And, like, it totally works.

Dworkin, having led viewers so deeply into her subjects' lives, resists coercing them into any pat conclusions. We're left to wonder about Love and Diane -– and root for them -– on our own.

Bale and Jackman inject their reliable charisma into two otherwise very cold fish. Okay, I'll say it: If you see only one magic-at-the-turn-of-the-century movie this year, make it this one.

Has important things to tell viewers about global politics, and in an eerily resonant way.

A movie that, in the story of one man dying, shows us all how to live.

Does a terrific job of capturing the outlaw energy of the original production.

A smart, absorbing, often exhilarating documentary.

A true original, thanks to some memorable characters, an engaging story and a thrilling classical soundtrack.

Like its predecessor, the movie is a joyous celebration of extravagant pulp and post-Soviet kitsch, joyously trafficking in gore, loud cars, ladies' stilettos and excess for its own sake.

The result is a film exponentially more vivid and absorbing than the garden-variety rock-doc or biopic. "About a Son" is a must for anyone who still loves Cobain, or still has hope for cinematic portraiture.

Reproducing every bruise, blowup and body-check and getting right up on the ice and into the fray, the movie brings the audience back to 1980 with bone-crunching verisimilitude.

Absorbing, funny, exhilaratingly entertaining ride through two years in the life of the most successful heavy metal band in history.

Rarely have the dangers of drifting apart been given such a visceral and genuinely upsetting emotional wallop.

The Fall is often an affectionate caricature itself, but one of astonishing beauty, featuring two heartfelt performances from Untaru and the tender, often mordantly funny Pace. They're perfect foils for Tarsem's gorgeous tone poem to cinema as a medium of magic and miracles, stories and lies.