Scott Tobias

Above all, Hara's smile and Ryu's sigh are a touching show of good faith and the genuine pleasure they take in each other's company–which, of course, makes their response to life's disappointments all the more poignant.

In its perfect fusion of popular entertainment and high art, Rear Window ranks among Hitchcock's best.

Virtually every Super Technirama frame of Luchino Visconti's 1963 masterpiece The Leopard could be described as "painterly" in its ornate details and exquisitely balanced color compositions. (Review of DVD Release)

There’s dignity and folly to The Tramp in City Lights, and everything in between.

Intolerance is thrilling and vital, a collision of historical periods that feels as earth-shaking as the movement of tectonic plates.

Far from muting the satire, Renoir's hearty characterization complicates it and gives it life, which is rare among broadsides at the bourgeoisie.

A large part of what makes Some Like It Hot a perennial favorite is that it has the go-for-broke commitment of an early Marx brothers farce, but it's harnessed by a well-structured script that keeps building on itself. It's no fluke that the capper is the most famous closing line in movie history.

Every element in the film, from the dense thicket of forest branches to master cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa's deceptive framing and lighting design, is precisely calibrated to make the facts more difficult to discern.

Hunter is the stuff of nightmares, but it’s the stuff of dreams, too, and it beckons you to follow it downstream.

4 Months unfolds like one of those street-level Dardenne brothers movies (Rosetta, L'Enfant).

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.

[McQueen's] film is a tough, soul-sickening, uncompromising work of art that makes certain that when viewers talk about the evils of slavery, they know its full dimension.

Told with the stark simplicity of a fairy tale, Sansho The Bailiff demonstrates how compassion can overcome the forces of hatred and oppression, and shows how trying it is to remain decent and humane in an inhospitable world.

The Wackness' main draw is Kingsley's giddily over-the-top performance as a pothead, and the film delights in showing Gandhi sparking a huge bong or making out with Mary-Kate Olsen in a phone booth.

The film remains an exemplary piece of popular entertainment, full of vibrancy and wit, with unforgettable characters and a delicate, bittersweet tone that considers their emotions in balance.

A galvanizing piece of personal filmmaking.

A star in every genre, Stanwyck epitomized both the steely femme fatale (Double Indemnity) and the heartbreaking melodramatic heroine (Stella Dallas), but her performance in The Lady Eve was the only one to showcase her full range of ability. Her line readings sparkle with ruthless intelligence and wit, but she's also capable of surprising openness and vulnerability.

Don’t Look Now culminates in a shock for the ages, the grim payoff to Roeg’s editing scheme. But it would all be mere supernatural hokum if the film weren’t so persistently insightful about the gnawing pain of losing a child, and how the mind can keep that wound from scarring over... It would all be unbearably sad, if it weren’t chilling to the bone.

There’s great comedy in the adventures of a washed radical forced back to life, but One Battle After Another is a serious film, too, about the true multicultural fabric of America and its resiliency under duress.

A director known for the icy classicism and genre subversion of films like "Funny Games" and "Caché," Haneke has a pitilessness that could not be more perfect for Amour, which would collapse at any whiff of sentimentality.

For the first hour or more, The Hurt Locker boldly forsakes any conventional narrative hook beyond the ongoing tensions between these men and the terrifying grind of defusing bombs day after day.

Anatomy Of A Murder respects the audience enough to turn us into the jury, and trusts that we, too, can consider the facts like adults.

Zero Dark Thirty stands to become the dominant narrative about this important historical event, no matter its distortions, composites, or other slippery feints of storytelling. In that, it wields a dangerous power.

Beyond the impeccable performances and direction, it's foremost an exceptional piece of screenwriting, so finely wrought that the drama seems guided by an invisible hand.

Scorsese's seductive, dreamlike imagery and Schrader's voiceover narration draw the audience into Bickle's head and reveal the world through his eyes, which see only ugliness and filth.

Chantal Akerman’s radical 1975 masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai Du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles turns the term “realism” on its face, exploring the contours of a woman’s life through the mundane routines that never make it into movies.

Good comedies are rare, but rarer still are those that conflate laughter with intimacy.

Carlos is mostly tense and thrilling, revealing the poisonous side of global citizenship.

While Blue Heron has an experimental quality that might encourage you to intellectualize the way film processes memory, its payoff is as personal and emotional as movies get. It’s one from the head and the heart.

Hitchcock would make richer films in Hollywood, but The 39 Steps came off the line as the Model T of cinematic plot machines.

The beauty of The Class is that it puts the lie to the one-teacher-can-make-a-difference myth propagated by so many other films.

The film evolves into a simple, intimate, acutely emotional portrait of a family reaching a painful crossroads.

Timbuktu’s delicate tone is totally unexpected and specific to Sissako, who keeps finding notes of vulnerability.

The 33-year-old Koreeda, who began his career in documentary, has a gift for observing life as it's lived, accumulating simple, seemingly banal scenes into an unforgettable reflection on the frustration and helplessness of trying to explain the ineffable.

