Scott Tobias

Anarchy finally reigned supreme in 1932's classic Horse Feathers, which was the first Marx brothers comedy that smoothly integrated the story into the troupe's routine.

Over a difficult three-hour sprawl, Cristi Puiu's Aurora fully explores the time before and after a killer strikes, and it has the cumulative effect of making what passes for a "motive" seem absurdly simplistic.

Though it occasionally dips too deep into a well of redneck humor, Slither cleverly exploits the nervous laughter that fills a theater whenever a horror movie gets too frightening to bear.

While it never approaches the richness and gravity of a great Mann film like "Heat," Miami Vice blurs the thin blue line to similar effect, and he features a couple of bravura setpieces, including a tense raid on an enemy hideout and a shootout with chaotic, you-are-there immediacy. If only all summer movies were this majestically slight.

Though Anderson's storytelling gets murky at times, it's still a fine showcase for his versatility, adding to an impressive, under-the-radar résumé that includes the underrated science-fiction comedy "Happy Accidents" and the first-rate horror film "Session 9."

Nobody is better at capturing the crushing banality of everyday life than Judge.

Meet The Robinsons takes a large step toward making 3D a sustainable format, the CinemaScope of tomorrow.

Shine A Light pays tribute to the band's essential agelessness.

Though Climates lacks "Distant's" haunted, poetic melancholy, it has a vivid, sensual texture that's unmistakably Ceylan's. He's one of those rare directors who doesn't need a credit for identification.

Bale's live-wire performance typifies the many major and minor elements that elevate The Fighter from the deeply conventional sports movie it might have been into the endearingly offbeat sports movie it turns out to be.

While Raimi’s Stooges aesthetic — which was really more prominently displayed in the sequels than in 1981’s The Evil Dead — isn’t played up here, there’s enough outrageous unreality to make the brutality go down a little easier. It isn’t quite a cartoon, but it’s close enough.

Arriving on the heels of "13 Assassins," Miike's gloriously irreverent take on the samurai action genre, Hara-Kiri seems conventional by his standards, especially in a long middle section that occasionally dips into sentimentality.

At a minimum, his new film, Adoration, marks a welcome return to the Egoyan of old, the one who could spin seductive mysteries out of disassembled parts and show how images can be manipulated into comforting lies.

Still, there’s no doubt that To The Wonder is a fans-only proposition, continuing Malick’s evolution (or devolution, for some) from the narrative grounding of "Badlands" to much more abstract, poeticized notions of the human condition.

It's all done in questionable taste, mucking around in the nasty terrain of snuff films and children in constant peril, but Sinister is smart and well-crafted, and it scarcely gives the audience a moment to breathe.

Great casting takes The Other Guys most of the way: Ferrell draws a wealth of good material from his character's oddball ineffectuality, and he partners perfectly with Wahlberg, who's always best at his most incredulous.

Côté and Henriquez err in pressing their case too hard on occasion, especially when they cut to reaction shots of Khadr supporters watching footage of his agony; there's a line between providing context and manipulating the audience that they don't care to acknowledge. Then again, subtlety isn't likely the goal: You Don't Like The Truth beats the drum, and beats it loudly.

Though the lightness of Bernie can get disconcerting at times, even cartoonish, Linklater approaches the story with a bemused curiosity that seems about right under the circumstances.

The beauty of the film is how organically its themes are presented - it's a slice of life that comes about its sweeping ideas with surprising delicacy.

The Asphalt Jungle would be considered a heist picture if the mood didn't dictate otherwise. The standard "honor among thieves" theme applies, but dishonor gives the film its special noir flavor.

The Ghost Writer may not go down as one of Polanski’s masterpieces, but if it does end up being his swan song, it’s the ideal denouement to a life and career of unsettling resonance.

Doing some of his best work in years, Ewan McGregor plays Mills' alter ego as a prickly, not altogether noble loner in his late 30s who initially doesn't take the news of his father's coming-out well.

Witnessing outreach workers intervening in these situations is inspiring enough, but their subtlety and nuance in neutralizing people of different backgrounds and temperaments is especially impressive.

Enter The Void is a trance-like experience, feeding the shimmering neon of Tokyo at night into a spectacular hallucinogenic head-trip.

He's Premium Rush's villain, but Shannon doesn't attempt anything like the austere derangement of a Hans Gruber type, even though he specializes in playing terrifying nutjobs. Instead, he's a buffoon of the first order, and his hapless tomfoolery sets the tone for a light, fast, frequently hilarious 90 minutes.

Animal Crackers leaves the song-and-dance to Groucho in the great "Hooray For Captain Spaulding," sends Harpo running after screaming blondes in the background, and breaks down the fourth wall for a wry Eugene O'Neill parody.

Glawogger studiously avoids explicitness until he gets to Mexico, where he finally goes past the bartering stage and behind closed doors as business is conducted. Pleasure isn't part of the transaction.

