Steven Rea

The Conformist has a decadent visual beauty about it that's breathtaking. But as striking as Bertolucci's classic looks, there's even more powerful stuff in the storytelling.

Robert Burks' cinematography is outstanding, and composer Bernard Herrmann supplies one of his strongest, spookiest scores... A major influence on the movies and movie-making style of Brian De Palma (among many, many others), Vertigo has a dreamlike eeriness and a climax that is, well, downright dizzying. [29 Nov 1996, p.04]

What Touch of Evil is really about, though, is filmmaking: evoking a mood of sweaty despair, of sour, sinister doom, using the vocabulary of a crime picture and a group of remarkable talents, in front of and behind the camera. [Director's Cut; 25 Sept 1998, p.04]

An awesome cinema spectacle.

A crushingly sad, beautiful film.

Wondrously strange and just plain wonderful.

It speaks to the courage and resilience of one man, the savagery of many, and the potential, for both good and for ill, in us all.

It's a masterpiece.

It's inspired fun.

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

A smart comedy that serves as both bittersweet coming-of-age tale and '90s nostalgia piece, The Wackness has the feel of authenticity about it, even if some of its details (the ice cream cart, and the therapist's bong, for two) seem a bit much.

A wildly suspenseful zero-g tale of survival 350 miles beyond the ozone layer, Alfonso Cuarón's space saga is emotionally jolting - and physically jolting, too.

Amour arrives with plaudits and praise. But this is not hype, it is all deserved. This is a masterpiece.

Fused with paranoia and almost unbearable suspense, The Hurt Locker is powerful stuff.

A monumental achievement that documents a coordinated and complicated response to a monumental tragedy.

It's small. It's real. And it's deeply moving.

With rich, detailed, cinematic animation and terrific sound effects, WALLE pulls this unlikely love story off.

Mara and Blanchett are each extraordinary, working in the most organic and soul-stirring ways.

This is a movie that mines deep beneath the surface of human feeling. It will make you think - about love, about life, about two people who aren't real, except that they've become so for so many of us in this improbably successful indie franchise.

45 Years is a study in economy, in the beautiful symmetry of word and image and music.

Mr. Turner is no barrel of laughs. It's a barrel of life - an extraordinary one.

Shot in simple, elegant black and white, unfolding at a measured pace, The Wild Child is fascinating not only for its Tarzan-like true-life story, but also for what it says about the process of nurturing and educating children, and the tools we use - language, discipline, affection - to do so. [20 Feb 2009, p.W05]

Inside Out is the first psychological thriller that's fun for the whole family. Really psychological. And really fun.

The Return of the King is too long...The various story lines...come together in stilted, episodic ways. The narrative is less-than-seamless.

Some of it is wistful, some of it whimsical, but it's all wonderful, impossibly so.

Inside Llewyn Davis plays like some beautiful, foreboding, darkly funny dream.

Has to be among the worst movies ever made.

This is more than the story of soldiers grappling with stress and doubt as they reenter the "normal" flow of domestic life. It's about strangers bonding, about friendship and discovery, about the comedy and tragedy of the human experience.

Just a few barrels short of being a masterpiece.

Inspiring stuff, the stuff of Hollywood all the way back to Frank Capra and before: a story of scrappy underdogs, determined to get to the truth, and toppling the mighty in the process.

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

35 Shots of Rum is visual poetry, but poetry that examines the human condition with insight and illumination.

But moving across this tableau is Frodo and his gang, and here the trouble lies...Not a one seems believable as conveyed by Wood, who forever looks to be on the brink of a good sob. Likewise, his hobbit sidekick Samwise Gamgee (Sean Astin) is a real wuss.

The haunting mastery of Leviathan comes not from these broad indictments of a social order, but from the specifics of the performances, the actors wearing their hurt and rage, their defiance and dread, like well-worn clothing.

For its amusing premise, Fanboys is scarily flat.

A slo-mo gem of gangster cool, of vintage Hollywood noir reimagined by a French new waver in love with American cars, American jazz, and the kind of trench-coated tough-guys embodied by Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum.

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!)

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

A Summer's Tale is one of those movies where it looks like nothing is happening; there is a lot of walking and talking (against exquisite backdrops), dissections and discourse about the intricacies of romance, the false signals, the fickleness.

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.

Offers a crushing view of humanity at its most desperate, and a view of one man's fevered efforts to find grace and dignity amid the horror.

Sad, funny, and quietly alarming romance.

With a bit of Tintin and Tati, Charlie Chaplin and Wallace and Gromit echoing in the pacing and comic sensibility, Triplets of Belleville conjures up a world that's totally surprising and sublime.

Still stands as a gloriously silly and twisted send-up.

Vacancy, in the end, simply offers a particularly aggressive brand of couples counseling.

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.

A road trip at once tragic, hopeful, and unforgettable.

There's a loneliness at the heart of this world, and Ghost World, that's really touching -- and a bit scary, too.

If vigilance and preemption, recompense and retaliation is not enough, the film asks, then what is?

It's great to see an American filmmaker - and a successful one at that - willing to simply train his cameras on the actors and let them, and their characters, come to life.