In any form, Apocalypse Now remains an audacious, powerful, and haunting vision of war as a waking nightmare, and the new print looks and sounds better than ever. But as much as Redux was born of Coppola's intellectual restlessness, it also speaks to his unwillingness to make tough choices and live with them.

The film never loses its intensity from the first moment Leatherface's sledgehammer drops. It's horror without a safety net: Survival isn't guaranteed for anyone, heroism and struggle are often futile, and as the old adage says, you can never come home again.

Leviathan itself feels like a brave, lonely act of rebellion against the system, deeply pessimistic about the possibility of it ever working in the people’s favor. It advocates for a stiff drink.

Storytelling clarity has never been a Kurosawa strong suit, yet Pulse baffles even under those standards, so it's best to just get on his abstract wavelength and ride the thing out.

The Secret Agent has a warm affinity for communities like the one that adopts Armando—Dona’s apartment building echoes the lo-fi resistance of Baktan Cross in One Battle After Another—but it doesn’t sugarcoat the immense loss that history can deliver.

Far from the solemn earnestness of most Holocaust documentaries, Fighter addresses the war and its oft-toxic reverberations with refreshing impudence and candor.

Nemes does everything he can to connect the audience to Saul's numbness, shielding us as much as possible from the cacophony of human misery that rings in his ears. The chill seeps in regardless, as it should, and Nemes doesn't try to counter it with more than a tiny, stubborn flicker of hope.

Her is a 21st-century love story that perfectly captures the mood of the times and finds new inroads into the exhilaration and heartbreak that have existed since the first “I love you.”

I Am Cuba is still propaganda of the first order, a beautiful and sensually overwhelming tribute to the land and its people.

Making an assured transition to Hollywood after his Hungarian cult sensation "Kontroll," director Nimród Antal gets his business done with an efficiency that recalls "Red Eye," another thriller that clocks in under 90 minutes. But efficiency isn't everything, and Antal sacrifices too much in order to sustain tension.

Ida’s piercing intimacy makes the deepest impression, but its vision is deceptively wide-reaching despite a scale that’s deliberately pared-down and small.

More than any self-declared masterpiece in the Disney catalog, Bambi has earned the right to be called timeless, because its concerns are transcendent and universal.

The six men have different personalities that suggest varying styles of leadership, but what's remarkable about The Gatekeepers is how they speak in one voice about the moral complexities of their former jobs and their extreme pessimism about the future.

In the spirit of the original, Linklater closes with one of the best endings of its kind since George Romero's "Martin."

From its title on down, Towelhead alarms and manipulates, and succeeds in goading the audience like a schoolyard bully, but apart from Bishil's harrowing attempts to find herself, the strings stay too visible.

At its best, Bloody Sunday produces the same chilling illusion of history writ large, clearly detailing the strategies of both sides, then blankly observing the conflict through unadorned, newsreel camera stock and the precise orchestration of large-scale chaos.

It’s emotionally and sexually explicit, as raw as an exposed nerve at times, but Adèle and Emma have public lives as well as private ones, and the film’s great achievement is holding them in balance and observing how they relate to each other.

With a lovably cantankerous sense of humor and an honest strain of hard realism and pathos, the film thrives on the tension that comes from an artist who devotes himself to the truth, but watches his image get away from him.

Pleasing mainly just as a message-in-a-bottle from a restless, persecuted artist-that is, until the amazing closing shot, which brings the volatility of post-Green Revolution Iran home with unforgettable force.

It can be a bit of a slog, frankly, but Schilinski’s command over the look and feel of the film, from the evocative Academy-format images to the unnerving rumble of the soundtrack, sinks into your bones. The more it shimmers with uncanny horror, the better.

The action sequences are choreographed with the crackerjack timing expected from Pixar, but the film's funniest and most affecting moments exploit the tension between a special family and a world that insists on dulling them down.

Miraculously, High And Low turns the mundane follow-through of police work into the stuff of white-knuckle suspense.

There’s no other movie quite like it.

First-time director Jarecki, better known as the co-founder of MovieFone, skillfully integrates the home-movie footage with his own thorough inquiry, weaving past and present into a patient, deeply engrossing piece of storytelling that's rich in ambiguities.

The Age Of Innocence possesses a tension between the flowering of private passion and the quiet forces that make its survival impossible—and Scorsese, a master of coiled intensity, brings it across with heartbreaking force.

A surprisingly bittersweet love story at heart, Eternal Sunshine values the sum of experience, which in this case means a thorns-and-all openness to romantic possibilities.

A big, family-style Italian dinner, catered to the broadest tastes, yet satisfying all the same.

The thrill of The Overnighters is in witnessing a heartrending payoff that could not be anticipated nor written—and, miraculously, closes the movie on a perfect irony.

In the wild and consistently surprising Y Tu Mamá También, anything isn't the half of it.

After Hours is a caffeinated black comedy with an emphasis on speed. With a small crew and a tight shooting schedule, Scorsese transformed limited means into a staccato burst of creative energy, playing up the extreme paranoia and frustration of a data processor stranded in Soho.

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.

What distinguishes Goodbye Solo, beyond Savané’s larger-than-life personality bumping up against West’s intractable curmudgeon, is the continued particularity of Bahrani’s work.