In casting the brothers as stowaways on an ocean liner, Monkey Business gets laughs from broad Keystone Kops chase scenes, but extends the absurdity even further with bizarre one-liners (Groucho claims he "licked his weight in wild caterpillars") and a sequence in which all four brothers try to get off the boat by impersonating Maurice Chevalier.

The Secret Of The Grain stretches out at the relaxed pace of a seven-course meal, but at the end of it, Kechiche has squeezed the most he can out of percolating dramas within the family and he lets the audience get to know its members without needing to throw them all a subplot.

In its best sequences, Ramsay puts her duress in dazzlingly visual terms, collapsing the past and present in an associative rush of red-streaked images and piercingly vivid moments out of time.

Much like his father Ivan (Ghostbusters), first-time director Jason Reitman has a broad, anything-goes comedic sensibility that allows silly gags and incidental humor to sneak in alongside the satirical barbs.

The thinking behind Grey's casting, with its obvious sex-industry connections, lends the film a degree of verisimilitude, but it really pays off in a cameo by film critic Glenn Kenny, who brings a hilariously sleazy theatricality to the role of an "escort critic" who expects graft for his reviews.

Though it's compelling enough as soap opera, American Teen digs deeply into why kids grudgingly accept the roles they've been given and the brutal consequences that come with straying outside the lines.

The film deftly sketches a sibling relationship complicated by obligation, guilt, mistrust, and, not least, an abiding love.

Though Siegel's The Killers dispatches Hemingway after six unfaithful minutes, its roundabout treatment seems truest to his spirit.

For a genre film, Killing Them Softly goes to an awfully strange, none-too-subtle place, but the choice to move the '08 election from background to overlay is unusually bold and thought-provoking, too.

A mesmerizing study of the nature of evil itself.

This is not some nostalgia-soaked throwback to the noir of old, but a rude, shit-kicking thriller that co-opts - and merrily defiles - a classic like "Double Indemnity." Whatever its shortcomings, at least they're never failures of nerve.

When We Leave is a film without villains. Instead, it features a set of circumstances that inevitably and needlessly spin out of control.

The Descent sustains a level of intensity that most horror films can barely muster for five minutes.

Denis brings it all together for a genuinely shocking finale, unexpected, yet in keeping with the film's consuming madness.

Currently serving out a sentence that will likely consume the remainder of his life, Spector turns the interview into a trial on his own terms--one that's gripping, revelatory, and a little self-incriminating.

In an unusually subtle performance by a child actor, Kacey Mottet Klein stars as a crafty ragamuffin.

McQueen is a showy director, but his bravura long takes have the effect of heightened attentiveness, allowing scenes to build in intensity without the relief of a cut.

Given their reputations as feminist provocateurs, the coming together of Breillat and Argento seems natural, even inevitable, and The Last Mistress gets a charge from their feisty, uncompromising spirit.

Suburbia has the attitude and exploitation kicks of other films about youth rebellion, including more than a few Cormans, but Spheeris’ fidelity to the real L.A. scene—including performances by non-actors and musicians like Flea, who appears with a pet rat—compensates for some contrivances in the writing.

The value of No Impact Man, a compelling and suitably exasperating documentary about one family’s attempt to not harm the environment for a year, is that it forces viewers to reflect on their own casual consumption and waste.

Trier doesn't allow the bleakness of the material to swamp the film in a miserablist tone, but he doesn't hold back, either, in revealing every hairline crack in Lie's fragile psyche.

It comes off as calculatedly irreverent at times, and its Wes Anderson-isms are too precious by half, but its sweetness is genuine and next-to-impossible to resist.

Like many French films of its kind, Private Property remains content to simply observe a situation without tidying up the narrative, which in this case leaves some big questions unanswered. But Lafosse knows that problems that beg for a resolution sometimes don't get one.

Far from being a liability, Dolan's youthfulness gives it unmistakable vibrancy: This is a love-crazy, movie-crazy affair, laying bare its emotions just as plainly as its influences.

The trilogy's conclusion, 71 Fragments, doesn't quite fit the glaciation theme, but it does show Haneke's willingness to experiment with the form and challenge the way audiences receive information. The film's radical deconstruction of various narrative strands questions the way such information is delivered and received.

Like many debut features, Reprise is a foremost a statement of purpose, and in that respect, at least, Trier shows limitless promise.

Through it all, Vicky Cristina Barcelona remains unaccountably romantic, a confirmation that love, elusive and painful as it can be, is still worth pursuing.

A lush, ambitious, strikingly outsized play on Charles Perrault’s Little Red Riding Hood that makes explicit the dangers of a budding young woman straying from the path.

The Dictator keeps the gags coming as fast as it can manage, sometimes in big gross-out setpieces like an impromptu baby delivery, but more often in the general fusillade of hit-or-miss jokes that hit at a better-than-average rate.

