What writer/director Lee (himself from hill farming stock) catches is that their passion is welded in pragmatism. Homophobia, xenophobia, bigotry, and callousness all float beneath the surface here, but as quiet subtext. This is the silence of the hills, where three words are volumes.

But in the genre, as both a movie and a conscious addition to the ongoing celluloid Western mythology, the film is a masterpiece, a stunning and awe-inspiring statement.

This film, the inspiration for the less successful Sorcerer, is a textbook case of how to handle suspense. It has also been called the cruelest movie ever made and it certainly earns that title by the film's end.

While Raes may not be able to replicate the experience of the show for the cinematic audience, she undoubtedly leaves them with a new perspective on the curator's calling, and the work of Vermeer himself.

The only thing here that feels truly, utterly alive is Ledger's maniacal, muttery Joker. The last laugh is his and his alone. It's enough to make you cry.

While there’s hardly a plot to speak of, that’s never hobbled Linklater before and is indeed the director’s keenest, cleverest trick: the ability to make something sweet, honest, and true out of the ephemeral marginalia of youth minus the rose-tinted bullshit.

The film moves at a slow and deliberate pace, much like the wheels of justice. As viewers, we come to feel ensnarled in the grip of bureaucratic entanglement, much like Kornyev, fighting for justice against diminishing odds.

Do we ever get the whole truth? Only this: The past is never the past. In Farhadi’s wounding worldview, the past is the present and, most certainly, the future, too.

Scott subtly weaves those stories together by having every talking head be simply a voice, unified in their belief that this weekend was vital, an affirmation that it was OK to be young and broke.

Onscreen, Lighton explores the imbalance between the two and gently leads the audience with sympathy and empathy to a perfect resolution that asks both to face their own dysfunction.

At a silkily dispatched hour and a half, Black Bag is perfectly portioned and entertaining as all get-out.

It’s only in the last quarter of the film, when Wang strays from her own family’s touchstones to explore a case of separated twins, that One Child Nation loses just a touch of its urgency.

Loud, hilarious, and enormously entertaining, 24 Hour Party People makes you want to toss current FM radio out on its pre-fab, corporate-sponsored backside. And not a moment too soon.

An unsettling feeling hums through the film, and remains well after. Less of a jolt, then; call it a sustained current.

Chatwin may be the nominal subject, but this film is really about Herzog: Not in a self-serving way but, rather, self-analyzing.

It’s not quite as brutalizing as McEwan’s brilliant source novel – it bears too much of a Great Art buff – but it ravishes nonetheless in its grand exploration of the sins of the daughter and a lifetime spent making reparations.

Even when The Tree of Life does not achieve the heights for which it aims, it soars boldly and fearlessly.

The twists and convolutions can seem overwhelming, but Park sustains this high-wire act effortlessly. It’s about trust, you see, about letting go, and doing so will reveal as sublimely satisfying a romantic mystery as you're likely to see.

While the film provides many invaluable insights into Spielberg’s technical and thematic tropes that can be seen repeated throughout his career, the filmmaker also burnishes aspects of his life story and leaves out chunks of years to create what is inevitably a self-indulgent yet delightful origin story, appropriately called The Fabelmans.

The astounding performance of David Thewlis as Johnny is in no small measure responsible for the success of Naked. Talking his way through every scene, his portrait of this drifter is mesmerizingly appealing, hateful, humorous, self-destructive, honest and compelling. Still, I am unable to separate my loathing for this character from my feelings about the formal achievements of this movie. The effect may be one of naked observation but the view is ugly and corrosive.

The story Surgal tells is ultimately fascinating but dry, deep but limited, and a lesson more than an experience.

The Host is a freewheeling mix of high style and goofy, good-natured fear-mongering.

One of the most suspenseful films of all time, its wartime action setting makes it easy to forget it's also one of the most spiritually righteous. [Director's Cut]

Restrepo is an example of photojournalism at its finest.

Clearly the single best, the single coolest (to borrow from Harry Knowles) animated film in a great while.

Neither Iya or Masha (in astounding first-time film performances by both women) know exactly what they want, and it is in their path to fumbling towards that understanding that they show compassion, cruelty, longing, forgiveness, and flashes of joy that fracture into melancholy.

Neville’s film isn’t making a case for canonization. But it is a call to action.

This revisionist Western – intellectually, aesthetically, and narratively absorbing – rattles to the bone, but never quite rends the heart.