Keith Phipps

It's well-acted and filled with striking compositions, but director Mira Nair has trouble with a different kind of balance.

There's a little bit of everything in Bava's best-known film, the three-part anthology Black Sabbath.

The Odd Life Of Timothy Green attempts to stage a modern fairy tale in Middle America. But in spite of an abundance of earnestness, the pixie dust needed to create magic remains out of the film's reach.

Though it's dominated by two people walking and talking, after a point it's as difficult to parse what's real and what's constructed in Certified Copy as it is in the home stretch of "Inception" (although "Before Sunset" and Roberto Rossellini's "Journey To Italy" provide closer models).

That's a lot for any film to unpack, and "The Last King Of Scotland" director Kevin MacDonald deserves a lot of credit simply for keeping the narrative coherent.

Pawlikowski's off-balance compositions and affection for odd close-ups suggest the influence of Wong Kar-Wai, but the film's low-key observational spirit owes as much to Mike Leigh.

Johnson sets viewers up for greatness, but ultimately offers much milder pleasures. The film isn’t an outright con, but it’s easy to feel a little misled by the end.

For as long as director and co-writer Jacques Audiard focuses on the central relationship, his stylish film stays on steady footing.

While more grim than most Disney films, it's not bleakness that gets in the way of The Black Cauldron succeeding; unmemorable protagonists, annoying sidekicks, an awkwardly episodic plot, and animation that ranges in appearance from impressive to cheap to unfinished take care of that.

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.

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.

Neither Molina nor Lithgow are stranger to big performances, but here, they offer studies in restraint, underplaying dramatic moments in ways that make them all the more powerful.

The film, like its source, is filled with pessimistic fatalism, but it spares no pity for the instruments of fate, painting Alec as an irredeemable villain. What, if anything, this meant to Polanski remains unknowable.

The film is a bit of a slog, but in the end, it's a slog worth taking, thanks to a strange, moving ending that reduces the samurai era's codes of warfare, class, and honor down to two men meeting face to face.

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.

It plays like the work of a filmmaker operating at the highest level of his abilities.

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.

That nauseous mixture of laughs and shocks, and the fact that real passion drives Kastle's characters even when they plot against each other, is what makes The Honeymoon Killers such an enduring one-off.

Not only does Untraceable unmask its initially hidden killer with little ceremony, it's the sort of film that telegraphs every new development.

Mendes' second effort plays like a familiar song transposed to a minor key, a gangland fable soaked in portent and fatalism until its familiarity ceases to be an issue.

McCarthy's characters make for good company even in their story's awkward patches, and in a film so unabashedly about the value of friendship, good company goes a long way.

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.

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.

When Friday Night Lights gets to the big games, the time it's spent creates an atmosphere thick with tension, one akin to the real-world experience of watching a favorite team play for its life.

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.

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

Now an invaluable time capsule, the film has to transcend its own conceptual messiness.

Skyfall doesn't forget it has to be an exciting spy film above all, but from its first scene, it ratchets up the drama in ways that have little to do with action.