For this master of mindfuckery, Synecdoche, New York probably qualifies as a magnum opus, since it essentially multiplies "Adaptation" by an exponential factor and thus grows into a snarling, ungainly beast of self-reflexive absurdities.

The film never feels entirely staid: Lu wriggles out of convention where he can, especially in the first half, and engages with history as an artist, not a hagiographer.

Haneke's schoolmarm tendencies come to the surface in Benny's Video, which implicates the media for desensitizing people to violence.

I Served The King Of England views diabolical events from the sidelines, something like "The Remains Of The Day" reworked as an absurdist comedy.

Like a proper action sequel, it's bigger, louder, and sillier than its predecessors, but it's more streamlined, too, smartly dumping the tired underground racing angle in favor of a crisp, hugely satisfying "Ocean's Eleven"-style heist movie.

District 9 fuses science fiction mayhem and biting social commentary as well as any film since "Starship Troopers." It’s the rare alien invasion story that has the aliens running scared.

Bujalski’s funny, diverting character piece has a lived-in quality that’s no small achievement.

Gibney has enough material for a dozen movies here, but his attempt at an overview, however unwieldy, paints one hell of a nauseating picture.

Though narrower in scope and lacking the first-person angle, Waste Land resembles Agnès Varda's great 2000 documentary "The Gleaners & I," particularly in its awe of tough, creative, hard-working people who live on the margins.

At its best, Serbis is a vibrant slice of life that establishes this theater as a living organism, nurturing a society of outcasts; it's like "Ship Of Fools" with blowjobs and boil-lancings.

The film insightfully probes into the things that are said and the intense feelings that are merely implied, buzzing at a low level just beneath the surface.

Wingard’s direction is a robust throwback to the VHS gorefests of yore, but with a distinctly more modern slickness and snap, and he knows how to play around with the audience.

Morris’ film does everything it can to make Hawking’s thinking accessible to a wider audience, and reveal how A Brief History Of Time is as much its author’s story as it is the story of the universe.

Much of the fun of Malice derives from Sorkin, Frank, and director Harold Becker understanding the been-there/done-that formulas of thrillers past and tinkering with them as much as possible. Instead of a little bit of misdirection, they devote a vast swath of the film to one.

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.

Touring his father's magnificent structures, Nathaniel shows signs of coming around to his mother's point of view, and of realizing that Kahn's towering contributions to art and humanity perhaps exceed (if not altogether excuse) his shortcomings as a father, a husband, and a lover.

Like Blood Simple, Blue Ruin deals in crimes of passion, carried out by human beings who are flawed yet tragically relatable—one is about mopping up the blood, the other about the impossibility of stanching the flow.

A daring and immediate debut feature for Koshashvili, Late Marriage could lead two likeminded people to opposite conclusions, and that may be its greatest strength.

Though some of Slaughter Rule's conclusions are overly tidy, the film's powerful meditation on masculinity gets much of its credibility and punch from the two leads, especially Morse, a reliable character actor who sinks his teeth into a role with heavy physical and psychological demands.

Chabrol handles the upended family dynamic beautifully until the final third, when a wildly implausible sequence of events lessens the suspense just as he should be turning the screws.

Much of the observational brilliance of Approaching The Elephant comes from how closely form relates to content: Out of chaos comes order, both at Teddy McArdle and in the film, which brings the personalities and conflicts into sharper focus as it goes along.

Few scenarios are more cliched than the curmudgeonly father-figure who takes in the precocious imp -- irritation in the first two acts, love in the third -- but Hornby infuses it with warmth and honesty, not to mention his obvious gift for wry observation.

Story has made a potent political film without having to spray viewers with a fusillade of alarming numbers to back it up. She trusts viewers to intuit their way through fascinating anecdotes and detours that gain a cumulative power, one that data alone cannot possibly express.

Honest and moving.

Night Moves is a film of deliberate, gnawing intensity and focus, built around a Jesse Eisenberg performance that doesn’t give much away, at least not easily.

Emerges as an improbably hopeful tribute to the human spirit.

Nolan reverses the emphasis -- no surprise from the director of a plot-driven film like "Memento" -- but achieves the same end, bringing Hollywood noir under the harsh glare of permanent daylight.

Spring’s overall balance suggests that Benson and Moorhead are students of Italian genre cinema and of human behavior; the film has insight and style to burn.

The overall effect of Heise’s work is mesmeric, persuasive and cumulatively powerful, as each piece of the puzzle falls into place and he lands on overarching insights into a German century and what it portends for the future.

At once bitterly funny and devastating, Lost In La Mancha sides with Gilliam in form and spirit, piecing together the train wreck with snaky humor and interludes that cleverly mimic his Monty Python collage animations.

Though Law and Kidman spend much of the movie apart, Minghella and ace editor Walter Murch arrange their interweaving subplots like a running dialogue between two lovers, each compelled to survive on the thin hope that they'll be reunited.

