Scott Tobias

Though The Train is a marvel of old-fashioned action craft, from invisible dolly shots of breathtaking sophistication to the careful staging of massive railway catastrophes, it’s not a thoughtless adventure by any means.

The film is a true torchbearer of the French New Wave—playful, restless, full of invention, and born of an overwhelming discontent for the status quo.

A hilarious and unexpectedly profound comedy.

Since Belfort and his crew are complete knuckleheads, every bit the low-class slobs who bray like animals on the trading floor, The Wolf Of Wall Street may be the funniest film of 2013, rife with gross misbehavior, pranks, and tomfoolery.

Safdie stirs the pot expertly. With a soundtrack that bursts with anachronistic ‘80s New Wave songs—Tears For Fears’ “Change” is a jarring yet energizing curtain-raiser for ’50s New York—Marty Supreme has the burning-ulcer intensity of Uncut Gems, along with a sense of spontaneity that comes from Marty having to feverishly negotiate every moment of his life.

On a production of this magnitude, few actors have the presence to assert themselves above the cacophony, but Crowe carries the film with the rare combination of charisma and brute masculinity that has made him a star.

Newton has made a beautiful little film about sacrifice and redemption, and he earns it one tiny brushstroke at a time.

Heaven Knows What isn’t interested in merely exploring the world of New York City addicts. It wants to make their experiences felt, with the dissonant, amp-cracking roar of a punk anthem.

A superb portrait of a band and an industry in flux.

An inspired, original, and gracefully integrated collaboration of theater and cinema that complements not only both forms, but also the seductive, dreamlike qualities of the source material.

It takes enormous skill to pull off such a high-wire act without diminishing the gravity of the situation, but Bong and his first-rate cast are up to the task.

It’s a richly imagined drama that gives everyone involved a specific and understandable set of motives for acting the way they do.

Cianfrance and his actors, Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling, have not made a cold or schematic film. They aim instead for raw emotional experience, one that's full of insight into the ways a relationship can go astray, but mostly feels like a slow-motion punch to the gut.

Clouds Of Sils Maria is a great midlife crisis film, in other words, and, like Irma Vep, it’s also a great meta-commentary on contemporary moviemaking, with Assayas making keen observations about modern celebrity, screen-devouring blockbusters, Internet gossip culture, and the next generation of actresses, represented here by Kristen Stewart and Chloë Grace Moretz.

Tsai's latest, What Time Is It There?, runs his usual themes and obsessions through a whimsical premise worthy of Wong Kar-Wai, striking such an exquisite balance between humor and despair that the moods comfortably coexist, just as they do in real life.

Apart from anything else, Predators is a clinic in documentary ethics, but Osit’s intellect doesn’t mute his pain, sensitivity and outrage. It’s a film for the heart and the head.

Leon isn't a flashy director, but he has an excellent sense of proportion. Gimme the Loot unfolds in a series of loose, funny, naturalistic scenes, but they never trail off into improvisational vapors.

Greenfield's refusal to pass judgment on the Siegels lends her subjects and their marriage unexpected complexity and depth - especially Jackie, a true force of nature.

Though Chop Shop is an American film, it feels more like an Iranian movie or the Dardenne Brothers’ "Rosetta"; Bahrani introduces something like a plot point in the late-going, but he mostly focuses, to riveting effect, on how his young hero hustles and claws through everyday life.

With a few self-conscious exceptions, Soderbergh makes an earnest attempt to return to that place and time in both history and American filmmaking, and his risk-taking pays fascinating dividends.

Through the ceaseless efforts of two dedicated pro bono lawyers-both with personal reasons to keep up the fight for five or six grueling years-director Yoav Potash follows every revelation and setback with an urgency most fiction films can't muster.

Taylor and Frankel go too broad when they try for comic relief - and the on-the-nose soundtrack is borderline criminal - but Hope Springs handles marriage and advanced-age sexuality with a refreshing, down-to-earth candor. In today's Hollywood, that counts as radical.

Eternity And A Day occasionally lapses into navel-gazing ennui, and Ganz's reluctant kinship with the adorable moppet courts cliché, but Angelopoulos strings together so many haunting, exquisitely choreographed sequences that even his worst ideas are emotionally resonant.

Doubt is a complex, thematically loaded piece of work, and though it isn't enhanced on film, it deserves the wider exposure.

It's no insult to say that the fine documentary Bill Cunningham New York resembles one of those minor profiles found in The New Yorker's "Talk Of The Town" section: a slight, glancing, yet subtly wrought slice of New York life. And it seems likely that the exceedingly modest Cunningham would want it that way.

Ficarra and Requa are more comfortable being bad: The nastier the film gets, the better it is.

Operation Filmmaker takes a thrilling left turn from its original conceit, and Davenport does a nice job rolling with the punches.

I Stand Alone, Gaspar Noé's raw, corrosive, and relentlessly provocative response—part companion piece, part critique—to Taxi Driver unfolds with rare force and clarity of vision, rarer still for a director's first feature.

A clever, exceedingly wonky procedural about a undercover cop (Dragos Bucur) who quietly refuses to do what he's told.

Under Fresnadillo's assured direction, 28 Weeks Later blurs the line between genre entertainment and a photojournalist's shots of the next urban catastrophe.

Resnais and Ayckbourn care primarily about observing these characters' private and public faces, who they are and who they present themselves as. To that end, they've achieved a mood of enchanting intimacy.

Soul Kitchen plays everything big and loud-and sometimes too doggedly conventional-but it's the rare example of a crowd-pleaser made without cynicism or calculation.

American Graffiti is an unabashed nostalgia piece, but the poignancy of Lucas holding onto this memory only becomes clear at the end. For these boys, nothing would ever be the same again.

