Steven Rea

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.