Keith Phipps

The film's capes and cowls suggest one genre, but it's a metropolis-sized tragedy at heart.

A remarkable film that towers over the endless clones that followed.

Danish director Carl Dreyer's 1928 film The Passion Of Joan Of Arc is one of the indisputable masterpieces of the silent era.

To Be Or Not To Be works as both comedy and thriller, ratcheting up the tension and humor as the actors’ scheme threatens to fall apart, and the gags build on one another.

It's all presented in a detached style that's ultimately much more moving and truthful than any heartstring-slashing weeper. This may be Egoyan's best work yet, and it's surely one of the best films of the year.

A funny, touching, nearly cliché-free, and thoroughly considered evocation of a time, place, and state of mind. Released just 11 years after the events it depicts (it usually takes about 20 years for nostalgia to set in), the film both captures the enormous societal changes between the early '60s and early '70s and winningly dramatizes the lives of its characters.

Tati's most elaborate film, Playtime stands as his masterpiece, an awe-inspiring work of intricate choreography with a heart to match its technical expertise.

Frankenstein works as a fast-moving thriller and, even now, a stylish, frighteningly atmospheric horror film, but also as a sad outcast parable. Frankenstein's creature may be a monstrosity, but he's also instantly sympathetic to anyone who's ever felt like a misfit.

A film of fatally flawed heroes, oversized passions, nation-building, and, inevitably, violence, America follows its characters from childhood to old age by way of the kind of grand-scale filmmaking that wouldn't be seen again until Martin Scorsese's Gangs Of New York. [2014 re-release]

A bittersweet look at the closing of the frontier by focusing on two strikingly different men who help one town choose law and order over the chaos of the open range.

It's hard to film icons like Young as anything BUT icons, but Demme's film gets past the legend, zooming in on Young's aged, heroic face and finding an artist as human as the rest of us.

The film finds a surprising amount of tenderness and humor beneath the brutality. The laughs may catch in the throat, but that's only a byproduct of City Of God's power to leave viewers breathless.

Its social conscience and deep concern with what it means to be human remains unspoiled.

To create his disarmingly earnest film, Spielberg draws from the past. Its tone is humanistic and its technique classic.

It's not only one of the best classic-era Disney features, but also one of the best animated films from any studio at any time.

An excellent movie, as effective in battle scenes as it is in that of soldiers ruminating on an Edith Piaf song.

Weir builds atmosphere one detail and lingering shot at a time. The cluttered, shadowy interiors of the school contrast with the open spaces and welcoming light of Hanging Rock, but the film makes neither feel like a safe place. Every moment feels designed to be unsettling, but the film also creates a sense of inevitability, that whatever is happening can’t be avoided, and should perhaps be embraced.

The ultimate vision here is of a hard world in which civilization is the aberration, and the things we fear are always waiting for an excuse to make life normal again.

It's a heartbreaking, bullet-strewn valentine to what keeps us human.

At once a devastating condemnation of war and an exciting action film...The additional running time only adds to Petersen's masterfully bleak, claustrophobic atmosphere. Das Boot is by no means a pleasant experience, but it's an intelligent and emotionally gripping one that you won't forget. [Director's Cut]

Rio Bravo features characters who form a familial bond while performing an impossible task in the face of death. It is, in other words, a Howard Hawks movie. It's a great one, too, and if it's not Hawks' best, it's certainly the most Hawksian.

Burton brings his signature visual style, and a pair of stock players for his stars, into this film adaptation, but he wisely follows Sondheim's lead, letting the music and spirit of the original piece show the way.

A rousing, reverent, often brilliant re-creation of a seminal comics character, Batman Begins proves Batman is at home in the 21st century as he was in the 20th.

Out Of The Past is undeniably a film noir, and rightly regarded as one of the genre’s best.

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).

One of the best films of the year.

There's more going on in the film's mundane moments than the excitement its heroes imagine is waiting beyond the horizon. They never find the postcard America they were promised, but there's a lot of beauty, and a lot of America, in the way they keep searching for it, never quite saying what's on their mind as they go.

Hellman gives viewers plenty of time to study every detail, dwelling less on action than on quiet, small-town vistas, rundown diners, and forgotten stretches of Route 66.

