Marjorie Baumgarten

Nolan creates an effective thriller, although he keeps his stylistic pyrotechnics to a minimum.

Director Duke (A Rage in Harlem and countless TV work) rivets our attention with his tightly framed shots and crisp editing that intelligently revives that bygone tradition of jump cuts (though they confusingly disappear completely midway through the movie).

Helping Elvis & Nixon remain in conjectural mode is the fact that neither actor – Michael Shannon as Elvis and Kevin Spacey as Nixon – looks particularly like the character he is playing. Yet both actors make their roles believable through apt choices in body language and vocalization.

Jackson does it all in this movie: writes, directs, stars, produces, and designs the makeup.

With a startlingly climactic finale, Body Snatchers only underscores the ultimate illogic of placing your trust in your kin.

Chronicle may go over the top with its climax, but for such a giddy film, it's remarkably down to earth.

The film is an intelligent study of the will to live. It's so strong that even a suicidal man rises to the occasion.

Just look at the cast and try to resist the testosterone pull of this movie.

If anything, A Few Good Men errs by throwing almost too many elements, themes and moral debates into the mix thus, by default, they sometimes seem shallowly developed and overly simple. Then again, that perhaps allows them to connect with more universal experiences.

Pete’s Dragon has the power to breathe fire into the most tepid of souls.

It's too bad the language prevents this independent film from being rated PG-13 because this is the kind of movie that might be capable of realistically reflecting teens' lives to other teens.

Associated with the modernist architectural movement centered in Southern California during the mid-20th century, Shulman’s still photographs are essential to any study of the style’s vast popularization and commercialism.

Although there are shades of "All About Eve" here, the resonances lean more toward the fluid identities of the actresses in Ingmar Bergman’s work or even Assayas’ own "Irma Vep."

La Promesse is a penetrating coming-of-age story, one that argues that adulthood begins with the emergence of moral convictions.

Searingly potent and suggestively supple, Carax's images are rich with emotion and ideas.

As for the Austin-based Green, the director’s characteristically understated style is well-suited to this material. Joe recalls, in many ways, the filmmaker’s earliest features – "George Washington," "All the Real Girls," and "Undertow" – not to mention his heavily wooded last feature, "Prince Avalanche," films that capture a poetic sense of bewildered young people in the rural South.

The details of what went down are fascinating, but the ultimate focus of Best of Enemies is television and this demonstration that it can be both eminently viewable and illuminating.

Sharp-witted delight.

The worlds of the natural and the artificial are compared and contrasted in this non-narrative visual orgy.

Knockout ensemble performances like these don't come around all that often, though, and when they do they ought to be savored.

The hypocrisy, sexual repression, and backwater snobbery here is enough to make Peyton Place look like Vatican City.

Dry, ironic humor is also one of the primary ingredients of The Other Side of Hope, and one of Kaurismäki’s signature elements.

Neither slave nor mammy, junkie nor maid, these dawn-of-the-twentieth century African-American women are an unstereotypical breed unto themselves.

Though formally astringent, Police, Adjective is dotted with lots of humor.

Although slowly paced, it is always stunning to look at -- decadent and perverse in that certain Eurotrashy way.

A movie about life and death; its underpinnings are soaked in the perfume of artistic expression.

Me, I’ve now seen the movie three times and I’ve laughed and I’ve cried. It comes the closest to any movie experience I’ve had in re-creating the aftermath of unexplained suicide. Sometimes there just aren’t any answers.

In the end, Machete may not be all that original, but it is fresh – fresh as a steel blade to the gut.