Wild Strawberries remains a surprisingly optimistic and affirmative movie about getting old: It’s only natural for people at the end of their lives to reflect on the roads taken or not taken. And there’s peace on the other side.

It’s the perfect first-date movie: It’s flirty and romantic and a little bit saucy, but it leaves viewers with just a peck on the cheek at the end of the night.

This psychologically dense, genuinely erotic vampire thriller lacks fangs, but it has plenty of bite.

It's a funny, sweet-natured humanist character piece.

Margot has a kitchen-sink realism that's genuinely unsettling, like a John Cassavetes movie populated by the hyper-articulate. If nothing else, Baumbach deserves credit for refusing to cozy up to the audience.

It thoroughly eviscerates the MPAA and makes a solid case that the culture has paid the price for its censorious practices. His (Dick's) attacks are the equivalent of shooting ducks in a barrel, but these ducks had it coming.

It's the perfect material for Russell, who not only deals perceptively with the dizzying swings of manic depression, but makes it the fabric of a big, generous, happy-making ensemble comedy.

Much of the fun of Baghead is that it's unclassifiable, by turns a movie-movie lark, an Eric Rohmer-like relationship comedy, and a surprisingly effective "Friday The 13th" kids-in-the-woods slasher film.

Like his underappreciated "Haywire," Side Effects screws around in its own thriller architecture, toying with feints of structure and clever bits of misdirection, and otherwise playing the audience like a fiddle. At this point in his career, Soderbergh pulls it off with the unpracticed ease of a maestro.

Like other great pastiche artists, Gomes has created a time machine to a cinematic era that never quite existed, so it feels simultaneously borrowed and new.

Zahedi isn't afraid to put himself out there, even when his thoughts and actions are profoundly unflattering; his self-effacement makes the film a reflection on narcissism and misogyny rather than an exercise in both.

Chronicle becomes what "Hancock" wanted to be - a dark superhero story with firm footing in the everyday. Perhaps now the found-footage gimmick has been fully exploited; let us never speak of it again.

Mexican writer-director Fernando Eimbcke got his start in short films and documentaries, and his first feature reveals a gift for concision: It doesn't overexert itself trying to come to big conclusions about these characters, and even the comedic scenes settle for gentle quirks over broad guffaws.

Towne never strains for effect, justifiably confident that his polished staging and wry, sneaky wit will be enough to give resonance to Pre's life.

It’s not always easy to sort out the legitimately inspired touches from the merely campy ones, but the film has a deranged, go-for-broke spirit that makes such distinctions irrelevant.

Broadly speaking, Canner hails from the Michael Moore school of first-person editorializing, but Orgasm Inc. isn't given to vanity or cheap shots.

With juicy supporting roles for Chiwetel Ejiofor and Willem Dafoe as Washington's fellow officers, the film works best when the characters are just sitting back and shooting the breeze, which is what they're doing much of the time. Here, puzzling out a robbery is more fun than stopping it.

Head Games is particularly devastating when it shifts from the NFL and NHL, where brutality and headshots are a given, to girls' soccer and under-14 football leagues, where still-developing young necks and skulls make kids perhaps more vulnerable to head trauma than their professional counterparts.

The frequent outbursts of comedy help alleviate a tone that's appropriately muted and sad, and Jenkins should be credited for refusing to tack smiley-faces onto a tough, possibly lose-lose situation.

It's a film where the feelings and experiences of young people are highly specific in detail, yet fundamentally universal and timeless.

Drawing on a wealth of footage from inside ACT UP meetings and protests, David France's powerful documentary How To Survive A Plague pays tribute to their courage and relentlessness, but it's even better as a record of the tactics of effective activism.

The grand concept is really just a vehicle for a more intimate study of depression and its dangerous, shifting polarities.

Cul-de-sac functions better as an affectionate goof on Waiting For Godot, enhanced by an unforgettable setting that naturally severs the trio from contact with the outside world.

Fighting doesn’t break new ground so much as animate B-movie types, but New York movies this gritty and flavorful don't come along very often.

His film powerfully suggests that violent death of any kind, whether personal or state-mandated, transforms everyone in its vicinity.

Mara's Salander is the film's lifeblood, a shrewd yet vulnerable outsider whose resilience and pluck help Fincher elevate The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo above the standard procedural. But just barely.

Poised on the edge of camp, Horror Express nimbly cycles through genres, with drawing-room mystery and procedural elements bleeding into Universal-style monster effects and science-fiction hokum.

Miller directs with intelligence, though not flair, but the script makes up for any flagging energy with crackling Sorkin dialogue and performances that sing with revolutionary fervor.

In an era full of auteur-driven turbulence in Hollywood, The Sting stands out as a model of old-school craft, a richly appointed studio production with big stars and a premium on efficiency and pace.

His outrageous, self-destructive journey lands him in a place just as ironic as Rupert Pupkin’s in "The King Of Comedy," but it’s haunting and mysterious, too, reflecting the dream that consumes his life.

The Lookout's thriller elements could stand to be more surprising, but they're ultimately in service of a better understanding of the characters. Usually, it's the other way around.

While La Sentinelle doesn't end with a conventionally satisfying payoff, Desplechin's thoughtful and meticulously detailed direction offers many other rewards.

Though Away We Go lacks the screwball unpredictability of something like "Flirting With Disaster," it compensates with a unexpected depth of feeling, a novelist’s (or memoirist’s) sense of detail, and a panoramic view of what home means.

A caustic, witty, regretful elegy for a place so transformed that it's virtually unrecognizable.

It's a hilariously half-baked scheme, one that quickly turns them from hunters to hunted, but the strength of The Hunting Party is its shaggy-dog quality.

Most of all, The Host functions as a popcorn movie par excellence, loaded with the most familiar conventions, but shot through with such conviction and visual panache that even its clichés seem invigorating.