Keith Phipps

Crawl’s virtues, however, remain formidable: It’s fast, efficient, crisply directed, and delivers on the promised alligator thrills. In another year, that might be worth a polite nod. This year, however, those B-movie values feel especially refreshing, and illuminating too.

Through quietly fiery performances by Day-Lewis and Watson, as well as novel-like depth and complexity, The Boxer not only avoids these pitfalls but emerges as a thoroughly engrossing movie.

Where Barton Fink sometimes resembled a horror movie, Inside Llewyn Davis plays like an elegy. Its conclusions are more regretful than angry, and while the conflict between art and commerce is no less central, there’s much more emphasis on that conflict’s personal toll.

A deft, funny, fearless, and gloriously tasteless mix of horror and comedy, Re-Animator proves that entertainment value trumps virtually every other concern.

Finely crafted, tense, scary thriller from start to finish.

Captain Phillips could have stopped at simply depicting what happened; it’s the steps it takes to examining why it happened that make it extraordinary.

Though he has little coherent dialogue after a certain point, Mason is ideal as the embodiment of unsteadiness, physical and moral.

Falk and Rowlands—in performances of almost indescribable intensity—detail a marriage anchored by love, but tossed by the expectations of others and the unpredictable swell of madness.

A harsh (though slightly toned down from Moody's book), deeply moving, emotionally rich and intelligent film about the difficulty of rebelling against social restrictions--and the inescapable consequences of such attempts when they do succeed--The Ice Storm should not be missed.

The most exciting thing about Jackie Brown is the director's seamless transition to a less flashy, revealing style; it's well-suited to the more character-oriented focus of the film... an assured, accomplished, and very good film.

Works both as a great romance and a great, unconventional crime thriller. But step back from such distinctions, and it just looks like a great movie.

The Wachowskis do it so playfully well, keeping The Matrix's potentially confusing plot intelligible, intelligent, and suspenseful, that it doesn't matter.

Leigh’s generous approach to capturing the fullness of Turner’s life, through unhurried rhythms and scenes, makes Mr. Turner memorable.

There are moments when Velvet Goldmine threatens to collapse under the weight of writer/director Todd Haynes' (Poison, Safe) ambition. But, sometimes amazingly, it doesn't, becoming in the process one of the year's freshest, most exciting films.

There’s a lot going on in Tarantino’s latest film, including an exploration of the delicacy of a moment in time and how easily an era can be swept away.

An unpredictable, often funny, always winning film, Love And Death On Long Island is filled with low-key humor and sharp observations about the state of art at the close of the millennium.

Uncompromising in her art, her teaching, and her professional relations, Boyd makes for a classic tough old bird of a character.

Verbinski knows when to break out the stunning action sequences and when to let his characters dominate the film, and he handles both modes expertly.

Finds the right balance between reverence and wit.

A Trojan horse of a teen comedy that balanced lowbrow gags with subtle humor, genuine insight—Crowe spent a year undercover as a high-school student—and pathos.

It all serves a portrait of 1970 California that mixes absurdity with an air of looming cataclysm, a volatile formula that wouldn’t work without Phoenix’s performance.

Trier gives all four of these characters—and the actors who play them, all brilliant— the space to process their related sets of unsettled emotions.

All in all, it's a fitting conclusion to the series, and yet there are disappointments built in. For one, Jackson has opted not to film Tolkien's downbeat "Scouring Of The Shire" epilogue.

Like the best sports films, The Hustler makes the game look exciting even to outsiders, but Rossen's film is ultimately about a more universal subject than impossible breaks and the heavy spin of masse shots. Adapting Walter Tevis' novel, Rossen made a morality tale without the moralizing.

Nonetheless, Marvin's Room is not only sharply written and well-acted, but it's also the rare sort of film that takes an honest and uncompromising look at death and dying.

Stillman's arch, clever dialogue is as strong as ever, and he conveys in every frame a genuine affection for his characters, however insipid their actions may be at times. These gifts make it easy to forgive Stillman's tendency to let his story meander, especially in Disco's second half.

