J. Hoberman

To my mind, the greatest film by Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami.

Conceptually rigorous, splendidly economical, and radically Bazinian.

Raking over the same clichés as "Almost Famous," Rock Star is far less reverential -- it isn't burdened by generational nostalgia and doesn't take itself too seriously.

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.

Serious comedy, powered by an enthusiastic cast and full of good-natured innuendo, Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right gives adolescent coming-of-age and the battle of the sexes a unique twist.

Sunny as The Straight Story appears, Lynch is still defamiliarizing the normal.

For better or worse, the movie does for Chauvet what Baudrillard complained an on-site replica did for Lascaux-render the real thing false.

Increasingly unconvincing, In the Bedroom turns genteel rabble-rouser. Field's leisurely buildup forestalls but doesn't prevent his movie's mutation into a granola "Death Wish."

Beauvois's film is cool while Denis's is hot-but the main difference is that where "White Material" is knowingly postcolonial, Of Gods and Men aspires to the timeless.

The movie grabs hold and runs you through the wringer.

In a sense, Varda has done for herself what she did for Demy--creating a work, as charming as it is touching, that serves to explicate and enrich an entire oeuvre.

This is a movie of blunt juxtapositions-death accompanied by the sound of raucous street musicians-as well as awkward flashbacks. Still, the strategy works.

Too chatty to be ascetic, Summer Hours is nevertheless almost Ozu-like in its evocation of a parent's death and the dissolving bond between the surviving children. It's also an essay on the nature of sentimental and real value--as well as the need to protect French culture in a homogenizing world.

Traffic is not just an ultra-procedural--it's the Big Picture, the Whole Enchilada, complete with a complicated war between two Mexican drug cartels.

Initial strangeness inexorably gives way to rote sentimentality and mystical tenderness becomes narrative expedience.

Scorches the screen like a prairie fire.

It is an essay in film form with near-universal interest and a remarkable degree of synthesis.

Tian's movie seems to be among the finest expressions of the Chinese new wave.

For all its quasi-documentary materialism, The Son is ultimately a Christian allegory of one man's inchoate desire to return good for evil. The movie requires a measure of faith, and like a job well done, it repays that trust.

Everything is edged with desperation. However arduous Last Train Home may have been to shoot, it was infinitely more arduous to live.

Persona is at once tactile and elusive, splintered and seamless, systematic and free-associative. Essentially a movie of fragments and vignettes, it is held together by the power of the artist’s craft and the centripetal force of his unconscious.

Flight of the Red Balloon is in a class by itself. In its unexpected rhythms and visual surprises, its structural innovations and experimental perfs, its creative misunderstandings and its outré syntheses, this is a movie of genius.

Waking Life doesn't leave you in a dream, specifically the dream of Linklater's previous films, so much as it traps you in an endless bull session.

Contemporary audiences may not see why, even in its toned-down simplification of the novel, From Here to Eternity was the most daring movie of 1953, but it remains an acting bonanza.

Suffers from over-explanation. The movie maintains tremendous momentum through the Szpilman family's deportation. The second half is another story.

City of Life and Death is far more convincing as a spectacle of mass atrocity than a drama of individual conscience.

Not just the year's most impressive first feature but also the strongest new movie of any kind I've seen in 2010.

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.