Nathan Rabin

Like the best independent films, The Motel realizes that life is made up of minor pleasures and tiny epiphanies, not sweeping character arcs or big dramatic moments.

Lost In America is equally potent as a satire of the road movie and of the American dream of endless mobility and escape.

Instead of hitting all the usual beats, Sugar just moseys in a mostly delightful way.

The filmmakers throw everything at the audience, literally and metaphorically, and the results are exhilarating rather than exhausting.

Begins by living up to its fans' rabid expectations, and ends by justifying skeptics' doubts. In between lie roughly equivalent levels of tedium and hilarity.

Is it possible to talk about the fascinating and complex universe of black hair without dealing with race and identity? That’s the question posed by Good Hair.

The line for The Apple cult officially starts here. I humbly propose this as the ultimate midnight movie.

John Cassavetes’ films ostensibly explore what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real, but his conception of stark, unvarnished reality sometimes feels awfully artificial.

Anxiety is nearly as obsessive in recreating Alfred Hitchcock's visual style as Gus Van Sant's Psycho was, but to much greater effect.

Justice is seldom as deep or trenchant as it wants to be, but there's abundant pleasure to be gleaned from skating along its surfaces.

The film loses some of its grimy verisimilitude toward the end, but it’s nevertheless a surprisingly effective low-budget shocker with a sensibility as current as the latest viral videos, yet rooted in the suggestive, less-is-more atmospherics of Val Lewton.

For all its low-key charms, the coming-of-age story risks being too Christian for secular audiences and too secular and colorful for Christian audiences: Like its spiritual seeker of a protagonist, it's caught between worlds.

From an emotional standpoint, it's enormously satisfying, even cathartic to watch Ferguson "nail" some of the rogues behind the economic crisis with the unseemly zeal of Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report.

O’Horten feels like a waking dream. It's a film of subtle, insinuating charm, a character study about an eminently sane, reasonable man unsteadily navigating an increasingly insane, unreasonable world.

In choosing cheap gags over incisive cultural commentary, Borat scores more as scatology than satire, but it's easy to overlook its ramshackle nature in light of the explosive laughter.

Wag The Dog is an oft-hilarious, witty, scathing satire that represents four gifted if uneven artists (De Niro, Hoffman, Levinson, and Mamet) at the top of their respective games.

Funny and realistically romantic, but almost never at the same time.

A vibrant, funny, fully realized slice of oft-overlooked cultural, show-business, and black history. It's better than the film whose genesis it chronicles, though inherently doomed to be nowhere near as important.

Propelled by a fine Tomandandy score and a savvy assortment of seductive new-wave hits, Attraction is top-notch trash, a guilty pleasure designed for the decadent 14-year-old in everyone.

The film's heart and soul belong to O'Hara and to Levy, whose folk-music burnout has the shell-shocked expression of someone who's been to hell and never quite made it back.

As the team leader, Jackson finds exactly the right tone for the role: a sort of playful cockiness that comes from knowing just how good he is. He's clearly having fun, but he never winks at the audience too much or allows his performance to devolve into camp.

Needs to be seen to be believed, and even then defies belief.

Its protagonists' hearts aren't lawless so much as stuck in various states of quiet desperation, and the modest charms of this observant, affecting film fortunately bear little relation to the sensationalistic label.

Joe’s brilliance doesn’t lie in its destination, but in the gripping, intense, surprisingly joyous and funny journey it takes to get there.

One of its great strengths lies in its surprising universality.

A frenzied, sometimes overreaching biopic that paints in bold colors on a huge canvas, the film stars a never-better Leonardo DiCaprio--as perfectly cast here as he was miscast in "Gangs."

10 has the rare and wonderful quality of being simultaneously a perfect sociological document of the era that created it, and strangely timeless in its obsessions.

One of the boldest, most audacious American movies of the last 25 years, a freewheeling cerebral carnival of energy and ideas, if not always coherence or cohesion.