Beyond giving a human face to Uganda's crises, Kiarostami attempts to capture the actual place, a swirl of contradictions as vibrant and beautiful as it is troubled.

After a start heavy on exposition, the film strings one action setpiece after another, each realized with the breathless excitement of an adventure pulp cover. It's as if Jackson set out to bring to life every fantasy of the last moment before earth gave way to space as the site of the final frontier.

It’s a classic tale of survival that draws on how movies, in the right hands, can make viewers see the world through others’ eyes, and to feel what keeps them grasping as it threatens to slip away.

The marvelous new Talk To Her has elements that wouldn't have seemed out of place in an Almodóvar film of 20 years ago

Though told largely in chronological order, Train Dreams conveys Robert’s experience less by a story with a beginning, middle, and end than a collection of moments from his life, puzzle pieces Bentley renders with great beauty and occasional moments of horror.

In the end, it's that reserve that makes it work. Keeping his distance, the director lets viewers see in full the moments in which grief turns the world into a narrow, never-ending tunnel.

An old-house thriller retrofitted for the 21st century without any touch of unneeded flash, Panic Room is scary enough to do for downtown living what Jaws did for beaches.

As an imaginative visual experience, there's nothing like it. Today, at least.

Deliberately paced at the outset, the film slowly establishes a sense of hatred that makes the violent explosion of the film's second half as plausible and inevitable as the laws of physics.

It’s such an entertaining film that it’s almost possible to forget its didactic agenda, which is certainly part of the point.

Thoroughly realized characters and relationships and Solondz's masterful ability to switch the tone from comic to tragic within the same scene help make Happiness a better film than it might have been otherwise. Much better, in fact.

The Hidden Fortress is, above all, a roaring piece of entertainment, a Western-like samurai adventure set against the chaos of 16th-century Japan.

Mann takes all the instincts he learned as a Miami Vice producer and trims them of their excesses, and the result is an unsettling thriller whose detached style perfectly complements its psychological intensity.

Haynes makes it possible to forget all the layers at work and simply be swept up in the story's emotions. As in Sirk's films, these characters live and breathe within the film's exaggerated reality, thanks to rich performances by Haysbert, Quaid, and especially Moore.

Co-directed by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg—the latter then a top-rank cinematographer making his directorial debut—it begins as a nasty slice of British underworld life, and ends as a psychedelic excursion into insanity.

Smart in a rare way that matters greatly to good contemporary comedy: Like last year's "Flirting With Disaster," its script and direction underplay absurd situations, letting its characters amuse without showing the strains of forced wackiness.

Though it occasionally wears its metaphors on its sleeve, Ulee's Gold should, if there's any justice, find the same thoughtful-drama-hungry audience that made "Sling Blade" a hit.

Neither condemning nor forgiving, the film is a model of documentary evenhandedness, even though James makes no claims of objectivity.

A funny and fascinatingly open-ended look at the state of the art, Irma Vep is well worth a look.

For his first feature, Canadian director Vincenzo Natali has, like the setting of his film, created a complex piece of work around an essentially simple foundation.

Shakespeare’s wife may remain forever a mystery, but Hamnet makes Agnes a creation of yearning, aching humanity who’s impossible to forget.

What Von Trier arrives at is a complex, contemporary, and deeply moving exploration of faith.

The film uses the cutting edge of technology to take viewers to the far reaches of the human experience, but also to create a sense of empathy, of investing in the life of another person. It’s a remarkably complex film, but an admirably simple one, too.

An important act of historical preservation, a focused and effective film that brings back a dark, important moment in history with startling clarity.

Ubiquitous screen presence Steve Buscemi makes an impressive writing/directing debut in this depiction of small-town alcoholism.

Hitchcock is fully Hitchcock here, plunging deeply into his characters’ psyches, and remaining in full control of every cinematic effect.

