Steven Rea

Jolting, suspenseful, full of twisted sympathy for its goons' row of characters, and wickedly amusing to boot, Killing Them Softly summons up the ghosts of "Goodfellas" and a whole nasty tradition of crime pics. And then it lets its ghosts go, whacking and thwacking away.

It's a charmer.

Quietly and keenly observed, Summer Hours nods to Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard" (a country estate, a family reunion, an impending sale). Assayas displays a lucid sense of how personal history and family identity are inextricably linked to a physical place - here, to a house that is still busy accumulating its memories.

This is Highsmith, and so things do not go as planned for her protagonists. The Two Faces of January - drop-dead gorgeous to behold - is not a merry tale, but a murderous one. Murderously good.

A funny, sad and absolutely lovely film.

Brian Cox is especially good, and slippery, as Menenius, a Roman senator.

The Hoax makes the fakery of disgraced writers Jayson Blair, James Frey and Stephen Glass seem puny by comparison. Irving was the grand master, and Gere's portrait and Hallström's movie suggest why: He almost bought his own story, believed his own outrageous pack of lies.

Monaghan is stronger still. This is a performance that deserves to be noticed. She is crushingly good.

How the film plays out, and what happens to the boy and the adults in his company, may prove a revelation, or a disappointment, or something in between. But getting there is thrilling and wondrously strange.

A darkly comic, piercing, and occasionally painful study of a young woman's quest for identity.

It's a beautiful, grim tale.

Leaves you feeling rich - and richly satisfied.

A rollicking tale of rehabilitation and redemption, rife with cool special effects, Hancock is smart and surprisingly raunchy.

The Dardennes are aces at these small-scale human dramas, and Two Days, One Night is almost without flaw.

Made in a forthright, unfancy style and utilizing a cast of born naturals, Washington Heights deftly draws parallels between father and son's complicated relationship and the tensions that pulse through this predominantly Dominican American community.

It's a feminist nightmare, the world brought to life -- in hard-hitting documentary style.

Fear(s) of the Dark, a French production, interweaves the shorts, linking the segments together thematically, and narratively.

A spirited, smart-alecky look at the ongoing conflict between a government that wants to eliminate pot and a public that wants to smoke it.

Ergüven's film, beautifully shot and beautifully performed, cuts its storybook tone with starker, more brutal truths. Anger - aimed at a conservative social order and those complicit in maintaining it - courses through this sad, striking tale.

It's a celebration of the good times and bad times shared by a man and woman who found each other in the middle of some historic craziness, and it rocks.

The story of Donald Crowhurst is not one of remarkable courage or remarkable endurance. But it is remarkable.

Selma may be flawed, even spurious at points. But in its larger portrait of a man of dignity, purpose, and courage, and in Oyelowo's performance as that man, the film rings true.

A riveting documentary.

A heartbreaking story of true love.

A wonderful, witty mix of horror and social satire, The Host takes its simple, time-tested premise - menacing creature terrorizes the populace - and runs with it.

Exhilarating, alternately funny and horrific film.

Pray has a great story here, but it's much more than just "The Brady Bunch's Endless Summer."

If Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter takes its time, it's time worth taking. The cinematography is lovely: great swirls of midnight snow, frosted trees in glinting sun, the bustling modernity of Tokyo, a big library, subway stations exquisite in their orderliness.

There's nothing mean-spirited, or judgmental, about the way Morris goes about his business - he must have been kicking himself with glee as one bizarre strand of the story unravels to reveal the next.

Presented with an economy and emotional cool that add to, rather than subtract from, its dramatic impact, The Girl on the Train reverberates with a quiet, seductive power.

White God offers a dark - very dark - take on the way humans exert authority, and superiority, over our fellow creatures.

Has a dreamy ominousness about it, and a sorrowfulness that speaks to the artificial intimacies of cellular communication, digital images and dial-up porn.

An entertaining, occasionally illuminating autodocumentary.

There's whimsy and raunchy humor here, but also an underlying sense of darkness and despair.

Charming is such an overused, film critic-y designation, but The Way Home is that, and more.

Things get a little tricky by the end, but it's the sort of trickery that's immensely satisfying.

Sly, sophisticated and surprising.

Marwencol is about Hogancamp and his miniature alter-ego, about his photographs and his creative process. But it is also, on a deeper level, about how we process our experiences - good and bad, violent and mysterious - and how we try to build safe places in our lives.

A taut, tricky thriller.

It's complicated. And it's fascinating.

A crushingly sad, beautiful film.

Gripping, powerful, heart-breaking.

Kore-eda, deploying a Western pop score by the Japanese indie-rock band Quruli, just lets these kids be kids.

Simply put, it's terrific.

Disturbingly good. The writing and the performances are such that as things go from bad (sad motel-room affairs) to worse (a 4-year-old gone missing), the film's characters get inside your skin, your soul. It's enough to make you want to cry.

If Munich raises disturbing issues about Jewish-Arab relations, past and present - and how can it not? - it is also an absolutely riveting tale of the hunt and the hunted.

13 Tzameti is cut from the same cloth as the humans-hunted-for-sport classic "The Most Dangerous Game" - and from that early talkie's many subsequent remakes and rip-offs, including John Woo's "Hard Target."

Splendid, smile-inducing fun.

A kind of deadpan soap opera - but one that, despite its high melodrama and wicked humor, delivers a real emotional wallop.

Not just a great sports movie, Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 captures a pivotal moment in recent history.

This story of two very old souls who suck on O negative Popsicles is, in many ways, more about the life-sustaining force of music than any hankering for blood.

Hopped-up and electrifying. The soundtrack is wall-to-wall and propulsive.

