Steven Rea

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.