Millennium Mambo is a resolutely minor work, so enveloped in ennui that it never gets past the surface of things. But those surfaces are remarkable.

Gives the impression of spontaneity while being meticulously planned. Most importantly, Steers and Culkin know that the best way to evoke sympathy is never to beg for it; by the end, their achievement seems hard-won.

Just as Hearts Of Darkness is as compelling an adaptation of the Joseph Conrad novel as Apocalypse Now, Blank's Burden Of Dreams follows a maniacal Werner Herzog as he one-ups his blinkered hero in Fitzcarraldo, the tall-tale biography of a rubber magnate who builds an opera house in the middle of the Amazon jungle.

Dramatically leaps through time, covering months or sometimes years in the span of a single cut. The effect is jarring and exhilarating, but it also bucks the common idea that relationships deepen over time.

Seidl has made an insightful film that’s more about the trials of a young woman’s coming of age than about being overweight.

Even as The Quiet American loses focus and urgency, Caine's performance keeps the doomed spirit of Greene's hero intact.

Viewers can walk away with something more precious than factoids: an emotional, aesthetically striking experience that cuts more deeply than words. And if they crave more information, that’s what the Internet is for.

Posed somewhere between a fairy tale and harsh reality, the film pulls off a daring feat by turning Blancan into an almost abstract monster as a way of getting into the deeply unhealthy situation that created him.

3-Iron gains its hypnotic power by observing these characters through a slight remove. With total command of his effects, Kim transforms an already peculiar romance into something as otherworldly as a ghost story.

Flaws and all, Dark Blue has a combustible energy that's usually anathema to Hollywood, reopening an old wound that has festered too quietly for more than a decade.

Narco Cultura makes it abundantly, forcefully clear that the illicit business of narcocorridos thrives on the illicit business of cartels—and business is still booming.

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.

A galvanizing piece of personal filmmaking.

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.

In accounting for Almodóvar's identity as an artist and a man, Bad Education comes together like a bold and far-reaching summation of his career to date.

In keeping with Hong Kong's style-as-substance tradition, Fulltime Killers is beyond reproach.

At bottom, though, Happy People celebrates the hard-won freedoms that living in the Taiga offers those who are willing to confront its challenges. There are few places on the planet where the strictures of society don't apply, and the trade-off for fending off bears and minus-50-degree weather is the opportunity to lead a pure, solitary life.

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.

If there’s anything worth extrapolating from The Tribe, it isn’t the deaf experience so much as recognizing our own tendencies to conform to certain unspoken laws. The more insular a society, the more severe the consequences of rebellion.

It would be enough for The Babadook to get by on scares alone—the eponymous spook is eminiently franchise-able—but Kent doesn’t give the audience that kind of distance. Her agenda is more personal.

It's not the artistry of X-Men: First Class that's particularly striking; though it's finely crafted, the film feels less the product of a visionary director than of the Marvel movies machine working at maximum efficiency.

It takes an uncommon talent to keep the mundane from seeming inert, and through Solnicki’s lens, the absence of outer conflict doesn’t mute the turmoil within.

At times, Goldsworthy's philosophy edges into fuzzy New Age-isms, but with an ever-widening gulf separating humans from their environment, his work demonstrates the enlightening pleasures of reconnecting.

Portraits of maternal ambivalence are rare in cinema and Bronstein pushes it to the limit, turning motherhood into a white-knuckle experience with the highest of stakes.

Smith delights in these offbeat personalities and their jerry-rigged accoutrements, but the real joy in the film comes from the happy interaction between the subjects and their creations.

The hits outnumber the misses well enough in Airplane!, especially in the first half, when the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team (writer-directors David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker) are layering jokes in the foreground and background. There are parodies of popular favorites like Jaws and Saturday Night Fever, wacky stock footage on back-screen projection, slapstick violence against various religious solicitors, and plenty of silly wordplay.

Much of the film is difficult to understand—as with many poems, its meanings are so personal that they’re often cryptic—but Gorchakov’s (and Tarkovsky’s) displacement comes through powerfully in lonely rooms and in tracking shots that give the impression of a soul adrift.

Writer-director Michael K. Roskam takes his time in revealing why Jacky needs to shoot up, but that LaMotta restlessness is unmistakable - this bull here can rage.

The incendiary Dogville confirms the director's sadistic knack for locating his characters' (and his audience's) soft spots and prodding them for a singular emotional experience.

With ruthless efficiency and wit, Kahn ratchets up unbearable tension and releases it in startlingly visceral fashion, but his placid denouement is the most chilling scene of all.

It is shocking in its revelations, thrilling in its possibilities.

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.

It may not have been what the producers had in mind, but they asked for a Paul Schrader movie, and that's exactly what he delivered.

A lean, well-contained slice-of-life at 83 minutes, 'R Xmas finds the director making a confident return to the hard-nosed realism on which he's staked his maverick reputation.

