Peter Rainer

Rather than structure their movie as a chronological biography, the co-directors, Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine, wisely focus on the genesis of Cohen’s most celebrated and performed song, “Hallelujah.” This approach allows them to interweave Cohen’s entire career while also avoiding the one-thing-after-another sprawl that often bogs down these kinds of films.

Michel Bouquet's performance makes Anne Fontaine's How I Killed My Father required viewing.

Most of the time we are with Cruise and Foxx, and their interplay is never less than galvanizing.

A film director doesn’t have to shoot the works to hold an audience. If the drama is galvanizing enough, that’s all you need. And what we have here is more than enough: Viola Davis in one of her greatest performances, and the late Chadwick Boseman in his final and most powerful appearance.

The documentary is, in essence, not much more than a record of what happened in Zaire, but it has been assembled with a real feeling for the historical moment. It's literally a blast from the past.

The film is an indictment of a cultural tragedy; a testament to the steadfastness, against all odds, of the Indigenous community; and a plea for healing.

Linklater, whose previous movies include "Slacker," "Before Sunrise," and "Waking Life," may be the most versatile director of his generation. School of Rock is his most unabashedly mainstream movie by far, and yet it’s commercial in the best way.

It’s a magical little movie about a most unmagical subject.

A comedy in the best sense--it draws its life from the pitch-perfect authenticity of its characters.

A flashy, nasty triumph

Coppola both wrote and directed, and there’s a pleasing shapelessness to her scenes. She accomplishes the difficult feat of showing people being bored out of their skulls in such a way that we are never bored watching them.

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 film’s moral issues don’t come across as tacked on. They arise organically and register as both intensely personal to the filmmaker and much larger in scope. The film even offers up, against all odds – and a truly chilling final moment – a measure of hope.

Just when you think you’ve pinned down someone as good or bad, the tables are turned and the complexities thicken. Just like in real life.

Although Neville obviously had the cooperation of many in Bourdain’s inner circle, the film never feels authorized or hagiographic. He allows for Bourdain’s inner darkness.

Directed with deadpan flair by Barry Levinson and based on a memoir by Hollywood producer Art Linson, it's a pitch-perfect sendup of the movie colony with a marvelous cast.

This is not intended as a movie about what a genius must endure on the path to success. Sharad’s story is much more relatable than that.

What it's really about is the euphoria that talent can bring to those who are possessed by it. That euphoria lights up the screen.

Blue Moon may essentially take place inside a single room, but it rarely feels stagy. It captures the connivance and conviviality of theater people – the way they come together, if only for a night, with a spiritedness that is both forced and entirely genuine.

The paradox of Train Dreams is that we are looking at a vanishing way of life that, at the same time, has a startling immediacy. That immediacy is more than a matter of careful observation. In its widest sense, the movie is asking what makes life worth living.

The funniest and most emotionally charged erotic road movie since Bertrand Blier's "Going Places."

It's an elliptical tragedy in which the fate of its characters takes on a larger significance while never losing its intimacy.

The best family films are those that entertain both children and adults. The Sheep Detectives can be enjoyed simply as a funny fable with a solvable mystery at its center. The well-placed clues are hidden in plain view.

A movie that really zips along; it offers some of the same pleasures as the silent slapstick comedies, particularly the Keaton films, with their sense of how sheer velocity carries its own wit.

It's a truly prodigious piece of work, resembling a career summation far more than a maiden voyage.

Modest in scope, it ultimately conveys, at its best, the unifying joy that great music-making can inspire.

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.

What reveals Pontecorvo as an artist, and not simply a propagandist of genius, is the sorrow he tries to stifle but that comes flooding through anyway--the sense that ALL sides in this conflict have lost their souls, and that all men are carrion.