Peter Rainer

The Red Turtle benefits from being open to all sorts of possibilities and interpretations because we sense that Dudok de Wit respects our imaginings. He allows them to take shape right alongside his own.

Field made a thriller about what we are capable of in the name of hatred -- and of love.

It's a transcendently uplifting tragedy.

The sheer sensuousness of all these bric-a-brac memories is sustaining.

Most powerfully, Berg also films a number of O'Grady's victims as they recount their trauma and, in some cases, loss of faith.

At times, the movie resembled nothing so much as Kabuki with Cosmos.

The melancholy in this film is just as trumped up as the frenzy.

As a man flummoxed by circumstance and the rifts in his own marriage, Romano is deeply touching in the role. As for Hunter, this is her best work since “Broadcast News.”

In some ways the movie might have been better if it had been about those two Hollywood guys with only occasional blips from the hostage crisis in Iran.

Assayas conveys with great understatement an entire constellation of emotions in Summer Hours. I wouldn't have minded a little bit of overstatement.

As with much of Soderbergh's avant-garde work, his garde isn't quite as avant as he would have us believe it is. Still, Soderbergh's jazzed stylistics can be smartly entertaining. Without them, an uneven movie like Traffic might seem more of a mélange than it already is.

Talk to Her affects some people very deeply, while others, like me, find it high-grade kitsch.

The performances by Phoenix and Hoffman are studies in contrast. Phoenix carries himself with a jagged, lurching, simianlike grace while Hoffman gives Dodd a calm deliberateness. Both actors have rarely been better in the movies. The real Master class here is about acting – and that includes just about everybody else in the film, especially Adams, whose twinkly girl-next-door quality is used here to fine subversive effect.

What gives Los Angeles Plays Itself its extraordinary density is the way Andersen transforms a cliché into a metaphysical truth that encompasses far more than L.A.

A prime piece of whirlybird filmmaking, and the technique saps what might have been a powerful experience.

A marvel.

Alternately inspirational and disheartening, galvanizing and wearying.

The enchanting French-Belgian animated feature Ernest & Celestine is so liltingly sweet and graceful that, a day or two after I saw it, it seemed almost as if I had dreamed it.

Schrader’s chief influence here, as in many of his other films, is the great French director Robert Bresson, especially his “Diary of a Country Priest.” But Bresson’s spare stylistics achieved a sublimity while Schrader’s, though intermittently powerful, too often feel schematic.

Up until its final scene, I thought A Little Prayer was an entirely decent and poignant piece of work. But its closing scene between Bill and Tammy, those two self-described kindred spirits, moved me more than anything I’ve seen all year. It’s an infinitely touching expression of the love that one human being can have for another.

The endangered swampland dwellers are supposed to be an indigenous pastoral community threatened by eco-unfriendly oil refineries. I kept rooting for Hushpuppy and Co. to leave behind their squalor and relocate. This is not the politically correct response.

Fan's camera moves sinuously through these people's lives and gives a human face to a national panorama.

Too much of this film is attenuated and vague, but it has moments of deep melancholy.

There's a timelessness, an immanence to what she (Varda) shows us.

A lot of emotional weight is packed into this seriocomic ramble if you know where to look.

An astounding, one-of-a-kind movie.

Montgomery Clift is at his very best as Pvt. Robert E. Lee Prewitt, a career soldier stationed in Honolulu just prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, in this 1953 adaptation of James Jones's classic novel, directed by Fred Zinnemann with the utmost grace. [3 March 2006, p.12]

Director Paul Greengrass downplays the movie's travelogue aspects by repeating the bobbly, hand-held camera style he used on "The Bourne Supremacy." It's not a style I'm fond of.

Begins frighteningly and gets progressively more so.

Farhadi’s new film, The Salesman, isn’t his best, or even second best, but it offers up glints of what, at times, makes him one of the best directors around.

Belzberg doesn't intervene during the moments of violence, believing that the film can force social change only by showing the worst. If she is correct, then this film should move mountains.

Polanski’s strongest and most personally felt movie.

What makes Get Out more than just a slam-bang scarefest is that, in its own darkly satiric way, it is also a movie about racial paranoia that captures the zeitgeist in ways that many more “prestigious” movies don’t.

