Steven Rea

Feig, who wrote the Spy screenplay, encouraging his actors to improvise along the way, has his own stealth mission. For all the over-the-top comedy, zigzagging chases, and choreographed fight scenes, Spy is very much a tale of female empowerment.

Opens the window on a pivotal time in 1960s (and early 1970s) pop culture.

Devilishly delightful.

Add Mostly Martha to the list of great mouth-watering food flicks - "Eat Drink Man Woman," "Big Night," "Babette's Feast" -- but don't stop there. Add it to another list: movies that get at the heart of what family, and love, is all about.

Wonderfully evocative, funny, sad, complex, and essential passages from a man's childhood and adolescence.

A wise, wistful study of hope and dread.

OK, first off, anyone who shares his or her life with a dog, or has done so in the past, go see My Dog Tulip.

Never mind Hollywood's big-star, big-budget hand-wringing about Africa - Bamako is the real thing.

At once a deeply personal film and an important historical document, The Man Nobody Knew leaves us with an incomplete portrait of a man. Did Colby have a moral core? Did he know what was truth, and what was a lie? Did he sanction assassination plots? Did he love his family? Was he even capable of love?

Jafar Panahi's Taxi looks onto a world where the social order and the spiritual order are at odds, in flux, where the conversations are sometimes cutting, sometimes comic, sometimes troubled, sometimes profound.

Bold, ambitious -- and ambiguous.

This beautifully taut and terrifying thriller is faithful to its source in just about every way that matters.

There's a fine line between bag lady and belle of the ball, and Apfel instinctively knows it. Her sense of style is uncanny.

A love song to the new Europe (Klapisch's original title: Euro Pudding) and a snapshot of a polyglot gang on the cusp of kind-of-reckless youth and responsibility-burdened adulthood.

It's oppressive and claustrophobic, confused and scary in there. But it's also compellingly real.

A beautifully strange movie.

Holofcener writes with an ear for the rhythms and ridiculousness of real life, and her cast - to a man, and woman - embraces her words with subtlety and certitude. Friends With Money is gimmickless, and great.

So jaw-droppingly out there, so bracingly bizarre, and, much of the time, so fall-over-funny that even its flaws don't matter. Easily the oddest movie of the year, it is also one of the best.

It's the stuff of soap opera, infused with a nonchalant, David Lynch-like surrealism and a nutball Canadian humor. Beer - because of the baroness, and because this is Canada - flows freely.

Although its tone is generally genial and jovial, Good Hair touches on some tricky issues, at times complicitly.

Remy, the little rat who stars in the big, beautiful, funny Ratatouille, isn't gross at all. In fact, he's adorable.

A movie every American should see, although parts of it are close to unwatchable - notably an operating room sequence in which a pair of surgeons performs a gastric bypass, or "obesity surgery," as they like to call it, on a dangerously overweight patient.

With an attention to the telling detail that one finds in a great short story, Kiarostami guides Takanashi and Okuno - and then Kase - through the mischievous and melancholy tale. It is quiet. It is lovely. And it will stay with you for a long time.

An ingenious blend of sci-fi and mystery.

By the end of their arduous journey, Lore and her siblings are changed. But it's the kind of change that will take years, perhaps generations, to understand, to heal.

A rich, beautifully detailed espionage thriller that captures the bygone days of Shanghai - and 1940s Hollywood noirs' romantic evocations of same - Lust, Caution is also one of those rare movie experiences: Its scenes of the trysts between Yee and Mak, from their rough-stuff first encounter to the long, tangled love-making sessions of subsequent meetings, are truly erotic.

Terrifically satisfying film.

It's a heartbreaker of a coming-of-age tale, even if there's a string of exsanguinated corpses to be accounted for.

A steady, soulful film experience. It's got poetry to it - the poetry of humanity.

Marion Cotillard has made her share of unremarkable, if not remarkably bad, films. But when the French star, who won the Academy Award for her unearthly reincarnation of Edith Piaf in "La Vie en Rose", gets it right, the result is magic.

A political drama, a personal drama, a sharp-eyed study of how the media manipulate us from all sides, No reels and ricochets with emotional force.

And how can you not reflect about time, and change, and physical and spiritual being, when confronted with such a stunning visual record of human existence?

With deft and subtle performances and an uncomplicated but savvy script, Autumn Tale gets to the inner lives of its characters.

The film is a sharp, funny, touching tale.

