Keith Phipps

An oddly effective mixture of technical prowess, well-executed cliché, and unexpected political poignancy.

Turtles Can Fly creates a haunting reminder that collateral damage can't always be measured in casualty rates, and that it goes on long after the news cameras have left the scene.

Nicole Kidman -- continuing the string of remarkable performances that have followed "Eyes Wide Shut" -- finds plenty of fodder in the long-delayed Birthday Girl. A grimy thriller with a wicked streak of humor.

Delivers the goods, if the goods you're in the market for happen to be a clever romance concerning William Shakespeare that's unlikely to cause anyone to reassess their notions of Shakespeare, romance, or enjoyment.

Investing a lot of time on each corner of his three-sided character piece, director Ira Sachs (who co-wrote the film with Michael Rohatyn) has created a film as dramatically intense as it is opaque.

It's impossible not to admire what, apart from "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," may be the most ambitious action film since "The Matrix."

In the end, the camper-lot prostitution serves as trapping for a weirdly touching coming-of-age film that leaves its heroine sadder but wiser.

As a marriage of big-budget filmmaking and old-fashioned scare tactics, it easily ranks alongside last year's "The Others."

Effective as a drama as it spirals Golbahari deeper into her nightmarish world, Osama is similarly powerful as a fictionalized account of the Taliban's obscene wish for a world where the stringent enforcement of religious laws took the place of instinctual human kindness.

McAdams is the real show here, playing Lisa as a mouse who becomes a lion as she adapts to an environment that allows her to be herself at last.

For a film that clearly required a small army to make, it often feels thrillingly off-the-cuff, which keeps with The Lego Movie’s themes of creativity and weirdness: Nobody’s following an instruction book with this one.

For all the memorable dialogue and elegant camerawork (courtesy of Javier Aguirresarobe), it’s Blanchett’s movie, and her performance tells yet another story, that of a woman losing control.

However complicated the historical issues at play, the poetic introspection that consumes The New World's characters could only take place in a Terrence Malick movie. But, here at least, history and lyrical drift go together surprisingly well.

The satire is headline-fresh, the action scenes keep pace with summer blockbusters, and no one shoots an evisceration with as much skill.

Some of the points seem too easy, some of the revelations practically announce themselves in advance, and there's never any sense of excitement or suspense as to where the whole thing is heading. But it still works, most of the time.

Fontaine gives her film the tone of a psychological thriller, with the potential of violence always lurking beneath the surface.

A truly scary horror film, something akin to a lost art these days.

The Wings Of The Dove is thought-provoking in a full and lasting sense; it'll stay with you long after its dubious final scene.

Hawke’s ability to convey flashes of self-awareness elevates his performance from a brilliant impression to a fully realized tragic portrait.

Swimming Pool returns Ozon to the psychological complexities of "Under The Sand" and his early mini-feature "See The Sea," and he again proves himself a master of building shocking moments from a series of seemingly insignificant gestures and throwaway lines.

May register most immediately as a snappy whirl of visual gags, double entendres, overheated romance, and comically oversized living quarters, but beneath the exuberance of this fond counterfeit is a heartbeat as powerful as that of any film anchored in the present.

The film’s structure comes with some built-in restrictions, limiting how well we can get to know House of Dynamite’s many characters, who range from low-ranking soldiers to the highest rungs of power. But it also challenges a first-rate cast to tease out their characters’ hidden depths.

She was, the documentary argues, a complex artist, one of awe-inspiring talent and many frustrating contradictions, and one who deserved better than to become just another punchline on her way to the grave. Kapadia provides a heartbreaking reminder of what we lost when we lost her.