Bill Weber

This autumnal statement compensates for its fixed despair with bracing wit and a willingness to see acceptance of misery as the best of all possible options.

Terri, a generously spirited dramedy in the high-school-misfit genre (indie division), finds director Azazel Jacobs taking a calling-card approach to his second feature.

Beginning of the Great Revival is muddled, all right, but it's the helter-skelter speed at which it ticks off names and incidents, both in hopelessly confused action and on-screen text, that seems nearly unprecedented.

Those who find Rohmer heroines difficult - that is, demanding because they are three-dimensional, non-formulaic creations with an intricate set of foibles and needs - might even be won over by the depth and poignancy of Delphine, one of its maker's most generously etched characters.

Recalling the ‘70s shaggy-dog stories of Makavejev, Ashby, and Schatzberg, Kusturica’s French-financed American venture deserved better than the neglect it suffered in the blockbuster age.

Like the original cast’s best movie, The Wrath of Khan, this Star Trek essentially turns out to be a war film, with the occasional philosophical timeout to discuss love, friendship, and duty until the next bone-crunching fistfight or multi-weapon rumble with the Romulans. But Bana’s villain lacks the wit and corny majesty of Ricardo Montalban’s.

A sibling drama of unsentimental urban grit and swooning lyricism, Nénette and Boni meditates on the myriad permutations of love and sensuality, from familial longings to food fetishes.

Felt in the full impact of a theatrical screening (with the pleasure of seeing patrons reflexively kick or stiffen at the sight of Miles startled by her mirrored reflection), its power is not just that of a showman’s calibrated scare machine, but of a somber fugue on the trapped 20th-century creatures who inhabit its world, clawing but never budging an inch.

Notwithstanding the veracity of the American-occupied urban locations he captures, De Sica doesn’t innovate or subvert expectations in the manner of the contemporaneous war trilogy of Roberto Rossellini, and his plotting with principal screenwriter Cesare Zavattini doesn’t rise above the level of a vivid potboiler with a mild bent for muckraking.

Likely the most influential film ever made.

Despite A Star Is Born’s musty jabs at movieland decadence in the wake of satires like Sunset Blvd. and The Bad and the Beautiful, it was the craft found in Cukor’s alternately splashy and shadowy mise-en-scène, and displayed by Mr. James Mason, that most greatly aided Mrs. Sid Luft.

Newman remains watchable and glamorous throughout, bloody, muddy or coated in torso-flattering sweat, but the film’s efforts to sentimentally humanize him by psychological revelation are clumsy.

The picture is hugely pleased with itself, but it’s too funny and expertly calibrated to mind in the least. Both Hitchcock and Grant raise relaxed confidence to masterpiece level here.

Planet of the Apes became a blockbuster because it’s cannily crafted, in part, as a ripping adventure yarn, director Franklin Schaffner staging a long desert trek for survival by Taylor and his two surviving shipmates in the opening half-hour, a brilliant “hunt” sequence with gorillas pursuing the human brutes as targets and trophies (memorably enhanced by Jerry Goldsmith’s dissonant, percussive score), and a lengthy chase sequence where the escaped spaceman leaps and dodges past hairy denizens of church, museum, and marketplace.

The sizzle of the bon mot-tossing ensemble, intact from the stage original, is bracing and fuels the film’s momentum, along with Crowley’s lacerating dialogue.

A prisoner-of-war drama as fever dream, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence fascinates mostly for the hit-and-miss alchemy of its discordant elements: in performance, pop-star charisma versus British actorliness; in narrative style, genre expectations coming up against modernist psychosexual undercurrents.

Mitchum doesn’t remotely overshadow the film’s first-rate ensemble of character actors.

Huston’s Wise Blood is a sharp, busy canvas that, like a man with a good car, doesn’t need to be justified.

A horn of cinematic plenty continuously spills from Sunrise, not only in its production design and Murnau’s dreamlike images (rendered by a pair of American cinematographers in the German émigré’s first Hollywood film), but in an unswerving commitment to the varied tones of screenwriter Carl Mayer’s scenario.

Released in the midst of the Korean War and the prime of McCarthy, the film achieved a unique relevance for a “spaceman” movie by unambiguously advocating for peace and grounding its pulp story in social reality.

Forty years on, it’s still an eye-catching, fast-paced watch, but the plaudits it won as an uncompromising thriller and landmark cinema seem as shaky as the film’s villainous military officers’ insistence that its central murder was an accident.

Updating this anachronistic cash cow with the scrappy and sexy Craig still looks like a wise move, but it requires a greater quantum of style than Solace provides.

Von Trier and his three cinematographers fashioned a handmade, retro pastiche with a small, dried-out heart.

If Playtime’s enormous scope was visionary, here Tati’s tone is that of a bemused, unshakably certain philosopher.

A beautiful x-ray of middle-aged existential crisis, Seconds is arguably a second-tier John Frankenheimer funhouse of paranoia, but the same might be said of any film that isn’t The Manchurian Candidate.

Alfred Hitchcock’s rich and strange masterwork.