Scott Tobias

Gosling excels at playing contradictory characters like this one, having kick-started his career as a Jewish neo-Nazi in "The Believer," but here, his inner turmoil rarely gets vocalized. It's a remarkably subtle performance.

Old Joy doesn't try for too much, but its subtle victories leave plenty to savor.

There's a bittersweet quality to McCandless' story that Penn captures intuitively.

Having the dog around raises the emotional stakes tenfold, and develops a kinship with Vittorio De Sica's Italian neo-realist classic "Umberto D.," which also revealed societal ills through a poignant dog-owner relationship

Like its spiritual predecessor The Battle Of Algiers, Z is as much a mini-revolution as it is a movie, actively engaging in a political battle as it was unfolding.

While it was ultimately the songs—You Can Get It If You Really Want, Many Rivers To Cross, Pressure Drop, and the title track, among other classics—that carried the day, The Harder They Come remains a powerful testament to their meaning.

The body means different things for each of them, and Ceylan's mesmerizing existential drama takes its time establishing the players and bringing their inner lives into focus. It's cinema as autopsy.

Raimi’s new film feels distinctly unburdened and fun, happily frolicking in its own pulp silliness.

Never to be confused for the rom-com starring Amy Adams - though that would be the mother of all video-store mix-ups - Leap Year lets actions speak louder than words, and the actions here are shockingly explicit.

Since women are usually such foreign creatures in Scorsese's work, he seemed an unlikely choice to direct Burstyn's feminist vehicle, but his aggressive style suits her uncompromising character.

Humpday carefully raises the stakes until it hits a finale loaded with humor, tenderness, and delicious ambiguity. It’s like "Old Joy" by way of Judd Apatow.

Debut features are rarely this confident and accomplished, much less such a perfect blueprint of what to expect from a filmmaker down the line.

By turns playful, harrowing, intensely moving, and uproariously funny, Chain Camera cuts away all documentary artifice and goes straight to the source, allowing these kids to reveal themselves with the utmost directness and candor.

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

Dazzling cinema-essay.

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.

It takes less than a minute of watching Duel, Steven Spielberg's feature-length debut, to realize you're in the hands of a master director.

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

As it stands, Brook’s adaptation is an encroaching nightmare of innocence lost, following Golding’s thesis about what happens when civilization breaks down and man’s true nature is revealed.

The Dardennes sustain that tension through a masterful closing drive that resembles the final third of "In The Bedroom," only without the same dreadful inevitability.

With the conceptual rigor and emotional directness associated with the best of Iranian cinema, Oskouei simply listens to the stories of those who have never been listened to before. Their shattering testimony, elegantly harmonized in a chorus of stolen childhood, has universal appeal.

Though glazed in chilly surfaces -- the Kubrickian spaces, Cliff Martinez's gorgeous ambient score, the elliptical editing rhythms of Soderbergh's recent work, particularly "The Limey" -- the film contains a surprising depth of feeling within its egg-shaped head.

Provides one of the rare glimpses of the upper class to come out of recent Iranian cinema--the last one in memory was 1996's exquisite, Ibsen-esque melodrama "Leila"--and director Jafar Panahi (The Circle) captures it vividly through his hero's wounded obsession.

Emerges as something rare, an issue movie that's so honest and keenly observed that it doesn't feel like one. It earns its thesis statement through minute details and a unique grasp of a commonplace problem.

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

What really sets The Immigrant apart is how urgent it feels. Historical dramas often have a reserve that comes with perspective, but nearly a full century removed from this story, Gray seems, if anything, more emotionally invested here than in his contemporary dramas.

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.