Keith Uhlich

The oft-hilarious push-and-pull between director and subject - Williams wryly notes that the film is turning into "the Steve and Paulie Show" - effectively hacks away at the celebrity-enthusiast divide. By the end of this perceptive dual portrait, both men are content to merely be human.

The jaw is meant to and does often drop, and not just because of McFarland. Two words: Ja Rule.

This potent emotional undercurrent goes a long way toward counteracting the movie’s clumsier moments, carrying us aloft to a finale that, in its strange mix of trepidation and tenderness, is truly sublime.

A moving meditation on history, knowledge and mortality.

This is in many ways a white-knuckle brand extension for Honnold above all else. Still, the film frequently treads into knotty territory.

Ferrara’s unconventional methods only manage to serve Chelsea on the Rocks, his loving portrait of Manhattan’s boho landmark, the Chelsea Hotel.

The mostly dialogue-free middle section is a scare-film master class - and when a becalmed smile does finally cross his lips, it's in the most giddily mordant of circumstances. As Arthur embraces the darkness, so does the darkness embrace us.

The film isn't blinded by Candy's beauty and celebrity; it digs critically, if still empathetically, beneath.

A 25-words-or-less pitch for The Day He Arrives - shot in luminous black-and-white - might go something like: "Hong Sang-soo does Groundhog Day."

Scorsese, that sly spiritualist, is out to make us sick on commerce and greed run rampant. He moves us beyond the allure of avarice so that we might take better stock of ourselves. What starts as a piggish paean becomes, by the end, an invigorating purge.

Del Toro and Amalric’s concentrated performances — the former resigned and shell-shocked, the latter agitated and servile — have an anguished grandeur.

Spelling may not be Quentin Tarantino’s forte, but his grasp of language (both verbal and visual) is peerless.

What follows is pulp made near-profound through director Jonathan Mostow’s sure-handed guidance.

An Arabic-German coproduction, it is a rare movie shot entirely in Saudi Arabia, which has no cinema industry to speak of, and the first feature by a female filmmaker from that country. Forbidden from mixing with the men in her crew, Al-Mansour often directed via walkie-talkie from the back of a van.

Thompson's imagination-she's also the screenwriter-knows no bounds, and she does a brilliant job of connecting the fantastical elements to the sobering realities of life during wartime.

This is prime Woody Allen - insightful, philosophical and very funny.

The effort is commendable and the complicated emotions of the piece (for a place and a people) come through loud and clear. To paraphrase the great Ms. Russell, the movie has the power to make you laugh and the power to break your heart in half.

At one point, Tsemel describes herself as a member of an occupying force and defines her mission in life as to somehow rectify the resultant power imbalance. The only way to get there, as the film's pointed final image suggests, is to keep on trudging.

It will test your faith in humanity, but Hersonski's film is nonetheless a brilliant reminder of the importance of bearing witness.

The sights are gorgeous—a seamless mix of archival imagery and impressively rendered digital views of our galaxy—and the science is, to layman’s eyes and ears, more than credible.

End of the Century is at its best whenever Castro keeps things thematically and temperamentally woozy.

By the time the beast spreads his wings to full span, soaring skyward toward a vaguely Spielbergian moon, you’re in the kind of breathless awe that so few current cinematic superproductions are able to provide.

By the end, you feel curiously closer to the performer and her process without having any clue how you got there. It's exhilarating.

The creepiness builds with symphonic precision until reality truly is indistinguishable from fantasy.

It’s high time Pedro had a lark. The buoyant and bawdy I’m So Excited plays like a to-hell-with-it-all riff from this seminal Spanish auteur, an excuse to gather his stock company for a breezy 90-minute party.

Toward the end of the film, a few hard-hitting cuts between young and old brings the title's meaning home: These children have an inescapable life of drudgery before them, and there's little likelihood it will change anytime soon.

