Steven Rea

It's a story of global consequences and historic proportions, and of astounding athleticism and synchronicity - and filmmaker Polsky ices it.

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

Whether it's simply the change of locale, or a change in Allen's psyche, something is up in Match Point. With a dark view of humankind, and of the vagaries of chance - bad luck, good luck, dumb luck - the filmmaker has crafted a wicked, winning gem.

A flat-out electrifying experience.

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

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.

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

Our Little Sister zooms in close, observing everyday rituals, the commonplace that suddenly turns significant.

Beautifully observed, and beautifully acted by the novice thespian Polanco (culled from a New York City public school), Chop Shop is at once a heartbreaker and a story of hope and the American Dream.

Pitch-perfect and profoundly moving.

It is, without doubt, a transcendent endeavor, from its exhilaratingly smart screenplay - director David O. Russell's adaptation of the novel by former South Jersey teacher Matthew Quick - to the unexpected and moving turns of its two leads.

Without doubt one of the scariest, creepiest, gut-churningly unsettling pictures to come along in ages.

Structured in three beautifully paced, keenly observed acts, Living in Oblivion is that rare picture that leaves you gasping in disappointment at the end - gasping, that is, because it's over and you don't want it to be. [04 Aug 1995, p.05]

A quietly soulful study of two very different men.

An awesome cinema spectacle.

The real 3-D experience of the season is Pina, Wim Wenders' shockingly beautiful and moving tribute to the late German choreographer Pina Bausch.

It doesn't happen often, but when it does, look out: a movie that rocks and rolls, that transports, startles, delights, shocks, seduces. A movie that is, quite simply, great.

It's an observation of crushing truth.

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.

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

A wicked deconstruction of a dysfunctional clan: brothers at each other's throats; a father whose legacy is anger and betrayal; an unfaithful wife; a history of deceit. It's a horror show of hatred and festering psychic wounds.

Creed is corny like the old Rocky films, but riveting like the old Rocky films, too.

Green Room is just as accomplished a film, with the writer/director doing everything right: the cast, the music, the editing, the way he leads you one way and then clobbers you (and some of his ill-fated characters) when you (and they) are least expecting it.

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]

Simply the best adaptation of any John le Carré thriller to make it to the screen.

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.

Moreno, with her wide, watchful eyes, owns the camera - and the film. Her performance is perfectly natural and profoundly moving. Maria Full of Grace is a remarkable picture, full of suspense and discovery.

Still, somehow, The Tree of Life - impressionistic, revelatory, elliptical - works.

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.

Has a slow-burning emotional power.

One of the finest pieces of screen acting in the career of Juliette Binoche -- the actress playing the actress in this extraordinary film.

Wildly sad, funny and terrific documentary.

A profoundly unnerving historical document.

A riveting sci-fi investigation into humankind's experiments with A.I. (with pages from Spike Jonze's Her and Stanley Kubrick's 2001), Ex Machina marks the extremely able directing debut of British writer Alex Garland, of the novels "The Beach" and "The Tesseract," and of the screenplays for Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later" . . . and "Sunshine."

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.

A dazzling costume epic, a spectacle for the eyes and for the soul.

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

Smart, suspenseful, satisfyingly unpredictable.

Girl on the Bridge, with its doomed art-house romanticism and echoes of Fellini, may not be the deepest piece of filmmaking out there now, but it is easily the most intoxicating. Take the leap.

Clooney has never been better, subtler, more deeply rooted in a performance than he is in The Descendants. And he's funny, too.

A quiet, loopy gem, Duck Season is a goofball celebration of old friends, new beginnings, adolescent freedom, and baked goods laced with a little something extra.

Although Mistress America is very much a New York movie, full of references to couture, pop culture, boutique hotels (to Antigone and Faulkner, too), its comic centerpiece is a brazen assault on a country compound.

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

A beautiful, appropriately loping little gem about growing older, daring to take risks and follow your heart. That probably sounds corny, and The Straight Story is.

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

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?

A quiet, heart-rending masterpiece, one with an actor's turn that people will remember, and rediscover, eons into the future.

Mud is steeped in a sense of place, and the people inhabiting it. Southern. Superstitious. Suspenseful. Sublime.

Riley's film brings the American icon's career back into sharp focus.

This taut cautionary tale explores the dark side of American politics. And leaves the viewer to wonder - if anyone's still wondering - is there a bright side?

