Steven Rea

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.)

Although Me and You and Everyone We Know requires patience on the part of the viewer - to get past the faux naivete of its grown-up characters, to get past its deadpan arty tone - Miranda July's feature debut is worth the time.

Hugely affecting - and reflective and witty.

A loopy, surreal, beguiling collage of a film, the writer-director's meta-biopic embraces its subject.

Still Mine resonates in all the right ways.

Hanna is a goofy and exhilarating mash-up of all sorts of things. Luc Besson's "The Professional" comes to mind, as do the propulsive synth-syncopations of "Run Lola Run" and the dark allegorical menace of Grimms fairy tales.

It's not a very good title, Waste Land - this isn't a bleak film, at all - but just about everything else in Lucy Walker's documentary works, and illuminates.

Rush, which marks a return to form (and more so) for Howard after plodding through adultery buddy movie comedies (The Dilemma) and Dan Brown sequeldom (Angels & Demons), is almost primal.

Wadjda is a movie about freedom - and nothing represents freedom with the metaphoric simplicity and symmetry of a bicycle.

A breakneck French thriller, Point Blank is so ridiculously successful at keeping its momentum going - and keeping the audience tense with suspense - that it's likely to leave you with your heart pounding, gasping for breath.

The dialogue is smart, screwball, sublime.

Rife with dark humor, Little Otik presents a cautionary variation of the creation myth, and a warning that tampering with the natural order of things may not be such a wise idea.

Valérie Donzelli's Declaration of War deals with issues that may scare audiences away. Don't let it.

A meditation on mortality, on loneliness, on the way technology and narcissism have intersected to create a fascinating monster, The Future is all of this and more. What Frank Capra would have made of it, who knows? But he would have liked its star.

Features entertainingly brainy musings from New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman, and comments from child psychologists, friends and Marla collectors.

A deeply creepy and mysterious noir.

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.

An intriguing study of identity, marriage and, perhaps, madness.

Even with a voice-over narration, and conversations with her dog, Robyn's nomadic quest is full of grand silences, all the better to take in the sky, the rocks, the world spinning underfoot. Wasikowska plays this wordless wanderer just right. That is, she makes her real.

The Killer Inside Me is tough, disturbing stuff: We're tagging along with a sociopath as he explains himself, reveals himself, works things out inside his head.

This is a picture of quiet observation, contained emotion, the hush before the cathartic scream.