By the time of The Searchers, Wayne had toughened to match Ford's darker vision. Redemption is still out there, but it has to be fought for, and sometimes winning it doesn't make anyone happier.

It's Malick's particular genius to make viewers feel like they're seeing the world, with all its beauty and danger, for the first time. [28 Nov. 2007]

For all its nonsensical qualities, it also contains some of Argento's most hallucinatory images and unforgettable setpieces, as always reason enough to watch even when the usual reasons are nowhere to be found.

Encounter remains the definition of timeless, a beautifully shot, heartbreakingly acted, minutely detailed illustration of thoroughly recognizable human frailty.

Working from a script by Edmund North (Patton), taken from a story by Harry Bates, Robert Wise directs the movie with a minimum of spectacle.

Newman picks up speed and symbolic baggage as the movie progresses, and much of the film’s brilliance lies in the way Sarafian balances the two elements.

In three short scenes, this otherwise linear film unexpectedly slips loose from time, portraying a joyous moment, a tragic revelation, and then a long, slow scene that holds both in the balance, letting viewers tip the scale in whichever direction their hearts incline. It's an effect that could only happen in cinema, and it's made all the more stunning by its appearance in a film taken from a by-all-logic-unfilmable book.

If Fury Road were only interested in action, it would still be a stunning achievement, but the film has more on its mind.

Roeg’s film contrasts Western corruption with native goodness, but it’s naïve by design, and ultimately concerned more with the way all innocence passes than with the politics and particulars of any single part of the world.

While it's very funny, Boogie Nights taps into something much deeper with its on-target depiction of the shifting political and social tides of the '70s and '80s and thoughtful relationships between characters. It's a deeply satisfying movie.

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

Anderson has made a strange, entrancing, often darkly funny film that’s at once like nothing he’s ever made and one no one else could make.

A sharp, exciting thriller that beautifully captures a dispirited Europe nowhere near recovered from WWII, Carol Reed's The Third Man is one of those miraculous films that work on every level.

What makes Towers so staggering is the way it brings the full scope of Jackson's adaptation into focus. Without missing a beat in three hours, the film shifts from epic to lyrical and back.

Ozu lets the story of uneasy transitions play out against a Japan that's undergoing changes of its own.

Haneke’s latest is essentially an inquiry into the roots of a certain kind of evil.

The film plays just as easily as a stand-in for the mob mentality that let Joseph McCarthy run amok in his attempt to sniff out every last American with communist sympathies—past, present, and future—until all had conformed to a rigid definition of the right thinking.

Granik has no taste for noir archness, opting for a chilly, shot-on-decaying-locations naturalism that feels as lived-in as Lawrence's performance.

There’s not a wasted moment as The Post packs what could be an overwhelming amount of information into a story that ultimately reveals itself as a Capra-esque morality play with deep roots in recent history and a style that sometimes calls back to the paranoid thrillers of the 1970s.

The liberal Ford and the conservative Wayne had nothing in common politically, but artistically, they're perfectly in sync.

The power to provoke may not always have a smoke-to-fire relationship with greatness but with Scorsese's film, a testament of faith that leaves in the question marks, it undeniably does.

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.

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

It puts human faces on the victims of mass destruction, faces that might easily have been yours or mine, staring down the maw of something we don't understand.

Le Samouraï is a terrific film, at once a tense thriller and a fascinating character study, and only as cold as it looks until its unforgettable final scene.

Tasked with meeting the many requirements necessary for any Avengers movie to work, Whedon checks off all the boxes, then sets about creating new expectations for what a big superhero movie ought to be.

As Cruise clings to the side of the building using malfunctioning equipment, and a sandstorm looms in the distance, the question shifts from whether Bird can direct an action film to whether there's anyone out there who can top him.

Zuckerberg's story ends up feeling bigger than his own life.

It's a film assembled from moments out of time, destined forever to weigh down the boy at their center.

Almodóvar is still one of the few directors worth watching just for how he uses color on the screen. But the pleasures have always run much deeper, and now they run deeper still.

The horror is fueled by sexual frustration, repressed passion, and the everyday anxieties of marriage and urban life, and it plays out in a noir-lit New York filled with everyday people. No fan of gothic castles, Lewton brought horror home with Cat People.

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.

