Ella Taylor

Though the frighteningly late-term abortion at its center hints at larger sins in the last gasp of Nicolae Ceausescu’s iron-fisted regime, it’s no metaphor, but a sordidly visceral transaction conducted in the next best thing to a back alley.

With acting as good as this, Wonderland gives you all the expected pleasures of eavesdropping on the intimate lives of others.

A classic of politically engaged filmmaking, based on a book by Saadi Yacef, a former FLN leader who also produced the picture and played a version of himself.

At his provocative best, though - in his brilliant, gorgeous 2009 film "The White Ribbon," a study of the roots of fascism in domestic tyranny, and now in Amour - Haneke implicates us in the full range of human capacity.

The two films bursting out of The English Patient (a chamber piece and a David Lean dune epic) require a juggling of tone, pace and scale that might easily defeat a director more seasoned than Minghella.

Has the sprawling canvas of an epic and the emotional heat of classical melodrama.

In the nearly 30 years since the movie was released (it won an Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1972), one forgets how falling-about-funny is this mad caper.

Lame comic-strip excuse for a biopic.

Easily the most brilliant of the genuflections bestowed on the American gangster movie by the French New Wave.

Though Baran is more forgiving of the Afghans' Iranian hosts than they may deserve, writer-director Majid Majidi ("The Color of Paradise") handles his unassuming material with surpassing delicacy, and the poetic eye for the rhythms and routines of hard labor that has become the hallmark of Iranian film.

A humane and precociously wise documentary by the young Los Angeles director Amir Bar-Lev.

Fraught with a deep sadness and sense of yearning. Yet, it is also an enormously -- at times, even uproariously -- comedic film, not because it feels any obligation to be "funny" in some contrived, screenwriterly sort of way, but because Coppola has set out to make a movie set to the rhythms of real (rather than reel) life.

This divinely eccentric movie feels as if it came straight to the screen from one man’s wild and wantonly free imagination.

If Steven Spielberg's emotional intelligence matched his visual genius, his honorably flawed new film might qualify for one of the greatest-ever American WWII movies.

On its face, Winter's Bone, like "Down to the Bone," is a bleakly realist drama about a community decimated by poverty and hopelessness, yet bound together by deep ties of class, gender and blood.

At his best, Altman turns us into interlopers who have stumbled into a world that seems to predate us and persuades us it will continue to teem with life long after we leave the theater.

If you pay close attention, there's also an exhilarating evocation of how art is stubbornly made, and arbitrary authority put in its place, under the most confining conditions. Rene Magritte, whose famous pipe painting is slyly honored in the movie's title, would be jazzed.

Carrey is a genius at registering the rage behind television's sunny smile, while Laura Linney excels as his wife.

Once feels handmade in the best sense, an impressionistic feast for the senses cobbled together from lovely grace notes and a warm palette of reds and yellows.

Above all else, though, Capturing the Friedmans is a vividly personal, devastating story of a family that was hopelessly compromised years before it was scapegoated for crimes that two of its members may or may not have committed.

And like all great family sagas, The Best of Youth, while tipping its hat to the painful confusion of living life forward, reels it backward to give it the thrilling significance of time and place.

This delightful riff on the identity crisis of a young Jewish Argentine man deserves both the Grand Jury prize and Best Actor awards it won at last year's Berlin Film Festival.

The movie survives beautifully both as an elegant thriller and as a study of the twisted infantilism that shapes the fanatic heart.

Why Capote liked the movie so much (or said he did) isn't entirely clear, for though it's a gripping piece of American Gothic, it's as thematically timid as it is formally flamboyant.

I’m Going Home is as much an ambiguous poem to Paris as it is a study in artistic and physical mortality, and an elegy for a more decent past as it gives way to a brassier, more corrupt new century.

As usual, though, the Coens have more venal satisfactions in mind. "The fun of the story for us," they crow in the notes for this loathsome movie, "was inventing new ways to torture Larry."

Even an advanced case of critter fatigue shouldn't stop you from rushing out to see this delightfully cheeky animated tale.

