Keith Uhlich

And though not all of Lonergan's conceits work on a scene-by-scene basis (an upper-crust womanizer played by Jean Reno skews a bit too close to caricature), the film has a cumulative power-solidified by a devastating opera-house finale-that's staggering. This is frayed-edges filmmaking at its finest.

Filmmakers from Jacques Rivette to Hou Hsiao-hsien have treated the City of Light like Alice’s rabbit hole; writer-director Hong Sang-soo similarly embraces the fantasy, but goes one step further in this extraordinary character study by fully erasing the line that separates the actual from the fictional.

Gallo and Dalle are sublimely tragic figures; the scene in which Shane stalks around Notre Dame like Frankenstein unleashed is a pitch-perfect encapsulation of the way the film plays with and deepens movie-monster archetypes.

This time around, the director documents a 2011 Young solo show in Toronto (the musician's birthplace), but in an intentionally fractured way.

Nichols has said that the idea for the film emerged from a free-floating anxiety that he sensed in the world at large, the feeling that everything we treasure in life could be lost in an instant. That sensation permeates this strikingly original movie - especially its enigmatic mind-fuck of a finale, which will haunt you for several lifetimes.

Indeed, you leave the film feeling like Wiseman has given you a glimpse of one of those ephemeral ports in a storm to which all of us retreat at times.

It is the richly evocative performances of Marion (aggressive yet enticing) and Merhar (wearing world-weariness like an aged suit) that cut deepest.

You might actually say the documentary itself is Mohassess’s final canvas, so infused it becomes with his alternately infuriating and infectious personality.

But when has a performer as fully and uniquely sacrificed himself to the moving-picture cause as De Niro? He leeches LaMotta of soul and conscience, making him a purely physical creature sculpted in sinew for the glory days, then padded up in lard for the declining years.

These characters are more than what we see on the surface, and it's thanks to Leigh's rigorous yet generous eye that we never just gawk at the drama.

Its stunningly composed images showing how Isaac is himself something of a ghost-given to staring off into the distance, being condescended to by those around him, a man perpetually outside the times. What he needs is to take that one extra step toward his spectral siren; the scene in which he does so might be one of the most exhilarating visions of death's sweet embrace ever filmed.

It’s the creature’s instinctual murder spree that makes the immediate impression, but that would be nothing without the simmering tensions among the human counterparts. [30th anniversary release]

You could hardly ask for a more beautiful vision of souls in transit.

What you see and hear always seems perfectly natural, even if you can't exactly say why. Who needs words when you have cinema?

The arc of La Flor’s first three episodes, in particular, suggests someone continually working and reworking the film of their dreams, adjusting the tone, the approach, the narrative twists and the emotional intensity on the fly.

The film is at its most potent in the scenes where human frailty and the specter of injustice come more elliptically to the surface.

This is Young in his playroom, grabbing his toys at random while indulging his every antimelodic whim, and Demme’s off-the-cuff approach makes for the perfect aesthetic complement.

The meanings of Close-Up shift, subtly and profoundly, with every viewing; the only certainty is that its rewards are boundless.

Schimberg confidently blurs the lines between fantasy and reality (more than once a scene that appears to be real is actually fiction and vice versa), though never to the point that it detracts from the people onscreen.

No one makes movies like Peter Strickland.

Stephen Maing's documentary about the NYPD's illegal policing quotas and other discriminatory practices gets the blood boiling.

The film attests to George Miller’s enduring aptitude for utilizing the ridiculous to achieve the sublime.

Marielle Heller takes a script that many filmmakers would turn into cringe-inducing treacle and interrogates the sentimental trappings.

The film is an illustration of the transition from the ethical pliancy of youth to the moral discernment of adulthood.

Scorsese knows what his audience is hoping for: glory days, resurrected. But he also understands the impossibility of anyone being exactly as they once were. So he weaves that longing into both The Irishman‘s text and its technique.

The genre trappings are familiar, but this isn’t any old horse opera.

More than any other Jim Jarmusch film, Father Mother Sister Brother is haunted by mortality and the inevitable passage of time.

Think of Chris Nash’s film as Béla Tarr doing an unholy doc-fiction hybrid about Crystal Lake.