Peter Rainer

It's a strange, one-of-a-kind film that was to be Benacarraf's only full-length feature.

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

By holding the shot, as she so often does in this film, Takesue is encouraging audiences to take a deep, long look at things they might otherwise miss.

Ultimately “Ex Libris” demonstrates that libraries are about people, and what gives the film its great and accumulating force is that people are infinitely complex.

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 film's final seven-minute shot is one of the great denouements in film history.

In Panahi's case, he is insuperably handicapped by his current constraints. And yet, despite everything, here is This Is Not a Film, which is emphatically a film – and an extraordinary one.

The extraordinary tact and compassion with which Victor dramatizes Agnes’s assault and its aftermath allows us to see this story for what it truly is – a diary of personal reclamation.

This is a Holocaust movie that is so relentlessly observed and so aware of woe that it never feels like it belongs to a genre.

And yet the great conundrum of the Holocaust is that it was perpetrated by human beings, not monsters. Few movies have rendered this puzzle so powerfully.

Amir Bar-Lev's documentary is fascinating on all kinds of levels: as a movie about the nature of art, the lure and pitfalls of celebrity, and the complicated conundrums of parenting.

The irony of Afterimage is that it champions an avant-garde artist, warts and all, and yet Wajda’s stylistics here are conventional and understated.

A rare example of first-rate filmed opera.

A lousy title for a marvelous movie.

This time capsule of a movie is timeless.

A lyrical, yet intensely rooted, tragic vision.

Helen Mirren gives the mostly subtly expressive performance based on a living historical figure that I've ever seen.

A quintessential Mike Leigh performance. It deepens as it goes along until, in the end, in its final close-up, it overwhelms.

An astonishingly fine movie about the vagaries and frolics of childhood as seen largely through the eyes of its pint-sized protagonists.

On the personal betrayals that accompany Capote's ache for literary transcendence. The betrayals were necessary to create "In Cold Blood." This is why Capote is such an unsettlingly ambiguous experience.

It is quite likely the greatest Shakespearean film ever and, except for Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, it’s also Welles’s greatest film – which is saying something.

A marvelous documentary that brings home the terror and heroism brought forth by the Katrina debacle.

Before Midnight is the fullest and richest and saddest of the three movies in the trilogy. Make it a quartet, I say.

It's a transcendently uplifting tragedy.

Brett Morgen’s documentary Jane brings Goodall’s ineffable and incredible story to vivid life, starting with the aforementioned anecdotes as, now in her 80s and still seraphically beautiful, she recalls with an almost ethereal calm the extraordinariness of her days.

A Separation is not the work of a constrained artist. It's a great movie in which the full range of human interaction seems to play itself out before our eyes.

I have rarely seen a movie that better expressed the revivifying nature of music. (Many of the women, not surprisingly, grew up singing gospel in church choirs and had preachers for parents.)

This is a startlingly funny portrait of Gothic Americana.