Side Effects, chilly and noirish, and boasting a wily performance from Catherine Zeta-Jones as a therapist who worked with Emily earlier in her adulthood, is, Soderbergh says, his swan song.

Amirpour clearly studied their films and listened to some Sergio Leone spaghetti Western scores while she was at it. The music in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night pulses with a late-night Persian vibe, reverby and twanging, soulful, hypnotic.

That this purposefully twisting exercise takes place amid the sun-burnished cypresses and towns of Tuscany - where ancient statuary is as commonplace as pasta and wine - only makes this playfully enigmatic meditation the more pleasing.

Year of the Horse is an appropriately edgy, ragged salute to a rock-and-roll band that refuses - happily - to say die. [31 Oct 1997, p.04]

Doesn't overdo it on the 1950s period charm -- lots of tweed, old cars and bikes, great woolly sweaters and painted rowhouses -- and the performances never get out of hand, even when the plot does.

Wildly ridiculous and thoroughly entertaining thriller.

If you're going to take another stab at this tale of a taunted, traumatized teen who exacts fiery revenge on, well, everyone, then Kimberly Peirce is the director to do it.

The footage is spectacular, the colors electric, the life aquatic trippier than anything you'll see in even the most wildly imaginative animated fare.

And tell me if I'm nuts, but another distraction: Doesn't the BFG bear a striking resemblance to George W. Bush?

Moretti knows how to orchestrate a good laugh when it's needed, but he can plumb more soulful, sorrowful depths, too. In Mia Madre, with its self-doubting director and wild-card American interloper, Moretti works a palette of shifting moods. Triumphantly.

Bringing a wily, slow-burn energy and a southern accent to the role of Lyle, Dennis Hopper adds just the right touch of warped malevolence to Dahl's film. [29 Apr 1994, p.5]

A deadpan delight.

As entertaining as it is exasperating.

As soon as it's over, and you find yourself back in the harsh light of the workaday world, you'll be hard-pressed to remember what happened. Except that you'll remember enjoying yourself - immensely.

There's a playlike quality to Complete Unknown (Marston's cowriter, Julian Sheppard, has extensive credits in the theater). That's not a bad thing: The talk is smart. The actors doing the talking are easy to like.

What began as a bold and thrilling story descends into Hollywood cliché. But Crowe and Connelly's work rises above the mush. They make A Beautiful Mind go.

It's a view filtered through a prism of memory and emotion, but one well worth investigating.

While there are similarities to the hardscrabble saga of "Angela's Ashes," Frears' film avoids the mawkish pitfalls of Alan Parker's screen adaptation.

Not everyone's cup of tea, but a strong, heady brew.

A Kiwi nerd love story and loopy portrait of Down Under underachievers, Eagle vs. Shark offers a deadpan take on family, friendship, obsession and self-delusion.

A "small" movie. But in its keenly observed examination of strangers who become intimates - and of family members who remain, in part, strangers - it has big things to say.

Tokyo! is a must-see for the Gondry segment, and a strange, diverting pleasure for the rest.

Ajami brings its audience into a world where the cultural conflict is fierce, emotions run high, yet the hopeful vision of peaceful coexistence shines through the cracks.

It's not impossible to address grown-up issues of commitment, of responsibility, of love, and have some fun, and some profanity, while you're at it.

An accomplished and compelling film by writer/director Josh Mond, James White is also pretty much a bummer.

Batman v Superman lacks the levity (forced or otherwise) of a typical Marvel Universe entry. But Snyder's superpowered epic does have a sense of import and grandeur about it.

Although Toy Story 3 plays with themes of aging and obsolescence, it's really a straight-ahead action pic, with the toys planning, and attempting, their escape and rescue missions. (Hey, it's The A-Team!)

Offers dazzling cinematic family fun, and a mad medley of tunes.

Swiss Army Man is a quest movie of sorts, and also a sort of modern-day piece of absurdist theater. Samuel Beckett by way of Monty Python, it is a story that is at once rooted in the fixations of adolescence (sex, the idea of sex, bodily functions, more sex) and in the loftier firmaments of the mind.

Informative, funny, sad and intriguing.

Comes across as gratifying, not grating: the same way the familiarity of a well-crafted whodunit is part of the book's pleasures.

Quiet, finely etched and beautifully acted by Dina Korzun and the wise-beyond-his-years Artiom Strelnikov.