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

It's not a pretty picture. But Food, Inc. is an essential one.

Quiet, rageful indictment of a two-tiered Islamic society.

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.

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

Amazingly - and this movie is amazing - Room is a story of hope, of possibility. Sure, your stomach will be in knots, your fingers clenched, your heart racing. But it will also fill that heart with a sense of the goodness, the courage, the enduring love that is out there to be discovered - and to be held onto with the fierceness of life itself.

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.

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

A tale of horror, heroism, unimaginable physical challenges, and, yes, cannibalism, Stranded offers the kind of real-life drama that can't help but bring up notions of God, fate, and nature's imposing will.

Is it dumb to say, "Wow?"...I don't care. Wow.

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

Wickedly smart and wickedly playful, Roman Polanski's adaptation of David Ives' Tony-nominated Venus in Fur works on so many levels, it's almost dizzying.

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

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

It's impossible to imagine anyone, right-leaning or left, coming away from this hugely important documentary unshaken by its representation of the United States and its military establishment.

We feel it, in our hearts. And therein lies the great power of this small, wise film.

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

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.

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

Fulfills the promise of its title: It's transporting, it's magical.

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

A feast for the eyes and succor for the soul.

Symphonic and cinematic, full of melancholy and hushed magic.

This sad, staggering drama should be seen: out of the grimness, and the profound calamity, you can almost taste life in your mouth.

Asif Kapadia's extraordinary documentary, Amy, is filled with similarly soul-stirring, heartbreaking moments.

It shows us the everyday pressures and problems, the joys and pleasures, experienced by someone moving through life. And then that BART train pulls into Fruitvale, and the rest is history.

While White Material is very much the story of this one woman, it is also a story of postcolonial Africa, a place where Europeans staked their claim, and where disorder and destruction upended everything. A mournful, frightening, powerful film.

This is a sweet, gentle film - slow and sunny like a summer day, with a message that growing up can be hard, but can also serve as the wellspring of memories that will sustain you for a lifetime.

Calvary is also just jaw-droppingly beautiful. McDonagh and cinematographer Larry Smith capture the four-seasons-in-one-day miracle that is Ireland, with its jagged stonescapes, roiling surf, fairie towns, and bracing skies.

Gorgeous, and full of bittersweet whimsy.

Kings and Queen, full of passion and humor, madness and grief, is close to a masterpiece. It's like life: messy, impossible, elating, unavoidable.

The usual complaints and caveats about Anderson - he's precious, his characters have no grounding in the real world - can be made about Moonrise Kingdom, but so what? This is his seventh feature, he has been working with a gang of collaborators in front of the camera and behind, and his worldview gets richer, and more revealing, even as the view from his lens gets smaller, closer, almost two-dimensional in its oddball tableaux.

Moves from its protagonist's dream state to her memories to her waking present in imperceptible shifts - the effect is disorienting, at first, but ingenious.

A visually dazzling mood piece.

The narrative at the heart of Rust and Bone is a vehicle for sentiment and over-the-top histrionics if ever there was one, but Audiard and his two stars deliver the exact opposite: a film thrillingly raw and essential, life-affirming, sublime.

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

Crazy Heart is the real thing, and a real gem.

The Lobster is what would happen if Wes Anderson set about doing Franz Kafka, with a hefty dash of George Orwell thrown into the mix: surreal, comic, sad, strange, beautiful, sublime.

Like Hitchcock, only creepier, Haneke slowly cranks up the suspense.

A triumph.

This heartbreaking film, with its rich performances and simple eloquence, lays claim to greatness.

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.

That is the sum of writer/director Steven Knight's movie: a man, a car, a hands-free mobile device. And it is extraordinary.

Unstoppable fun.

The movie is, start to finish, candy-colored angst.

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

The first date that James Gandolfini and Julia Louis-Dreyfus embark on in Enough Said - has to be one of the great getting-to-know-you encounters in movie history.

Wondrously strange and just plain wonderful.

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

Captain Phillips is harrowing, inspiring, a must-see piece of moviemaking.

At turns funny, sweet, sad, trenchant and telling. It's a gem.

With no-nonsense narration by Peter Coyote and a soundtrack that's at once apt, ironic and really, really good, The Smartest Guys in the Room is anything but a dry dissection of a major Wall Street debacle.

