Scott Foundas

Time of the Wolf is tough medicine, to be sure. Yet, the movie builds to a note of cautious optimism that is as stirring as it is unexpected.

With There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson has taken a stab at making The Great American Movie -- and I daresay he’s made one of them.

The Dardennes once again find a richness of human experience that dwarfs most movies made on an epic canvas.

di Florio emerges with a serenely powerful, handcrafted film that navigates into a place Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once called "the tangled discords of our nation."

Spring Breakers seems to be holding a funhouse mirror up to the face of youth-driven pop culture, leaving us uncertain whether to laugh, recoil in horror, or marvel at its strange beauty. All I knew is I couldn't wait to see it a second time.

A film of quiet but profound outrage, laughing on the surface, but howling in anger just beneath.

The Dark Knight will give your adrenal glands their desired workout, but it will occupy your mind, too, and even lead it down some dim alleyways where most Hollywood movies fear to tread.

Landes's tone is never salacious or exploitative, nor for that matter pandering or sentimental. This is a sui generis work—warm, sporadically funny, deeply human, and altogether beguiling.

Absolutely exhilarating...Pound for pound, it's more kinetically thrilling than anything Hollywood has produced in years, not least of all because it's real.

For Denis’ film - which may be her most intricately constructed and intensely beautiful to date - is one that transcends words and stories, a movie to be felt rather than rationalized.

There's a kind of rawness on the screen that most movies never approach.

Perverse, funny, and ultimately profound.

For most of its running time, it's an enjoyably unpretentious celebration of the guilty pleasure we can take from a stupid-as-all-get-out car chase or from watching things blow up real good. Then, in its final half hour, Wright and Pegg ratchet up the absurdity tenfold and enter the realm of the sublime.

An almost ridiculously ebullient Bollywood-meets-Hollywood concoction--and one of the rare "feel-good" movies that actually makes you feel good, as opposed to merely jerked around.

It's an unconscionably funny sex farce that, by its end, turns into a tender and honest romance, an acute portrait of loneliness and, believe it or not, a musical. This is a movie Blake Edwards might have made.

Almereyda has crafted an uncannily revealing portrait of a major American artist at work, all the more remarkable for the deceptive casualness with which it unfolds, as if Almereyda had just shown up.

Three words of advice to those who haven't yet seen it: Run, don't walk. Composed of excerpts from hundreds of locally shot movies past and present -- from grade-A prestige pictures to unrepentant grade-Z schlock -- Los Angeles Plays Itself serves as Andersen's exhaustive but never exhausting attempt to reconcile the myriad identities of the world's moviemaking capital.

Porumboiu’s particular brand of farce is always shot through with the pulse of everyday life and its Sisyphean struggles. He is, simply put, one of our great contemporary observers of the human comedy.

Rock is enormously appealing here, balancing his patented comic abrasiveness with a real tenderness, the faint bewilderment of an ordinary man blindsided by his own success. And Dawson makes an excellent foil.

The film unfolds at a deliberate pace, with a soundtrack occupied less by dialogue than by the sounds of water flowing and crickets chirping. And if you listen carefully enough, you might just hear the sound of one hand clapping.

Above all, it feels like a summation of everything he (Eastwood) represents as a filmmaker and a movie star, and perhaps also a farewell.

For Scientologists, going clear refers to a coveted status awarded to those who have completed a certain level of auditing. But for the men and women on screen here, it means something else: reclaiming their own voices and demanding to be heard.

A great sports drama first and a heart-wrenching triumph-over-adversity weepie almost never.

A breathtakingly original nonfiction work by Seattle-based filmmaker Robinson Devor (whose "Police Beat" was among the highlights of Sundance's 2005 dramatic competition).

The result is a film marked by eruptions of brutal violence, but also passages of extraordinary tenderness.

Up emerges as a gentle hymn to adventure of both the soaring, storybook variety and the smaller, less obvious kind -- the perilous, unpredictable and richly rewarding journey of ordinary, everyday life.

A tightly focused romantic drama that exudes the narrative terseness of a good short story and the lucid craftsmanship of a filmmaker in full command of the medium.

This superb debut feature by Korean-American director So Yong Kim seems to be constructed entirely of the ineffable and intangible, those fleeting moments that most movies treat as throwaways.