One of the big reasons Flight is so satisfying is that it moves with the no-frills, meat-and-potatoes conventions of a first-rate procedural while being awash in ambiguity.

For as long as Park and Wasikowska keep it burbling, it's an intoxicating brew.

Here’s a film that opens with a man being smeared in excrement and closes with an even more horrifying act of revenge, yet it’s fevered, passionate, and occasionally erotic, at least by Greenaway standards. It’s a film awash in the color red, full of blood, sex, and rage, the rare Greenaway that feels alive as more than a formal or semiotic exercise. You may even catch him storytelling here and there.

Compared to the CGI chaos that tends to engulf DCEU and MCU movies, especially in crossover teamups, the clean zip of Pixar animation feels exhilaratingly rare, like a lost language rediscovered.

Immensely likable.

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.

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.

Though comparisons to "The Blair Witch Project" are inevitable, the impeccable first-person camera technique not only makes sense dramatically, but also facilitates a complex and queasily ambiguous relationship between the conspirators and the audience.

Even the flaws mesh with the overall fabric of the film in a way that impeccably choreographed musical numbers and fight scenes might not have. Altman reverses the emphasis of most mainstream family entertainments, which are about pace and snap, and instead favors a gentle, more inviting evocation of Sweethaven and its oddball inhabitants. Robert Evans wanted an answer to the Broadway hit Annie. Instead, he got a Robert Altman film.

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.

What makes Raising Victor Vargas so special, beyond its irresistible charisma, is how Sollett and his cast capture the thrill of first love.

Though tagged as the director's bid for commercial success, School Of Rock is as philosophical in its own way as "Slacker" or "Waking Life." It was made by people who not only know the music well enough to create magnificent flowcharts around it, but also understand how a simple, soul-stirring rock song can seem revolutionary.

The issue may be polarizing, but Vera Drake resonates with such seriousness and truth that it transcends the narrow limitations of polemic.

Herzog also finds extraordinary beauty in what Dorrington is trying to accomplish: Like Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his boat, Dorrington wants to float around the natural world in a reverie, and when he finally does, he experiences a connection with Plage that's genuinely transcendent.

The experience is two-thirds thrilling to one-third enervating, a winning ratio for what's essentially a tightly curated anthology film.

Denis’ atmospherics, as usual, carry the day.

Abortion, incest, infidelity, revenge, and hockey collide at a fever pitch, juxtaposed with such frantic energy that they're pushed to the level of high comedy, funniest at its most dramatic.

In light of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's young career, it's fitting that his beguiling, transfixing romantic fable Tropical Malady splits down the middle into two radically different halves.

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.

A taut, diamond-cut piece of storytelling.

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.

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.

The result is a powerfully visceral experience that justifies itself almost entirely on surface chops, with striking color composition and a complex sound design that elevates the story to an operatic scale.

With The Nightmare, Ascher abandons the strictures of a conventional documentary to frolic in the terrifying netherworlds of human consciousness. It’s not enough for Ascher, a sufferer himself, to tell his audience about sleep paralysis—they have to feel it, too.

It remains to be seen whether Kill Bill is merely a skilled slice of juvenilia or a pastiche with real emotional and thematic underpinnings, but based on Tarantino's storytelling command in the first half, it's worth giving him the benefit of the doubt.

Showing the best of humanity and the worst of humanity doesn’t mean denying one in favor of the other; taken together, Salgado’s photographs have the scope and perspective of someone who can genuinely say he’s seen it all.

Though conventional in many respects, it feels like no other boxing film ever made, due largely to Eastwood's unmistakable presence on both sides of the camera.

Sleepaway Camp keeps defying every possible expectation of how a slasher movie is supposed to behave. It isn’t really scary or atmospheric, but the implements of death... are exceedingly gruesome and unprecedented.

Does nothing to justify its own existence other than be consistently funny from start to finish.

Beyond theme, however, these stories are united by the agonizing, low-level tension Östlund brings to bear on every scene, which vary in importance, but not in consequences for the characters involved.

Handsomely produced and photographed, which alone distinguishes it from the guerrilla standards of its cut-rate peers, Enron succeeds most by simply making a complex situation graspable, a tall order when the perpetrators are masters of grand-scale deception.

Starlet shows enough of her unbalanced, unsustainable situation to make sense of her connection to Sadie, however frail a ballast her new friend might be. Their need for each other is disarmingly sweet, but far from sticky.

The fact that Morris applies the same basic methodology to The Unknown Known that he did to the The Fog Of War makes the contrast between the two men meaningful, and says something profound about Rumsfeld, too.

From the combustible opening-credits sequence, Caan displays a whip-crack sense of timing, pace, and energy that's so rare for a first-time filmmaker that it's tempting to call him a savant.

Morvern Callar not only attempts to reveal an interior life, usually the province of novels, but also focuses on the interior life of a woman who refuses to open up to anyone.

Ferrara blows up the everyday threat of harassment and violence against women into a magnified force.

