Wesley Morris

It's a gas, dude!

The Mill and the Cross captures the wish that some of us have had while standing in front of a great painting. What hangs before us is so striking, beautiful, strange, vast, horrifying, ethereal, lifelike - so alive - that we're desperate to enter the other side of the canvas, to be inside the painting.

A knock-down, haywire ballad of the adrenalinization of love and despair.

The film is a tower of literary and cinematic references, tangential yet somehow essential characters, and one fantastic performance after another. It's a simple movie yet is anything but.

A smartly observed, unpretentious, and unconventional comedy of manners -- or more properly, it's a comedy of mannerisms.

Like "Life Is Sweet," "Secrets & Lies," and yes, 1971's "Bleak Moments," to name but three of Leigh's 10 semi-improvised character studies, Another Year is another frowning comedy.

What's astonishing is that the movie is not a half-baked production. The spectacle now LOOKS spectacular.

The movie isn't a critique of zoo life. But it's possible we have on our hands, in Nénette's captivity, a microcosm of celebrity star-gazing.

lluminating and exceptional docu-portrait.

The movies are smart -- smarter than you, but not in an off-putting way. Their basic appeal, especially this new one, is that Matt Damon’s killing machine, Jason Bourne, is the cleverest man on earth. And we thrill to his sense of superiority.

The director is becoming a master of blending the political and the personal with eloquence and deceptive lightness.

Mike Leigh's great big, superbly performed homage to the creative process.

A parody of and winking homage to the history of Thai melodrama, Wisit Sasanatieng's uproarious filmmaking debut exuberantly combines pop and kitsch with a wholesome belief in the thrills of bad art.

A collection of beautifully acted encounters, conversations, symbols, and vignettes woven into an evocative and unforgettably surreal garment.

Comes on as both a rebuke to male vanity and a chic metaphor for midlife panic.

The genius of Zulawski is that he's dispensed with all the buildup and explanation and logic. How many horror-movie explanations make any sense? He just made an entire movie out of the scary parts, the way a different genius concocted only the muffin top and some pop music producers give you 10 minutes of beats and chorus. Possession climaxes for two whole hours. It's as if, with "The Shining," Stanley Kubrick found 25 variations on "here's Johnny" and "red rum." [17 Nov 2012, p.G5]

What an amazing presence Gorintin has. Never mind her hunched back and white hair, she's no crone. She makes Eka needy for happiness but susceptible to heartbreak. It's a great performance, full of both joy and the quiet, disappointing parts of being alive that come with knowing change is part of life.

All the gears, in fact, are shamelessly visible, yet they lock smoothly and resonantly into place. If Akeelah and the Bee is a generic, well-oiled commercial contraption, it is the first to credibly dramatize the plight of a truly gifted, poor black child.

Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck's film is a fascinating look at the intersection of commerce, celebrity, and controversy.

To say the least, the film is awkward, like a piece of badly assembled Ikea furniture. Still, editor Bernadine Colish weaves together all that C-SPAN footage into a disturbing procedural indictment. Legislators use the same language - often the president's - to justify the rush to war. The repetition is comical until it's scary: They're parroting.

This is the best thing Mortensen's ever done. His slow, paunchy, hairy Freud has a cavalier authority and a capacity for drollery. He's also seductively wise in a way that makes both Fassbender and Knightley, as very good as they are, also seem uncharacteristically callow.

[Cuaron]'s a visionary and crafty storyteller who rewards your patience, not with twists in the plot, though the movie has its share, but with pure feeling. Deploying wit, grace, and artistry, he's whisked a kid flick into adolescence.

Boys Don't Cry's intensity sneaks up on you like a snake.

As Apichatpong erases, once again, the barriers between the celestial and terrestrial, he also does away with the cordons between film genres - this is sci-firomancefamilyreligiousthrillercomedyporn. No video service has a section for that. The only suitable shelf is the one in your soul.

The film's central drama is not between the former secretary and the filmmaker. It's between McNamara and history.

Ultimately, Bingenheimer seems underwhelmed with himself. The people who know him say, in the movie, that he's a relic. Mayor of the Sunset Strip makes heartbreakingly clear what a glorious relic Bingenheimer is.

Proves acutely subtle. But its question of what we forgive art in the face of atrocity and immorality is one for the ages.

Oasis is that rare miraculous whirlwind romance that moves from attempted rape to reverence without kicking up a lot of dust.