For Piaf fans, La Vie en Rose is a must-see. For fans yet-to-be, Dahan and Cotillard's film is an opportunity rich with discovery.

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

Moore is nominated this year, and whether she wins or not, her performance deserves attention. It is one of this very fine actress' defining roles. And it resonates with humanity and heartbreak.

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.

Take Shelter, which, it should be said, boasts haunting but seamless visual effects, is a movie for this moment in time, this moment in our lives.

Wily, sad, funny, and full of life.

It's a masterpiece.

A powerful film.

A mischievously inventive, surreal entertainment, one that celebrates not only Whipple Scrumptious Fudgemallow Delight and Nutty Crunch Surprise but Busby Berkeley, Stanley Kubrick, the Beatles, and the outer-space acting choices of one Johnny Depp - not to mention those bushy-tailed rodents in all their bustling splendor.

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

If that sounds highbrow and pretentious, it's not. The neat trick of Tristram Shandy is that the whole thing comes off as a lark.

Offers a view of war that is anything but epic. Instead of sweeping battles and swooping fighter planes, in Lebanon we are brought into the impossibly claustrophobic world of a lone tank crew.

Wild and woolly, the movie is a breathtaking head trip that hails from a long tradition of backstage melodramas: "42nd Street," "A Star Is Born," "All About Eve," and, yes, that kitschy '90s relic, "Showgirls."

13 Assassins is, at turns, thrilling and funny, visually exquisite and emotionally charged.

There is incredible tension in this ordeal, this effort to survive, to find rescue, and Redford - an icon of the American film experience for more than half a century now - makes that tension deeply palpable.

It's a relentless and relentlessly funny game of one-upmanship as the two men, playing somewhat exaggerated versions of themselves, roam the hills and dales, posh inns and poetic ruins of England's Lake District.

A pitch-perfect portrait of a man full of inspiration and ambition - and full of himself.

Wendy and Lucy is modest, minimalist. But it nonetheless reverberates like a sonic boom.

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

Foxcatcher is a story of wealth and the lack of it, of family connection and disconnection. But more than anything, it is a story of a mind unraveling. The result is devastating drama for those of us looking on.

Beasts of the Southern Wild transports us to places that are peculiar and dangerous and magical, and makes us feel weirdly at home.

Sad, funny, and quietly alarming romance.

That's exactly why Heavenly Creatures is the small masterpiece that it is: because the film roots so deeply and eagerly into the psychology - and pathology - of its characters. It takes us to a lush place, defined by passion and imagination, where reality intrudes with surprising, gruesome results. [25 Nov 1994, p.03]

A beautiful eyeful of puckish whimsy and dark-humored mystery, Hukkle (it means hiccup in Hungarian) is a little gem in which nature and humankind commingle, where coincidence and causality collide in a chain of odd, even murderous, events.

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.

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]

Funny, furious, and full of front-office drama.

A feel-good movie, in the absolute best sense.

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

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

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.

Witty and wonderful, Fantastic Mr. Fox is the perfect Thanksgiving entertainment.

A baseball movie, a stranger-in-a-strange-land movie, a movie about real people facing real challenges in the real world, Sugar is all that and more.

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.

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.

With its knowing take on men, messed-up romance and music, is like one long, hook-filled pop song for the eyes.

It's strong stuff.

Nebraska is not a breakneck, screwball farce - although it has its moments, like the comical heist of an air compressor from a farmer's barn. Payne's film is loping. It's deadpan, poignant, absurd.

A beautiful, head-spinning mystery that requires keen attention - and rewards it with a tricky and poetic payoff - The Double Hour is a topflight Euro thriller right up there with "Tell No One."

It's inspired fun.

You know how some kids just connect? Jake and Tony connect. And the adults in their lives, without really meaning to do so, make it difficult for that connection to hold. It is a measure of Sachs' talent and skills that such a seemingly small story can resonate in such big ways.

Easily the best computer-animated feature to come from Hollywood in a long while, Monster House is also one of the weirdest. A creepy-crawly, freak-show Halloween yarn.

Haunting and sad. And absolutely worth seeing.

The Revenant is exhilarating cinema.

In many ways, City of Men is like a Portuguese-language version of David Simon's "The Wire."

A romantic comedy for anyone in love with the movies, and anyone, for that matter, who's in love.

A quiet, glistening love story - or not-quite-love story - adapted from Martin's novella of the same name, Shopgirl is such an atypical Hollywood affair that it's almost startling.

