Ernest Hardy

This Ain't California is a masterful lie that illuminates a little-known reality.

But for all its bleakness, Nightmare is a film that demands to be seen. In unflinching terms, it captures the hellish existence endured by the many so that the few may wallow in privilege.

A crash course in history, politics, and social science, Valentino's Ghost is both sobering and illuminating, and its execution is thrilling.

Yudin pulls lovely philosophical grace notes from his subjects as they illuminate some universal truths from their very specific world.

Thanks to Lynch's expert pacing and modulation of narrative tension, even viewers who already know the outcome of the film's central incident will likely be pulled to the edges of their seats.

If Secret can leave the viewer despairing, it's also hugely inspiring, thanks to Mino. She's one of the cinematic heroines of the year.

Writer/director David Mamet, who's built a career in both theater and film by being a hyper-manly sort of writer, has crafted a film that is laugh out loud funny and dinner-conversation smart.

One of the best films of the year. Queer in every sense of the word, it's poignant, laugh-out-loud funny and thoroughly provocative.

One of the funniest, shrewdest, smartest movies in recent memory.

It's charming, gently humorous, and beautifully attuned to the interior lives of children.

That tragedy looms heavily in Behind the Sun only makes its life-affirming moments -- resonate more deeply and powerfully in a film that is one of the year's best.

Tragic, funny and deadpan dark, it's easily one of the best films of the year...It's the brutally unsentimental, intelligent, unflinching heart at the film's core that makes it a marvel.

Mitchell retools his play magnificently, opening it up into a vibrant cinematic work.

A must-see documentary.

Honeydripper is classic Sayles cinema: an insightful sketch of assorted common folk whose criss-crossing dreams and agendas unfold against larger, more powerful (and sometimes crushing) sociopolitical and cultural forces.

What leaves you breathless, though, is the knockout acting by the cast.

One of the best films of this year...unlike anything you've seen on the big screen.

Laced with brilliantly knotted ideas on race, masculinity and cults of violence.

One of the things that makes Traffic so very good is the wry humor that's laced throughout the film. It's a funny movie.

Lilya is the more genuinely unsettling film because Moodysson seems to actually know something of what it is to take and stumble beneath a crushing blow. You feel that here. And you feel it for days after.

In watching Soul, it helps to be a Spandau fan, of course, but the smart, layered contextualizing and historicizing of the group within the film makes it a gift for any pop-culture aficionado.

Black's cool-headed but blistering indictment of globalization and the racist international economic policies that have shoved that country into crushing poverty.

This is a real-life horror story, raw and galling — but not surprising. The fact that viewers, like the Fergusons, can muster only bittersweet relief at Ryan's release from prison is the film's whole point: The legal system itself is so damningly captured.

While Hall and Shepard nail their parts, Don Johnson, still magnetic after all these years, steals the film as a sardonic private eye with a vintage cherry-red convertible.

It's an admittedly hagiographic film, an unabashed celebration of the man and his work and worldview. The few mild naysayers are largely set up to be knocked down, but as such the film is invigorating.

Show Me Love has the pulse of teen life down-pat, shaming its many sleek and glossy American counterparts at every turn.

The film ends on up notes, but its strength is that it's not really a feel-good movie, instead shining a light on both how far we have come in terms of race in America and how very far we still have to go.

There's a shrewd satiric method to LaBute's madness, and a payoff in comedic gold.