Wesley Morris

You can see her (Binoche) effect on Kiarostami's filmmaking: She brings out something new in him, too.

"Grin Without a Cat" brilliantly used montage and a wide intellectual scope to speculate about the history of war and revolution. "Grinning Cat" is a more modest achievement, but the director's wisdom remains robust.

I've never seen a movie so perfectly balanced between unabashed nerdiness and hipness.

Grace is grace, and however it arrives, there's no denying its presence.

Everything about Chop Shop is modest - the movie's scale, the characters' ambitions. Another director might have tried to nudge the film's grim detours toward tragedy. And that might have worked, too. But Bahrani is a refreshingly deceptive director in that sense.

Here the Japanese senses of honor and of shame are particularly entangled. Later in the film, Lu mounts an Imperial Army parade through the Nanking ruins. It's something to see.

It sounds like the old unstoppable-force-meets-immovable-object trick. Ramin Bahrani's Goodbye Solo has the trappings of such a story, but, mercifully, none of the follow-through.

What's most remarkable about it is the way Bong builds real suspense and plays the chilling moments straight while leaving himself room for nonsense and horseplay. He seems completely at ease with the marriage of the silly with the serious. Only time can reveal whether he's a master filmmaker, but this, at least, is a masterful performance.

Like its stunt work, the movie is both ridiculously hyperactive and a muscular feat of absolute confidence. I don't expect to have a more adrenalizing time at the movies this summer.

The achievement of this movie is that Kaurismäki manages the seemingly impossible task of making a farce about farces. In other words, this is a very good movie in quotation marks and a very good movie.

Alexandra is a pleasure to watch, but it's also one of those lovely, unclassifiable movies that flourishes better with repeated or prolonged exposures.

A monumentally graceful union of two extremely dissimilar stars, one inspired cinematographer and an exceptionally patient, curious, independent-minded director.

A triptych whirling on a Lazy Susan of revolving character perspectives.

Burton, who directed the film with animator Mike Johnson, has rarely been in brisker, friskier form.

Nathaniel fares well with his father's fellow masters, although Frank Gehry seems evasive.

I Stand Alone has the ghastly stink of a rotting corpse. You can smell the cess as clearly as you can see the blood vessels striking like lightning around the pupils of its malefactor's eyes.

It's the hypnotic long-form music video Smoke never got to make.

In the absolutely moving new documentary Watermarks, seven women in their 80s return to the Vienna swimming pool of their youth.

Anderson is the rare filmmaker who doesn't want to use the actress as an instrument or to exploit her independent-movie cachet. She has freed Moore to be what she hasn't been with many directors: credibly human.

It's the boys' most immediately gratifying movie: The goods are delivered in a hearse.

A movingly acted, terrifically old-fashioned World War II picture rethought as a post-colonial rebuke.

The decadence is obvious. But true to the Valentino prerogative, it's beautiful - sad, too: a dream life moving into the unknown.

Engrossingly manic version of Tracy Letts's great stage play.

The majestic pageant of images - no sylvan landscape has been this indelibly, dimensionally alive - is inextricably welded to the multifold spiritual / ecological questions about the future that Miyazaki is contemplating.

Incisive, highly entertaining political farce.

Has a power that doesn't announce itself until it's over: You leave not wanting to give up on life, just resentful of the world we live in.

The least opaque of Antonioni's films, unburdened by stylishness and his imagistic inflammations.

The movie has you from its nearly wordless opening sequence.