Kinetic and kooky, with a climactic shoot-out at a rail station that's daring in its ridiculousness.

Control doesn't claim to know the reasons Curtis killed himself. The act of suicide poses the question why, but rarely answers it, leaving the living to wonder, and to grieve. And there's certainly grief to be had in Control, but also joy. Really.

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.

Sensual, dreamlike, both intimate and epic, The House of Sand is a cinematic tour de force.

Richly informative and fascinating.

A delightful, oddball surprise.

The movie is near-perfect, suspenseful, heart-breaking, profound.

The talented Hansen-Love, with clarity and economy, manages to avoid the maudlin.

Baron Cohen brings scary conviction to the performance.

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.

Weirdly funny, inspiring film.

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

Like some murderous version of "Working Girl," the ruthless exec and the seemingly naive underling go at one another - turning the film, at a pivotal moment, into a satisfying whodunit.

Code Black is sobering stuff. The American health system, McGarry's film argues, is broken. But the film is undeniably inspiring, too: Despite everything that is wrong, there are nurses and doctors and technicians determined to do things right.

A must-see for Pearl Jam fans - and for folks keen on gleaning insights into the pressures that come with megastardom.

What's less clear, and more maddening, is how several generations of Ecuadorans have been left to live on toxic land, their health and livelihoods compromised, while lawyers file motions and counter-motions and blame is passed around.

The action is exhilarating, the visual effects spectacular - and spectacularly realized.

Assembles varied and remarkable digital video, archival footage, photographs, interviews and personal reflections and academics' perspectives to convey the scope and history of the Tibetan story.

This is a movie about friendship, about foolhardy endeavors that get your adrenaline going and make you feel life buzzing in your toes. Written with wit and concision and remarkable confidence, Bottle Rocket is a joyride worth taking.

Avatar delivers. Combining beyond-state-of-the-art moviemaking with a tried-and-true storyline and a gamer-geek sensibility - not to mention a love angle, an otherworldly bestiary, and an arsenal of 22d-century weaponry - the movie quite simply rocks.

An English-language remake is in the works, but why wait for the Hollywood knockoff? Easy Money is the real thing: a great gangster pic.

A Most Wanted Man's cast - a mix of Germans speaking English, Americans speaking English with German accents, Russians, and men and women from the Middle East - is uniformly stellar.

It's “The Wizard of Oz” with a viral infection.

Limitless rocks.

The Queen of Versailles combines the voyeuristic thrills of reality TV with the soul-revealing artistry of great portraiture and the head-shaking revelations of solid investigative reporting.

A story of obsession and honor, deception and self-deception set against a sharply etched landscape of political upheaval and intrigue. Malkovich orchestrates all this with assuredness, and Bardem, looking weary and worn, inhabits his character with a realness, a truth, that's downright spooky. And beautiful.

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.

Argo's white-knuckle nail-biter of a climax takes liberties with how events played out in real life. But while Affleck and screenwriter Chris Terrio have opted to go Hollywood, it's high-class Hollywood, not the low-rent and exploitative route that the make-believe movie at the heart of this tale would have taken.

Madly entertaining and just plain mad.

Beloved spans 45 years, shifting from Paris to Prague to London to Montreal, and it boasts an especially strong performance by Paul Schneider.

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

Irma Vep is over before you know it, which is both a tribute to the talents of Assayas - he draws you in completely, his film never lags - and a bummer. You want to follow these people around a little longer, see what happens to their movie (although we do get to see something that happens, and it's weird and dazzling) and what becomes of them all. This a film about thievery - the character of Irma Vep is a jewel thief, the director is stealing from the past - and in its own very cool, very brash way, Irma Vep steals its audience's heart. [13 June 1997, p.10]

This is a story about legacy, the sins of the father, the restlessness in our souls. It's powerful, it's bold, it hits you hard.

The final third of Audiard's drama falls into crime-drama mode. It is tense and violent. But even if it feels true, given Dheepan's history with the Tamil Tigers, it also feels a little beside the point.

A small but moving film that gets the details right (life in a sleepy burg, sidewalk chats between old high school pals) and gets at the heart of human longing for family, for love.

Shines with weird, whimsical invention.

Plays with cultural stereotypes, and upends them as well. The picture starts as one thing and turns, dramatically, movingly, into something else.