It's transformative.

George Miller's Fury Road is a hundred things at once: a biker movie, a spaghetti western, a post-apocalyptic dystopian action pic, a tale of female empowerment (The Vagina Monologues' Eve Ensler was a consultant on set), a Bosch painting made scary 3D real, a Keystone Kops screwball romp, and an auto show from hell.

Works its way under your skin, and then into your heart.

It's been a long time since a film has conveyed a culture, and a sense of place, with such telling precision. At the same time, Winter's Bone thrums with suspense.

Elkabetz, alternately resigned and raging, stoic and sad, bitter humor in her eyes, is riveting. Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem takes its time to unfold, but like its star, the film presents its case in powerful, persuasive ways.

With its feverish, percussive soundtrack and bravura cinematography, is like a bolt from the blue, chock-full of unexpected delight.

A bracing, unblinking work that serves as a painful elegy and sobering cautionary tale.

Blue Is the Warmest Color explores a life with a depth and force that would be scary - if it weren't so scarily good.

A triumph.

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.

If Malik doesn't remind you of Al Pacino's Michael Corleone on his journey from innocence to corruption in "The Godfather" saga, well . . . he should. A Prophet is similarly, startlingly momentous.

It's Greengrass' way of asking a question that looms large in these post-9/11 days: Are we all praying to the same God, or is one man's God better than another, and one man's God vastly more terrifying?

Big hair. Big mouths. Big scams. Everything about American Hustle, David O. Russell's wild and woolly take on the late-'70s FBI sting operation code-named Abscam, is big. And the biggest thing of all is the love story that beats at the heart of this rollicking disco-era ensemble piece.

A visually dazzling mood piece.

It's a trippy but tender examination of human emotions, relationships, all-consuming love.

Whiplash is writer/director Damien Chazelle's hyperventilated nightmare about artistic struggle, artistic ambition. It's as much a horror movie as it is a keenly realized indie about jazz, about art, about what it takes to claim greatness.

It's action opera, sword-and-sorcery song-and-dance, and it's a heart-pumping, jaw-dropping thrill. OK, so I kind of like the thing.

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

Pitch-perfect and profoundly moving.

Baron Cohen brings scary conviction to the performance.

The polar opposite of the J.K. Simmons character in "Whiplash."

There is intrigue. There is suspense. Guilt - a man's guilt, a nation's - hangs heavy in the air.

A quietly soulful study of two very different men.

Strangely, wonderfully, The Artist feels as bold and innovative a moviegoing experience as James Cameron's bells-and-whistles Avatar did a couple of years ago. Retro becomes nuevo. Quaint becomes cool.

We're in the company of a great character here, with a lot on his mind, a lot to say.

One of the great war movies - or antiwar movies - of all time.

Despite the potential for some supernatural grandiosity, the tone here remains understated and quiet, and Gainsbourg's performance feels lived-in, and deep, and right.

Singular and stunning.

This is no-nonsense, let's-get-to-it business, and will probably be less satisfying, and less clear, to viewers unfamiliar with the source material.

Easily the best stop-motion animated necrophiliac musical romantic comedy of all time. It is also just simply, wonderful: a morbid, merry tale of true love that dazzles the eyes and delights the soul.

A profoundly unnerving historical document.

Sustaining illusion with marvelous grace is, in a nutshell, exactly what Anderson is all about.

It's aimed at adults as much as children, with jokes that work on multiple levels, and contraptions.

And Bridges? What's there to say about a man who makes it look so easy, and who - in one breathless, pivotal scene - runs through a range of emotion like a wild pony running across the land. Genius, any way you look at it.

Toy Story 2, like its forebear, will stand the test of time.

Brooklyn is that rare period drama that doesn't lose itself in its dogged re-creation of another time.

It's a quietly powerful work, pulsing with gentle humor and a gripping sense of imminent calamity and dread.

Yun's performance is remarkable. The journey Mija takes is painful and hard and - for us, watching - sublime.

With its improvisatory score (drummer Antonio Sanchez provides a hustling backbeat throughout), its seamless shots, its leaps into the surreal, and then back again into the excruciating, embarrassing real, Birdman ascends to the greatest of heights.

In his own profound and ingenious way, Panh has brought the pictures and the thoughts together again.

It's a cinematic feat, an art lover's dream, but as a moviegoing experience, Alexander Sokurov's Russian Ark is something of a letdown.

A frightening portrait of corruption, cynicism, intimidation, greed and violence, Gomorrah is tough stuff.

A black comedy, a character study, and a thriller, Lord of War lacks the gritty, hell-bent hilarity of David O. Russell's contemporary war pic, "Three Kings."

A feast for the eyes and succor for the soul.

It's a lush, lovely dreamscape of a movie, steeped in familiar vernacular (film noir), yet capable of shooting off in totally unfamiliar, surreal directions.

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.

Funny, passionate, full of compassion for its just-pubescent protagonists, We Are the Best! is a total charmer.

An honest and personal and unblurred examination (even through that druggy blur) of a tricky voyage into womanhood.