Jonathan Rosenbaum

One of the craftiest and most satisfying pieces about gender politics to come along in ages.

A highly emotional epic about what it means to be both Chinese and American.

Guy Maddin has reached a new expressive plateau with The Saddest Music in the World.

A veritable salad of mixed genres and emotional textures, this exciting black-and-white cold war thriller runs more than two hours and never flags for an instant...A powerful experience, alternately corrosive with dark parodic humor, suspenseful, moving, and terrifying.

An excellent introduction to the singular vision of avant-garde stage director Robert Wilson.

Arguably Woody Allen's funniest movie. A riotous object lesson in how much dialogue can transform visuals, and Allen works wonders with it.

The results are masterful, admirably unsentimental, and never boring, if also a little stodgy.

Better in certain ways than the original Apocalypse Now, though the flaws are also magnified.

Powerful and haunting.

First-rate agitprop about the ruthlessness of South African apartheid, directed by Euzhan Palcy (Sugar Cane Alley) and adapted from Andre Brink's novel by Palcy and Colin Welland. The relentless plot is effectively set up and expertly pursued, and Hugh Masekela makes some striking contributions to Dave Grusin's musical score.

To my knowledge there's no one anywhere making films with such a sharp sense of contemporary working-class life -- but for the Dardennes it's only the starting point of a spiritual and profoundly ethical odyssey.

While it's easy to imagine an infinite number of bad courtroom comedies based on this scenario, this 1992 movie turns out to be wonderful—broad and low character comedy that's solidly imagined and beautifully played.

A quantum leap in ambition from "Hard Eight" and "Boogie Nights" and is, to my mind, much more interesting.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing here is Thornton's nuanced performance, but the film has other rare virtues: all the characters are fully and richly fleshed out (with some unexpected turns by John Ritter and singer Dwight Yoakam), and the story's construction is carefully measured.

Neil LaBute delivers his most interesting and powerful film to date, though it's also his most unpleasant and disturbing.

The film offers a fascinating glimpse of the Iranian urban middle class, and though it eschews most of the pleasures of composition and landscape found in other Kiarostami films, it's never less than riveting.

The first Ang Lee film I've seen that I've liked without qualification.

The overall effect is disturbing yet mesmerizing.

Stylistically captivating, subtly nuanced, and structurally unpredictable.

Unprecedented in its intellectual ambition, this is endlessly stimulating; it probably tries for too much, but it shames many other contemporary essays that try for too little.

In its own quiet way this is an astonishing film, both as a medical detective story that sustains taut interest over an extended running time and as a piece of cinema combining unusually resourceful acting and direction. If any movie of recent years deserves to be called inspirational--a much-abused term that one hesitates to revive apart from exceptional circumstances--this one certainly does.

For all its minimalism, Tsai Ming-liang's 81-minute masterpiece manages to be many things at once.

A stunning achievement in epic cinema.

Sweet and warm as well as manic, this is full of loopy surprises, and the supporting cast (including Penelope Ann Miller, Bruno Kirby, Steve Bushak, Maximilian Schell, and Bert Parks, playing himself in his film debut) is uniformly fine.

Kiarostami's brilliantly suggestive script, which is quite unlike anything else he's written and is marred only slightly by one of his obligatory sages turning up gratuitously near the beginning.

By placing so much emphasis on aspects of life and work that other films routinely omit, mystify, or skirt over, Akerman forges a major statement, not only in a feminist context but also in a way that tells us something about the lives we all live.

Woo's third Hollywood movie, Face/Off, is the first to balance his visual imagination with the emotional intensity of his Hong Kong films.

The film is both wise and tender in its treatment of relationships -- between birds, between people, and between birds and people.