Scott Tobias

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.