Michael Atkinson

Because it's so carefully parceled out and so evocatively framed (in widescreen), Wrecked is an absorbing ordeal, perhaps less for its survival narrative than its metaphoric heft.

Just as fabulously cartoon-Gothic as "Sleepy Hollow."

Often stark and ravishing, Nostalgia for the Light is most moving as a manifestation of the filmmaker's stubborn righteousness.

Actually lighter, wittier, and more original than it has a right to be.

Promiscuously inhabiting several planes at once, Reygadas's restless inquisition may already be this year's movie to beat.

Sweet and fiercely humane, Song’s layered family portrait is decidedly Buddhist: silent when it needs to be and steadfast about approaching inevitable tragedy with care and patience.

Formally astute, visually arresting, and fearlessly horrifying.

The summer's best cinematic equivalent to a lazy afternoon in the shade with a cool drink.

May not have enough story to sustain its narrative momentum, but Gray just might be our best shot at a new Coppola.

It's a satisfying swan song.

One of the year's best imports and one of the very few queer movies that transcends its sexual orientation.

A film that's bound to be loathed for its irrationalities and narrative drunkenness, just as it will be beloved for its original risks and manic visual energy.

A near-perfect confection, a beautifully executed Hollywood all-you-can-eat salad bar of glamour, plot twists, breathtaking Mediterranean vistas, and jazz.

An adroitly made, perfectly acted little nightmare.

A remarkable debut, and its first half is a genuine jolt.

Rarely falters but neither does it ever take flight.

A thoughtful, stunning piece of work in what, of late, has been an otherwise arid indie landscape.

Has an intemperate vitality that's hard to resist.

(Paradis) delivers what might be the most affecting film performance ever given by a supermodel.

The film's details are spot-on, its tone ludicrously ironic, and its casting deft.

Follows a predictable low-comedy path, but does it with such fierce appeal and beautifully wrought wit that it doesn't feel quite like any comedy American theaters have seen since the equally underrated "Grosse Pointe Blank."

This is not a movie, really, but a back-rub and a cup of tea for Tsai purists, for whom the filmmaker's company, behind or in front of the camera, is all that's required.

May be an elaborate stunt, a bungee jump, but even so, it's forceful enough to leave a rare palpitating residue.

Ishii's rough-hewn film may be the nastiest entry in its dubious but resonant subgenre since "I Spit on Your Grave." It's a black pearl for anyone who likes a little existential psychosis with their semi-softcore exploitation.

Much more so than any movie actually about spiritual discipline, the new Chinese film Mongolian Ping Pong could be a meditational object-- if, perhaps, it wasn't a sneaky comedy and, to boot, one of the most breathtaking cinematic records of landscape and sky ever filmed.

Dead flesh is a ruling motif, but Gleize's airy, observant personality makes even the graphic dismemberment of the bull, scored with flamenco stomps, buoyant and fascinating.

Perhaps little more than an object lesson in the end, the movie's nevertheless a sobering day trip, more for its hints of a forgotten history of culture collision than its sensible but rote socioeconomic sympathies.

The movie's shake-and-bake mix of "reality" and crumbling subjectivity is too deliberate to be about character--it is, rather, a game of movieness, a masquerade of Grand Guignol–as-psyche, virtually a parody of the surrealist's notion of consciousness bagged and tagged on celluloid.