Smart and novelistic and spiked with more than a bit of The Catcher in the Rye, Steers' movie is a prickly coming-of-age tale in which everybody -- but especially Culkin -- shines.

1971 is a testament to a generation's idealism, heroism, foolhardiness, fearlessness.

Remains rooted in the real world, which makes its story all the more satisfying -- and chilling.

It's a haunting, scary, funny, sad portrayal from Rourke.

This cunning and provocative Romanian film requires patience, but its rewards are many: It's hard to imagine how a scene in which a police captain barks an order to bring him a dictionary can be loaded with suspense, but, really, it is.

In an extraordinarily inward and moving performance, Gere sheds every vestige of his silver-screen persona.

Stranger Than Fiction is slicker than Kaufman's work - and Forster's direction is certainly more studio-ish than Kaufman collaborators Spike Jonze's or Michel Gondry's. But it's a clever idea, and you feel a little smarter watching the thing unfurl.

Think "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," but then think fun.

Reverberates with the power and passion of Greek tragedy.

Ridiculously funny, ridiculously charming.

A devastatingly funny portrait of a wildly dysfunctional clan, Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums is a movie about how people never really mature in ways that matter.

Baker's life, like his music, was as sad as it was beautiful. And Weber's movie - obsessed with Baker's image as much as with his songs - hits all the right notes.

The movie is a winner. One of the commuter ferry men declares, as he starts plucking people out of the water, "No one dies today." And no one does. If that isn't hopeful, I don't know what is.

Ghosts haunt Heart of a Dog - but so, too, does love.

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.

The Painted Veil is rich with history and heartbreak. It's stirring stuff.

Dazzling and delirious, The Fall is a celebration of cinema, of old-fashioned storytelling and globe-hopping spectacle.

Lord knows how Holofcener got the performance she did out of Goodwin, but the child actor's Annie, rude and unmanageable, is an extraordinarily rich and complicated figure.

A super-taut and superbly acted three-character piece.

Hunger is daunting and powerful work.

Chronicle is full of smart writing that isn't too smart.

Extraordinarily sensual and extraordinarily bleak, Claire Denis' Nenette and Boni depicts a world of diffident youth, of estranged families and displaced souls. [02 May 1997, p.15]

Stays with you like great movies tend to do. It asks you to examine the inner mechanisms of human beings, cheerful and miserable alike. It's not about looking at a glass half empty or a glass half full. It's about drinking down what's in that glass and letting it fill your soul.

The rare movie that manages to convey the inner soul of an artist.

It's a devilishly twisted affair.

Chuan's unsettlingly beautiful black-and-white, wide-screen account of those nightmare six weeks, re-creates that horror in ways that are at once allusive and lucid, mixing cinematic impressionism with documentary-like detail.

A story of companionship, loneliness, resilience. It's a small, artfully crafted thing, but it resonates in big ways.

Her life, and her work, transcended what we think of as "fashion."

Try not to let the film's overbearingly jaunty score get in the way. The Lady in the Van is quite a feat.

Although the pervading mood of Twin Falls Idaho - a beautifully shot, noirish thing - is one of sadness and loss, the Polishes' film is playful, too.

Tcheng finds Simons in moments of haughty self-confidence and tremulous self-doubt.

A gorgeous confection, packed with gargantuan gowns and pornographic displays of pastrystuffs, Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette is also a sharp, smart look at the isolation, ennui and supercilious affairs of the rich, famous and famously pampered.

Rain is a quiet, disquieting triumph.

An amiable mix of "Grumpy Old Men" comedy and "Apollo 13" can-we-fix-this-jalopy-before-we-die? Drama.

David Ayer, the writer of "Training Day," director of "Street Kings," writer/director of "Harsh Times," does not make movies about princesses with witchy curses, about yuppie commitment-phobes, about talking plush toys. His territory is narrow, but he owns it: cops, in Los Angeles.

Tender but never sappy, Monsieur Ibrahim brings two people of vastly different age and background together in ways that are touching, and telling. It's a small, glowing gem.

Roiling with laughter, tears, drunken confessions, revelatory soliloquies, pain, sorrow, hospital visits, and various kinds of love, A Christmas Tale is a smart, sprawling, and sublimely entertaining feast.

A sly and surprisingly sublime little noir romance.

A gorgeous operatic tale of obsession and madness.

A beautifully mopey adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's much-praised novel.