This lifelong Tintin fan was more than pleased, even while having to acknowledge that the movie lacks the subtle state-of-the-world commentary that Hergé often smuggled into his creation.

Even at a mere 75 minutes, Silent Souls is thrillingly dense and allusive, and the elegiac finale maintains the overall air of mystery while beautifully bringing all the disparate threads together.

Jordan’s poetic sensibilities more than make up for any flaws. His uncanny aptitude for conjuring up resonantly metaphorical images — from a pointed fingernail pushing toward a vein to a waterfall turning into a literal river of blood — proves there’s plenty of life left in this undead genre.

As engrossing as it is maddening, Pierre Thoretton's documentary on the sale of Yves Saint Laurent's extensive art collection is perched somewhere between a sanded-edged official portrait and a keen examination of affluence run amok.

Losier has made a quietly revolutionary work that treats a pair of people on the fringes with the decency all humans deserve.

The impressively lean script by Alex Garland (28 Days Later) is shorn of almost all superfluity beyond a few dud Schwarzeneggeresque kiss-offs, while Anthony Dod Mantle's sensational widescreen cinematography harkens back to the tension-inducing inventiveness of early John Carpenter.

Polanski has made a genre piece with a verve and vitality that’s in sadly short supply.

The tone this time out is primarily comic.

It’s almost impossible to describe the narrative specifics of The Past without making the movie seem ridiculously hammy. Indeed, several twists involving Samir, a dry cleaner with plenty of his own troubles, tip a bit into hoary melodramatics.

There’s a sense that all the thematic messiness is intentional, a way for Jia to diagnose the ills of a country whose economic and social fabric is wilting under the effects of rapid modernization.

Like :Carnage,: it’s a bit of a minor lark until a deliciously grotesque finale pushes it into the realm of such kinkily profound Polanski films as: Cul-de-sac: (1966) and "The Tenant" (1976). By that point, you can’t help but submit to the perversity.

The man himself has rarely been profiled without noticeable reluctance, though documentarians Molly Bernstein and Alan Edelstein delve fairly deep by allowing their subject to guide them where he may.

If there's a misstep here, it would be in the character of camp medic Maj. Clipton (James Donald). His overwrought dialogue---especially some Heston-like cries of "Madness!" during the finale---is too much of an on-the-nose contrast to the story's necessarily clinical existentialism. It slightly dilutes the film's piercing grandeur, but the nit is easily enough picked.

Bellocchio counters these flaws with an energetically combative aesthetic (he makes you feel like you’re riding out a sociopolitical tempest, careening between perspectives) and an overarching humanism that gives equal weight to the many feelings stirred up by this hot-button situation.

Imagine if Frederick Wiseman and David Lynch had a bastard child, and you'll get a sense of the movie's off-kilter aesthetic, a potent and pointed mix of firsthand observation and surreal flights of fancy.

It’s nice to see this great filmmaker sculpting something that feels genuinely revelatory. That’s not to say that the 3-D Goodbye to Language is always an easy sit.

Sensitive parents shouldn't fret; this is the kind of grim fairy tale, equal parts midnight-movie macabre and family-round-the-hearth compassionate, that scars in all the right ways.

You still leave hoping he ultimately found peace and enlightenment, two things he graciously gave to those of us who hung on his every word.

No side overwhelms the other in the back-and-forth; you feel more like a profoundly uncertain moment is being marked, with little concrete sense of the outcome beyond mankind's enduring hunger for moving pictures.

In comparison with near-impenetrable Garrel efforts like "Regular Lovers" (2005) and "Frontier of the Dawn" (2008), Jealousy cuts straight to the heart.

The real beauty of Maidentrip is how it downplays the go-for-glory aspect of the tale (this adolescent mariner’s aim is to become the youngest person ever to sail around the world) to focus on more earthly matters like the isolation and loneliness of the voyage or the lingering effects of the divorce that irrevocably shaped Dekker’s life.

