Marc Savlov

Moll's film is a far cry from the elegiac poetry of, say, Night and Fog; it's a document more than an examination, and its power of record is inarguable and incorruptible. And then, at the end, somehow you find yourself with that least likely of expressions on your face, a smile, courtesy of Representative Lantos.

Osama begins in fear and ends in terror. In between there's all manner of hopelessness, deprivation, and death, which is to say that as the first film to come out of a post-Taliban Afghanistan, it's practically a documentary.

Feels brief and dreamlike. Waking from its spell, you touch your face, and it's wet, but you're smiling anyway.

That Aimée & Jaguar manages so well in triple duty as a wartime melodrama with a lesbian twist is remarkable.

It speaks to both the head and the heart, and it is, in myriad ways, some of the best work the legendary animator has ever created.

At times poignant, joyful, and terrifying, Shawshank Redemption is an altogether brilliant movie and the debut of an equally brilliant director.

Is it a comedy? A documentary? An underground gore-fest? Man Bites Dog, the first feature film from Belgian director Rémy Belvaux, is all of these and much more, a ghastly, shocking and explosive debut with all the genuinely ruthless ability to disturb as an oily blue-barreled revolver jammed in your mouth. And it's funny, too.

The end result is an electrifying, morally complex story of the evil that men (and women) do in the name of the greater good.

A crazed, lovestruck, wholly original (and yet amazingly referential) beast, part pop-culture wasteland, part glowing tribute, and part wild-eyed roller coaster (of love).

It's a ripping good yarn, to boot, breathlessly paced and seamlessly edited, but most important, resoundingly and surpassingly fun.

The effect is devastating, both emotionally and physically. You literally can’t take your eyes off Saul.

The film is delicious, welcome, and entirely satisfying and, as an added bonus, far and away the best genre-fan date movie of the year.

Cooly feral in dark suit and tie, Glover’s the man in the gray flannel suit gone way, way over the edge, and it’s one of the most fully realized screen performances in ages, rats and all.

Casting is everything, and the casting of Stallone -- playing way against type -- as the powerless hayseed sheriff in Cop Land is nothing short of inspired.

It is violent, certainly, but it's also a genuinely excellent film, horrifying and touching and beautiful in a bloody sort of way. A bit like real life, really.

Everything about this swift and gorgeous and tremendously enjoyable film is played out in a rush of staccato edits, crisp performances, and charmingly giddy subplots that coalesce into Spielberg's most purely entertaining movie in years.

The subtitle of Richard Linklater: dream is destiny is drawn from a line of dialogue found in his equally groundbreaking and hypnagogic animated art film "Waking Life," and it serves as a mission statement of sorts for his entire oeuvre and endlessly curious philosophy.

This remarkable adaptation of the supposedly "unfilmable" novel by David Mitchell achieves near-perfection on virtually all levels.

Definitely not for the squeamish, Wake in Fright is calibrated for maximum psychic impact. Its madness is viral and disconcerting. Truly, you're going to want a stiff drink and a hot shower, or a noose, after visiting the Yabba.

One of the most suspenseful films of all time, its wartime action setting makes it easy to forget it's also one of the most spiritually righteous. [Director's Cut]

Just plain unforgettable.

The Blue Room is mesmerizing, psychologically complex, and, at the very end, viscerally devastating. They don’t make them like this much anymore, but they should.

Loud, hilarious, and enormously entertaining, 24 Hour Party People makes you want to toss current FM radio out on its pre-fab, corporate-sponsored backside. And not a moment too soon.

Crowe has rarely been better, and the same goes for director Scott, who parallels and then dovetails Lucas and Roberts' stories with sublime, gritty precision, working up to a magnificent "Godfather III"-style crosscutting sequence that electrifies an already explosive tale.

For those who only recall Bana from his bland showing as Ang Lee's super-thyroidial meltdown monster, his performance here is a revelation.

While it’s perhaps not the best date film of the year, it is a grim and unmistakable masterpiece of bleak, black sorrow.

A sweet-natured romantic fable, albeit one that packs in carnivorous cockroaches, rampaging brontosaurs, and the ever-Freudian Empire State Building among its requisite emotional baggage. And, too, it's a corker of an action/monster movie.

Factotum, for all its grim grind, is funny-serious, and smart-stupid. Just like you after four beers, and me after eight.

As concert films go, this is heady stuff.

Danny Boyle's 127 Hours is the calm, cool, and tear-your-hair-out exciting mirror image of Tony Scott's bland and formulaic "Unstoppable."

You can take a page from Wes Craven before he went flat and keep repeating, "It's only a movie; it's only a movie; it's only a movie." But is it?

