Ella Taylor

Crialese is a sentimentalist at heart, but a fine one, and his compassion for the wretched of the earth is thrillingly amped by the movie's ecstatic imagery.

The star of the film is a matter-of-fact, highly perceptive Indian woman, Soma Mukhopadhyay, whose autistic adult son is now a published author.

The elephant in the room of any discussion of Poland and the Jews is that country's less-than-glorious record of betrayal and collaboration with the Nazis. Holland, who is half-Jewish and whose mother was active in the Polish Resistance, doesn't shrink from that legacy.

Costa-Gavras' film excels as a meticulously researched procedural that goes deep into the grime of greed, deception and cynical exploitation. But it is also a wickedly clever character analysis of a man more divided against himself than his preternatural calm suggests.

Kings of Pastry is about the craft, the teaching and learning, the collaborative work, the tedium, the heartbreak and emotional backbone it takes to make something lovely, even if that something is destined to disappear down a gullet in seconds - and even if the maker ends up a noble failure.

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.

Running through the streets of New York for the sheer hell of it, Frances has the gift of joy to her very marrow. As for Greta Gerwig, I get the feeling she's just gearing up.

A freakishly engrossing black comedy about excessively mothered men and the women who enable them.

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.

Michael Winterbottom has made an enormously moving document of the tense days between Pearl's capture and the news that he was dead.

The movie's a beauty.

Indeed, The Good Thief is a fairy tale, not just in the plotted fun of the heist and counterheist, or in the clever twist thrown in at the end, but in the grandiloquent myth, so passionately espoused by Melville, of the crook as a man of honor and elegance.

A brilliantly atmospheric, sweetly nutty film.

A reunion movie, and while it's often very funny, it has none of the self-satisfied piety or strenuous jokiness of "The Big Chill." Its mood shifts between defiant exuberance and wistful contemplation, but it's never mawkish.

Director Fly works with a delicate touch, probing the slow, insidious corruption of this fundamentally decent but weak man.

As a tactfully quiet story of mother-daughter estrangement and psychic rescue, Solas can hardly fail to excite the longing so many of us have to right domestic wrongs.

Made may look like a Wong Kar-Wai movie -- the cinematographer, Chris Doyle, has brought to the film the dark, rich romanticism of the movies he's shot for the Hong Kong prodigy -- but the sensibility is Woody Allen, only sweeter.

Though the progress of this ill-matched love triangle is fun to follow in its self-consciously wacky way, the movie's chief pleasures, at least to a Western eye, are anthropological.

More than anything, though, Another Earth is an impressive calling card for Brit Marling, who wrote and produced the movie with Cahill, a classmate from Georgetown University. Marling also steals the movie as Rhoda Williams.

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.

What makes it enthralling is the younger Kahn's openness to a range of emotional responses (his own and others') to his father's life above and below board, and his readiness to turn his own predicament into both entertainment and a provisional kind of puckish wisdom.

A smart, beautiful piece of storytelling, attentive to Le Carré's broad intent, while boldly taking a knife to his more egregious longueurs.

If you can't think of a crisis in your life that's tied to a Leonard Cohen song, then Canadian director Lian Lunson's velvety, exuberantly hagiographic film of a 2005 Sydney tribute concert to the Prince of Pain may not be the movie for you.

Carnage is a film about the violence of living, of finding and keeping a place in the world, and though it's a work of preternaturally sophisticated philosophy from a director who's barely out of her 20s, this beautiful, bizarre movie could function quite well without its capable screenplay.

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.

If The Lincoln Lawyer has nothing new of substance to offer in its tale of life on the judicial margins, it has relaxed L.A. atmosphere to burn.

Michael Schorr's delightfully deadpan comedy debut blew away the German box office, and once you let yourself sink into its gentle rhythms, as slow and deliberate as those of its protagonist and inflected with tiny but significant shifts of pace and tone, you'll see why.

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.