It would be risible if Ozon’s hand didn’t remain so steady and confident throughout, all the way up to a complicatedly upbeat conclusion that recreates the Christian Annunciation with the straightest of faces.

Mileage will vary from viewer to viewer as to whether this singularly eccentric movie is ultimately illuminating or enervating.

This fascinatingly knotty movie never becomes a facile screed against the powers that be. Instead, it plays as a more relaxed and leisurely requiem for a slowly vanishing way of life, with sounds and images-a time-lapse contemplation of the cosmos is in the running for scene of the year-that are as mesmerizing as they are subtly pointed.

Godly as the monks are, they are still human-which makes their ultimate sacrifice all the more devastating.

What matters more is recognizing Post Tenebras Lux’s kinship with a strain of impressionistic autobiographical cinema practiced by filmmakers such as Andrei Tarkovsky (The Mirror) and Terrence Malick (The Tree of Life) in which every sound and image seems to spring straight from the psyche.

The point, of course, is to get lost. As the soft-spoken sage himself notes, “The world is a very puzzling place.” What a pleasure it is, the film suggests, to be perpetually befuddled.

A movie with an unflinchingly tough heart.

When the action eventually switches to an Austrian rehab retreat, Dalle gets to make like the best of the Old Hollywood divas and waste away with devastating reserve - an icon quietly, crushingly crashing to earth.

This is a tumultuous muse story in which the artist and his inspiration just happen to be blood relations.

Do you like movies about gladiators? Well, lend me your ears: The Eagle will more than gratify your sword-and-sandal cravings.

Even the stoniest face will crack when Aladeen sums up our cultural moment in a rousing, uproarious climactic speech worthy of both Chaplin and Team America.

It would be a Christmas miracle save for one lump of coal: an ear-shattering Justin Bieber song over the end credits. Gotta sell something to the kids at Yuletide.

Though Stranger by the Lake leans a bit too heavily on its long-take, slow-cinema bona fides, there’s a clear purpose to Guiraudie’s rigorous perspective. He’s out to unearth the very potent (and often terrifying) emotions underlying every explicit act, sexual or otherwise.

Strasberg’s doe-eyed dedication to her role and Douglas Slocombe’s brilliant black-and-white cinematography counterbalance the film’s increasingly ridiculous plot turns, which nonetheless have a crude, jaw-dropper effectiveness.

Not a bad setup for a cops-and-robbers thriller, and in the hands of action-movie maestro Johnnie To, the result comes very close to greatness.

Too many movies come to us as preordained cult objects - this is the real deal.

Anderson's romantic fantasia is after something much more complicated and profound-an ever-renewing balance between the hopes of youth and the disappointments of age.

What most distinguishes the redo is the often remarkable use of 3-D: Miike turns the format's inherent limitations, especially the tendency toward visual murkiness, to his advantage, fully immersing us in a world suffused with moral and ethical rot.

Chomet builds this beguiling symphony of sadness to a poignant finale that does ample justice to the many layers of Tati's tale, both in text and out.

The director’s latest—a lighthearted romance set in 1920s Germany and France—won’t do much to sway proponents or detractors from their own perspectives, though taken at face value, it’s one of Allen’s most charmingly conceived and performed efforts.

Watching the formerly spry Harris struggle to maintain a normal life (he's frequently glassy-eyed and jacked on painkillers) emphasizes the underappreciated sacrifices our men and women in uniform make in the name of vaguely defined ideals.

Delon and Crenna paint an idealized portrait of masculine camaraderie, one that’s exposed at the end of Melville’s bracing last testament as a soul-shattering illusion.

It's in between the lines that this movingly perceptive film scores a TKO.

The movie does have an air of cautiousness about it, trying so hard to be a respectful, definitive statement on WWII (and often succeeding) that it sometimes feels cadaverous.

It's easy to think of comics, especially time-tested ones like Rivers, as mechanical laugh-generators. Stern and Sundberg allow her to reveal the deep-rooted humanity of those ever-present quips, and the effect is humbling.

