Walter Addiego

A remarkable study of the corrosive effects of fear and power on an establishment insider who puts duty above all else.

The director has said that, though the story was inspired by the deaths of his parents, he hoped to make a film "brimming with life." He's succeeded.

A documentary with a keen eye, a playful sense of timing and an inquisitive soul.

In the hands of visionary filmmaker Alexander Sokurov, this simple material makes for a haunting drama about war, generational relationships and the human condition.

This Is Not a Film isn't just a film, it's a strong one. It's also an act of political defiance, a moving personal document and a meditation on what film is and can be.

The director is clearly an admirer of Francis (both the saint and the pope), and was able to conduct extensive and exclusive interviews with the pontiff.

The silence captured in this documentary -- a meditative look at life in the Carthusian monastery of the Grande Chartreuse in the French Alps -- may be the most eloquent you'll ever hear.

Ida is a rarity, a film both intensely grounded in painful historical reality and genuinely otherworldly.

If you know Federico Fellini's "La Dolce Vita," you'll be unable to watch The Great Beauty without thinking about it. This gorgeous Italian movie, like its predecessor, balances pungent satire and a more melancholy mood in portraying the dissolute world of the upper crust in contemporary Rome.

Though the material might lend itself to heavy-handedness, director Ole Christian Madsen is steady, and he gets fine performances from the two leads and Stengade.

Stagecoach both revived and elevated the Western.

A couple of other odd moments to savor: Lucky, seeking a crossword answer, reads a dictionary definition of “realism” that’s perfectly to the point. And listen as he plays “Red River Valley” on the harmonica. Either one is a great way to remember Harry Dean Stanton.

This is a nearly miraculous conjunction of director, material and actor.

It's a bleak, fatalistic tale about rootlessness and the changing moral order in the machine age, but the wondrous details of the film trump any grand thematic concerns.

The bloodshed is somewhat less gory than in many slasher films -- with stress on the "somewhat." [26 Sep 2004]

Timeless, and as fine a depiction of human folly as you're likely to see at the movies.

This is a vision of hell conveyed in a simple, documentary style, far removed from the sumptuous American Mafia fables.

Both very funny and a bit of a tearjerker, with an on-the-money performance from Ricky Gervais.

What Mackenzie has crafted here is a crowd-pleaser with undeniable art-house elements.

A film of great sadness, but also a galvanizing depiction of heroism.

An old-fashioned prisoner-of-war movie that becomes much more because of writer-director Werner Herzog's admiration for the remarkable true story of its protagonist, Dieter Dengler.

The short, sad life of Amy Winehouse is compellingly told in a new documentary that sidesteps sensationalism and dime-store psychologizing and lets archival footage do much of the work.

As an antidote to the frenetic nature of a lot of children’s TV of the day, Rogers preferred a measured pace on his show, and even made judicious use of silence. These are just two of the numerous gifts given by this extraordinary man to the children lucky enough to have watched “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”

This is filmmaking of high energy and wit. What it adds up to is debatable. You can view it as a bright twist on the being-a-cop-is-lonely sort of police picture, or as a mini-anthology of quirky not-quite-love stories. If it's hard to say where Chungking Express arrives, the trip is still exhilarating.

Its brazen mixture of the comic and dramatic, the high and low and the emotional and intellectual is positively Shakespearean.

A simple, serene and occasionally humorous film about a subject that is complex, emotional and usually treated with solemnity.

All the women are good company, but in some ways Dench is the star of the show. She laughs often as she kibitzes with the others and seems not at all in awe of herself.

It's no great shakes as a film, but its combination of mild comedy, slapstick, pathos, many photogenic canines and a positive message will make it irresistible to families.