The triumph of Capote is that it both grants and shares with him that twisted brew of obsessive identification and monstrous detachment that is the fertile burden of the artist.

The artificial look of the added footage, counterpointed by the commentary of inmates and survivors, only underscores the unending shock of the film's unadulterated images, even though we have seen them in other Shoah documentaries.

Unfolds with such leisurely, terrible beauty, it takes a while to realize that what we are witnessing is the children's long slide into beggary, exacerbated by the slow torture of faint hope.

Part of the fun of Joshua is the skill with which Ratliff juggles horror and realism, feeding one into the other until we become part of the unraveling of the Cairns' perfect life.

As Dardenne films go, with their slow, minutely observed journeys from despair to faint hope, L'Enfant is a horror movie of sorts, and for a few minutes at least, a kind of thriller.

The five interwoven narratives in this visceral but disciplined and beautifully acted movie show to devastating effect how ordinary men and women -- and especially vulnerable boys desperate for masculine role models -- get caught up in the seductive violence and are ruthlessly destroyed by the network's hardened henchmen.

To Be and To Have works in the grandest tradition of documentary filmmaking -- it keeps company with a small, specific place going about its business, and from it parses the whole world.

While Grizzly Man is never less than a fascinating portrait of a troubled Peter Pan who couldn't function in human society and tried to remake the animal kingdom into his own private Hanna-Barbera cartoon, it fails to establish Treadwell as much more than a serious headcase, let alone a titanic figure.

Who could resist a movie in which a garden gnome holds the front line in high-tech home security?

Beneath the noirish topicality of Elena, which won a special jury prize at Cannes last year, lies a bone-deep existential unease and spiritual alienation, a preoccupation with sin that is at once quintessentially Russian and wholly archaic.

All is Lost is as quiet as "Margin Call" was chatty; at a minimum, you might call this film a procedural. But like the best of the genre, its relentless focus on the material and the practical also gestures subtly at a life of the soul, however battered.

Unlike the zippy American medical dramas it apes, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is paid out with the deliberate slowness of a dray horse straining up a mountain path. With every painstaking turn of the screw that seals Lazarescu's sorry fate, Puiu flirts with tedium, but tedium is the point of this hyperrealist tale, paced in what feels like real time.

The movie is thrillingly subjective, teeming with the fullness of everyday proletarian life that one finds in the work of the directors who most influenced Marston in the making of this movie: Hector Babenco and the Brazilian realists, Ken Loach and Mike Leigh.

Good fun, though not more than up-market situation comedy studded with the usual leaps out of period-speak to swipe at contemporary Hollywood.

Like "The Pianist," Fateless painstakingly builds up the reality of what it is like to be drawn into a perfectly arbitrary hell you can neither comprehend nor rationalize.

You don't have to believe in the transmigration of souls to fall languorously in love with the Thai film that won the Palme d'Or at last year's Cannes Film Festival.

Brokeback Mountain is at once the gayest and the least gay Hollywood film I've seen, which is another way of saying that Lee has a knack for culling universality from the most specific identities.

Caouette lifts his story clear out of the victimized whine that bogs down so many confessional memoirs and offers the viewer instead an intimate look inside his ravaged yet loving head, at once street-smart and haloed by the naiveté of a young saint.

The eerily timely subject of Haneke's film is France's unwilling encounter with the disenfranchised minorities it has tried to sweep under the rug. As one who giggled through his widely admired, irredeemably silly "The Piano Teacher," I wasn't prepared to be easily won over by Caché, but it turns out to be his most human and affecting movie to date.

Just about everyone worth knowing in All About My Mother is female in spirit, which is to say they're all sexy, impossible, powerfully durable souls, quarrelsome and loyal, inventive at navigating the tragedies.

"Nothing happening" is everything happening between the lines, in the gap created between what is unstated onscreen and what we bring to the story ourselves.

Powerfully enigmatic study of the fundamental opacity of human relations.