An almost literal slice of life, as its title suggests, Cléo allows Varda to illustrate beautifully the lost world surrounding those too stuck in their own heads—and, more pointedly, too caught up in the role-playing expected of women.

Cholodenko's casually observant style perfectly matches the cast's thoughtful work, though the film ultimately proves more successful at creating messy situations than trying to resolve them.

The generous, sharp performances, especially Garai's, deepen the story's emotional impact, as does Wright's assured, frequently astounding direction.

Herzog instills in his film a hypnotic, dreamlike quality. It may fail as a straightforward story, but its many other virtues allow this version of the Dracula tale to stand beside Murnau's Nosferatu, Tod Browning's Dracula, Hammer's The Horror Of Dracula, and the good bits of Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula as the best committed to film.

Innocence and corruption live together beneath the harmonious, hypocritical surface of an idyllic-seeming American town, and while that situation may seem familiar now, thanks to the films and TV shows Naked Kiss helped inspire—Blue Velvet comes immediately to mind—familiarity has dulled none of the film’s force.

Gordon's feature directorial debut mostly stops being about video-game obsession and turns into a film about what it takes to make it in America.

In The Loop floats above its chaotic world on wave after wave of beautifully profane dialogue.

It's an exercise in metafiction that, while providing grisly fun, never distances viewers. And it's entertaining, while asking the same question of viewers and characters alike: Why come to a place you knew all along was going to be so dark and dangerous?

There's not a weak performance in Secrets And Lies, a fact made more notable by the seeming ease with which the cast performs as an ensemble.

Nobody handles unvarnished interactions quite the way Kiarostami does, and for much of Ten, it's a kind of austere thrill to watch him focus so intently on one aspect of his craft.

Lee at his best, a virtuoso piece of filmmaking that's stylish, substantial, and rich in detail.

Despite years of imitators, sequels (some great, some not so), and edited-for-television broadcasts, Alien has lost none of its power, and the big screen only intensifies its impact.

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.

An ingenious, maddening film inspired by the "many lives of Bob Dylan."

Klayman captures the earlier parts of that story so compellingly that the finale's "to be continued" quality ends up playing into the film's unspoken goal: raising awareness of one man's ongoing attempts to better the world through art.

A knowing comedy, Good Morning isn't one of Ozu's indisputable masterpieces, but it serves as a fine example of everything he does well.

Played with black humor that never gets in the way of the horror, Natali’s film cleverly exploits Dren’s uncanny semi-humanity.

Huston’s tone sometimes feels as conflicted as his protagonist’s, and the overbearing Alex North score doesn’t help. But the decision, possibly helped by the film’s tiny budget, to shoot the novel as a contemporary piece with no period trappings and a minimum of the attendant Southern-gothic clichés pays off beautifully.

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.

The pleasure here, as before, comes from watching skilled professionals team up for a job well done.

The Curt Siodmak-penned, George Waggner-directed film uses werewolf legends as an excuse to put modern minds comfortable living with moral ambiguity into conflict with undeniable evil.

It’s a great-looking film--and an impressive use of 3D--but ultimately, the story makes it memorable.

The film's surface is made up of familiar '60s romantic-comedy elements, from Hepburn's haute wardrobe to the Henry Mancini score to the breezy interaction between the stars. They banter, bicker, and make up with witty repartee. It's what movie love is supposed to look like, which makes it all the more heartbreaking to know that it's destined to sour.

Red Riding’s depiction of the avarice and corruption possible when regions become kingdoms unto themselves feels simultaneously cynical and true.

Yes, it's fundamentally business as usual, but it's the best kind of business as usual, and it finds everyone working in top form. Abrams imports and enlarges "Alias'" smooth, stylish, yet remarkably visceral approach to action, and the actors pack a satisfying amount of drama into the moments between action scenes.

For all its nonsensical qualities, it also contains some of Argento's most hallucinatory images and unforgettable setpieces, as always reason enough to watch even when the usual reasons are nowhere to be found.

As a filmmaker most often comfortable working within a genre, De Palma also knows how to deliver thrills, a skill he displays with remarkable regularity in Sisters, which still looks like one of his best.

The Three Musketeers...is superficially little more than a high-spirited adventure in the form of a string of beautifully executed moments of physical comedy.

