Has the impact of a left-right combination to the chin.

Alexandra is a pleasure to watch, but it's also one of those lovely, unclassifiable movies that flourishes better with repeated or prolonged exposures.

Black Book takes the conventions of the WWII epic -- the prison breaks, the interrogation scenes -- and undermines them with craft and muscle and the ripe lack of restraint we've come to expect from this director.

Truly, there is no looniness like looniness with lineage.

Like films such as Cristi Puiu’s “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” (2005), Glory transforms that realism into metaphors that don’t just criticize a particular system but lay plain the universal exploitation of the weak and honest by the corrupt and powerful.

In retrospect, it’s obvious why the film was never produced: The director was a lunatic.

If there is any message in Tarkovsky's work, although as a poet he would never stoop to anything as banal as a message, it is that life is an internal affair, played out in one's soul, not in public.

It’s been seven years since the writer-director David O. Russell’s last movie. At its frequent best, “Amsterdam” makes it worth the wait.

It’s well worth seeking out for older kids who don’t mind reading subtitles, their parents, and any adults who can appreciate a good story movingly and creatively told.

The Aristocrats -- the movie, not the joke -- is a working demonstration of the pleasures of the profane.

Burton, who directed the film with animator Mike Johnson, has rarely been in brisker, friskier form.

If The Trip to Italy begins shakily, it ends with expansive bliss, a father and son reconnecting off the shores of Capri as Gustav Mahler’s art song “Ich Bin Der Welt Abhanden Gekommen (I Am Lost to the World)” sends everyone heart-stoppingly home.

Though it has a few things to say about class — and how even the most downtrodden are entitled to hopes, dreams, passions, and solidarity — Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris never devolves into a preachy treatise. Instead, it’s a soothing tonic, a nice little escape from the troubles of the world. Sure, its plot hinges on a materialistic desire, but capitalism has seldom felt this comforting.

Nathaniel fares well with his father's fellow masters, although Frank Gehry seems evasive.

His film aspires to a poetry about barbarism that will not let us forget.

Like a great silent movie, it creates its pathos and comedy out of the concrete objects being animated, building elaborate gags involving everyday items transformed into Rube Goldberg devices that sometimes entrap the characters, or, when properly manipulated by them, provide a means of achieving their goals.

“The Fog of War” (2003), about McNamara, won Morris a best documentary feature Oscar. The Unknown Known takes its title from a favorite phrase of Rumsfeld. It also accurately describes its subject, whose smiling inscrutability makes him consistently fascinating and often maddening.

Like the best spiritual movies, of whatever faith, "Of Gods and Men" moves us toward a union with the infinite, and when we come to the monks' last supper, the moment is staggeringly powerful.

Some might find the dual conclusions too blunt in their irony, but “Norte” does not try to be consoling. Crazy as Fabian’s ideas seem, they might be the ones that prevail.

Should you see it? Of course you should. Anything Miyazaki does is worth your time. But the movie’s a gorgeous, problematic anomaly in an illustrious career.

The thread that winds through their stories is love lost and connections found, but only the audience is able to weave it into something to keep.

Smart, unpredictable, and alive with the energies of actors who clearly are enjoying being stretched by their material.

This may not be the greatest movie version of the novel, but it's possibly the truest.

More conventional in approach than Linklater’s 12-year filmmaking odyssey, “Identity” demonstrates its boldness not with stylistic originality but with political acuity.

This is music to gorge on, raw ethnic survival in the form of sound.

The deeper Tim’s Vermeer takes you, the peskier and more profound the questions get.

Certainly none of Olivier's other contemporary film characters matches Archie's resonances. We're lucky to still have The Entertainer. [04 Aug 1989, p.41]

Trust me on this: Go.

Ynever seen a documentary quite like this one, and aren't likely to again.

The script is biting and timely.

The film's an even four-hander, with awful behavior spread evenly among the characters and spellbinding performances by the quartet of co-leads.

Watching Room 237 is like being stuck on an airplane next to a stranger hellbent on convincing you of his very detailed, very paranoid theory of the universe. Actually, it’s like being stuck on a plane full of those guys, each with a different yet compellingly insane take on reality. And the in-flight entertainment features only one movie: “The Shining.”

In the absolutely moving new documentary Watermarks, seven women in their 80s return to the Vienna swimming pool of their youth.

Anderson is the rare filmmaker who doesn't want to use the actress as an instrument or to exploit her independent-movie cachet. She has freed Moore to be what she hasn't been with many directors: credibly human.

It takes a woman to make a great film about the all-male bastion of the French Foreign Legion. Claire Denis did so in her elliptical desert updating of Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd” in “Beau Travail” (1999), and her fellow French director Sarah Leonor nearly equals that feat in The Great Man.

