J. Hoberman

Boxing Gym is a companion piece of sorts to "La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet," Wiseman's previous doc that played Film Forum last fall. It's not simply that boxing and ballet are understood as kindred activities. Boxing Gym is itself a dance movie-which is to say, a highly formalized exercise in choreographed activity.

This has to be the most richly entertaining movie anyone has ever made on the subject of female genital mutilation.

It's a baroque and intermittently brilliant brain twister so convoluted that it inevitably deposits the viewer in an alternate universe.

A movie of cutting humor, near-constant talk, and one show-stopping dance routine.

An explicit ode to mortality, not without a certain grim humor.

Although dense with incident and motif, the movie has an effortless flow.

This extravagant family melodrama, one of the highlights of last year's New York Film Festival, runs two and a half hours and never lags, so moment-to-moment enthralling are Desplechin's narrative gambits, as well as his reckless eccentricity.

Ultimately, The Woodmans is a haunting study in family dynamics.

A wondrously perverse movie that not only evokes a lost moment in time but circles around an unrepresentable subject. Mood is the operative word. A love story far more cerebral than it is emotional.

As bittersweet a brief encounter as any in American movies since Richard Linklater's equally romantic "Before Sunrise."

A supremely intelligent pastiche.

Blind Shaft means to leave the viewer dazed, and it does.

A fairy tale that presents love as a case of mutual enchantment, Two Family House is not only uniformly well acted, superbly designed, lovingly lit, and sensitively scored, it's as romantic as it is funny.

Fateless has a remarkable absence of sentimentality. The movie is obviously artistic, but there are no cheap or superfluous effects. It's almost mystically translucent.

As chilly a spectacle as you're likely to see. It's like watching a comeback in an empty stadium.

It's here that Melville fully achieved his notion of the sublime, applying "Le Samouraï's" "empty" compositions and near theatrical blocking, as well as its methodical suspense, cosmic fatalism, and sense of grim solitude, to a subject far closer to his heart, namely his own World War II experiences.

As fascinating as it is discomfiting and as intelligent as it is primal. From first shot to last, France's foremost bad girl has made an extremely good movie -- and maybe even a great one.

No matter what your opinion of McNamara, The Fog of War is a chastening experience.

Not only Mike Leigh's strongest film since "Naked" but a true show-making epic.

Drawing on interviews with SLA co-founder Russ Little and amazing TV news footage, Robert Stone illuminates this fantastic narrative as vividly as it has ever been.

The lovability quotient is as high as the altitude.

A very nutty fruitcake, Spirited Away is characterized by wonderfully detailed animation, packed with incident and populated by all manner of comic creatures.

One of the funniest social comedies of its period.

Thrilling and ludicrous. The movie feels entirely instinctual. The rest is silencio.

Grounded in Fessenden's handheld camera, stuttering montage rhythms, and time-lapse photography, the engagingly primitive animated special effects contribute to a mood that's sustained through the surprisingly somber conclusion.

Claire Denis's strongest movie in the decade since "Beau Travail," her tense, convulsive White Material is a portrait of change and a thing of terrible beauty.

I can't remember a teenage romance this engagingly offbeat since "Lord Love a Duck."

Arguably the founding work of the American independent cinema, John Cassavetes’s 1959 Shadows is the prototype for Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise, Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It, and all their progeny.