Scott Tobias

The film is memorable mainly for attractive people sailing and smooching against an attractive backdrop. There's no urgency behind all the preening.

The latest bloom from the flourishing garden that is Romanian cinema, Radu Muntean's Tuesday, After Christmas chronicles the emotional fallout from a classic love triangle, but it unfolds with the agonizing tension of a suspense film.

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.

There aren't many laughs in this vaudevillian gambit, and fewer still in the fish-out-of-water comedy of Madea hosting a rich white family that's chiefly concerned with yoga, wi-fi, and their carb intakes. Still, Perry remains a true outsider artist-nobody makes movies like his. (And please don't try.)

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.

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.

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.

Norte is the rare film where the characters seem simpler the longer we spend time with them. They’re humans that evolve into types.

A sort of distracted, freewheeling form of inquiry and observation drives Encounters At The End Of The World, a loosely constructed documentary that seems to have been made on a whim.

The Turin Horse has a burnished beauty that's awe-inspiring, like a clear window into a faraway world as it dangles, and then falls, off the precipice.

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.

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

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.

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.

Concerns feelings that can't be expressed, relationships that can't flower, and connections that are impossible to bridge.

The film sprawls across two decades and 127 minutes, but there isn't a memorable image in it.

A canny piece of autobiography that looks at the man behind the legend and the legend behind the man.

The true audacity of The Mastermind may be Reichardt’s conception of J.B. himself, who not only lacks nobility or competence, but possesses a compelling vacancy that’s harder to unpack.

The tough urban realism Lumet perfected in cop dramas like Serpico, Q&A, and Prince Of The City has been reflected in first-rate TV shows like Homicide: Life On The Street, The Wire, and The Shield. But those shows had multiple seasons to draw out the breadth of institutional corruption, while Lumet miraculously covers this territory in 167 minutes.

There’s a promotional bent to Mad As Hell that whiffs more of branding than rigorous documentary filmmaking.