Lisa Alspector

A scene set inside the chicken-pie-making machinery proves that the Rube Goldberg formula is infallible.

This surreal, subversive teen drama tanked at the box office but has since become a cult favorite, prompting this new release with 20 minutes of additional footage.

Some powerful dialogue.

It's easy to suspend disbelief and embrace this historically creative fiction, whose clever relationship to what's known and what's unresolved is part of what makes it so intriguing and so romantic.

Intending to study the degree to which social class would determine the subjects' destinies, the series actually documents something more filmable--the degree to which the subjects believed social class would determine their destinies and the degree to which they believe it has.

Without becoming manipulative, sensational, or trite, the movie lets us know what became of the animals -- many dogs and one stowaway cat -- on the ill-fated ship.

A sparing use of exterior shots during the mesmerizing buildup to the match heightens their impact, while invasively tight close-ups put the actors to the test.

Almost cagily creating understated drama from high-stakes reality.

Mitchell, who also directed and wrote the screenplay, originally created this glorious rock opera for the stage with composer-lyricist Stephen Trask.

Often coming across as simultaneously out of control and self-possessed, Borchardt can't have been an easy target, but the filmmakers seem to have nailed him.

The luminous images--as much the filmmakers' as the painter's--are occasionally transcendent.

A movie whose story may be even more innovative than the superreal solidity of the animated characters.

A wonderfully complex examination of sexual and material politics that's full of bravely provocative, gently funny, and warmly human encounters.

The treatment of this touchy material is impressive, neither gratuitous nor mincing, but this satirical comedy doesn't really go anywhere.

The visuals are wild, the sound track has the audacity to underscore the subtext instead of just echoing the obvious, the comedy is irreverent and occasionally slapstick, and the metaphorical details are consistently strong.

Doesn't try too hard to be anything other than a vicarious experience that makes you crave the satisfaction you know you'll get when the hero gets his revenge.

The stylized physiques and movements of the characters in this exciting animated musical-romance-adventure are at once realist and fantastic.

A hopeless romantic meets a hapless realist in this gritty, elegant drama brimming with spontaneous-seeming close-ups.

An unprecedented friendship between a monster and a child leads to an amazing chase scene.

Dizdar inventively examines bigotry, combining daring humor and hyperbole, dark realism and shining idealism.

Scenes of ingenious slapstick violence.

This 1968 Beatles musical gets somewhat plot heavy near the end, but it's a marvel of innocence and free association, blending several animation techniques in a loose narrative full of gentle bad puns and flowing visual segues.

Even the melodramatic score can't ruin the essentially serious tenor of this old-style non-self-referential horror story, whose characterizations are unassailable--stereotypical shtick you buy because the performers are working so hard and their faces are so skillfully lit.

Sumptuously hued in its emotional and visual tones, this drama is also a fairy tale, its plot contrivances beautifully justified by its minimalism.

With the devout collaboration of the cast, Williams blurs the boundary between experience and storytelling as if the distinction were not only irrelevant but presumptuous.

Full of adventure, spectacle, light romance, and the kind of suspense that doesn't require an unpredictable outcome to make your spine tingle.

Subplots are woven stealthily into the story, taking the pressure off the central drama, allowing it to be affecting rather than melodramatic, and heightening the atmosphere of the lush Louisiana setting.

Using archly staged interviews and reconstructions that draw attention to the components of the documentary form, Morris does justice to the complexity of hot-button issues by suggesting several layers of subtext at once, portraying the articulate Leuchter as both rational and prone to rationalize.

Depp conveys his character's ambivalence and ambiguity with utter conviction, and though the annoying score tries to throw Pacino's monologues over the top, his persuasive, low-key performance puts the violins in their place.

One girl's melancholy (beautifully expressed by actress Kerry Washington) is a response to a fractured romance.

One problem leads to another, but because the children's points of view are so powerfully rendered, the plot of this elegant and lightly magical-realist 1997 drama never seems merely coincidental.

Spheeris, who includes her offscreen questions, evidently sympathizes with her subjects, though this doesn't stop her from pointing out their hypocrisy.