As far from "Slacker" as you could possibly get and still be using a motion-picture camera, The School of Rock is nonetheless pure Linklater, pure rock & roll, and pure fun. Gabba, gabba, hey!

Pixar's Finding Nemo may well have the best casting of any animated film of the past 30-odd years.

Kempner's documentary is a streamlined, gorgeous piece of work, full of revelations of time, place, and person.

This pleasantly rambling absurdist father/daughter drama is also one of the most strikingly unusual films of the year, period.

A glorious, action-and-pathos packed capstone to the rebooted Apes franchise.

It's almost dreamlike in its weird little tone, a Manischewitz hangover of a nightmare that's giddy enough to usher chuckles and is thoroughly unique.

More emotionally complex than even I had thought possible, Chasing Amy is the sound of burgeoning genius on the fast track to maturity.

It's no wonder Imamura has now collected not one but two Palmes d'Ors; The Eel is a flash of quiet brilliance that resonates long after the images have faded from the screen.

It's not necessary to be a longtime fan of the Star Trek universe to appreciate the sheer emotional punch and swagger of this rough and randy Enterprise crew.

Dueñas and Lucas give knockout performances as two twisted souls seemingly locked in a match to the death to determine who is the madder one. I’ll call it a tie, and I’ll also say Alleluia is a grotesque masterpiece. L’amour fou, indeed.

Absolutely harrowing, shocking in its sudden revelatory immediacy, and very, very well done, Black Hawk Down is one of the best depictions of the outright lunacy inherent to battle I have ever seen.

Perhaps the best way to sum up Boy and the World is by saying it is what it is and what it is, is absolutely remarkable.

Possibly the best argument against couples therapy ever, Antichrist is a tour-de-force trip inside the mind of a dangerously depressed man. That man is Danish filmmaker von Trier, and he has gone on record as having conceived and executed Antichrist in the wake of a deep depression.

Everything about Gaia works in tandem to create a steadily escalating mood of Blastomycotic body-horror distress (including Pierre-Henri Wicomb’s anxiety-inducing score). Fans of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy and its Annihilation adaptation, and lovers of the defiantly feminine and vengeful natural world will find plenty to chew on in Gaia.

Vladimir Putin’s Russia – brutal, carnivorous, delusional, but monstrously well-evolved for crushing both spirits and lives large and small – is taken to task in this excoriating portrait of the state’s omnivorous hunger for control in a far-flung northern fishing community on the Barents Sea.

The director is unflinching in his portrayal of the horrors that occurred, and nearly all the characters, from Voight's Wright to Rhames' Mann, are wonderfully nuanced, desperately believable creations.

Hauntingly beautiful film.

Everything here from costuming and production design to the note-perfect score from Edward Shearmur works in tandem to create not so much a film as a singular and joyous tribute to a vanished age when wonder only cost a nickel and played three time daily at the Bijou.

It's the truth, unshackled and captured against all odds, and it's one of the most powerful documentary films I have ever seen, period.

The most original comedy from either side of the pond in years.

Disturbing, harrowing, visceral, and even sporadically humorous, Kids is one of those rare films that begs the description “a must-see.” For once, it's the truth.

Snatch is nothing if not watchable: It has the insane, popcorn rhythms of a Road Runner cartoon, and for that reason alone it's a minor masterpiece.

Park is one sick puppy, and I mean that in the very best sense of the phrase.

If Victorian Manchester had been remotely like this, H.G. Wells never would have bothered to pen "The Time Machine" – he'd have just stepped outside and into the fray.

For those willing to submit to its terrible charms, it may be the single most important debut to come out of the Americas in years.

As sequels go, Paddington 2 is up to the challenge. It’s neck and neck, or paw and claw as to which is the better, so why not just watch both back to back?

Don’t leave until the final credits finish rolling or you’ll miss what many are considering Kill Bill: Vol. 1’s best bit. Trust us on this one.

It is, in fact, an instant classic, the sort of film that will make you check under your bed at night and then amplify into terror the midnight creaks and 3am breezes that unsettle every house at times, most especially yours. Highly recommended.

Wildly entertaining, "Shakespeare in Love" minus the Bard and the babe, but with substantive style to burn.

An altogether more viscerally engaging film, from its relentless pacing and slam-bang effects work to the fine, appropriately heroic score by John Ottman. That the movie has an obvious gay subtext neither adds nor detracts from the film’s smashing popcorn appeal.

There are so many terrific things going on in the film – rapid-fire wordplay, split-second visual gags, and some veddy, veddy British punning – that, frankly, Paddington deserves more than one viewing. Huzzah Paddington, and marmalade forever!

Like a car crash in slo-mo, it's a riveting, beautiful mess.

Filled with brilliant, stand-out performances.