American Sniper may be the hardest, truest movie ever made about the experience of men in war. Why? Because there’s no glory in it.

It’s not a fun time at the movies, but it’s an informative and worthy one.

Melding history, science, and up-to-the-minute urgency, A Fierce Green Fire is a clarion call that’s passionate and provocative.

No one, but no one, makes movies like Bong, a South Korean master who combines baroque concepts, epic visuals, international casts, and a sense of humor that can make you laugh out loud in the middle of the darkest doings.

The Babadook remains a potent journey through the fears, anxieties, and repressed rages of motherhood. The ending, remarkably, gets to have it both ways, reminding us that some of the scariest monsters are the ones we learn to live with.

Lebanon gives us viscerally violent, intensely distressing glimpses into war's annihilation of people, places, and communities.

The movie’s a galvanizing, tragicomic work of 21st-century schadenfreude, marred only by a barely repressed giddiness on the part of the filmmakers.

It’s an empathetic yet forceful cautionary tale; we should pay heed to its message.

So what is Hunger? Unexpectedly, a visually ravishing tour of hell and a meditation on freedom that at best is wordlessly profound and at worst interestingly obscure.

Is it an allegory for contemporary Greece? Beats me. Like the films of Buñuel, it’s about the human condition, regarded with bemusement and acuity.

As the sensation of imminent doom spreads from character to character to character, She Dies Tomorrow takes shape as an allegory with just enough genre trimmings to keep us off balance.

Australian rocker Nick Cave talks of how discovering Cohen during his small-town youth "just changed things." Bono calls the singer "our Shelley, our Byron."

Like its subject, Pollock is a messy creation, but one whose depth of commitment and high attack keeps it on track.

Maybe not entirely depersonalized, however. Hogg has a point of view and a point to make, cryptic though they may be.

Beyond its fresh twists on the cop and romance genres, Witness is, above all, an anti-consumption film. [08 Feb 1985]

All Abrams wants to do is give us a great ride while holding firm to our longstanding emotional investment in these characters.

Time of Favor, which boasts a haunting score, is an unflinching, complex portrait of a modern Israel that is rarely seen on-screen.

A tremendously decorative picture. [13 Apr 1936, p.21]

As a movie, The Post is engrossing and enjoyable, if falling slightly short of “All the President’s Men” and “Spotlight.” As a period piece, it couldn’t feel more eerily of the moment.

If you've seen the Beatles documentary "Let It Be," you know what four men who are heartily sick of one another look like, and in 2001, Metallica had been recording twice as long as the Fab Four.

Visually, it has the intense intimacy of a dream.

The dialogue is terse and funny while hinting at much larger matters, such as the way poverty can be handed from generation to generation like a bad gene or a disease.

This is a cautionary tale, but it’s also a celebration of a life filled with crazy stories and lots of love.

As the title implies, though, Keep on Keepin’ On has more on its mind. The film’s as much about the young Kauflin’s struggles — as a 21st-century Asian-American naïf trying to succeed in a 20th-century art form created by African-Americans, as a blind man navigating the often callous New York jazz scene. It’s also about the ongoing health of jazz itself as the music recedes further from the mainstream into the protective world of festivals and small clubs.

Despite the self-conscious derivativeness and allusions, Tsai’s debut already demonstrates the contrariness and motifs that have distinguished him as a unique, difficult, and transcendent filmmaker.

A bleakly funny character study of a very particular species of urban fauna - the sports radio call-in fanatic - Big Fan’ is compulsively watchable.

You never know where Mother is going to go next. All you know is that you're in the hands of a master with an appreciably bent sense of humor.

The characters look as if they’d be more comfortable with intertitles than spoken dialogue. And the faces — Marion Cotillard as Ewa, the beleaguered Polish immigrant of the title, holds a close-up as well as Lillian Gish or Louise Brooks.

Pillion is the story of that one relationship that defines a person, the one that finally reveals to them what they want out of sex, love, and life. We can all relate to that.

Like another documentary set in North Dakota, Jesse Moss’s “The Overnighters,” they follow the story for months as it unfolds, offering no editorial guidance except dates and places and a soundtrack by T. Griffith that underscores the growing angst and pending horror. Welcome to Leith. Say goodbye to certitude.

After 152 epic minutes, ‘Lake of Fire’ comes down to this: If you’re not living this woman’s life, maybe you shouldn’t tell her what to do.

The result is Grade-A agitpop, a mixture of archival footage and cheeky, creative animated reconstruction that's funny and frightening in equal measure.

