Pollock is that rare breed, a biopic that makes you want to learn more about its subject, as much as you can, as fast as you can.

It's too bad the language prevents this independent film from being rated PG-13 because this is the kind of movie that might be capable of realistically reflecting teens' lives to other teens.

There are countless hilarious scenes in this film. Even if you didn't grow up in the Midwest, you'll still be able to appreciated the anticipation of the holidays and all of the tension and happiness that accompanies the most eagerly awaited and equally dreaded time of the year.

Snap! That’s the crack of people teetering on the verge in each of the six segments in the perversely entertaining Argentinian film Wild Tales, a more-than-deserving recent Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language film.

Bielenia's damp-eyed performance is the broken heart of this restrained and low-key narrative.

The content is enjoyable and informative, a loving tribute even if deeper analysis and insight rarely rear their heads. Yet I dare anyone not to snap to attention and spontaneously follow the sound of that voice.

Unfortunately, The Royal Hotel ultimately lacks the subtle ambiguity about complicity and power that made The Assistant so fascinating. Instead, it's a feel-good ending that borders on trite, and even oddly carries a whiff of cultural imperialism.

The details of what went down are fascinating, but the ultimate focus of Best of Enemies is television and this demonstration that it can be both eminently viewable and illuminating.

24 Frames is a classically Kiarostami work, indicative of his life’s curiosities and trademark inquiries, but far short of a culminating utterance.

In adapting James Lee Burke's short story, "Winter Light," Higgins and cowriter Shaye Ogbonna (The Chi, Lowlife) have taken the barest of its bones and grown fresh meat.

Shanghai Triad doesn't feel up to Zhang's usual standards.

You can’t stop watching this film, even if you can’t always express in words what you’re seeing. Intuition fills in the gaps.

The Dogme pedigree rarely distracts; there is too much emotional investment to care much about dogmatic fidelity.

But even a rapper needs to punch things up a bit, and 8 Mile, for all its hip-hop braggadocio, is a pretty weak riff.

The film's story is both culturally specific and broadly universal and that duality is a large part of what makes Once Were Warriors work.

The Ghost Writer hasn’t the complexity or breadth of such stunners as "Chinatown" or "The Pianist," but it is nevertheless a solidly built little roundelay of intrigue with a veracity that seems torn from newspaper headlines.

The impressionistic documentary Ailey communicates this visionary auteur’s comprehension of the art form: through his own words; through the words of others, most notably, his muse Judith Jamison and fellow choreographer Bill T. Jones; and, with great potency, film clips of archived performances (some of them original performances!) of his work.

The studio’s 1967 version of Kipling’s classic tales (the current film qualifies as a remake of sorts) softened the source’s edges a bit, but it offered a New Orleans jazz-infused score unlike anything in the company’s previous animated features. The new Jungle Book retains the two best songs, although their inclusion may strike the unfamiliar as clunky and unexpected.

This is an emotionally devastating piece of advocacy journalism, as it should be. It should also be mandatory viewing for both college-age teens and their parents.

While We’re Young struggles to reconcile its protagonists’ rival impulses to either welcome an unexpected source of youthful vitality with open arms or embrace such an individual so as to better displace them from one’s lawn.

[Yuasa's] latest, magical and bloody historical musical drama Inu-Oh, is a rock & roll, stadium show, pyrotechnic extravaganza.

There are no life lessons here, only an uncommonly focused look at one life – the sometimes joyful, sometimes punishing day-to-day existence of a young man whose future is more uncertain that most.

While 12:08 East of Bucharest could take more than one viewing to truly appreciate, it's worth the commitment.

Though the advertising plays up the film's Bush-bashing angle, it gives a false impression. This is really more of a backstage drama.

Any workplace drama (and that’s what it is, more than a sports film) must fit you for the shoes of the laborer, and that’s exactly what Jockey does. It makes you understand why riders would subject themselves to so much pain and poverty in search of what one calls “that one minute where you feel like the most important thing in the world.”

Dallas Buyers Club is an indelible story about one man’s unwillingness to go gently into that good night, and the personal growth he experiences along the way.

Yet for all the bleakness, Better Man is one of the most visually inventive and uplifting films in recent years.

Cue the footage of Cockettes in spangles and glitter, high-kicking and belting out show tunes at the top of their lungs. Damn, it looks grand.

The crime is beyond bizarre, and the film is relentlessly suspenseful, but perhaps the most disturbing question of all is this: Whatever happened to Nicholas Barclay? To that, there remains no satisfactory answer.

The B-Side is not one of Errol Morris’ finely focused film essays; instead, you may feel a desire to “shake it like a Polaroid picture” in an effort to encourage its development.

In those complexities, and its more mordant analyses of the arbitrary mechanisms of power, The Promised Land bears impressively bitter fruit.

Everything fits perfectly, from titles to fin, but most of all Firth, who dons the role of George like a fine bespoke suit.

The movie's critiques of the music industry, the ganja trade, and organized religion still ring true.

Introduction feels like a mediation on how time chips away at first impressions: What started as something beautiful and simple can become complicated, unattainable, and hard to hold on to.

