A Most Violent Year is its own thing, hypnotic and exacting and as subtly savage as mellow-voiced Marvin Gaye’s “Inner City Blues (Makes Me Wanna Holler),” which opens the film and sets the tone. I was fully in thrall to it all.

It is beautiful, lyrical, tragic, redemptive, and focused down to the last tick on a dog’s nose. His animated characters have all the grace, quirk, and charm of any live-action performance.

Haneke (Caché) has created a morality tale that concludes with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand: one more example of a solitary act of violence that unleashes a cataclysm.

I hope we don't have to wait another quarter-century for the next great Dahl adaptation, but for a film as good as this one, I'll wait.

One of Jordan's best films, and almost certainly in Nolte's top two percentile.

Though Crumb is packed with information and telling details, the movie's objective is hardly art history or a survey of Crumb's place in the world of comics. The movie aims for broader subject matter, to discover something about the role art plays in the life of the artist, and about how the release of art may, indeed, allow the artist to function as a stable human being.

The performances are first-rate, and Anderson as the obsessively attached maid Mrs. Danvers is a perverse gem.

So many things come together so beautifully in this movie based on the life of John Forbes Nash Jr. that you're likely to find yourself willing to benignly overlook its occasional biographical lapses and narrative sweetening.

It's a mistake to confuse Zero Dark Thirty for "truth" – that would be a disservice to the high level of craftsmanship, from first-billed actors to below-the-line production crew, at work in this movie fiction – but there is admirably little fat on its bones.

An unexpected classic.

Mary Harron's movie turns out to be anything but a sensationalistic bio-picture; it neither sanctifies nor demonizes the shooter or her famous victim. What the movie accomplishes is something trickier: It treats its two principals, Solanis and Warhol, with respect and humanity.

If the hilarious soundtrack isn't ample motivation for those intimidated by the freakish sex and violence, the side-splitting sight of shrimpy Villechaize coupling with the 225-pound, 6-foot Queen (Tyrrell) is reason enough to slog through the insanity.

From its opening tracking shot of four furry legs sauntering through a bed of colorful pansies as cars and trucks whoosh nearby, Stray is a documentary of unhurried pleasures.

It's thrilling and lovely and sad and explosive in all the right ways, and it needs to be seen – on the big screen, in 3-D – to be believed.

Saulnier and co. have crafted a gleefully merciless update on Deliverance, except instead of city folk vs. hillbillies, it’s punk rockers vs. neo-Nazis, and it is one of the most brutal, visceral films to come along in quite some time.

The Last Duel is a thematic gold mine, one that sits nicely alongside some of Scott’s best work to date.

Audition's take on the war between the sexes is bleak and almost entirely devoid of hope. --It's enough to make you give up dating altogether.

A phantom of a movie whose beautiful flakes fall into the deep crevices of memory long after the seasons change.

This Is Not a Burial, it’s a Resurrection is arthouse cinema at its best, a lyrical eulogy from a confident auteur whose poetic touch is meticulous and grand.

What's best about Markus and McFeely's script is that they understand the characters.

Focusing her camera on the rising cogs in the machine of China’s insatiable consumer culture, Jessica Kingdon expands on her 2017 short “Commodity City” with the visually stunning feature Ascension.

The documentary has no narration, and uses excellent expository camerawork to say things that no narrator could equal.

The overall execution add up to a film of beautiful, ultimately heartbreaking honesty.

The film is a wonderful choice for older teens and has considerable crossover appeal for adult audiences.

Anyone expecting truth from Bannon is on a fool's errand, and the floating criticism that there's no confessional here is missing the entire point.

It's the final act that takes that final twist of the knife, as the thriller becomes a grand guignol horror, yet still based within the world and the rules established in that grounded opening.

With these two actors in command, Supernova doesn’t just dare to speak the name of a love between two deeply committed men facing an untenable situation. It shouts it from the rooftops.

This modest French-language film follows the time-honored cinematic tradition of plot as spearheaded by a simple twist of fate.