Goes through its airport-thriller paces with dazzling kinetics and style.

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

In its dramatic shift from the real to the allegorical, the ending of Andrey Zvyagintsev's auspicious debut feature The Return is likely to leave many viewers scratching their heads.

In the end, Harold And Maude metes out these life lessons directly and without much ambiguity, yet that does little to diminish its power.

An impeccable minimalist drama that's tailored specifically to Devos' expressive capabilities, which say more than the sparse dialogue.

It seems like a departure, but soon turns into a Bruno Dumont film—and one of his most rigorous and powerful at that.

Director Tiller Russell doesn’t spin this gripping tale out of cinematic bravado like Scorsese—just extensive interviews with all the people involved, footage of a commission hearing after the fact, and a wealth of stock material on Brooklyn’s East Side. But he paints a vivid picture all the same.

Make no mistake: Rich Hill is a social document, and conclusions can and should be drawn from its beautiful, empathetic portrait of life on the fringes. But Tragos and Palermo content themselves with shining a light and leaving it at that.

Makes heavy demands of even jaded viewers, who are unlikely to stomach de Van's anatomical noodling from the same curious distance. But for the brave, the film's literal journey to find the "I" inside the body moves forward with a riveting single-mindedness.

The film has much more sophistication than the average throwback, but the search for justice across Indian Territory is uncomplicated and righteous, and the half-contentious/half-sentimental relationship between a plucky teenager and an irascible old coot grounds it in the tried-and-true.

Little about [Östlund’s] work is simple-minded or cut-and-dried. His films marinate in viewer discomfort.

Witherspoon's broad, obsessive comic performance is bound to get the most attention, but Broderick does the best work of his career, finding an affecting spot between the all-purpose defiance of Ferris Bueller and the put-upon foil of his recent work.

The Christophers is a slippery customer, an ingenious and twisty two-hander that shifts in tone as Lori and Julian get their hooks into each other. Coel and McKellen prove to be a combustible pair, two actors of contrasting generations, genders, and race who parry in darkly funny sessions that morph in complexity as their characters continue to try to outflank each other.

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

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

Adjusting to Martel's style requires patience, but her indirection pays dividends, culminating in an unforgettable final shot that flies in the face of narrative expectations.

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.

Buoyed by Hong’s romantic optimism, the immensely satisfying conclusion hints at the possibility of love as a renewable resource, so long as both partners are flexible to different terms. Yourself and Yours asks the audience to take the same leap — best to keep an open mind and go with the flow.

In keeping with his concept that the mind and the body are inseparable, Sade builds to an extraordinarily powerful centerpiece when the two come together, fusing fear and desire, pleasure and pain, innocence and enlightenment.

John Woo's smart thriller Paycheck may not intend to be political, but it's marked as much by its era as post-Watergate thrillers like "The Parallax View" or "Three Days Of The Condor."

In a sense, Oasis is an unabashed tearjerker, but Lee keeps knocking the melodrama off-balance, making all the big emotional payoffs a little discomforting, because they're not that far removed from something really disturbing.

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.

Drifting through time and space without firmly situating the viewer, Iwai's elliptical style requires patience, but also a willingness to be carried along by its gorgeous, dreamy lyricism.

Its dense mysteries remain more tantalizing than distancing: No other director integrates the creepy with the cerebral quite like Cronenberg. (Review of DVD 9/13/04)

Has a gentle, hypnotic tone that's insistently sweet and elegiac, in spite of the horrors that overwhelm the frame. In its juxtaposition of the serene and the violent, the beautiful and the brutal, the film achieves a balance that's exquisitely judged, tiptoeing artfully through a cultural minefield.

Much like David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive," which it resembles in more ways than one, Femme Fatale makes a rich bouillabaisse out of De Palma's trademark themes and obsessions, stacking references to the heavens and operating with an internal logic that may take several viewings to fully unpack.

In the lively exchanges between the titular duo and the technical innovation that links the past to the present, The Lady And The Duke brings the period to life with surprising immediacy.

Touching and wise, with fine performances and impeccable widescreen photography, The Rookie is a rare family film that encourages kids to pursue their dreams, but not before giving full weight to the consequences.

Less a story than a situation, the film contends with a difficult transitional period in the lives of its title characters, who face the growing necessity of getting some distance from each other.

The Testament of Ann Lee suggests a bigger story than Fastvold has the time or resources to tell, but it stays close to Seyfried’s hip and allows the purity of Ann’s vision to carry the day.

Quietly asserts its eccentric romanticism with an assured, matter-of-fact blend of humor and pathos.

After all, the documentary itself stands as a thrilling testament to the fact that art is — and should be — open to interpretation.

With this rueful, cantankerous yet hugely charismatic figure at its center, Tony Stone’s beautiful documentary reveals the twin burdens of working the farm alone while beating back an encroaching inner darkness.