Not least among Khan's pleasures is the way it continually veers toward, but never quite crosses, the neutral zone between space opera and interstellar camp. By the end, it becomes simply operatic, with a death scene of surprising emotional power.

It's a film with its own identity, the simple, thrilling story of a handsome god who falls to Earth and reminds everyone what heroes do.

Franciosa and John Saxon (as his agent) turn in amusing performances, and Argento makes some points about the intersection of art, reality, and personality, but the director's stunning trademark setpieces, presented here in a fully restored version, provide the real reason to watch.

I’m still deeply fond of De Laurentiis’ King Kong now, no doubt in part because we’ll never see its likes again. Whatever the failings of its ape effects, they have a tangible quality that even Jackson’s great CGI work couldn’t fake.

Despite the casual homicide and a premise rich with Reagan-era political undertones, the gleeful satire draws inspiration as much from Bugs Bunny as Luis Buñuel.

Eason's twist of fate and too-sudden ending seems as rooted in Washington Heights as the music that pours from the neighborhood's car windows, the smoke that billows from its late-night eateries, and the stoic resignation inscribed on its inhabitants' faces.

A combination of criminal smoothness and overloaded neuroses, Cage pulls off the lead role better than any actor imaginable.

Teeters on the brink of New Age ludicrousness, but it never goes over: Like Kieslowski and others, Shyamalan knows that what makes for lousy metaphysics can make for powerful metaphor, and in the end he creates a deeply, surprisingly affecting film out of a little bit of smoke and brimstone.

Bielinsky's debut is a fine con picture, but at its best, it achieves even more, presenting the profession as a lifestyle with almost existential ramifications.

It isn’t a hopeful story, but it is a story of how committed people have fought and struggled to create the possibility for hope in the future.

Heavy is the kind of deliberately slow-paced character study that allows carefully realized performances to shine.

Shot like a horror film and featuring Olivier as one of the least sympathetic heroes in the Hitchcock canon, Rebecca's smart extrapolation on themes inherited from gothic thrillers and Brontë novels allows the director to begin with a suspenseful romance that barely keeps its subtext under the surface, and smuggle in a story of one woman's immersion into the sexual expectations of her era.

However much the film breaks with Disney tradition, it’s still a winning effort that mixes cuteness with dry wit in the service of a fast-paced, emotionally charged adventure tale.

When the credits roll and the mood breaks, Japanese Story finally reveals itself as more dewy-eyed than deep, but as long as the mood holds, it holds fast.

As specific as the film is to Italy at the turn of the turbulent 1970s, it’s also a film about how power first corrupts, then makes mad those who possess it.

Like Golding's novel, Flies wears its allegorical impulses on its sleeve, but, also like Golding's novel, it rings uncomfortably true.

An early shot of two turtles crawling through the classroom establishes the film's deliberate pace, and To Be And To Have benefits from the care.

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

The filmmaking is so strong and the scope so large it helps obscure the fairly simple moral at the heart of the script by Zvyagintesev and Oleg Negin.

Working from a script by Richard Matheson that spins Poe’s story to feature length, Corman, cinematographer Floyd Crosby (father of David), and composer and exotica icon Les Baxter create a hallucinatory swirl of a movie that has the feel of an especially sharp nightmare.

Already as dark as London soot, the comedy hardly needed work to bring it in line with the Coen brothers' sensibility, but the remake moves to a beat of its own, one unexpectedly in sync with the gospel music dominating its soundtrack.

With its sharp wit and its portrayal of how broken families sometimes fit back together, Lilo would make a fine summer double feature alongside "About A Boy," another film that stays funny while dancing around a tiny abyss.

"I knew the children here had something to say," Goldberg says in voiceover early in the film. That statement may sound slightly maudlin, but the film that follows is anything but.

Jeong's movie is at its best when it forgets about everything but the interactions of its cast, whether they're together or communicating via one of Cat's cleverly orchestrated cell-phone scenes.

Herzog is still the only person who could have made Grizzly Man. His admiration for Treadwell has its limits, but he understands, better than most directors, what it means to follow dreams into the belly of the beast.

It could all be done much more efficiently, but any other approach would lose Tsai's unique mix of stone-faced comedy and dewy-eyed lyricism.

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.