One of the rare movies that communicates honestly and artfully about the real casualties of war: the surviving combatants.

At the end of the day, Johnston's childlike stream of unrequited love landed him on MTV, Atlantic Records, and now a feature-length theatrical recounting of his life. Take that, Satan.

Fukunaga's images are striking, and his storytelling abilities are strong, but his screenwriting skills rely heavily on sappy formulas that add nothing to our understanding of the border-crossing experience.

The poverty that is at the heart of the situation is in prominent relief, yet there is a happiness about their lives that defies sheer gloss. Here is a brother and sister who truly love each other and are bonded by their complicity.

However, unlike "The Wolf House," the shifting styles of Marona never feel like change for change's sake, or like an extended highlight reel. Each sequence carries a different tone, a reflection of Marona's inner life and inner light. Even in her tragic end, her fantastic tale keeps wagging with hope.

There is a confidence and a self-assuredness on display in Kent’s second feature that was only hinted at in her first. From her unflinching examination of the dual standards for gender and ethnicity to the film’s lush compositions, The Nightingale is a tough watch, but one well worth the ugly brush with sexual violence and trauma.

An intriguing export with crossover appeal.

Weitz (About a Boy) is a sharp observer, and Tomlin and the rest of the cast are so superlative that any anxiety is quickly quelled. You’re happy to follow this movie over the river and through the woods.

Both Koepp and Soderbergh are to blame for the underdelivery of a pivotal, plot-defining, single line of dialogue that should have been a strand woven throughout the film.

A riveting piece of cinema, successfully utilizing all the things that screenwriters are supposed to avoid: voiceovers, direct address, unreliable narrators. It also looks gorgeous, thanks to cinematographer Nicolas Karakatsanis and production designer Jade Healy.

God Loves Uganda and recent events make it seem like the time is right for a 21st century raid on Entebbe.

The horror imagined by Évolution does not depend on the genre’s familiar tropes but instead its arousal of dread and fear, not unlike Guillermo del Toro in "The Devil’s Backbone," in which the peril is intuited rather than defined.

Like any great funfair ride designer, it’s Barker’s grasp of pacing, of when to lull and when to launch, that makes Obsession such a terrifying blast.

Fonda brings all of his childhood frustration and angst to the screen in one of the year's most unexpectedly brilliant acting performances.

Grindhouse raises the bar for a certain kind of movie lollapalooza (and also for the kind of filmmaker who is also a showman, along the lines of a William Castle or Cecil B. De Mille). It's this injection of playfulness and fun and attention to the entire movie-going gestalt that will probably become Grindhouse's lasting contribution to movie history rather than any on-the-screen content of the movie itself.

At its best, there's an undoubted thrill and wonder to Pom Poko, like the massive parade of phantoms the tanuki conjure up as one of their harebrained schemes. Takahata's misfire at least provides some wonderful sparkles.

It ends up being a smashingly good and goofball history of the non-world of Canadian history and flim-flammery, deeply committed to its own colonial crazy.

Celebrate Father's Day in grand movie style.

A powerfully unique film.

We see the work, the figurative (and sometimes literal) sweat that went into crafting these characters. It’s capital-M Movie Acting, and I couldn’t love it more. It moved me.

What's fascinating is the depth of humanity Cruise finds within the character of Jerry and also Cruise's generosity toward the other actors in the story -- a generosity that allows all the other performers to shine and create vivid and memorable characters.

For two filmmakers best known for their comedic scripts like the Jump Street films and The Lego Movie, they know when to pull back on the humor and instead embrace the spectacle, and find their perfect proxy in Gosling.

The comparisons to "Hereditary," Ari Aster's febrile masterpiece of familial dysfunction, are inevitable, and while James doesn't quite reach that film's perturbing depths she brings a different insight.

Although the film is never fully convincing about this rock band’s overlooked potential – despite testimonials from the likes of Alice Cooper, Henry Rollins, Jello Biafra, and Elijah Wood – the story of Death sure adds an interesting and virtually unknown footnote to the annals of punk rock.

Director Nunez, whose previous films (Gal Young 'Un, A Flash of Green) are also set in Florida, has an ability to translate states of mind into their native environments and vice versa. In this instance, his regional realism combines with Judd's transfixing performance to create a movie that sticks to your ribs.

Chi-Raq constantly shifts tones from comedy to drama and back again, while most of its dialogue is delivered in rhyming couplets. The transitions can sometimes be bumpy, but never when Samuel L. Jackson pops up as nattily dressed and off-color one-man Greek chorus.

Squibb’s charm, her gutsiness, and her sharp, subtle humor fill the movie with warmth and veracity.

Starving the Beast does an admirable job of making even the most arcane of arguments and abstruse alliances plain and clear.

The all-out Love Lies Bleeding is a love story that won’t work for everyone. However, for those who can revel in the blood-soaked, complicated, sapphic delights that make up the backbone of the film, the saga of Lou and Jackie will be one for the ages.

With Calvary, John Michael McDonagh (who wrote and directed "The Guard" and is the brother of Martin “In Bruges” McDonagh) has crafted a darkly hilarious and deeply ruminative update on the passion play.

