Relax, sit tight, and enjoy the ride.

A relentlessly entertaining exercise in putting Cruise’s Ethan Hunt through his paces again. And again. And again. But hey, there’s much pleasure in watching him continually fall off things.

A one-of-a-kind essay centered on art forgery and hoaxes that is built from spare parts, questionable coverage, obvious overdubbing, and outright bluff, 'F for Fake' is a masterwork most often hailed for its hijacking of documentary form to tease cinema's capacity for making truth out of bullshit

A truly provocative essay.

It leaves a lot of room for interpretation – depending on how you come to it, you could read Dog and Robot’s relationship as platonic or romantic, straight or queer – but the takeaway is all tenderness.

The way the destinies of four people converge in a small Arkansas town in One False Move is nothing short of wondrous.

One of the most immersive and intimate documentaries on Goodall, Jane is a triumph of filmmaking, and essential viewing for humans.

Sweet-spirited and sometimes meandering but always working in the service of its young protagonists’ perspective, We Are the Best! might come off as slight if you aren’t paying attention, or you pay too much attention to the too-cute closing credits montage.

Kubrick’s gladiator film is the pinnacle of sword-and-sandal epics, and who isn’t a sucker for stories about rebellious slaves? This is the kind of movie the Paramount’s screen was made for.

Where Rolling Thunder Revue works best is when it's clear in its ambiguity.

Funny, tragic, moving scenes unfold in Andersson’s meticulously crafted frames. In cafes, bedrooms, offices, street corners suffused in muted off-whites and grays, with characters (mostly nonprofessionals) participating in a sublime ballet of choreographed insecurity, doubt, and frustration, but also of tender and fragile grace.

It’s all rather stunning to behold, especially in black & white, but Below the Clouds eloquently articulates the maxim that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” That eye sees something very different from a safe remove. By and large, the people featured in Rosi’s documentary are in the path of danger.

As usual, Oscar-winner Frances McDormand delivers a rich, physically detailed performance that leaves as much under the surface as above it.

It's a ripping good yarn, to boot, breathlessly paced and seamlessly edited, but most important, resoundingly and surpassingly fun.

The Diary of a Teenage Girl is the rare movie that presents the subject of the loss of virginity from the female perspective. Not only is the film unique in this regard, but also in its frankness, humor, and artistry.

His (Spielberg) is an old-fashioned style of moviemaking that can produce soaring entertainment or, alternately, a fussed-over theatricality. Minute to minute, Lincoln moves between these extremes.

Audience fortitude aside: This is compulsively watchable stuff, a masterstroke of thoughtful direction and thought-provoking performance.

Every laugh-out-loud line is punctuated by an ever-present sense of both despair and unpredictability.

What wicked good fun it is watching this bad girl do her worst.

An exquisitely crafted box of nightmares, and once you realize that the lid has already closed with you inside, it will leave splinters under your skin.

No talking heads here, just Marlon in all his magnificent complexity. For any cineaste, it’s a mind-blowing experience.

As far as the chase genre goes, there have been worse films (better ones, too).

From the moment Shula first appears in On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, director Rungano Nyoni lets the quiet charisma of actress Susan Chardy subtly dominate the screen.

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is hopelessly depressing. Yet as a story of the callous impersonalization we inflict upon one another, the film is timeless.

This may be the first film to examine the intricacies of the Colombia-to-U.S. drug route in any detail.

The end result is a delightful, though a smidge too long, reminder of one of the reasons we so enjoy going to the movies: perchance to dream.

It’s in the semi-improvised or captured moments, like the looks of desperation and abandonment on the faces of old men on the streets of a mining community, that Caught by the Tides is most striking.

In the end, The Fog of War offers a couple of hours of brilliant clarity amid the noise and chaos.