It's a classic Hollywood domestic comedy with a mischievous twist.

ACT UP soldiers on today, as it must, given the lack of official attention to the resurgence of HIV among young American men in metropolitan areas.

Goes the distance to avoid banalizing the dilemma of a reasonable couple unhinged by unreasonable events.

The only player in this tawdry round-robin game who moved or seduced me in any way was Andy’s poor, hapless Gina. Tomei’s an ordinary beauty... But she has real screen presence and range, and her neglected wife is an artful inversion of her Oscar-winning role as Danny DeVito’s pert squeeze in "My Cousin Vinny."

The ghost of Federico Fellini hovers wickedly over The Great Beauty, a fantastic journey around contemporary Rome and a riot of lush imagery juggling past and present, sacred and profane, gorgeous and grotesque.

His (Soderbergh's) work has taken on echoes of a classier, bygone age of cinema, at once more literate and lighthearted.

Talk to Her is as melodramatic -- and, sporadically, as funny -- as any Almodóvar comedy, but its mood is one of muted, aching loneliness, while the color scheme leans less to hot reds and magentas than to rich, elegant shades of ochre.

Without ever saying so, the movie adds up to nothing less than a social psychology of the nervous, spiritually questing geist of post-World War II America.

Free of the disclaiming jokey sneer that defaces so much of contemporary neo-noir.

Makes no attempt to entertain us. Much of this extraordinarily tactful movie, like "Rosetta," is shot in close-up, focusing on the back of Olivier's neck, as if inviting us to see the world as he does.

It's not a happy film, but there's much incidental, quotidian happiness in it. Like Lynne Ramsay's lovely "Ratcatcher," the movie is far from sentimental about children.

Elegantly stylized but emotionally strained.

Individual artists were assigned their own characters and given free rein -- characters and locations shift on a dime from naturalistic to baroque -- with the result that the movie's formal imagination surpasses and redeems the banal tedium of some of the dialogue.

Faster and, if possible, furiouser than its predecessors.

Polanski, wisely, doesn't interpret or explain. He seems to have decided that in the face of such meticulously planned horror, the best one can do is get the details right.

This heartfelt tale of disintegration and acceptance, seasoned with family devotion, will both raise and soothe the anxieties of those of us who regularly ask ourselves why we came into the kitchen two minutes ago.

For all its hectic comings and goings, though, Kings & Queen is superbly controlled, gracefully shot and edited, and, for its entire 150 minutes, as engrossing as its meanings are opaque.

Line for line, Knocked Up isn't quite as funny as "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," which got most of its laughs from the friction between prissy Carell and his sex-crazed stoner co-workers. But it is equally good as a nutty anthropology of marginal living and as an illustration of how much energy it takes to do nothing in a work-obsessed society.

The screenplay, by Peter Straughan and his late wife, Bridget O'Connor, is debonair. Alfredson's mastery of tone and ambiance is flawless. The bloodletting is brief and necessarily appalling, the comedy mordant: I guarantee you will never sing along to "Mr. Woo" in quite the same way again.

Vincere, which comes as close to grand opera as can be achieved without anyone actually bursting into song, feels like a big movie -- handsomely mounted, full of dark shadows counterpointed with stray shafts of light, with dramatic close-ups of faces driven by passion and madness and heavy silences brutally interrupted by clashing tympani.

Jonathan Demme's superb film of Neil Young's 2005 performance at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium is as fervent a musical homage as was Demme's bubbly tribute to the Talking Heads, Stop Making Sense (1984).

A schizoid monster slapped together by uneasy bedfellows.

The Host is a miracle of breathless play with form and tone that also seethes with attitude and ideas, from pure movie love to pointed sociopolitical commentary to a bleak existentialism about the inherent cruelty of our world.

If Meek's Cutoff is every inch a Western, it's an art-film mutant of the genre, inching along with intensely naturalistic obsession for detail that courts tedium even as it dares us not to pay attention.

