By now, we’ve grown accustomed to the signature touch of Zemeckis (Back to the Future, Forrest Gump), who is one of the best creative minds to see the innovative narrative potential lying dormant in technical cinematographic advances. This does not always provide the underpinnings for great stories, but bien sûr his movies are almost always quite something to see.

Sharp-witted delight.

The language barrier borders the Babel-esque; it’s a surprise fount of humor, too, as when a translator is terrified to pass along an Italian tailor’s request to the French-speaking chief seamstress, knowing she’ll be furious at the added work.

Roth delicately captures the weight of weariness that burdens Neil, as he shuffles the streets in his Birkenstocks, briefly showing signs of life in the company of Berenice. We are locked on to Neil for those signs, and Roth’s performance is utterly absorbing.

Chalamet embodies Dylan in a quite literal sense; he’s clearly studied the tape and does a more than passable mimicry of Dylan’s voice and performing style. Problem is, it’s an intentionally opaque characterization, in a film overcrammed with musical performances – onstage, in the studio, on the bed noodling on a new song – which basically means half the movie is like watching pretty good karaoke.

The chaos, the confusion, the ongoing struggle between personality and purpose, The Paper really gets the beat, gets how a paper comes together and the beat at which that happens.

Embrace the simple pleasures of pen to paper.

My Penguin Friend is ultimately a charming story of quiet resilience and healing as much as it is about a man and a bird. May we all find such friends.

The game footage is as engrossing as the real thing, although it comes at the expense of diminished attention to the teen players and their emotional problems.

Neeson, taking a welcome break from his late-career reinvention as a man of action, and Manville (Another Year, Phantom Thread) are such gifted performers, and they play this couple – their tenderness and stress – at a likably subtle frequency.

While some filmmakers fade into obscurity during their time away from the screen, The Bikeriders is a welcome reminder that Nichols’ thoughtful explorations of economic tension and toxic masculinity are more relevant now than ever.

While never dull, The Cup is a leisurely, quiet film, rife with staid, sometimes ponderous moments reflecting the seriousness of their situation in exile.

As atypical a summer film as they come -– no explosions, no car chases, no Arnold -– but immensely more pleasing than films with all three of those summertime staples.

A literate, sophisticated comedy whose humor and loss and hope linger in our hearts, like the jazz music it reveres, both sweet and lowdown.

Fresh and raw like a blown-out vein, Narc takes a walking-dead, cop-flick subgenre and beats new life into it.

It's a one-note gag, but a superior gag performed with a minimum of cheese and a surplus of laugh-out-loud moments.

Ultimately, the film’s many charms drown somewhat under crushingly sad events. Still, there is redemption in the chemistry between the two lead characters, their passions and complexity, as well as in the grace of the music as it is performed and how it is used.

1900 is a marvelous movie, Bertolucci is one of the best directors who has ever lived.

With a saga this sprawling and byzantine, it makes sense that the emphasis is not on Schiele, but rather on what the sorely wronged Bondi never stopped calling "my Schiele."

The film’s light hand, appealing style, and simple exposition make it an eminently watchable inquiry into the politics of food and public health, accessible to the documentary-shy and wildly appropriate for older kids, who may further respond to its generational emphasis.

While a solid addition to the new canon of microbudget sci-fi flicks that look like a million bucks, with an aesthetic that’s equal parts Blade Runner and Tron, it’s really about this couple who aren’t a couple yet. It’s that old equation of two people who are clearly too high-maintenance for anyone but each other, and that’s why Litwak isn’t afraid to use oh-so-familiar beats of the rom-com classics.

The director is unflinching in his portrayal of the horrors that occurred, and nearly all the characters, from Voight's Wright to Rhames' Mann, are wonderfully nuanced, desperately believable creations.

Something is terribly amiss when the American actors sound like English is their second language.

Cotillard doesn't look part Native American or sound like a Thirties Chicago moll, but damned if she isn't a sight and sound to behold. Whatever her technical limitations, she rises above them to breathe a flesh, blood, and battered verisimilitude into the part. You can't tear your eyes off her, any more than you can Mann's flawed but still engrossing picture.

Even as Aatami survives completely ridiculous and clearly life-ending assaults, the magic of bloody-mindedness keeps the action … if not plausible, then never less than hilarious and gruesome.

Resurrection nearly nails it – it’s masterful in its body horror elements and its creeping anxiety is crafted effortlessly – but the film’s final moments pull the rug, failing to twist the knife in the gut, sticking the kill.

What Tsotsi fails to explain is how the mere introduction of a baby can melt the cruel cycle of criminality and disregard for others.

Recounting the history of nukes, mankind's seeming inability to render them obsolete, and the many nightmare scenarios that are cropping up with almost daily frequency in this grim new age of terror-on-demand,Countdown to Zero is less a documentary in the traditional sense than a scathing piece of advocacy journalism.