Kenneth Turan

Impeccably made and uncompromisingly adult, Claude Chabrol's A Girl Cut in Two is unquestionably the work of a master.

Adventurous, provocative, even daring.

The thrilling documentary Dawson City: Frozen Time is indescribable not because it's ambiguous (it's totally straightforward) but because it does so many things so beautifully it is hard to know where to begin.

Made by a first-time feature director working with a microscopic budget and a tiny, 11-year-old protagonist, it’s a 72-minute wonder, a self-assured, gently mysterious little film that is hypnotic in unexpected ways.

It's the film's glowing visual qualities, a striking performance by Denzel Washington and the elegant control Carl Franklin has over it all that create the most exotic crime entertainment of the season.

Despite the presence of a college-aged siren that Allen’s married, fiftysomething character becomes intoxicated with, this assured, penetrating film is no sentimental homage to May-December infatuations. Rather, Husbands and Wives is a lacerating comedy about love turned sour, a painful, deeply pessimistic yet somehow funny look at how caring relationships wind up as destructive emotional dead-ends.

The most convincing war movie ever made.

Nearly three hours long, and deliberately paced at that, this first feature ever in the Inuit language is a demanding experience. But the rewards for those who risk the journey are simply extraordinary.

Set in an enchanting locale where the potential for magic is everywhere, this impeccable animated film puts its complete trust in the spirit of make-believe.

Masterfully put-together, made with confidence, intelligence and command.

Though it takes the risk of appearing too quiet too long, Roma and its melding of the personal with a glimpse of a society veering toward collapse is incontestably persuasive, a film whose like we are not likely to see again.

This delicious satire about aging hipsters and their discontents is everything we've come to expect from the best of Noah Baumbach, as well as several things more.

Nebraska offers something deeper and more mature, the ability to make us care about its characters and their story on a different level than Payne has given us before.

This is a film that insinuates itself deeply into our awareness. It's that rare pulp story with something on its mind, an unnerving, socially conscious thriller with a killer sense of narrative drive.

The Shape of Water is a wonder to behold. Magical, thrilling and romantic to the core, a sensual and fantastical fairy tale with moral overtones, it’s a film that plays by all the rules and none of them, going its own way with fierce abandon.

Part avant-garde art film, part amusing but morbid fairy tale, it is a delightfully ghoulish holiday musical that displays more inventiveness in its brief 75 minutes than some studios can manage in an entire year.

Inside Out manages to be honest and unafraid but never cheaply sentimental where emotion is concerned, evoking a largeness of spirit whose ability to be moving sneaks up and takes us by surprise.

A revelatory, strikingly emotional look at a complex, troubled, enormously gifted man.

An intense, nihilistic thriller as well as a model of implacable storytelling, this is a film you can't stop watching even though you very much wish you could. That's because No Country escorts you through a world so pitilessly bleak, "you put your soul at hazard," as one character says, to be part of it.

As the current Emma testifies, Jane Austen continues to knock them dead but nothing beats the high gloss of impeccable studio craftsmanship that elevates this Laurence Olivier-Greer Garson vehicle. [03 Apr 2020, p.E1]

His is a triumph of pure filmmaking, a pitiless, unrelenting, no-excuses war movie so thoroughly convincing it's frequently difficult to believe it is a staged re-creation.

The Ghost Writer is the kind of impeccable adult entertainment, able to alternate edge-of-your-seat episodes with bleakly comic moments, that Hitchcock used to specialize in and that Polanski himself realized so successfully in "Chinatown" and "Rosemary's Baby."

[A] crackerjack thriller, at once brooding, claustrophobic and unbearably tense.

As essential in its own way as Anton Karas' celebrated zither work was to "The Third Man," Lola's music is perfectly suited to the film's aims and just about addictive in its throbbing, insinuating rhythms.

This is a police procedural, if you will, about what's been called the artistic crime of the century.

The Invisible Woman is an exceptional film about love, longing and regret. It's further proof, if proof were needed, that classic filmmaking done with passion, sensitivity and intelligence results in cinema fully capable of blowing you away.

Perhaps the director's most touching, most elegiac work yet, Million Dollar Baby is a film that does both the expected and the unexpected, that has the nerve and the will to be as pitiless as it is sentimental.

The fact that this kind of serious material ends up playing puckishly funny as well as poignant is a tribute both to Coppola and to her do-or-die decision to cast Murray in the lead role.