It's an inspired pairing. Wilson is electric as he seduces Chan into a partnership in this self-consciously crafted western, whose cleverness is only part of what makes it so funny.

The plots of animated features are often excuses for visual showboating, but here the lilting story line, based on west African folktales, complements the alternately sumptuous and austere images.

The bitterly beautiful black-and-white industrial and residential landscapes reflect the sense of anonymity felt by the characters.

Possibly the most daring and honest drama about sexuality I've ever seen.

Kempner's lighthearted yet not apolitical collage conveys how Greenberg's success as an athlete in the 30s and 40s contradicted an ethnic stereotype.

Deep and textured drama.

This wonderful 1997 comedy--about an unlikely group of men who are determined to strip to music rather than get day jobs--is genuinely effective at inverting gender stereotypes and other assumptions, and it's not the slightest bit heavy-handed.

Despite a melodramatic score that at times seems almost facetious, the movie's tone is sober and sincere, its unlikely ending persuasive.

Though passionate, doesn't pity or flatter the rank and file.

The narrative--a complex structure of flashbacks and shifts in perspective that's part inspirational story, part courtroom drama, part character study, part exposé--never makes it seem that history is being oversimplified.

A delicate balance of fantasy and realism, caricature and character study that isn't driven primarily by its plot or even the development of its protagonist.

It's scary and hilarious, with a magical, nonrealist tone, and it emphasizes physical comedy as much as disturbing, beautifully integrated metaphors.

Shtick isn't all this movie has to offer.

Jensen's use of the conventions of documentary making -- and his undermining of them in ways both bold and subtle -- seems too canny and consistent for the form. Yet the harder I try to decide whether this is a documentary or a parody, the more I wonder why it matters.

Powerful, funny romantic drama.

Maya Angelou?s very deliberate blocking of the actors charges each movement and line of dialogue with emotion, and the expressive combinations of colors and textures in the settings convey a palpable sense of the environments in which the characters undergo big but believable changes.

Deftly realist character study.

Much of this fractured drama and dark fantasy takes place inside the mind of Charlie (Futterman),

Scenes that should have been uproarious are weaker than many of the movie's smaller moments.

Realist fairy tale.

All the macho men who let down their guard for Blaustein can be proud of the loving deconstruction of violence-as-entertainment that resulted.

The wavering style and tone fragment the movie, undermining both characters' development, though each retains her power as a symbol.

Rodriguez's unironic directing brings out the complexity of characters painfully aware of the stereotypes they represent and allows this gripping, scary, and romantic movie to offer more than factoids about other movies the filmmakers have seen too many times.

With its persuasive special effects, gentle pace, and more expressionistic than surreal production design, this serious yet far from ponderous drama is something of a marvel.

The lush, emotional scenes are enhanced by the sound track.

Writer-director Wong Kar-wai makes these five self-consciously idiosyncratic types--often seen through distorting lenses in cinematographer Christopher Doyle's somber, garish Hong Kong--fully and instantly believable.

Lee performs magic. He's preserved and expanded the experience of an adrenaline-pumping, uproarious night of racism-, classism-, and sexism-subverting humor.

Director Ron Howard's deftness in suggesting the subjective experience of Crowe's character, who's later diagnosed with schizophrenia, makes for inspirational narrative.

A text that provokes thought more than directs it, which should fascinate new and repeat viewers for a long time.

Funny? This one is. It's also sweet and thoughtful.

Set in an expressively underlit environment, this rivetingly moody drama is enhanced by the restrained use of incidental music.

Director John Madden calmly dissects the emotions of a woman whose personal life is effectively nonexistent.

The movie manages to push buttons without seeming formulaic.

Movies about the trajectory from outsider to insider in LA social and professional circles--the two always seem inextricably linked--are a dime a dozen, but this one is fresh, thanks to a script by lead actor Jon Favreau that lets us know Mike knows he resembles a character in a movie even if he doesn't know he is one.

This low-key romantic comedy proves that destiny-powered love stories can be formulaic without being predictable.

This bleak vision directed by Darren Aronofsky ("Pi") is pointless with good reason.

