Farran Smith Nehme

Making a movie this warm, funny, and rigorously truthful about lovers trying to remain partners is even harder.

At some point in her 50-year career, Rampling became one of the world’s great actresses. Driven by her and Courtenay’s work, and by director Andrew Haigh’s limpid style, the film is devastating.

Tamhane’s quiet techniques build to pure, cold fury.

Each scene is breathtaking, such as a long shot of a river at a key moment, and an unforgettable soccer game played with no ball. Timbuktu deserves every accolade it gets.

The cumulative impact is devastating, and very far from a simple Western condemnation of another country’s brutality. In forcing viewers to hear the boasts of genocide’s perpetrators, The Act of Killing puts a harsh spotlight on all celebrations of bloodshed, from Hollywood to the op-ed pages.

Director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s film combines allegory, brutal melodrama, black humor and strikingly beautiful compositions, each frame dense with meaning. Leviathan stays absolutely gripping, right up to the O. Henry twist that slams the film shut.

A groundbreaking, highly influential film, A Man Vanishes is a fiercely brilliant piece of work, but it's more intellectual challenge than pleasure.

“The past is past. I don’t want to remember . . . the wound is healed,” says Kemat, an Indonesian man who survived the massacre of more than 10,000 people at the Snake River in 1965. As this documentary shows, nothing could be further from the truth.

Yet while Nemes criticized “Schindler’s List” as “conventional,” all that’s new here is the hyper-realistic technique: Saul’s quest is not very far from the girl in the red dress.

Often extremely funny, always thoughtful, the movie transcends its static nature to become a deeper picture of modern Iran than any news story could offer.

Both actresses are extraordinary, but Kulesza — bitter, sarcastic and tragic — carries the movie’s soul.

The filmmaker doesn't speculate about why these men are talking, but he leaves you with an excellent guess.

As Viviane, Elkabetz is fascinating, wielding an incredible variety of contemptuous looks.

The cast is excellent, particularly Timur Magomedgadzhiev as a conscience-stricken co-worker, but it’s Cotillard who’s in nearly every scene. Desperate, downtrodden, but grasping at each shred of hope, Cotillard — who won an Oscar playing Edith Piaf in 2007’s “La Vie en Rose” — carries the whole film.

Less tiring than a three-hour tramp through the halls, and considerably less expensive than a plane ticket, National Gallery gives the feeling of having seen everything there is to see.

More than a thriller, Phoenix is a ghost story, made plain in an extraordinary shot of Nelly’s terror at a passing train.

The best compensation for sitting through this silliness is Alice Taglioni as the primary cop.

Beautiful to look at, with its burnished interiors and magnificent Turkish steppes, this long film builds to a powerful conclusion. Ceylan’s characters grind each other to a powder while hardly raising their voices.

Panh’s technique achieves things a conventional documentary could not, as when he pans across dozens of the clay figures jumbled in a box, in a shot that calls up both the toys of childhood, and graves.

About Elly shows that the ethical dilemmas of ordinary adults can, with this level of talent, become as gripping as any thriller.

The sharpest, least sentimental and possibly the best version of Austen yet.

There’s a good cinephile heart beating under this fluffy story. But Lellouche, in making her homage to Allen, left out one of his essential qualities: bite. Paris-Manhattan drifts by and never leaves a single toothmark.

The surreal images, offbeat jokes and pointed human-rights allegory make this an altogether different experience from most American animation. It’s dreamy, poetic and not to be missed.

These elisions give an odd feeling to a film so long in the making. Crewdson's work ultimately begins to seem less enigmatic than he is himself.

This is the sort of movie that gets called “hallucinatory,” but it is strongly grounded in the New York in which 99 percent of us live. Fleischner gets his uncanny effects simply by showing what this city looks like to a child who has a different filter.

Petzold raises questions of honor and builds the romance with an absolutely rigorous lack of sentiment, moving Barbara to a sweeping finish as emotionally satisfying as any this year.

The closing subtitle says that no one was ever prosecuted for this madness. The pure-archive approach leaves a taste of despair; civic governance, it seems, can’t even promise not to kill you.

This sounds like a comedy, and in its slow, deadpan way, that’s what The Treasure is; the film is an unusual mixture of joy and cynicism.