Peter Rainer

It's minor, but powerfully so.

Particle Fever doesn’t prompt us to say: “Gee, these superbrains are just like us, except for the brains.” The film allows for our awe. It also demonstrates that science is the most human of activities, with all that that implies.

By all odds, Tarnation should have been an unwatchable, masochistic morass, but Caouette's love for the broken Renee--which is the true subject of the film--is awe-inspiring.

It’s no secret that the best animated movies can enthrall us in ways every bit as immersive as any live-action film. Flow is a triumphant case in point.

His greatest legacy, however, as this film documents, was his courage in the endgame of his life.

The best parts of The Shape of Water, a fantasy fairy tale set in 1962 in a top-secret aerospace research center, are marvelously rhapsodic in ways that recall films like Jean Cocteau’s “Beauty and the Beast” without ever seeming slavish.

This is the most Hitchcockian of Haneke's films. A seemingly well-adjusted man in a well ordered universe is brought to the brink.

Moneyball presents a misleading story line in order to prop up Billy Beane as some kind of would-be miracle worker antihero. In truth, he's just another tobacco-chewing go-getter trying to make sense of a game that, thankfully, has never quite made sense.

Overall this overlong movie is too knowingly coy for its own good.

Force Majeure is ultimately about something not often explored in film: the consequences of male weakness in a world in which men are expected to be strong at all times.

It’s a rarity, and a real pleasure, to find a movie that presents without condescension rural working-class people, especially women.

Has a terrific premise that shatters almost upon arrival; no bad-boy legend trashing a hotel room could have done a more complete job.

The film is very good at laying out the forensics of the case, but Triet is after something larger. I’m not sure she altogether succeeds: She wants to show how Sandra is being judged not just for the murder but, in effect, for everything – for her failures as a mother, a lover, an artist.

It’s a filmmaker’s conceit. These filmmakers may come from Nebraska, but, from the looks of things, they don’t want to be spending much time there.

Creepily evocative.

Ferlinghetti’s home-brewed brand of anarchism is weirdly as American as apple pie.

The rise and fall of Dawson City, intimately tied to the vagaries of climate and man’s greed, is heartbreakingly rendered.

Director Ira Sachs, who co-wrote with Mauricio Zacharias, has a plangent feeling for the small-scale travails of “ordinary” people – who, of course, are only ordinary on the surface.

Positioned somewhere between sitcom and piercing human drama, The Kids Are All Right, is both overtly familiar and cutting edge.

These paintings speak to us; they both compress and elongate time. In Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Herzog is reaching for ways to comprehend what he imagines to be the emblems of the birth of the modern soul.

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.”