Many of the plot points seem belabored because they're introduced in the voice-over, then ploddingly dramatized, then analyzed by the family over meals.

Kelly is a supple and courageous storyteller, boldly free-associating as he mixes parody and satire with earnest psychodrama and coming up with plot points no one could anticipate.

The script by Brannon Braga and Ronald Moore provides all the background necessary for viewers unfamiliar with the characters' previous movie and TV-series exploits, but not so much as to annoy fans.

A persuasively feminine coming-of-age story.

Exciting, clever sequences driven by surprisingly little plot and culminating in a climax full of the transmogrification animation was invented for.

Audaciously combining conviction and childish humor, this SF thriller reminds us that the distinction between the tangible and the intangible may be frighteningly arbitrary--an idea that's made too scary ever to seem trivial, no matter how silly things get.

Director George Tillman Jr.'s screenplay covers an array of events in the characters' lives so replete with drama it could easily be too much, but the movie's humor is vibrant, the sorrow unexploitive, the sexuality character enhancing, and the love heartfelt--and Tillman is tremendously skilled at bridging the vast shifts in tone.

Subtly profound love story.

Some delicately interwoven and unresolved subplots help make the young character's rite of passage wholly, disturbingly compelling.

A black waitress and a white corrections officer in rural Georgia experience more misery in the first hour of this movie than some people do in a lifetime, and to its credit the drama doesn’t collapse under the weight.

Challenges us to reconcile its snapshots of earnest entrepreneurs, colleagues, and fans with its long takes of her disillusionment.

This gorgeous expressionist drama makes the comparisons so effectively at the outset that by the end they seem belabored.

For the sake of more irony--the movie is lousy with it--the precocious characters have an infantile response to the discovery that their parents are missing: all want their mommies after a night of junk-food excess.

Many of the elements in this story about a woman who's nearly eclipsed by her overbearing mother are all too familiar, yet the combination is utterly charming.

It's all very clever but not really provocative - though a layer of political subtext may make the scenario seem funnier and more meaningful.

Transcendently kitschy, trippingly funny fairy tale, which has a surprising amount of psychological insight and a dance number to die for.

Though hypocritical in the way it sensationalizes sexuality, this serious and funny 1998 movie about a 15-year-old coming to terms with her body and her family in 1976 is, refreshingly, never coy or ironic.

At once a light comedy and a reasonably serious meditation on the perils of fame.

The conventional ghost-appeasement scenario isn't very suspenseful, which may be part of the reason it's so gripping.

The social criticism is as unforced as the humor (and the references to "The Conversation") in this 1998 conspiracy thriller, whose spirited action is balanced by an almost contemplative attitude toward surveillance phobias and the movie cliches they've spawned.

Quaid's buoyant earnestness complements the stunning, low-key performance by Caviezel, whose close-ups give new meaning to the idea that still waters run deep.

Their blossoming love is thwarted at every opportunity by wicked stepmother Anjelica Huston, whose practical motive -- she wants her own daughter to become queen -- is part of an unusually nuanced characterization.

The imposing performances in this chess game between pointedly black and white criminals (Christopher Walken, Laurence Fishburne) and police detectives (Victor Argo, Wesley Snipes, David Caruso) are as impressive as ever.

The characters have been designed to make fun of themselves, disguising the craft of writer Neil Cuthbert and director Kinka Usher in getting us to laugh at them.

The line between romance and sex is blurred in this enthralling feature by Guy Maddin, whose overwhelming stylization unexpectedly produces an emotional and psychological authenticity.

A sense of authenticity overshadows any contrivance in this subtly classic drama.

Eventually writer-director M. Night Shyamalan neutralizes Willis's star presence with impressive plotting that's a fine excuse for the powerful atmosphere.

The blend of animation techniques somehow demonstrates mastery modestly, while the special effects are nothing short of magnificent.

The movie's no roller-coaster ride, but there isn't a boring moment either.

A hallucination sequence and a scene set in a Vegas nightclub are so engrossing you forget they're animated; even the showiest techniques don't detract from the story.