Pascale is the movie’s most defined character, and its most repugnant. Whatever sympathy we can muster for her boils down to Huppert’s richly layered portrayal.

A middlebrow domestic drama beating its wings against an experimental frame.

Speaks so eloquently for itself, there's not much more for me to do than urge you to get over to the Nuart for the one week it's playing in Los Angeles.

Frances Reid and Deborah Hoffman's heart-stopping, Oscar-nominated documentary about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is narrow in focus, but broad in its reach for insight into the power of public drama.

The kind of small film -- morally ambiguous, graceful in its admission of imperfect knowledge, at once specific and universal -- that expands our understanding of the emotional economy of family life, with its ebb and flow of love and hostility, secrecy and egregious candor. You must see this film.

A marvelous tribute to a heady age.

Their endless groupings and regroupings, their brief encounters and power struggles are framed by an armory of cinematic devices that will be familiar to any Desplechin devotee.

Notable for its power of surprise and its refusal to immediately clarify the confusion of these lost souls.

Their pain is our pleasure, for though occasionally Apted's bluntness makes you want to take a bite out of his neck, there's something immensely satisfying about watching the playing out of ordinary lives we've become attached to over time.

Surprises you with a kind of hardheaded romanticism.

Not a campy movie. True, it has its ironies, but though you can read it ironically if you wish, Haynes' triumph is that it also plays beautifully straight.

The movie's scale is minuscule, but the physical and emotional landscapes it travels are as broad, deep and mysterious as the human psyche itself.

Momma's Man taps into that ambivalence, and those moments when all of us long to flee adulthood and sink back into being our parents' beloved baby birds, whether or not we ever were in the first place.

If King Arthur is as magnificently ridiculous as any Bruckheimer picture, its thuggish charms, which owe as much to Monty Python as to Sam Peckinpah, more than pick up the slack.

Seattle filmmaker James Longley's poetic essay on the plight of ordinary Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds trapped in a war simultaneously waged over their heads and in their faces stands head and shoulders above an overcrowded field of documentaries about the Iraq war.

Where Lehane's novel seethes with emotionally charged subtext, Eastwood's workmanlike direction feels static -- fatally tasteful, embalmed in gravitas -- while his sporadic efforts at dramatic heightening come off as vulgar cliché.

Not that How Do You Know doesn't have its moments of shamelessly entertaining shtick, much of it furnished by Nicholson (watch for a very funny visual gag about his proclivities for much younger women) and by Wilson as Lisa's current squeeze.

Adaptation is hardly profound, but it's one of the most soulful and loopily romantic movies I've seen all year.

Subtle distinctions have not been Costa-Gavras' long suit, but urgency becomes him in this forceful and intelligent evocation.

The film never coheres. Trying to carve out a space between black comedy and straight evocation of a difficult but rewarding marriage, the movie never settles on a tone.

Nim's suffering is heartbreaking, but Marsh's melodramatic style, with its re-enactments and intense score, sometimes feels bombastic and overblown for a group of people who, aside from the frighteningly detached and morally careless Terrace, seem to be garden-variety neurotics and narcissists, more clueless than willfully cruel.

Molina is an actor of unusually elastic gifts, but unlike Willem Dafoe, who has only to bare his scary teeth to send us all scampering for the exits, there's no getting around the fact that Molina has the face of a kindly basset hound even when it's contorted into a deadly grimace.

The film's director, Sebastian Lelio, is up to all kinds of mischief, the least of which is Gloria's abundant hairdo and outsized spectacles, which give her a slight but unmistakable resemblance to Dustin Hoffman in Sydney Pollack's beloved 1982 comedy, "Tootsie." The movie puts her through hell, but make no mistake: Gloria is a celebration.

Deliciously wicked, strangely poetic portrait (adapted by Patrick McGrath from his own novel) of a schizophrenic man at once tyrannized and elevated by oedipal terrors.

The story proceeds, by minuscule tonal shifts and barely perceptible changes in the atmospheric temperature, from touches of ghoulish comedy -- to the creepy stillness of death that pervades the house.