Polinger tracks the escalation of danger and violence with startling intensity—the first third of Full Metal Jacket also appears to be an influence—but there’s nuance to the way Ben chooses to handle this situation.

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.

As Marty continues to run scams, the laughs continue unabated, but the dread only deepens, because we realize he’s a creature of need, capable of anything but empathy. And he’s been pushed to the precipice.

Morgen isn’t interested in rehashing the facts and highlights of Cobain’s life and career, or in providing chin-scratching insights via music scholars and other talking heads. He’s made an impression of Cobain, which is a much more intuitive and vital enterprise.

Lucas' beautiful script and a trio of first-rate performances carry the material with an intermittently breathtaking urgency.

As usual with the Knives Out series, Johnson stays well out ahead of his audience, and Craig gets more than one delightful drawing-room moment when he pulls together the elusive facts of the case.

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.

Even without all the other complications, Doillon's handling of the language gap alone gives Raja a pungent dramatic edge.

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.

Riveting testimonial.

When she (Breillat) succeeds, as she does in "Fat Girl" and in the final minutes of Sex Is Comedy, the impact can be overwhelming for filmmaker and audience alike.

Kitano's gentle side reigns in Dolls, a gorgeous meditation on love and devotion, but the film's hypnotic tone and beautifully formalized color scheme makes it unlike anything he's done to date.

At its best, the film sustains the heightened tension of great science fiction, dropping in on a frightening new world that's just this side of familiar.

While there are surely gags and references that are for-fans-only in the film, which exists in part to pay off longstanding support, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is shambling and sweet, loaded with hilarious standalone bits that are held together by the duo’s warm camaraderie and intimate connection to the city of Toronto.

Even without its bleak and affecting story, Beijing Bicycle would work beautifully as a travelogue alone.

Every time the pace starts to flag, it coughs up one hilarious left-field interlude after another.

Not since Lukas Moodysson's "Together" has communal living been depicted with such warmth and feeling for the entire ensemble.

All this colorful mayhem is mere warm-up to the great rabble-rousing catchphrase Nada delivers when he enters a bank, armed to the hilt: "I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass… and I'm all out of bubblegum."...I love that line as much as anyone else, which is enough to make any cultist salivate like a dog in anticipation, but here's the thing: I wish a better actor than Roddy Piper had delivered it.

The rare sequel that magnifies the scope of the original without diminishing the fun.

More than a slight, pleasant oddity, Hukkle shows Pálfi's keen attunement to the sensual possibilities, both in nature and in cinema.

As reticent as Nathan is to cast explicit judgment, the film shows the tragic impasse between a street culture that’s reckless and provocative, and a police force that exacerbates the problem with heavy-handed tactics.

Though Cronenberg makes some creepy insinuations, eXistenZ is more effective as a black comedy than as a visceral shocker.

A Touch Of Sin stumbles in the coda, which makes the themes embedded in its title too explicit, but it’s a bold, invigorating statement from a director who keeps reinventing himself.

With Scott playing the perfect foil to Leary's exasperated sage, the fantasy sequences are hilariously caustic, but as they accumulate more rapidly, the distinction between real and imagined situations becomes disturbingly vague.

A joyously demented musical-comedy built on a macabre foundation, like "The Sound Of Music" with a kickline of corpses.

Stunning you-are-there account of a grand swindle in the making. Were the coup not such an outrageous and chilling affront to democracy, their documentary would be a gut-busting comedy along the lines of Woody Allen's "Bananas."

Wiseman's fragmented approach misses the continuity of the show, which mixes erotic dance with comedy, magic and even a little soft shoe, and tells an overarching story that Crazy Horse never quite communicates. Yet there's more than enough compensation in the scenes Wiseman does catch.

Siegel is almost too tasteful, nearly to the point where his coming-of-age story loses color and purpose. But he finds a mesmerizing presence in Ambrose, a terrific young actress who carries the film without a second of showiness.

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.

The film is a powerful reminder never to underestimate the historical evils that have been, and could again be, unleashed.

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

A romantic comedy with jagged edges, Fatih Akin's exhilarating Head-On paves the road to love through miles of prickly thatch.

A brainteaser of the first order, Primer ranks among the best of recent thrillers such as "Memento" or "The Matrix," which rupture the fabric of reality and radically destabilize the narrative in kind.

Unlike "Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind," which holds the memories of a doomed affair as precious, there's nothing bittersweet about Ozon's failed romance, but its problems are equally true.

Plays like an old-fashioned romantic comedy with updated hardware.

Jed Rothstein’s wildly entertaining documentary The China Hustle blows the lid off another multibillion-dollar heist built on complex financial instruments and a whole lot of smoke and mirrors.

Using simplicity as another form of deception, Mamet lays out a hand of three-card monte for the audience to see, then tricks it into guessing falsely. In this case, it's worth getting fooled out of a little cash.

Claire Denis’ grotesque, mesmerizing, one-of-a-kind new science fiction movie.

