Glenn Kenny

This is one of the year's most subtly moving films, and a strong affirmation of Coppola's substantial talent.

A remarkably appealing success story full of heart and humor and poignancy, with Swank as winning as she’s ever been.

While avoiding specious bromides about universality, Persepolis insists on communicating with its audience, and insists that communication and empathy are the keys to our survival.

It’s an impeccable, creepy and genuinely transporting movie.

This is a sexy, fun film filled with a lot of zingers, but it also feels a little less personal than many of Assayas’ movies, perhaps in part because it’s not stuffed to the gills with songs he loves.

All of it staged and shot with conscientiousness and ingenuity rarely seen in films from any country anymore. It is indeed a phantasmagoria, and perhaps an overload.

Jean Dujardin, who’s best known here for a still-controversial performance in Michel Hazanavicius’ “The Artist,” is utterly flawless as Picquart, maintaining proper military bearing even as he begins to seethe with indignation.

Composed of relatively few events and scenes, it's often excruciatingly tense and never less than heartbreakingly human. And as much as I admire "Munich," Shadows leaves Spielberg's film in the dust in the moral-ambiguity department. Never before seen in the States, it's already on my year's ten-best list. (April 2006 Premiere)

It’s disarming and lovely to see a spiritual growth parable rendered in Anderson’s jewel-box style. His delivery here is not willfully eccentric but gorgeously centered. Form underscores content in "Henry Sugar" in a most delightful way.

Aquatic maintains its buoyancy throughout.

Burnett creates an insistently poetic, devastatingly ironic world and work.

[An] exemplary documentary.

Although this installment is a beautiful stand-alone thang (check out how its chronology-juggling storyline creates a perfect circle, structure-wise).

What’s most bewitching throughout “Scruggs” is its sense of detail. Its meshing of formal discipline and screwed-down content sometimes give it the sense of a work that has been carefully and elaborately embroidered rather than photographed.

This concise but cogent documentary directed by Tom Surgal is crammed with exhilarating sounds, moving reminiscences and stimulating arguments that it is not just music, but vital music.

Here the fellows seem to be getting along reasonably well. And director Maben’s frequent close-up views of guitarist David Gilmour’s cosmic-blues fretwork will make axe wonks happy, especially given the dimensions of the screen.

The movie reminded me of what Peter Bogdanovich said of Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”: that it "is not a young man’s movie; it has the wisdom and poetic perceptions of an artist knowingly nearing the end of his life and career." The wisdom and poetry here are just as real and just as thoroughly felt.

I haven't been crazy about a lot of Van Sant's recent work, but what he does here is simply astonishing. [November 2003, p. 25]

Bonello’s not here to tell us that the only thing to fear is fear itself. He’s here to tell us to be afraid—be very afraid. What he delivers is not just a densely packed art movie but the most potent horror picture of the decade so far.

One leaves Vortex feeling cleansed by fire.

The plot is pretty convoluted, but Miyazaki has a very good handle on it and lavishes his customary heart, humor, and inventiveness on every situation he depicts.

This is spectacular, exhilarating entertainment. One might be moved to say, corny as it sounds, “All hail King Hu.”

There Will Be Blood is, in fact, not a historical saga; rather, it's an absurdist, blackly comic horror film with a very idiosyncratic satanic figure at its core.

Make no mistake: this is a horror film; as you stare at the screen, the abyss it represents stares back at you.

A giddy kick-out-the-jams entertainment. Diary takes a tack that's not exactly new, but is new to Romero, and as one might expect, the director brings a sharp and uncompromising new perspective to it.

One of Cronenberg's subtlest, most insinuating pictures, and one of the highlights of the year so far.

This is not a children's picture, although it touches on the imaginative powers and emotional resilience of children. It's another slice of Hou's distinctly poetic realism, and as such, also a kind of tribute to Paris -- the Paris of both today and of the older film.

A thoroughly remarkable and disquieting film from Mali’s Abderrahamane Sissako, Timbuktu is also a work of almost breathtaking visual beauty, but it manages to ravish the heart while dazzling the eye simultaneously, neither at the expense of the other. It’s a work of art that seems realized in an entirely organic way.