This is the kind of unusual but involving picture that's ripe for a Hollywood remake - but while you're waiting for the Sandra Bullock-Ethan Hawke edition (it's a good post-movie game: coming up with your own casting ideas), Read My Lips is well worth checking out.

Clean, director Olivier Assayas' spellbinding study of a junkie trying to get her life in order so she can reclaim custody of her child, avoids the pitfalls, brilliantly.

This long (nearly three hours), revelatory movie is both a thrilling adventure about endurance and survival, and an elegiac examination of centuries-old tribal culture, fast-fading in the new millennium.

Quiet, watchful, out for himself, Sorowitsch is a complicated figure - neither hero nor villain, and certainly no fool. The Austrian actor Markovics is riveting in the role; he is wiry, anticipatory, his eyes darting with intelligence and worry.

It's transformative.

It's pretty much impossible not to love Sing Street's young hero as he stumbles around Dublin, dumbstruck and smitten, at turns clueless and confident.

A fine, inventive '70s period piece about friendship, first love, and growing up to face the hard lessons of life.

A small, beautiful film exploding with big ideas.

An eerily quiet, bracingly bloody, and expertly laid-out adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel.

A sweet but unsticky comedy from Norway that was one of the five foreign- language nominees at this year's Academy Awards.

The relationship between Chris and his diminutive namesake is at the core of the film - the determination to be there for his son, no matter what; the mentoring, the pair's goofy, lovely banter. And Smith and his bright-eyed boy pull it off brilliantly.

The Cooler is small-scale moviemaking about small-scale lives. But it's big in all the right ways.

This is a sad, passionate, beautifully wrought story, and Bardem's portrait of Arenas is at once daring and deeply moving.

You can feel the world closing in, which, I would venture, is exactly how Fassbinder wanted you to feel.

The film's save-the-world scenario may be the stuff of crusty cliff-hangers, its imagery may be borrowed, and its jaunty dialogue anything but deep, but there's something exhilarating going on here. It's darn sublime.

The Golden Door feels, at points, like a silent film - a silent film with CinemaScope vistas and dazzling, saturated color.

Exhilarating and tragic.

Like "The Square," the startling Down Under noir released a few months ago, Animal Kingdom explores the down and dirty side of human nature, fraught with greed, suspicion, and betrayal.

The dialogue and action in One False Move seems instinctive and unforced. There isn't an iota of caricature, there isn't an affectation of "style," there isn't a false note sounded.

There's real joy in O'Day's eyes - and larynx - as she bobs and weaves through an amazing songbook.

As in David Lean's "Brief Encounter," the suspense in Cairo Time comes from what doesn't happen between its pair of "lovers."

Linklater's film adaptation succeeds in bringing the flamboyant Welles to life.

On a deeper level, the Dardennes' film offers a portrait of a fragile yet determined woman set on making a home for herself in the world, even as that world unravels before her eyes.

Thoroughly engaging.

By recording this all too commonplace and dehumanizing process, Puiu's film shows the sick old man and the strangers who deal with him to be all too human - extraordinarily so.

Suffers from several goofily tacky animated reenactments and a music score that unnecessarily underlines the significance of key events, but for those who lived through the turmoil of Vietnam, and for the generations that have come since, the film is an important document in its own right.

A meditation on a life lived in the public eye, I'm Still Here is strange, riveting, and occasionally appalling stuff, any way you look at it.

A chase movie, a spy movie, a futuristic thriller full of colorfully bizarre characters and deftly choreographed stunt work, Children of Men works on multiple levels - as action and allegory.

Trainwreck is anything but.

Love Is Strange has a gentleness about it, and an empathy, that inspire.

With the filmmaking techniques pared to the bone, it is left to the actors to bring the scenes alive - and they do, often brilliantly.

Lady Vengeance is not for everyone. The violence, while less over-the-top and orgiastic than Park's two previous installments, is still hard and crackling. The sex is grim and graphic. And deadpan nihilism permeates the air.

Rivette's slow-moving but seamless study of the rituals of courtship has a disarming grace, even as its downcast hero, Depardieu's Gen. Armand de Montriveau, limps around stiffly.

To be sure, there are goofy flourishes here, the in-jokey, left-field rummies that are the Brothers Coen's stock-in-trade. But this is altogether a quieter, more philosophical sort of endeavor.

Mountain Patrol is breathtakingly beautiful, breathtakingly brutal and simply breathtaking.

Ozon has crafted a near-perfect film, a mournful, moving kind of cinema poetry.

Rife with nightmarishly violent and horrific behavior. It's intense, graphic, frightening.

The film speaks to fundamental issues of history, truth, and the philosophical conflicts of humankind.

It's a tearjerker, sometimes, and sweetly funny at other moments. It's near perfect.

Manny & Lo, wonderfully photographed (by Krueger's brother, Tom) and full of telling detail, is a wry, intelligent picture with a sweet, but hardly saccharine, story to tell. [06 Sep 1996, p.03]

Boasts another formidable and fine-tuned performance from the great Charlotte Rampling.

Mr. Holmes is about how the past defines us. It is also very much about regret and trying to put things right.

Disarming, alarming, and more than a little impressive, Shults' movie was shot in his mother's Texas home, and the thing plays like a cross between Eugene O'Neill and a slasher pic. (It's cut like one; the soundtrack makes you feel jumpy like one.)

Late in Looper, when a highly telekinetic kid starts levitating things, it really does look like Christopher Nolan had wandered onto the set and taken over.

The Fighter is funny, ferocious, sad, sweet, pulpy, and violent. Sometimes, all in the same minute.

Guadagnino, who directed Swinton in the 2009 Italian gem "I Am Love," has kept the core premise - and the sensuality - of Jacques Deray's original. (Delon and Schneider go skinny-dipping, too.)