Joe Neumaier

A wonderfully entertaining, beautiful Western drama that lets the quirks of the genre gallop freely as it keeps a tight rein throughout.

Entertaining, smart and snappy, this terrific doc, a Sundance favorite, digs into the country's use of steroids and how it affects sports, pop culture and the self-image of young men.

Flow makes you thirsty for more information.

What Room 237 is really about is how movies inspire passion. Which is a great thing, even if it comes out in wack-job ways.

Fans of Dario Argento and Mario Bava will appreciate the references. Even for newcomers, there are minor chords to enjoy. If only there were less screaming.

Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa is better known for horror films; this is a movie where the horror is internalized, and hideously truthful.

This is the film that fulfills whatever promise Kristen Stewart has shown for more than a decade.

Though it’s more testimonial exhibit than movie, “Unjust” remains a crucial document.

Certainly, the West Memphis 3 deserve more chances to detail how the justice system went nightmarishly awry. But take this as ultimately more personal journal than investigation.

His years of success aren't as gripping as Kapadia, and Senna's legend, would have us believe. He had no demons besides fame, and no hurdles besides a recklessness that went with the territory.

The deliberate pace Mungiu employs in this incredible work is so engrossing and quietly heartbreaking that its philosophical ending may come as a shock.

It's strange to call a film with so much nudity and simulated sex "old-fashioned," but The Sessions nicely bridges that gulf.

Oduye, especially, is utterly absorbing. Even in those few moments when the movie follows a slightly more straightforward line than it needs, she is always engagingly, beautifully real.

If you're looking for an incisive portrait of self-generated stardom, you won't do better than this.

Here, in his best performance since "Spider," Fiennes plays the snarling, entitled general Caius Martius Coriolanus, whose bloody brow and bald head are stained with what's left of his soldiers.

The actor (Garcia), whose banked anger has been a secret weapon since "The Untouchables" 25 years ago, paints a fascinating portrait of a man moved by fate.

Chandor (“All is Lost”) has made a movie that quietly but ferociously immerses us in a time and place, with atmosphere done in minimal yet evocative strokes.

Fincher is a fearless filmmaker who understands his audience’s intelligence (not to mention their cinematic blood lust). By the end of Gone Girl, we feel like we’ve lived through about four movies, not just one. Good luck letting go of any of them.

The finished "Ring" cycle, a combination of "myth, science and legend" made to order as Wagner imagined it, was unique to every viewer's eye. The making of it will be spellbinding to everyone.

Scott Thomas breathes more emotion into Juliette's affectless, haunted demeanor than most actors do with pages of dialogue.

For all the movement in Drive, the quiet, deathly still moments are the ones that count.

Its creepy atmosphere aside, Maggie is a slog of the living dead.

By far the most rousing, expertly cast movie this year, David O. Russell's movie takes a roundabout way of telling its true story.

Given the evidence compiled here by director Frank Pavich, there’s reason to believe Jodorowsky’s “Dune” was more influential for never actually existing. It wound up being inhaled, like some ethereal alien spice, by a generation of moviemakers.

The result is the first comic-book movie in a while that actually feels like a classic comic book: fast, furious and flip. Forget about superheroes with love problems and tortured souls.

Boasting perhaps the most bored-sounding voice-over ever, this unexceptional drama imagines itself - much as its young heroine does - to be far more noteworthy than it actually is.

It’s hard to imagine the lives behind the voices that are part of the movies. But In a World ..., the debut feature from actress-turned-writer-director Lake Bell, not only gives the people who do movie voice-overs a closeup, it savvily and wittily uses what we hear as a metaphor for what we are.

The battle it documents is both a cornerstone of the past and a reflection of ongoing struggles. DuVernay infuses Selma with that dichotomy, never forgetting how Selma, the place, was a pledge to march ahead.