There are plenty of great things to say about director Janice Engel’s portrait of the late, legendary Ivins, but maybe the best is that after watching Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins, you'll immediately want to go back and re-read all her books.

This is nobody's idea of a happy family story, but it is a pristinely chilling depiction of familial meltdown in a post-Stalinist, Twilight Zone anti-place, the dark heart of heartlessness and mysterious parenting techniques.

Amreeka is anything but a depressing digression on American wartime paranoia.

There's so much information and so many finely honed arguments in this ultimately joyous film that it's liable to send audiences scurrying home to their computers to download the bands they've just heard.

Seems more like a subtle, elegiac tone poem than an indictment of human banality and the evil that men do.

An antidote to holiday cheer like no other, this French tale of psychological horror is as harsh as they come -– it’s like finding a severed finger in your stocking and then finding it’s even better with hollandaise.

So upbeat it might as well arrive on a sunbeam.

"Always be good to rock and roll and it will always be good to you," the film quotes Phil Spector as saying, and a more fitting explanation of the Bingenheimer mystique you'll likely never find.

This is highly personal artwork writ in a grand, towering script, and all the more intellectually and artistically legible for it.

Take the politics out and you’d still have a powerhouse action film. But please, don’t take the politics out.

Narco Cultura smartly and movingly focuses on the cultural cycle of violence, beginning with a young, Los Angeles-based rapper, Edgar Quintero, whose main job is penning lyrics celebrating the orgiastically violent lifestyles of the drug thugs for his band Buknas de Culiacán.

It ends up seeming more real and more artistically, morally, and spiritually honest than any dozen bedrock documentary films you'd care to name.

The quiet respect Venus displays toward lions in winter, defanged though they may be, is rare enough; the film's respect for unfinessed lionesses-to-be is rarer still. Wherever they're going, no one here is going quietly.

You can't help but feel conflicted watching this superb documentary about the seminal New York-based punk rock vanguard, the Ramones.

It’s a spooky, moody doozy of a debut, lensed by Director of Photography Lyle Vincent in a radiant monochrome that somehow makes even the darkness sparkle.

That they were just hormonally blitzkrieged kids at the time, unaware of their role in history, only makes Peralta's superior doc that much more winning.

Fresh and raw like a blown-out vein, Narc takes a walking-dead, cop-flick subgenre and beats new life into it.

12 is every bit as much of a moral powerhouse as its predecessors but with the added bonus of being simultaneously intellectually riveting and, at times, almost indescribably poetic.

Absurdist humor abounds throughout a story whose underlying themes echo Elvis Costello’s eternal question, “What’s so funny ’bout peace, love, and understanding?” even as corpses dangle from a foregrounded gallows.

Provides that rarest of documentary accomplishments: a glimpse into the artists' sunny, dark hearts.

A genuinely outrageous and occasionally brilliant coupling of American animation and classic early-Eighties heavy metal (does anybody even remember Riggs and Trust?).

This second incarnation of the Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeldt-produced animation anthology is, if anything, even better than the first.

Amid the increasingly horrific images of daily ghetto life are moments of utterly unexpected, haunting beauty, including a reel of color film that does more to humanize an inhuman situation than anything I've ever seen.

Fiercely original in every respect.

With such a frenetic, brain-melting load of images to ponder, it's easy to forget that there are also some terrific actors at work here, not the least of whom is the amazing Vinnie Jones.

Ferociously subversive and trippily beautiful debut feature from director and screenwriter Coralie Fargeat.

Nearly a perfect film, from its bold and epic man-vs.-nature conflict to the breathless scripting, editing, acting, and direction.

God forbid this should ever play on an IMAX screen -- the concussive soundtrack and relentless visuals would likely strike viewers deaf and blind (but what a way to go!). Simply breathtaking.

Far from being atypical, the events of June 12 and the litany of tiny nightmares that led up to that day are brutally obvious.

You’ve got to hand it to director Andy Muschietti. Adapting any Stephen King novel – or, for that matter, shorter material – is always a hit-or-miss gig, but It Chapter Two manages to pull out all the stops and in several areas actually tops the first film.

Castle-Hughes and Paratene are nothing short of remarkable in their roles.

This astonishing animated feature from first-time Slovenian director Krstić is required viewing for art history majors and anyone else with even a glancing interest in the works of everyone from Warhol to Gauguin, Diego Velázquez to Joan Miró.

Anything but dull, Gibney’s clarion call whipsaws along like a combo Jason Bourne/007 thriller minus all that running. Unnerving and likely to give viewers some bitter food for thought, Zero Days is Gibney’s most important work yet.

You miss out on this and you miss out on something entirely, amazingly original and jaw-droppingly entertaining. C’est magnifique!