Scott Foundas

Examines 50-odd years in the life of its eponymous subject -- a most compelling character -- and in doing so literally provides the viewer with food for thought.

Nary an original idea abounds in The Island.

The more vital subject of Mr. Holmes turns out to be our need for stories themselves and, in particular, the role of fiction as an escape from the pain and loss of everyday life.

A superb, eye-opening and often absurdly funny deconstruction of the myths and realities of global terrorism that is marked by a balance, broadmindedness and sense of historical perspective so absent from many recent political-themed documentaries.

Whereas "Nine Queens" was a movie of clockwork precision and blindsiding reversals, El Aura is more internalized and digressive but no less striking, in large part thanks to Darin's mesmerizing performance.

Though an admirable attempt to allow the characters to tell their own story in their own voices, docu may be a bit too freely associative, as it becomes difficult at times to identify individual characters... Picture's second half, which proceeds in a more linear fashion, is resolutely gripping.

A routine memory piece about long-buried family secrets that bubble back to the surface to wreak havoc.

The result is a film chilly and externalized in all the ways that Mood was bottled up and woozily dreamlike.

It's something of a family affair -- only this time, instead of casting his relatives in the leading roles, Ceylan has cast himself and his real-life wife, Ebru, as Isa and Bahar. And if, in the hands of a lesser filmmaker, such a decision might foster a mood of lurid home-movie voyeurism, both Ceylans are such commanding and subtly expressive performers that any charges of nepotism here are as erroneous as in the storied collaborations of John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands.

The canniness of Bale’s performance (which may be the best of his young but brilliant career) is that he plays Dengler as a fundamentally kind and simple yet rather ingenious man.

Assembled in a straightforward, television-style presentation that gets the better of it.

Where The Gift toys with our expectations is in its refusal to align itself with any one character or to manufacture obvious heroes and villains.

An unnerving, acidly funny work that fosters an acute air of dread without ever fully announcing itself as a horror movie.

Wetlands might have landed with the thud of empty shock value were Helen not such an innately engaging character, or Juri so commanding in the role.

Amel’s script is agonizingly airless and contrived

Strikes me as one of Godard's most accessible works - one in which the graying, stubbly maestro, who turns 74 today, presents himself and his ideas to the audience in a less combative way than he sometimes has in the past.

Though likely to be variously praised and pilloried as a pro-choice film, Weitz’s film is really a movie about choice in both the specific and the abstract — about the choices we make, for good and for ill, and how we come to feel about them through the prism of time.

I suspect that Death Proof will throw some of its director's admirers for a loop, though it may be the most revealing thing Tarantino has yet done -- a full-throttle expression of a singular artistic temperament disguised, like so many gems of grindhouses yore, as a glittering hunk of trash.

A preposterously bad, grade-Z adventure yarn.

There may, somewhere in the premise of Incantato, lie the inspiration for a fine farce, but under Avati's shaky stewardship, the picture is leaden and charmless.

This is still powerful, undiluted stuff -- a jolt of backwoods moonshine whiskey injected into the veins of the atrophied American relationship drama.

In Jauja, Alsonso saves his most dazzling trick for last: a sudden plunge down a Lynchian rabbit hole that should, by all means, rupture the film’s hypnotizing atmosphere, but instead pulls the viewer in even deeper.

Making an altogether impressive big-screen directing debut, Jones exudes quiet control over this full-bodied Western, taking pleasure in his measured pacing, mixing somber authority with flashes of surrealist wit and luxuriating in the magnificent, vanishing vistas of his home state.

As factoids do-si-do with testimonials from the likes of drinking buddy Sean Penn and fan-boy Bono, the movie all but becomes the very A&E Hagiography for which Bukowski would have had little or no patience.

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."

Bay can be a master of exuberant chaos, but here the violence mostly lands with a sickening thud, which is fitting, one supposes, but also ultimately numbing.

What keeps Dheepan engaging throughout is the tremendous charisma of the performers.

The movie's sense of immutable desire resonates well after the lights have come up.