The House I Live In is depressing stuff, but it sparks the fires of anger, and from that anger, possible action.

Sometimes a documentary doesn’t have to change the world, but make you feel warm and that your passion for something is matched by another person.

Hepburn brings Truman Capote's Holly Golightly to vivid life. [Review of re-release]

Hustle is a great modern love story disguised as a neo-noir police procedural.

Where Shinkai remains peerless is in taking those big, magical, melodramatic swings and landing them with a gentle, compassionate touch.

The internet is infinite. So, too, are the ways it can breed creepy behavior and new opportunities to commodify human connection. People’s Republic of Desire explores only a tiny swath of the internet of grossness, but it’s a subject so epic it deserves much longer examining than a quick 95 minutes affords.

As emotionally devastating as it is, The Hunt is nevertheless rather schematic and pat.

The Beguiled is a slow-burn tale of repressed sexuality and duplicitous doings. Its final twist, though, steals it from the realm of male-gaze fantasies into sheer nightmare territory.

The Mustang, Clermont-Tonnerre’s impressive debut feature, is a slow-burning, tightly coiled character study of felony offender Roman Coleman (Bullhead’s Schoenaerts).

So upbeat it might as well arrive on a sunbeam.

It's Wilson's film all the way. He's brings an unexpected frisson of surfer-esque chutzpah to the role of Roy, a bad guy with good intentions, a cowboy who, dammit, just wants to be loved.

Honest and unflinching, Daughter From Danang isn't always pleasant to watch, but it is powerful and memorable.

Shaw works mostly because Samantha Montgomery is such a compelling and likable character, that you want – nay need – her to succeed, and that is Haar’s ace in the hole.

The Planters is a lovingly crafted film full of genuine wonder and surprise, like finding buried treasure.

For the viewer, however, solving this mystery is not nearly as engrossing as watching the actors’ pas de deux.

Yet while this vibrant and energetic version of Miike is certainly a blast, it can feel underwhelming when you know this was the same man who made the visceral and disturbed "Visitor Q" and the bone-chilling "Audition."

You need only see Get Low for absolute proof that, while Hollywood may be in decline even as bad actors' salaries climb ever higher, there remain at least three very exemplary reasons – Duvall, Spacek, and Murray – to switch off your home theatre and get out into a real one.

The Immigrant is two hours long, but I stayed even longer in my seat, through the credits, still in thrall to it all. The title is singular, but the scope is not so easily quantifiable.

Don't let the near-impossible-to-remember title keep you away from this singular and slightly surreal Tommy Lee Jones scorcher.

For those looking to be stylishly entertained while learning more than anyone might ever want to know about the formation of the Bergman psyche, well, here it is.

Finally recovered from the archive by the George A. Romero Foundation, and restored by New York's IndieCollect from two faded 16mm prints, its mere existence as a lost Romero is enough to make it worth watching. But it's not simply a dated curio: it's a fascinating if dated curio.

Rarely has a movie been more urgently needed than Detroit, yet after delivering on its promise for nearly the entire first half, Detroit goes down in flames before it’s over.

I recognized a lot of my younger self in The Edge of Seventeen. It’s crummy that teenagers just shy of 17 won’t get the same chance.

Set against a backdrop of deep budget cuts and high-stakes testing, this story makes an eloquent plea for the crucial but endangered role of afterschool programs in public education.

As light on his feet as he is as a musical-comedy showman, Jackman is perversely even more pleasurable when he’s popping neck veins from the effort of heavy drama.

Thanks to funding provided by Jane Fonda and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the documentary – once thought to be lost – has been digitally restored to its original length and color quality under the supervision of Greaves’ widow. We should be grateful for this gift.

Enhanced by stunning cinematography by the film's director Aaron Schock and a soundtrack by indie rockers Calexico, Circo does more than provide an exotic peek at a vanishing way of life.

As the start of a new trilogy for the franchise, it’s a promising entry that signals a different approach to a well-worn subgenre. If only it could figure out its footing.

Mehta and her cameraman Giles Nuttgens capture the area's rich interplay of light and color, land and water, and riches and poverty.

Will be of interest for anyone seeking unconventional romantic stories as well as those curious about the development of the Dogme movement.

The bulk, the heft, and the girth of Bukowski: Born Into This arrives in the form of the author himself, giving beery readings to Berkeley audiences clearly enjoying a contact high or sitting, ill-kempt but quiet, pensive, Heineken in one yellowy paw, in his apartment.

I Stand Alone uses a cannon ball to shatter the psychological horror at the heart of human society.

For the most part, Code Black is a riveting document despite its tendency to jackrabbit around in its themes and personalities.

What is lost in translation from Wolitzer’s novel is her particular vision of Joe – short, Brooklyn-born, Jewish – and her sidelong portrait of midcentury men of letters like Bellow and Roth. The Welsh-born Pryce makes a halfhearted swipe at mimicking an Outer Boroughs accent; he’s better at capturing Joe’s gluttony and overgrown-child sulks.