Bi Gan’s Resurrection is trippy cinema at its best, a nearly three-hour deep dive into experimental cinema.

Watching Gus Van Sant's Gerry is the cinematic equivalent of watching paint dry. I mean that as high praise.

The cinematic equivalent of a high, arching rainbow of a three-pointer from midcourt.

The miraculous thing about Let's Get Lost is that Weber has managed to create something that's both impossibly stylized and unmistakably moral (not judgmental, moral).

Three quarters of Cold Mountain consist of some of the most masterful and absorbing filmmaking of the year. The final quarter is Hollywood business as usual.

The film is as spare and unvarnished as a wooden temple floating on a lake, but its reflections run deep, and it can ripple your thoughts for months.

Warm, intelligent, humane, The Bear is everything you could hope for in an outdoor adventure. [27 Oct 1989, p.33p]

Hurtling from the screen with a vigor and importance that are all but absent from contemporary film, it's a deeply moving social drama, raw and gritty in style, shining with moral purpose as it delivers a scathing take-it-into-the-streets critique of feral capitalism and racism. [18 July 1997, p.D1]

Is Kelly Reichardt the most under-acknowledged great director working in America right now? Her new movie, Certain Women, is one of the glories of this or any other year, but it stays true to Reichardt form, which is to say it’s low-key, allusive, lit up with implied meanings without ever leading us by the hand.

A movingly acted, terrifically old-fashioned World War II picture rethought as a post-colonial rebuke.

Across the board, the performances testify, often hilariously, to the pain these characters feel and inflict but are incapable of expressing.

The decadence is obvious. But true to the Valentino prerogative, it's beautiful - sad, too: a dream life moving into the unknown.

Extremely enjoyable true-life drama featuring some of our most deft actors having the time of their lives.

At once riveting and heartbreaking. This youngest daughter of Robert F. Kennedy has the good sense — far rarer among documentarians than you’d like to think — not to get in the way of her material.

Engrossingly manic version of Tracy Letts's great stage play.

Takahata and his animators balance aspects of nostalgia and the present day, urban modernity and rural timelessness, love and regret with a visual and aural sensitivity that draws a viewer in from the first frames.

Wants to claim Bukowski (1920-1994) as a 20th-century West Coast Walt Whitman -- a people's poet of modern degradation. Through a selective presentation of his writing and a reverently crass treatment of his life, it makes a funny, often intensely moving case, and you're having such a good time that you're glad to let it.

A witty yet fiery and, in the best sense, provocative play of ideas about freedom of expression.

The latest update, directed by Cooper and built on the sturdy bones of William Wellman’s and Robert Carson’s 1937 script, has heart, soul, and sinew. Above all, it has Lady Gaga, both before and after her character’s transformation from an outer-borough duckling into a superstar swan.

A movie called Snakes on a Plane had better be one of two things: So bad it's good or so good it's great. Darned if it isn't a little bit of both.

Superior and original filmmaking. You won't be able to take your eyes off it.

The General is a gravely beautiful film (in wide-screen black and white) by John Boorman about an Irish career criminal who was an antiauthoritarian folk hero, a warm family man to a menage a trois, and also a dangerous psychopath.

A delightfully deadpan comedy from Germany, is one of those movies where nothing whatsoever seems to happen until you look closely, at which point everything happens.

Booksmart registers as an instant classic that doesn’t reinvent the genre so much as refurbish it from within, and it matters very much that the writers, director, and stars are all women. Also that they’re having a hell of a good time.

On the basis of The Sisters Brothers, we’d all be better off handing our westerns to Frenchmen. Especially if the results do right by John C. Reilly. That fine, ursine character actor — our generation’s Wallace Beery, as I live and breathe — is one of the four corners of the movie’s acting pleasures, the other three being Joaquin Phoenix, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Riz Ahmed (HBO’s “The Night Of”).

The Lives of Others has similarities to Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 classic "The Conversation" but with undercurrents that resound across an entire century of European political history.

Signe Baumane opens her sardonically hilarious, sneakily moving, autobiographical animated feature, Rocks in My Pocket, with what looks like a darker version of one of those chipper psycho-pharmaceutical ads.

Incisive, highly entertaining political farce.

Jason Schwartzman is a fine actor, but he has a knack for creating characters you want to punch in the face, and Philip, who has a second novel coming out and is intent on burning all his bridges, is almost marvelously obnoxious.

Lee's light hand with his timeless subjects deftly, affectingly, ruefully and hilariously covers all the bases. [19 Aug 1994, p.49]

Has a power that doesn't announce itself until it's over: You leave not wanting to give up on life, just resentful of the world we live in.