Despite its blunt characterizations and simplifications, City of Life and Death, through the inexorable pileup of gruesome detail, achieves an epic vision of horror.

Spielberg and Kushner were right to bring modern attitudes to this beloved warhorse. Their movie, at its best, isn’t just a remake. It’s a rethink.

The plot may be a bit too busy, but a great wash of transcendent imagery floods the screen. If I had to recommend the best children’s film out there for all ages, this one, and “The Tale of Princess Kaguya,” would easily top the charts.

A powerful, and powerfully sad, experience.

Intermittently powerful drama explores a cross-cultural estrangement.

As thin and jokey as this movie often is, I prefer it to the serioso treatment that usually encrusts this type of material. At its best, The Savages captures the lunacy that comes with coping with sorrow.

Bracingly perceptive about the human comedy.

This is not the sort of movie that offers up immediate gratifications, though there are some of those. Instead, it moves along with a steady grace. Its ruminative power creeps up on you.

Burnham avoids most of the “Mean Girls”-style tropes in favor of a more gently humorous and nuanced approach.

Whatever it is, Exit Through the Gift Shop is an original.

One of the most dreamily unsettling documentaries ever made.

The interaction between soldiers and captives becomes a microcosm for an entire culture. It's a wisp of a movie but it has stayed with me longer than much supposedly weightier fare.

Sweep aside the gross-outs and you've got the family values comedy of the year.

DiCaprio's performance is a revelation only for those who have underestimated him. In Scorsese's previous films, "The Gangs of New York" and "The Aviator," he seemed callow and miscast, but here he has the presence of a full-bodied adult. He's grown into his emotions.

Kim exalts nature--life’s passage--without stooping to sentimentality. He sees the tooth and claw, and he sees the transcendence. Whether this is a Buddhist attribute, I cannot say, but the impression this movie leaves is profound: Here is an artist who sees things whole.

It's a beautifully modulated performance of a man whose presence, at times, seems on the verge of vanishing – not a bad attribute for a spy.

Best where it counts the most - in its recognition of how difficult it will be for Dan and Drey to turn their lives around.

An amazing, galvanic experience. It's about the hushed-up story of Benito Mussolini's first wife and child, but no one will ever mistake this movie for a standard biopic. It's too raw, too primal.

As one of Booker's supporters notes, it's a sad day when academic success is used to denigrate an African-American.

Harrowingly straightforward.

It’s the difference between artistry and knowingness. About Schmidt doesn’t bring us deeply into the lives of its people because it’s too busy trying to feel superior to them.

Wiseman lets the material breathe in a manner unique to the subject.

So deliriously chockablock with high-flying, color-coordinated fight scenes that non-aficionados may find it all a bit bewildering--a gorgeous abstraction. It sure is gorgeous, though, and it has a dream cast

The film periodically risks turning into a swoony fantasy. But it is a fantasy we can favor because it’s one we all can share.

All in all, a visual and musical feast.

The movie is admirable in its ambitions; in its execution, less so. The difficulty in making an “intimate” epic is that the characters have to fill out the frame in ways that are both highly individualized and symbolic. They have to be both lifelike and larger-than-life. In Mudbound, this combination works only fitfully.

The film is a real rarity, made even more so by the fact that what has moved us so profoundly are a bunch of pop-eyed plasticine figures.

This is the kind of it-can-mean-whatever-you-want-it-to-mean art film that I usually run from, but Carax is such a prodigiously gifted mesmerist that, if you give way, you're likely to be enfolded in the film's phantasmagoria.

This comic-book movie is more disturbing, and has more freakish power, than anything else I've seen all year.

It's almost impossible to watch this movie and not, on some level beyond reason, succumb. The Pursuit of Happyness is an expert piece of calculation: a male weepie engineered for the whole family.

The emotional stakes are large-scale, and Farhadi honors them by delving into their intricacies.

One of the sharpest and funniest movies about the music business ever made.

Vanessa Redgrave, as the adult Briony, appears at the very end in a monologue that rounds out the film with heartbreaking force.

If I had to give a two-word review of Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, it would be: "Wow! Huh??"

Spielberg is such a supersleek craftsman that what might have been intended as a deep dive instead comes across for the most part as a sprightly gloss.

A cross between "Godzilla" and "Jaws," it manages to be both truly scary and truly funny – sometimes all at once.

