Marc Savlov

The Host is a freewheeling mix of high style and goofy, good-natured fear-mongering.

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]

Clearly the single best, the single coolest (to borrow from Harry Knowles) animated film in a great while.

It's not a great action dust-up by any means.

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.

There's no denying it's a tragic film from start to finish, but equally undeniable is the endless stoicism displayed by the women, and Panahi's crisp, meandering direction.

Like Mumbai, Slumdog pulses and throbs with raw, unadulterated life and the hope for a better Bombay, today. It's brilliant.

This is one fish tale that’s well nigh guaranteed to linger in the viewers’ midnight memories long after its cinematic nocturnal emissions have unspooled.

Stylistically, co-directors McLeary and Aldous were given complete access to the retreat and wield their cameras like voyeuristic lanterns in a tremendously dark place.

Paranoid Park shows the Portland-based director to be working at the pinnacle of his art in every frame, in every composition. It's breathtaking, heartbreaking, tragic, gorgeous, and true all at the same time.

Hardly a serious caper film, Out of Sight instead takes a lighter approach, effortlessly offering up as many unexpected chuckles as it does bullets.

The story (even more so if you weren't around in July of 1969) is gripping, eloquent, and powerful stuff, the right stuff right down to its pioneering heart, taking manifest destiny to the stars themselves.

Once Upon a Time is an elegiac mash note to Hollywood 1969, at times sublimely, almost surrealistically moving while simultaneously managing to be the director’s funniest and least violent film to date.

A genuinely moving portrait of the artist as a young(ish) scullery maid.

Like the inky void of space, there's really not much here, but what there is, is certainly entertaining.

A brilliant, exhilarating piece of filmmaking. It may even be the best mainstream film of the year thus far.

Sauper's delicately horrific documentary is a short, sharp slap in the face of the developed world, and a long overdue one at that.

Steeped in bleak, ominous atmosphere and period-perfect costumes and design, this is one of those rare genre films that gets under your skin and stays there.

King Arthur is a snooze, overcast and drizzly both on location and on the pages of the script. Owen is too classy, too James Bond-handsome to realistically portray the not-yet-King Arthur.

Charmingly subversive animation like this is a rare thing indeed, and the fact that you don't have to be under 10 years of age to thoroughly enjoy Mr. Shrek's wild ride is an added bonus.

Mystic River asks plenty of questions but rarely if ever offers any answers, and certainly no easy ones. If this fine and sorrowful film is what can be expected from our aging cinema icons, here’s to the golden years, dark though they may be.

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.

It’s far and away the most original symphony of terror since F.W. Murnau raised hackles and Schrecks with his 1922 Nosferatu.

It's also a deeply moral antiwar film, if one chooses to view it that way.

Bridges makes this sozzled and desperate ex-desperado – a cliché by any other name – as fresh and vital as one final shot at cowboy-poet redemption. It may sound crazy, but it's true.

Make no mistake: This is a horror film right to its core, although the nightmare comes both from without (the war, the state decrees regarding how Shideh must dress in public, even when fleeing incoming missiles) and within (the unknown but entirely evil Middle Eastern djinn).

There's not as much bombast here as there was in Parker's Commitments, but then Frears is an entirely different kind of director. He prefers the ensemble to the character study, and here he does a wonderful job of it.

A vast improvement over the previous two outings, but still and all, it's no "Star Wars."