The film at its simplest serves as a cautionary tale, but it also functions as a meditation on how little it takes to redirect a life by choice or by chance.

While virtually every shot looks like a work of art, much of the beauty of Ain’t Them Bodies Saints comes from Lowery’s refusal to choose sides.

In his best film since "Unforgiven," Eastwood ultimately lets observations on character, community, and the tidal patterns of tragedy shoulder a burden an ordinary murder mystery never could.

The results suggest that Ponoc was guided by a single principle: If Studio Ghibli won’t make Studio Ghibli films anymore, then we will. Which is to say Mary and the With’s Flower is delightful — a visually stunning fairy tale filled with whimsical ideas and warmly realized characters — but also familiar.

Vega’s remarkable as Marina. Her character never opens up to anyone, but Vega skillfully conveys an inner life governed by sadness and a will for self-preservation.

The humanity behind The Square‘s jabs save it from seeming nihilistic but they also implicate everyone watching. The film seems less nasty for having such a well-developed protagonist, but also that much more squirm-inducing for anyone who recognizes a bit too much of themselves in Christian’s unexamined attitudes.

It’s a wistful, unabashedly minor swan song that fittingly casts Stanton as a man recognizing he’s much closer to the end of his life than the beginning — and wondering what it all means.

It's a remote location, but Frammartino's canny eye, wry humor, and careful sense of rhythm make it feel like the best possible spot to observe the workings of the world, from ashes to ashes.

The honesty behind Garcia's queasiest moments gives the film its pull.

Viewers not attuned to his (Aronofsky's) heartfelt, bombastic Richard Wagner-by-way-of-"2001: A Space Odyssey" lyricism might be better off looking elsewhere. But they'll never see anything else quite like it.

Forbidden Zone never really jells as a movie. But as a tuneful spectacle of weirdness, it doesn't really have an equivalent, and it's easy to see the influence of its free use of pop-culture relics in everything from Tim Burton's films to The Powerpuff Girls.

Zhang Yimou is a master of intimate character pieces.

The tone and subject at times recall David Lynch's "Lost Highway" and "Mulholland Dr.," but the approach is Hellman's own.

Winter Kills provides a perfect, absurd finale to the half-decade of post-Watergate paranoid thrillers that preceded it and compares favorably to the grand unified conspiracy-theory fictions that followed, such as Oliver Stone's JFK and James Ellroy's book American Tabloid.

A near-exact cross between Rosemary's Baby, Duel, and The Parallax View, Race With The Devil has problems getting over the flat, TV-style direction by Cleopatra Jones director Jack Starrett, but it gets by on engaging drive-in goofiness, even if it's tough to swallow the idea that mid-'70s Texas swarmed with Satanists.

The artist's arresting images speak for themselves, even though now only the bystanders are left to tell his story.

Strikingly shot and notable for Seyrig's monstrous, Dietrich-like character, Daughters is a psychosexual horror film that's gripping almost up to the very end.

The story of a much-admired graffiti artist who is tempted by the possibility of mainstream success, Wild Style is extremely clumsy as a drama, with awkward dialogue and even more awkward acting. However, as a showcase for many aspects of the incredible outpouring of creativity that took place in New York during the late '70s and early '80s, it can't be beat.

The roots of reality TV can be found here, but unlike most reality TV, Hitchcock shows a genuine (though characteristically distant) interest in people.

Director John Hough packs the film with stunning car stunts filmed in California backwaters. Though he sacrifices meaning for trashy thrills at every opportunity—and winds it all down with a brain-damaged variation on the end of Easy Rider—the way Fonda slowly loses his initially unflappable cool throughout the film makes it worth a look.

The incongruous pairing—the late-’40s equivalent of dropping the American Pie gang into a Saw movie—really shouldn’t have worked, but it resulted in a highly entertaining film that became a huge hit and breathed new life into the comedy team’s career, while providing a convenient tombstone for the monsters, who faded from screens.