Because the war in Afghanistan is so much in the news now – it should always have been so – a movie like Restrepo is both a bracing document and, in a larger sense, a disappointment.

Morgan Neville’s movie is more than just a chronicle of Rogers’s career. In some not-quite-definable way, the film itself is all of a piece with Rogers’s principled gentleness. It’s a love letter, but the sentiment and affection that pour through the film is honestly arrived at, even when, near the end, the film threatens to turn into the cinematic equivalent of a group hug.

Turn the River becomes a standard fatalistic misfits-on-the-run movie with more than its share of improbabilities. It's as if Eigeman didn't realize how good the best parts of his film were, and so went ahead and trashed them.

For a movie about hard-driving pioneers, there is nevertheless much existential ennui in the air.

Nothing that Davies does is ordinary or artless but his craftsmanship has its suffocating side too.

The only character in the film who seems to have the requisite gravity is Oscar’s mother, Wanda (the marvelous Octavia Spencer), whose scene with her son in San Quentin is as hard-bitten as the rest of the film isn’t.

I’m Still Here is a movie about remembrance – of a family and a nation. The necessity to acknowledge injustice is its timeless clarion call.

With a minimum of actorly fuss, Winger shows us the rage and hurt inside this overcontrolled woman. It's a great piece of acting – high drama at the service of the highest talent.

Edet Belzberg’s documentary Watchers of the Sky, which was a decade in the making, reclaims the reputation of Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Holocaust refugee who not only coined the term “genocide” but also invented the concept of categorizing mass murder as an international crime.

In The Circle, which is banned in Iran, the enforced society of women is, in effect, a community of adults treated as children.

The entire film has the glibness of a music video. Boyle has managed to make dire poverty seem glossy.

I'd be more inclined to call this French dysfunctional family epic gabby and preeningly self-indulgent – in a word, annoying.

After seeing this film, try reading Norman Mailer's "Of A Fire on the Moon," its perfect companion piece.

It takes a while to get into the ruminative rhythm of this film. But it’s worth it.

A first-rate crime thriller from 1960.

No other concert film has ever expressed so fervently the erotic root of rock. Seeing it is the opposite of taking a trip down memory lane; it's more like a plunge into the belly of the beast.

What I ultimately took away from the documentary is the deep love that can exist between owners and their dogs. In The Truffle Hunters, both are shown to be the custodians of each other’s happiness.

At times the film is so supercharged that it glosses over the story's thematic richness and turns into a very high-grade action picture. But if that's the worst thing you can say about a movie, you're doing all right. The best thing to be said about Children of Men is that it's a fully imagined vision of dystopia.

The paradox of Tarantino’s oeuvre is that it is highly derivative of other movies, mostly genre pulp, and yet the films seem distinctly his. He is the most influential director of his generation because he ranges promiscuously through pop culture and brings to his borrowings an incendiary force.

There are times in this lovely, complacent movie about uncomplacent circumstance when I wanted to be shaken up, and wasn’t.

It makes you nostalgic for the pangs of young love.

A crowd-pleaser in the best sense, it overflows with empathy for its beleaguered people.

Perhaps most heartening about Writing With Fire is how the film doesn’t discount the personal toll on these women. Crusaders though they may be, they voice throughout the film their deep doubts and fears.

The scene is so emotionally ravishing that it breaks you apart. The peacefulness that finally descends on Séraphine in the film's final moments is more than a balm. It's a benediction.

The passage of time has rarely been more forcefully conveyed in a movie, as we see clips of the interviewees not only from today but also at seven-year intervals from the past.

It elevates female sacrifice into an aesthetic. The movie isn't about suffering, really. It's about how you look when you suffer, how you dress up for it. Style is all.

If you've never experienced a Bollywood musical before, seeing Lagaan will be like watching "Gone With the Wind" without ever having seen a Hollywood movie.

Anderson works in animation and home movies (Lolabelle “playing” the piano is a wonder), and Anderson’s voice-over narration is closer in quality to song than to spoken word. It’s a confounding, transfixing mélange.

War Witch is most effective not when we are looking in on Komona but when we are inside her head. When she says that, in order to survive in the rebel camp, she “had to learn to make the tears go inside my eyes,” our identification with her is total.