Career Girls doesn't have the sweep of Secrets & Lies, nor the venom of Naked (which also featured the riveting Cartlidge). But in the small world it keenly describes, the film packs an emotional punch - silly voices and all.

It's a movie with a pulse. Sometimes, it flies off the chart.

Into the Abyss is a true-crime drama, to be sure, but in Herzog's hands it becomes something much more: an inquiry into fundamental moral, philosophical, and religious issues, and an examination of humankind's capacity for violence - individual and institutional.

A bruising, dark comedy.

A thinker and an educator, Zinn has led a life of commitment and compassion, and the film offers a loving tribute.

It's great to hear a director talking candidly about the actors he's worked with, dishing out good, juicy stuff.

Does what the best movies can do: take viewers to what might be unfamiliar places, into a culture with unique customs and traditions, and show, through drama and comedy, how the fundamental truths of the human experience need no translation.

Crash fools around with chronology in a Tarantinoesque way that brings its story full circle. You could argue that as events, and people, merge, Haggis' spiky screenplay (cowritten with Bobby Moresco) gets to be, quite simply, too much.

Mongol is great cinema, great fun.

Must-see stuff.

Offers a sometimes lyrical, sometimes gut-turning portrait of war seen through the eyes of children.

This beautiful, unfolding film is an antidote to the high-velocity, maximum-volume world most of us find ourselves immersed in, offering a glimpse into a rigorously spiritual alternative. Its calmness, its reflection, is full of allure.

Filled with bleak, beautiful Hopperesque tableaus and strange characters whose lives intersect.

With its mix of Lewis Carroll and William Gibson; Japanese anime and Chinese chopsocky; mythological allusions, and machine-made illusion, offers a couple of hours of escapist fun.

Eastwood and Morgan's movie, with its epic natural disasters (and a terrifying, man-made one) is optimistic. Hokey, even. But it's beautiful, too.

Its stars - especially the photogenic Leung and Cheung, fresh from Wong Kar Wai's jazzy romance In the Mood for Love - are wonderfully charismatic. And wonderfully athletic.

Quiet, quirky gem.

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

At once guileless and profound.

The Proposition, a beautiful, bloody meditation on justice, family, and the trap of retribution, is in every respect an artful addition to the canon of six-shooter morality tales.

In the end, what the movie is about: time and life, and what we do with them, and what we regret that we didn't do.

This is magnificent filmmaking, and a magnificent film.

The less said about the twists and turns The Illusionist takes, the better. Suffice to say, Eisenheim's masterful deceptions do not stop when he exits the stage.

It is the more satisfying of the two installments - less over-the-top, arterial-gushing violence and more investigation into character, motives, back-story.

An extraordinarily perfect little film: A bittersweet drama that explores sexuality and love, and their reverberations across the landscape of human emotions.

How I Live Now takes some frightening, gruesome turns. In tone and terror, it comes close to matching the jumpy dread of Danny Boyle's British Isles virus thriller "28 Days Later."

Impossibly charming and impossibly French.

While The Forgiveness of Blood lacks the narrative momentum of director Joshua Marston's previous film, "Maria Full of Grace" - it is nonetheless fascinating.

A smart, sensuous and sensory mind trip that caroms around a universe of thought.

A film full of a sense of impending danger, betrayal, seduction and destruction. Quite simply, it's great stuff.

Microcosmos is a Zen version of an old Disney True-Life feature: the hokum and phony palaver of those '50s pics supplanted by a wide-eyed sense of wonder. [08 Nov 1996, p.05]

A spectacularly satisfying reworking of the legend of Kal-El.

Resonant and surprisingly affecting.

As he's done in such otherwise diverse pictures as Lone Star, City of Hope, and The Secret of Roan Inish, in Limbo writer-director Sayles circles down into a community of friends, colleagues, strangers - and shows what happens when paths cross, and sometimes double-cross. [04 Jun 1999, p.03]

A slow-burning, character-rich study in desperation, grief, vengeance, loyalty, and love. It's the sort of arthouse entry - in German, mostly - that gets you thinking about an English-language remake.

Beautifully shot, in long, fluid takes, The Beat That My Heart Skipped is that rare thing: a remake that improves on its source.

Brings home the complexities and contradictions of the man.

A smart, sharp, stirring adaptation of the H.G. Bissinger best-seller.

There are some terrifically strong scenes and terrific actors contributing to them.