Kenneth Turan

You can't have Rushmore without Max, and though Anderson obviously planned it this way, the kid is finally too off-putting to tolerate.

Film has always been especially effective it portraying what it can feel like, what it can mean to be in love, and My Golden Days is right up there with the best of them.

This is a director's film, and Ostlund knows precisely the effects he is after. This filmmaker is in control at each and every moment, and does he ever know what he is doing.

At once too neat and too messy, but films like this are too rare to leave it at that. Ragged but ambitious, it retains a core of genuine emotion -- this picture is doing the best it can, and although that may not be everything, it ought to count for something.

A genial look at what happens when a wannabe becomes a headliner, Rock Star only stumbles when it decides it has to deliver a lesson about What's Really Important.

A story that won't go away, won't leave you alone, won't let you feel at ease. Intensely dramatic, filled with elevated heroism, crass self-interest and blatant stupidity, it's a paradigmatic narrative of our tendentious, turbulent times.

Larson has done exceptional work before... but the way she has taken the deepest of dives into this complex, difficult material is little short of astonishing. The reality and preternatural commitment she brings to Ma is piercingly honest from start to finish, as scaldingly emotional a performance as anyone could wish for.

It’s the rare film that decades later can seem as timely as it was the day it came out. The searing documentary The Murder of Fred Hampton is such a film.

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 ability to get inside hysteria and obsession, the skill to make us feel sensations as intensely as its protagonists, is what makes “Creatures” memorable.

Made with gusto, daring and visual brilliance, this stripped-down, jazzed-up “Richard” pulsates with bloody life, a triumph of both modernization and popularization.

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 film's plot may have more holes than one of Tequila's innumerable victims, but when a visual stylist like Woo is at his peak, no one even thinks of caring.[30 Apr 1993, p.F6]

These stranger-than-fiction tales, piled one on top of the other in the most gripping way, not only mesmerize us, they also point up another of Last Days in Vietnam's provocative points, that the chaos surrounding the evacuation was, in effect, the entire war in microcosm.

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.

A true storyteller, able to easily mix and match moods in a playful and audacious manner, he (Anderson) is a filmmaker definitely worth watching, both now and in the future.

Too mannered and weird around the edges to be convincing.

Observational with a vengeance, more an art piece than a conventional motion picture, Manakamana is simple in conception, but the reactions it evokes in viewers will be complex and multifaceted.

It's a privilege and a pleasure to be present in a sacred space where the human and the mystical effortlessly intertwine, and we are in Werner Herzog's debt for that great gift.

The Red Turtle is a visually stunning poetic fable, but there’s more on its mind than simply beauty.

While governments and politicians dither about global warming, the world’s undersea coral is moving toward a devastating death. If you don’t believe that, or don’t think it really matters, Chasing Coral presents the evidence with beauty, intelligence and a surprising amount of emotion.

With performances that will raise the hairs on the back of your head, it's a film that knows the private geography of love, grief and obsession.

It's one terrific film, as smart, thoughtful and emotionally involving as just about anything that's out there.

Robert Duvall's performance as a Holy Roller who shakes off his secular life to become a man simply known as “the Apostle” is a masterpiece of emotion.

A thrilling adventure of the spirit. Austere yet provocative, this is not only a film about faith, it also has faith that the power generated by complex moral decisions can be as unstoppable as any runaway locomotive.

The most accurate assault against the media age since "Network," To Die For's killer lines and wicked sensibility are given added poignancy by the off-center, sensitive performance of Joaquin Phoenix, River's younger brother, the only person more deluded about Suzanne than she is about herself.

As always with Newman, we never quite feel he could have been as bad a guy as the script insists he was, he remains the reason to see Nobody's Fool. The film's various difficulties inevitably fade from memory, but his performance lingers, as the great ones always do.

As its name promises, The Great Beauty is drop-dead gorgeous, a film that is luxuriously, seductively, stunningly cinematic. But more than intoxicating imagery is on director Paolo Sorrentino's mind, a lot more.