This is truly De Palma–ville, and the filmmaker’s remake of Alain Corneau’s tale of corporate bloodletting, "Love Crime" (2010), is a welcome return to the carnal shockers that he does so well.

Sensation trumps cogitation-unsurprising in a Hollywood production-which doesn't negate the enduring allure of this beautiful bauble.

Yun is quite simply spectacular as a woman who holds steadfastly on to her dignity and empathy, even in the face of unspeakable tragedy.

The film improves upon reflection, raising, as it does, some knotty questions about originality in art and in life, as well as provocatively positing that even a copy of a copy of a copy has the potential to move hearts and minds.

One thing’s certain: This is no swoony love story. It intoxicates all the same.

Taken on its own fun-over-philosophy terms, this is an exercise in tone-shifting virtuosity.

Fassbender and his multifaceted allure helps counteract any thematic or conceptual shakiness, as was the case in McQueen's highly uneven debut, "Hunger." One thing's for sure: McQueen has found his De Niro, and he better keep him close.

Leigh does a stellar job of showing how these events seep into the unaware girl's everyday existence - almost all of the film's sequences are photographed in precisely composed, inherently surreal single shots.

New Yorkers and those who've been following the neighborhood's plight know exactly how this ends; at the very least, Paravel and Sniadecki have preserved the memory of what was. Sometimes, that's the most you can do.

A cut above most nonfiction explorations of Katrina, thanks to the ever-empathetic Demme's talent for showcasing the uniquely human qualities of every person he films.

The movie might very well have come off as a too-clinical experiment if it weren't for Leo, who maintains a rivetingly mysterious aura even as her character's behavior becomes increasingly bizarre.

The film builds to a shattering climax that works precisely because all involved fully embrace the melodrama. Be sure to bring Kleenex.

As in his much-lauded "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," the latest feature from Palme d’Or–winning filmmaker Cristian Mungiu takes a rigorous approach to the material. But where the previous film — about two women seeking a back-alley abortion — was a reductively dour slog, Beyond the Hills feels more caustically all-encompassing.

It never feels as if we're watching a brand-name cash-grab, but instead as if we're participating in an endlessly imaginative afternoon of play.

Every monster-movie archetype is here, from nerdy scientists (Charlie Day and Burn Gorman) to hard-stare leaders (Idris Elba) with a penchant for 11th-hour inspirational speeches. (Watching the former Stringer Bell bellow about “canceling the apocalypse!” is one of those great, giddy pleasures you didn’t know you needed.)

This is an exquisite portrait of a family navigating the wreckage imparted to them by one of their own.

The story is kept at a stress-inducing simmer, with occasional surges of operatic emotion.

That liminal space between the peaks and the valleys of a person’s life is what Michael Mann is most interested in exploring.

Bradley Cooper understands that a message is only as resonant as its messenger, so he surrounds himself with collaborators, old and new, who can sell even the hoariest cliché.

In Claire Denis’s film, sex is the great equalizer, or at least the act that allows people to defer taking a firm moral or ethical stance.

If there’s humor to be found in some of the particulars, it’s never to judge or to poke fun, but to revel in the very real delights of consensual sexual roleplay.

The drama is all surface, in other words. And what a surface, for sure. A literal life and death struggle that’s exceedingly of this moment. Yet the best documentaries tend to have formidable underlying narratives working in concert with their overlying ones.

Through it all Sembène maintains a steady, humanist touch.

It’s not hard to parallel David/Dickens’s head-spinningly intricate descriptors with Iannucci’s own prodding, poetically vulgar rhetoric.

The Looney Tunes nature of Rambo’s murder spree tempers much of the script’s ideological offense.

For all the unbridled destruction, Godzilla Minus One remains perversely light and fun, a Roland Emmerich-like disaster flick helmed by an actual talent.