On a technical level, The Tree marks a significant advance over the humble utility of Bertuccelli's previous film, drinking in Australia's pastoral majesty with an abundant eye for beauty that falls just short of the intended poetry. Yet the characters aren't nearly as resonant.

The Seventh Continent deals with the deterioration of an average middle-class family by focusing obsessively on mundane life details. As images and actions start repeating themselves, it becomes clear to the family (and to us) that their lives are little more than a collection of routines, without joy or meaning. The conclusion they reach is better left as a surprise, but suffice to say, the third act shifts gears completely.

From his wonderfully idiosyncratic bits of silent comedy at a storefront window to a brilliant one-take of Malkovich watching a calamitous scene unfold, de Oliveira seems determined to exit on his own terms.

Like Antonioni, Coppola was wrestling with the properties of his chosen medium and showing how art can conceal and deceive as much as it can tell us something plain and true.

It helps that the actors' faces are so mesmerizing, particularly Manjinder Virk as Lorraine.

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 shouldn't be surprising that writer-director Steve Oedekerk, the man responsible for "Kung Pow! Enter The Fist" and the second "Ace Ventura" movie, considers single-celled organisms as he shoots for the lowest common denominator.

There’s nothing lost in his continued refinement of style; if anything, it makes the pleasures of his work that much more acute.

This isn’t merely about the follies of a misanthrope, it’s an epic tragedy about life in the Ivory Tower and the inability to understand—much less empathize with—other human beings.

Poitras fashions Citizenfour into a spy thriller whose intrigues bleed into everyday life. She doesn’t want the audience to feel like Snowden’s revelations are limited to him and potential enemies of the state—or even to activist journalists like her and Greenwald. She makes the threat feel as pervasive as they believe it to be.

Cantet's masterful study of a white-collar businessman in decline.

Shirkers isn’t about Cardona, but about Tan reclaiming the film and the story that he had taken away from her. Her energized, rough-hewn documentary style doesn’t seem that far removed from her lost debut, but she and her friends have enough perspective to look back at that period in their lives with touching fondness and good humor.

Ends with horrific revelations that are made all the more powerful by the lightness that precedes them. Simultaneously sad and hopeful, Ghobadi suggests the resiliency of a culture in which war is part of the fabric of everyday life.

Loosely structured around four seasons, Nobody Knows unfolds in a long series of episodes that slowly progress from lightly comic to bracingly sad as the situation deteriorates.

Alejandro González Iñárritu is a pretentious fraud, but it’s taken some time to understand the precise nature of his fraudulence.

For a low-budget production of the early sound era — 1934, seven years after "The Jazz Singer" — It Happened One Night has a wide-open quality that’s miraculous under the circumstances. This comes through in Capra’s technique, like a long tracking shot that follows Ellie’s humiliating trek to a public shower, but it really shows in the film’s ambition to be about more than this one love story.

This film confirms that Panh approaches the past not as a historian, but as an artist, and an exceptionally vital one at that.

Gomorrah takes place in a world where decency can't take root and we can only watch in horror as crime overwhelms society's most vulnerable-- women, children, law-abiding citizens, and the conscientious few who want to get out of the game.

The result is two bad movies in one: a gimmicky romantic comedy, and one of those seasonal headaches that submits loud family dysfunction as a vehicle for Christmas cheer.

Spielberg balances terror on the water with a rich portrait of an island police chief (Roy Scheider) torn between public-safety concerns and a community that thrives on the tourist dollar.

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

It's an austere Russian drama with shades of Hitchcock.

Revisits the past with an eye on the present and future, hoping as McNamara does that his "lessons" are instructive and might keep history from repeating itself.

A moving, gently reassuring tale that softens the boundaries between humanity and nature, life and the afterlife.

The second half of The Kid With A Bike diverges so much from the first that they seem like two different movies - the first a drama about an orphan's search for home, the second a moral thriller about the terrible things all people, no matter their social station, are willing to do in the interest of self-preservation. Both sections are riveting in their own way, and punctuated by startling shocks and bursts of emotion.

As much as any documentary since Errol Morris’ A Brief History Of Time, Particle Fever excels at expressing advanced scientific theory through graphics that are simple, attractive, and utterly approachable.

Caouette's shattering Tarnation represents a landmark in personal filmmaking: It finally realizes the digital dream of a raw, unsanctioned glimpse into the soul.

On a deeper level, Haneke tries to reach for political allegory on the French-Algerian War, but the film functions best as a perfectly calibrated thriller, perhaps his most accessible to date.

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.

Fast, exhilarating new comedy.

What makes The Duke Of Burgundy so affecting is how deftly Strickland and his remarkable actresses bring something as exotic as lesbian S&M into the realm of the ordinary and relatable. Viewers can see themselves in Cynthia and Evelyn, whether they’re hand-washing each other’s undergarments or not.

Östland writes the conflict between husband and wife beautifully, like a scab that gets picked at until it bleeds, and he does things cinematically, too, to suggest the growing distance between them—an already-cool visual palette broadens like a yawning chasm.