Fort Apache and She Wore A Yellow Ribbon both dwell on the problems of leadership, balancing out a respect for classic American frontier virtues with a less generous assessment of how those virtues were applied.

Like the best of its forebears, Grindhouse contains thrills to keep viewers in their seats, plus moments to think about on the ride home, which will probably seem unusually fraught with peril.

Point Blank smartly joins film-noir elements with techniques from the then-cresting British, French, and Italian new waves.

His vision is most immediately reminiscent of from the hellish New York of Scorsese's Taxi Driver, but Hoskins provides the crucial difference, spiking the nihilism by emerging from the abyss with a glimmer of hope instead of a thousand-yard stare.

Though not the masterpiece Disney's marketing would indicate, it is a charming, imaginative anthology of cartoon shorts set to music by the likes of such '40s favorites as Roy Rogers and The Andrews Sisters.

Robin And Marian would merely be an exercise in theory if the actors didn't make it breathe. Their scenes together a combination of easy humor and wistful grace notes, Connery and Hepburn find an easy rapport, playing something between legendary lovers and an old married couple.

The elaborate, gothic-inspired designs look great, and the supporting characters—most notably the three good fairies and the Joan Crawford-like villain Maleficent—liven up the proceedings despite the bland hero and heroine.

Like the character he plays, Kitano directs the film in a style that alternates between tenderness and brutality, making it a relentlessly tense suspense film one minute and a gentle character study the next. Either half would make Sonatine worth seeing. But taken together as the story of a man who regains his soul but whose face remains permeated with the knowledge of its inevitable loss, it becomes an artful gangster film, Yakuza poetry, and essential viewing.

Wes Craven's The Last House On The Left occasionally plays like the longest, grisliest drug-scare film ever made.

The visual wit, game performances, and overflowing humanity have more than made up for the shortcomings by the time the film finds a final moment that's simultaneously abrupt and magical.

The fairy-tale-like 3 Godfathers casts Wayne as one of a trio of outlaws charged with caring for a baby, and discovering responsibility and perhaps his soul (the two go hand-in-hand for Ford) in the process.

While not a masterpiece on par with Kurosawa's best work, High And Low is a fine example of his craft, and further proof that it's not a few masterpieces but the overall scope of a career that defines a great director.

A moving, funny, formative work that should be of interest to more than just Fellini aficionados.

Like the creatures in the films, and many of Cronenberg's other films themselves, Shivers is disturbing on an almost biological level.

Though the mystery has been spoiled somewhat by an over-revealed twist ending, Soylent Green still succeeds thanks to director Richard Fleischer's sure command of one of the grimmest and most sadly plausible dystopias put to film.

It’s a studied movie that gives itself over to bursts of intensity, and between them sometimes threatens to become as spellbound by its subjects as they become with each other.

Only the finale threatens to undo all that hard work. Though well-done, the last act leans less on the facts of the case than on Hollywood contrivances, heightening the tension with embellishments that feel at odds with the methodical, deliberate film leading up to them.

Effective both as Superman and as the bumbling Clark Kent, Christopher Reeve still seems ideal for the part, if for no other reason than his ability to summon up a convincing sense of intensity when charged with saving the world.

Developed by Mitchell and the actors, the characters don't always seem consistent from moment to moment, but a sharp sense of humor and comfortable performances by a committed and--it must be said--remarkably limber cast help smooth over the rough edges.

Though [Guinness's] performance may not immediately announce itself as his best, it's certainly one of his most representative, a thoroughly recognizable character of unseen depths and unexpected capabilities.

Gripping action and vulnerable heroes writ large. It boldly goes somewhere different and makes it hard to leave the film not hoping for a return voyage soon.

Crime's dreamlike tone and fantastic visuals make it impossible to forget, like an absurd nightmare that overshadows the following day. Even if Von Trier never made another movie, viewers would still watch and admire this debut.

The final effect is less haunting than was probably intended, but Butterfly Kiss is worth a look.

Though it's a stylistic change from what Zhang's been up to lately, this isn't entirely new territory for him.