Wesley Morris

All of that observation in Babylon amounts to something that still feels new. You’re looking at people who, in 1980 England, were, at last, being properly, seriously seen.

Tokyo Sonata, in so many senses, is about an allergic reaction to the very idea of what it means to be Japanese. The characters misplace their belief in etiquette, politesse, dignity, and propriety - or they struggle to maintain it.

At its best when it's hovering around the muted dysfunction between a father and a son, who never understood each other to begin with.

Death doesn't knock in Theo Angelopoulos' Eternity and a Day; it raps softly, sitting patiently in the waiting room of its terminally ill poet's life until he's ready to let it in.

This is an easy movie to spoil. It's rather plotless. But things happen in precisely the way that life happens.

A must-see.

The movie's assemblage of audio interviews poured mostly over astounding race footage is fit for a shrine.

Touching and brisk.

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

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

Full of action, but no soul.

This is a movie that feels in all its vividness, specificity, and honesty - and in its amateurish screenwriting, too - like something found from the early- to mid-1990s, when American independent moviemaking encouraged far more conversations about the sexuality of young, brown girls in movies like "Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.'' and "I Like It Like That.''

An elegy for a vanishing emblem of what once characterized this country's vitality.

Like laughing into a mirror for 113 minutes.

The movie feels exhaustive in its loaded 90-something minutes, showing and telling us much while leaving the meaning of the tangles and twists in this family open to interpretation. For once, the tip of the iceberg is enough.

Some bad movies can make you feel awful for the people who made them and worse for the audience that shows up. The actors, the script, the camera: There's nowhere good they can go. For Greater Glory is that kind of bad movie: a total embarrassment.

If the second hour or so isn't as strong as the first, it's because the filmmaking fails to rise to the injustice that's befallen its subjects since their exoneration. It can't, really.

A vicious horror flick with an actual beast and someone who just acts like one.

At once a stifling exercise in thwarting emotional dynamics and a heated invitation to engage in the film's discourse on the shortcoming of sexual politics and justice in a media-saturated land.

A marvelous, uncommonly observant, and unexpectedly rousing group portrait.

The movie has you from its nearly wordless opening sequence.

Part of what hooks you to this movie is how Leth outsmarts his taskmaster, and how the two men have divergent, almost incompatible aesthetic ideals.

This is a film of our times - paranoid, heartbroken, disillusioned - and the rare recent American movie whose characters react the way actual people might.

Downey appears to like all this make-believe. Even the clunky dialogue sounds witty out of his mouth. This is not a part that makes great demands on his talent, and his slummy approach to it is amusing.

Rarely is a movie audience asked to put up with so much noise for such a thankless payoff.

"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.

It's inspired of Sachs to lean on Russell for a kind of oblique emotional depth. But it's possible to leave this movie mistaking Sachs's soul for Russell's.

If Keane is a downer, it's a stupendously well-conceived one.