Marjorie Baumgarten

There's a serious teen angst movie somewhere in all this as well as an unflinching look at suburbia.

The film is also comic, mysterious, and structurally ambitious, while offering numerous points of entry and perspective.

One of the most original movies of the year.

When compared with most of what passes for honest teen drama these days, My Summer of Love is a real reprieve.

Exciting to watch: The audio disruptions of Carla putting in or taking out her hearing aids and the inventiveness of the way the heist plot is revealed are just a couple of the film's treats.

The subtlety and restraint in the way Reichardt links the vignettes is also commendable. It’s as if she’s reminding us that we’re all part of the grander scheme of things but at the same time disconnected from one another.

Frozen River skates matter-of-factly on thin ice.

Boasts a smart screenplay by Robert Benton and David and Leslie Newman, striking cinematography by Geoffrey Unsworth (especially in the Smallville sequence), bright comic turns by Margot Kidder and Gene Hackman, and of course, that winning performance by Christopher Reeve in the title role. Believe a man can fly? You bet!

Certainly one of the best drug movies ever made.... Great performances make this dispassionate study a memorable experience.

Scores its ultimate coup de grace though its interviews. Macdonald has lined up an amazing collection of interviewees.

One of the most exciting movies of this, or any other, year. It's smart, funny, and wonderfully crafted and performed.

With Captain Phillips we get a viable thriller whose conclusion is already known, and a character who reacts to circumstances rather than a personal, heroic code. And now, it’s a story preserved in brine.

A war movie with a conscience, an action movie with a funny bone, a caper movie with a shifting agenda.

Meticulous and abstruse, Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color is an idiosyncratic film that invites explication but defies total understanding.

An intriguing psychological study that, more or less, leaves out the psychology and presents us with surface behavior.

Sicario is at its best when its borderlines are fluid and indistinct.

Director David Gordon Green has made a work of uncommon beauty and intelligence, one that is smart enough to trust its characters and the technical contributions of its crew.

The music by Raphael Saadiq also belongs in the film’s plus column, helping to make Step one of the feel-good documentaries of the year.

If Wadjda, this Muslim girl, calls up film memories of adolescent Marjane Satrapi in "Persepolis", whose Western-loving lifestyle is uprooted by Iran’s Islamic Revolution, or the young women in Jafar Panahi’s "Offside," who countermand the rules that forbid them from entering stadiums to watch men’s soccer matches, you wouldn’t be far off the mark.

Usually, I am not so persnickety about such things, especially with first-timers, but the accumulation of mis-matched shots is so great that you have to wonder why some of the more experienced crew members weren't climbing the rafters to say “Whoa, Mel.”

The film is wickedly hilarious but more in a droll and knowing kind of sense than a har-de-har-har manner.

Everywhere in America these days, people pay lip service to the idea of conducting open and honest conversations about race. Due to a fluke of timing and its entertaining quality, Top Five should help get the ball rolling.