Ken Fox

Swank's nuanced performance is remarkable and it's a powerful film.

Thom Andersen's idiosyncratic, three-hour masterpiece is both a dazzling work of film criticism and a fascinating piece of urban anthropology.

British director Shane Meadows' strongest film to date is also his most personal: A stylish fictionalization of his own wayward youth, spent among a group of working-class skinheads in Thatcher's England.

A beautiful, slow-motion melodrama.

The results are a harrowingly intimate connection with a torn, tormented father, and an uncommonly powerful film.

Dabbed with sentimental touches, the film nevertheless avoids facile victim psychologizing and pulls no punches.

Once again brushing aside critical drubbings and public indifference, determined independent auteur Henry Jaglom follows up the abysmal "Let's Go Shopping" with something far better: an old-school Hollywood cautionary tale about -- what else? -- Hollywood.

Leaves you wanting much more.

Not surprisingly, we're left with characters that feel only half sketched and fail to resonate on their own -- but onto which much can be read by Hou's most ardent fans -- in a poetic looking film that's ultimately as inflated and empty as the balloon itself.

It's a humbling way of life, and one that, as Varda discovers in this wonderful, 80-minute essay, has survived in surprising ways.

Bardem's performance is simply shattering.

The action come fast and thick, and the sentimentality reaches near-operatic proportions.

Homelessness is all too familiar to many inhabitants of the world's wealthiest cities, but rarely has the situation seemed so hopeless, or its victims so desperate.

Polanski's film is an unqualified success both dramatically and artistically.

Akin achieves a peaceful balance here –- alongside the death and seemingly senseless tragedy, there’s also a kind of reassuring equilibrium.

Broomfield's film is didactic, awkwardly acted by the cast of former Marines who are meant to lend the film credibility, and clumsily inflammatory.

The kind of brainy human comedy that only this formidable French auteur seems capable of making.

Poignant and sometimes downright hilarious, much of the film unfolds in the small area outside the arena -- an "offside" penalty box for women who just won't behave.

Apatow's clever comedy is a romance in reverse, and it works.

Ghobadi has little use for sentimentality, and never flinches from the fate of these children.

Exquisitely crafted drama.

Superb drama from New York-based filmmakers Ryan Flek and Anna Boden.

An exciting dramatization of the strange events that marked the turning of the legal tide against Big Tobacco, and a particularly dark moment in the annals of CBS News.

Despite the exotic locale, this is a coming-of-age tale that should be familiar to anyone raised on the tales of Jack London or Robert Louis Stevenson.

It's a fascinating film, simultaneously enthralling, infuriating and guaranteed to make viewers ask how such a perversion of the political process could be taking place in America.

Extraordinary documentary.

The writing is sharp and often blithely cynical, although not above using a shooting star to put a lump in the throat. The tone, however, is at times dangerously uncertain.

While maintaining the appearance of clinical objectivity, this sad, occasionally horrifying but often inspiring film is among Wiseman's warmest.