It functions elegantly as both a victory lap for longtime fans and a belated introduction to the Belchers, a family of lovable misfits and cranks that’s as genuinely close as any on television.

Baratz’s apparent willingness to accept everything at face value papers over some of the more troubling aspects of Tenzin’s mission, but Unmistaken Child allows the mysteries of the process to be preserved without judgment.

More than any masculine heroics, Pearce's primary job is maintaining the tone: smug, irreverent, and giddily punch-drunk.

The key point about God Bless America is that it's extreme but not exaggerated, a dark comedy that indulges - and questions - a violent, misanthropic fantasy about laying waste to the cultural landscape while staying grounded in a recognizable reality.

The sequences without Chucky are as stock as they come, and so are all the flesh-and-blood characters around him, but he's still a hugely entertaining mischief-maker, and what he lacks in physical gifts, he compensates for in sneakiness.

Though the film is too slick and heavy-handed in its pro-integration sloganeering, and it's burdened by Travolta's ill-conceived star turn, its infectious high spirits and catchy tunes still pack one hell of a sugar rush.

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.

Jolie simply exercises Mariane's persistent will, and honors her in the process.

It's a small victory for flash in its eternal war with substance, but in this case, the flash is enough.

Elegantly scripted by Pulitzer Prize-winner David Auburn, The Lake House never establishes any clear rules about how and when these strands of time can intertwine, but it succeeds at forging a bond between people who only know each other on the page.

Ask The Dust may find Towne a little past his prime, but after so much time in the Hollywood wilderness, it's good to see him trying again.

The film is less about people or this specific herding ritual than about the majesty of the landscape and the interplay between these animals, their keepers, and the dictates of nature itself.

Decades removed from his dreamy Kelly in the "Bad News Bears" movies, Haley pulls off the remarkable feat of bringing childlike vulnerability to his character while still suggesting ungodly menace.

Hooper doesn’t entirely escape the rote business of semi-regular mutilations and impalings, but The Funhouse succeeds in updating a monster from the Universal pantheon and setting it loose in the type of traveling death trap that’s been haunting small towns forever.

Amid all this metafictional hoopla lies the real heart of the movie, a tentative romance between Ferrell and a tax-withholding baker played with adorable prickliness by Maggie Gyllenhaal.

Rulfo's simple strategy of sticking close to his subjects and allowing them to wax philosophical about their lives and labors pays off.

To a degree, the dynamic between Brosnan and Cooper resembles Aaron Eckhart and Matt Malloy's relationship from "In The Company Of Men."

What was scary once is scary twice, like a carnival funhouse remodeled with a few new mirrors and spring-loaded spooks.

The main problem with Breach is that the story is told through O'Neill, who's far less compelling, in part because Phillippe doesn't have the chops to draw out his own set of contradictions. By committing himself to O'Neill's perspective, Ray misses the opportunity to uncover more information about Hanssen's relationship with his wife and church, his aberrant sexuality, and his mysterious connection to the Russians.

While it falls short of its predecessors, the film is generally more confident and inventive than any of the non-Toy Story Pixar sequels.

All these characters make a beautiful mess together, even if McCarthy spends too much time tidying it up.

Severance still seems a few rewrites away from living up to its potential, but it's remarkable how much just a modicum of wit can spice up the standard backwoods slice-and-dice. Scaring people with a horror film is easy; entertaining them takes a little skill.

If the end justifies the means, it would be hard to deny that the legacy of Alberto Fujimori, the disgraced former President of Peru, is largely triumphant.

The truthfulness of Winstead's performance - and those of her co-stars, too - has a steadying influence on James Ponsoldt's modest drama, which at times seems in danger of failing a sobriety test.

With Douglas, the film's shambling charms slowly catch hold, thanks mainly to his personal magnetism.

Late August, Early September is a resolutely minor work, a quiet departure from the brash showiness of Irma Vep, but it's crafted with the sure hand of a major director.

It's the definition of a film meant to be admired more than loved, but Desplechin's fierce intelligence and uncompromising sense of character come through, as does some of the sharp wit and stylistic flourishes left over from his last film, 2004's "Kings And Queen."

Sure, the unlikely ascendance of 30-year-old Vince Papale from working-class suds-pumper to Philadelphia Eagles benchwarmer is a victory for the little guy, but it's still more of a personal victory, and that's what makes it touching.

Wong's visions of a New York café, a Memphis bar, and a Vegas casino--not to mention the swaths of beautiful country in the Southwest--have that enveloping quality that make his films so persistently seductive. The natives should feel flattered.

Appreciating what’s special about The Stepfather involves accepting—or at least tolerating—some clunky moments.

All calculation aside, scary is still scary, and Insidious makes up in old-fashioned tension what it sometimes lacks in originality.

Super exists in the no-man's land between indie quirk and raw exploitation, and when it works, it's thrillingly off-balance.