Keith Phipps

It’s breathtaking on two fronts: Reinert unearths stunning footage—far removed from the fuzzy copies used as B-roll in other documentaries—that captures the full scale of NASA’s accomplishment. But he keeps that footage grounded in the image and voices of the modest men and women who made it happen.

Escape From The Planet Of The Apes gets the series back on track, sending three apes back to the 20th century for a story that begins comically and ends in fear and loathing.

Working with a miniscule budget, Baron creates charged compositions out of found locations and makes a virtue out of the film's cheapness.

In both halves, Soderbergh emphasizes observation over ideology with an eye toward the mundane details of life on the front lines of a revolution.

Set at the intersection of post-Vietnam paranoia and the myopic introspection that became hippiedom's most lasting cultural contribution, the Philip Kaufman-directed Invasion alternates social commentary with impeccably crafted scares. As much an echo of Don Siegel's 1956 original as a remake, it does little to change a formula that worked fine the first time around.

Deliverance is a film about finding the place where ideas mean less than instinct.

Kiki's slow pace and light-on-conflict plot may surprise kids used to American animation, but it's difficult not to be won over by the film's endearing characters and beautiful animation, as well as a storyline that stresses the values of independence and friendship.

Rabbit Hole is a tremendously sad movie, but it's also the furthest thing from a miserablist wallow.

As played by Ralph Fiennes in his own cinematic adaptation of the play, Coriolanus' military genius makes him a figure of awe, but it's his near-absence of empathy that makes him terrifying.

Broken Embraces welds Douglas Sirk melodrama to the most gracefully unsettling elements of Alfred Hitchcock, wrapping both in the stylish, hushed elegance that’s become Almodóvar’s trademark since his mid-’90s reinvention.

Directing his first live-action film since 2000's "Cast Away," Robert Zemeckis paces it brilliantly, slowly ramping up the energy from hungover lethargy to coke-fueled confidence, while creating undercurrents of dread as Washington hits his stride.

Here was outer space as only the lavish production values of MGM could imagine it, a journey to an alien landscape painted in bold Eastmancolor and stretched across a CinemaScope frame.

It's an intense, uncompromising take that restores some of the shock that made Wuthering Heights so notable when it first appeared.

The film captures a moment, playfully but without losing sight of the stakes, when the hot political temperatures of the late ’60s and early ’70s made change of one kind or another look inevitable.

I'd seen moments from that chase for years, held up as an example of what makes the film great. And it is a great sequence. But it's even better in context, arriving after many scenes of false starts, wrong turns, and frustrating dead ends, like a brilliantly staged cat-and-mouse game on the subway involving Doyle and Fernando Rey's smooth French gangster. The explosions have even more impact when you first get to see the fuses slowly burning down...It's also what most imitators don't get. You can put together the most exciting sequence ever filmed, and it won't matter—or at least won't matter beyond the seconds it takes to unfold—if the material around it isn't there.

Being There finds humor in the way Sellers becomes a blank screen on which people project their expectations. But it also finds value in his simplicity, which might seem like a lot of New Age hokum if not for Sellers' disarmingly quiet performance.

After establishing an atmosphere of nearly unbearable dread, Alfredson keeps thickening and chilling it.

Even though its rough edges (the wildly mismatched acting, the scenes that never take shape) look rougher today than they must have at the time, watching Shadows still feels like witnessing a mold breaking.

Mirren begins the film having her portrait painted, looking every inch the monarch and proud to play the part. By the end, she's let the pressure of one week, and maybe a lifetime, show in her eyes.

Considine directs with the confidence of a veteran, giving his actors room to work while letting an ominous, overcast mood hang over almost every scene.

Much of The Edge's success can be credited to Baldwin and Hopkins, who know just how far to push a performance without crossing too far into ham territory.

But the slickness grows mesmeric and the performance unexpectedly wrenching as each trip Gere takes in a succession of classic cars brings him ever closer to his fate, a fate sealed the moment he drops a gun on top of a Silver Surfer comic while speeding through the desert to the accompaniment of Jerry Lee Lewis in the same type of Porsche that James Dean rode to his death.

Well-crafted, star-driven entertainment doesn't come much better.

A florid, often lurid, completely enthralling film held in place by a disarming Portman, who rarely leaves the frame.

Their talk feels as unforced as it is intense, but even that’s an illusion piled on top of an illusion. The film keeps returning to questions about the nature of reality and the function of performance, whether in theater or in everyday life.

It’s a film of odd moments, dry humor, and restless characters, each of whom end the film by departing from Memphis, weighed down by what they’ve taken away from it, even if they can’t exactly define what that is.

Partly improvised, partly scripted, and partly somewhere between the two, Cassavetes' films have frequently been likened to jazz. Faces bears the stamp of its particular era's jazz; it trades in long stretches of chaos, even ugliness, which produce unexpected passages of grace and beauty. As punishing as that ugliness can be, the graceful bits stick in the memory.

The Coens direct True Grit with a light touch, but like Portis' stark, funny novel, their adventure tale shaves off none of the rough edges.