Noel Murray

The Elkabetzes don’t need the audience to have any firsthand experience of what Viviane and Elisha are actually like at home. Gett works better if the viewer has to puzzle out the truth from testimony, asides, and outbursts.

My Perestroika is fairly foursquare as documentary filmmaking goes; it isn't stylistically snazzy, nor doggedly vérité. Its closest kin in the genre is Michael Apted's "Up" films, which are similarly focused on how people change over time.

A Prophet has been compared to American TV series like "Oz" for its episodic plot and large cast, but it’s more like a Gallic "Goodfellas": thoroughly absorbing, exciting, even poetic. It’s a full evening’s entertainment.

Without ever saying exactly what her heroine is thinking, Holmer captures a lot of what she’s feeling. And what Toni’s going through should be familiar to anyone who had an awkward puberty — which is to say, nearly everyone.

The two main points Persepolis makes are that strife is relative, and all politics are personal.

von Donnersmarck gives his debut feature, The Lives Of Others, no particular style, and the absence of visual risk-taking renders an exciting premise ponderous and stolid.

It's a story worth telling, yes--but after 90 minutes, it's hard not to wonder if the storyteller can talk about anything else.

The digressiveness of Y Tu Mamá También is its masterstroke.

Cagney's magnetism stems from his note-perfect combination of broad gestures and subtle shifts of posture, but the keen eyes of his directors are what make his gangster pictures classics.

Spike Lee's documentary When The Levees Broke runs four hours, but Lee arguably says what he needs to say in the brilliant opening montage, which cuts together footage of New Orleans in the 20th century, including Mardi Gras parades, segregation marches, and flood after flood.

Throughout The Tale Of The Princess Kaguya, even when it gets bogged down in too much story, the animation is so gorgeous that any given frame could pass for a masterwork.

It's a cogent, often infuriating explication of how the execution of the war went awry.

It's hard to explain exactly why Clint Eastwood's Letters From Iwo Jima is so much better than its companion World War II film "Flags Of Our Fathers," except to say that Flags tries too hard to emphasize the ironies of selling a war, while Letters deals with the ins and outs of the war itself.

Yes, the idea that the tree/father is literally tearing this family apart is way too blunt, but Gainsbourg and Davies sell it by playing the scenes naturally, with minimal histrionics.

Despite Tanović’s efforts to depict these crimes and their aftermath as aestheticized abstractions, there’s something depressingly mundane about the way the murders and the investigation play out.

Though it’s a good movie in and of itself, The Little Mermaid is even more fascinating as a Rosetta Stone of Disney history, representing the classic animation techniques that the studio revived for this film, the cheap shortcuts that had prevailed for much of the previous two decades, and the sophisticated modern storytelling that soon became the standard.

WQholly a Coen brothers movie, in that it’s full of exaggerated characters and comic cruelty, anchored to a way of looking at the world that seems to posit a fundamental absence of meaning. And yet there’s something sweet and even a little heartening about the movie, too.

In the battle of the classic Hollywood Christmas movies, It's A Wonderful Life feels charmingly ancient, fixed in an early-20th-century America that scarcely anyone today remembers first-hand. Miracle On 34th Street feels more modern, with slangy dialogue and naturalistic asides, and a general awareness of how Christmas has become about the intertwined stresses of shopping and selling.

A beautifully choreographed and photographed story about tradition and modernity in rural Asia.

The cast is terrific, and kudos to Boyd for including some specifics about how 20-something Angelenos hook up in the 2010s. But there’s just not enough that’s new here — either in what’s being said, or how.

It's arguably Malle's masterpiece, marked by a shooting style with little wasted motion or complication, emphasizing tiny, memorable details.

The Last Autumn mostly documents a way of life before it vanishes: the simple but nourishing meals, the hard manual labor, the neighborly pitching-in and the quiet hours looking out over ocean vistas like no other.

A Film Unfinished is affecting as a rare document of a terrible place and time, and those who lived there.

The story almost feels like an afterthought, whipped up to support the spectacle — and not, as it should always be, the other way around.

It’s not easy to make a movie as beautiful as Brooklyn, where the stakes are low but the outcome really matters. This is an old-fashioned entertainment, but one so masterfully crafted and heartfelt that it’s hard not to love.

Mary Poppins is a near-masterpiece. It’s the best of the first wave of Disney live-action features, and the most complete and satisfying musical of any kind that the studio produced until Beauty And The Beast came along.

Everything looks strikingly fresh… and overwhelmingly so. In fact what stands out most in this film is the sheer scale of NASA’s Apollo operation.

L'Enfant is intended as a pointed critique of pop culture's celebration of arrested adolescence. The title could refer to Renier's baby, Renier himself, or even the gang of schoolboy robbers that he's gathered around himself.