A comic put-on of awe-inspiring crudity and death-defying satire and by a long shot the funniest film of the year. It is "Jackass" with a brain and Mark Twain with full frontal male nudity.

Minari is as American as apple pie and kimchi, which is to say it’s what America is all about.

Like her heroine, Wang straddles the fence and argues from either side of it; like her, the movie is profoundly Chinese-American, speaking to both audiences and able to be enjoyed by both.

There is nothing I dislike more than a movie that demands that you love an obnoxious, insufferable protagonist. Marty Supreme is not only one of the worst examples of this phenomenon, it’s also one of the worst movies of the year.

It’s a gentle epic, based on a 10th-century Japanese folk tale, that uses pencils, ink, and impressionistic washes of color to convey a glowing visual otherworld, one that stands in contrast both to Takahata’s earlier work and the hard-edged lines and bright tones of much anime.

Ferguson's film is a clear-sighted counterpoint to the former secretary of defense's impression. As the title suggests, it's a seemingly infinite mess.

It is first and foremost a moral tale, and an overpowering one.

It sounds like the old unstoppable-force-meets-immovable-object trick. Ramin Bahrani's Goodbye Solo has the trappings of such a story, but, mercifully, none of the follow-through.

Gunda ― which doubles as the name of the movie and the name of the pig ― is as close as we may ever come to experiencing the world as animals do, specifically the animals that become our food.

Campion’s best-known films (the remarkable The Piano, 1993; The Portrait of a Lady, 1996) are not just set in the past but summon it up with a rare capacity to make viewers feel a sort of displacement from the present. She does that here, too.

What's most unusual about the original 24 years later, though, is its elegant minimalism.

Kogonada establishes a meditative tone and rhythm as his compositions parallel the building’s pleasing symmetries.

Michael Hazanavicius's love letter to classic cinema isn't perfect but it's close enough to make just about anyone who sees it ridiculously happy - and that includes children and grown-ups who have never come across a silent film.

The final shots are both majestic and damning, and they lift the film with a kind of gentle contempt into a surrealism that makes an awful kind of sense, the world in its lushness swallowing Zama as it will swallow us all. Some movies unfold as dreams; Zama dances us playfully toward the edge of nightmare and then asks us to open our eyes.

The film shifts back and forth in time. It works like memory that way, but the memories are Johnson’s, not the viewer’s, which makes the absence of some discernible organizing principle a real drawback.

If you’ve ever helped shepherd a parent or a grandparent in their final years, you may be better equipped to handle this movie’s gallows humor and to appreciate the care with which it separates the contradictory emotions felt by Kirsten and all grown children.

A film noir? A backstage musical? A whodunit? A comedy? In truth, it's all of the above -- plus a kinky love story, an absorbing melodrama, and a mordantly jaded snapshot of postwar Paris -- and all of them are wonderful.

As casually insensitive and careless as you might expect from a film of this era, but it's also surprisingly crafty about finding ways to incite discussion

Told from the perspective of its 9-year old protagonist, Cáit (Catherine Clinch), writer-director Colm Bairéad’s adaptation of Claire Keegan’s 2010 novella, “Foster” is as beautiful as it is devastating.

Eloquent, bloody, and daringly simple.

It takes a few minutes to catch on, and it would be indiscrete to specify what it is, but once you figure out what’s really strange about it you have entered the solipsistic prison of a tormented mind.

Richly allusive and eloquently stylized.

What has aged well in Diva is the grave beauty of that aria and the wry, painterly camera shots - you should see the new print for the colors alone - conceived by Beineix but executed by the great French cinematographer Philippe Rousselot. They're enough to tide us over and maybe convince the kids that hip date movies existed back when their parents and dinosaurs roamed the earth.

An innovative hybrid of documentary, staged reading, fictional feature, and confessional, The Arbor defies categorization not merely for art's sake - although its artistry is without question - but because conventional forms seem inadequate for such a harrowing story.

Languorous and enigmatic, “Long Day’s Journey” is the very definition of art cinema, and it will baffle and possibly enrage casual filmgoers expecting such niceties as plot. It is a movie not to be followed but steeped in and ultimately surrendered to.

Laurence Olivier gives the textbook course on Shakespearean villainy as crown-stealing schemer Richard. Considered by many to be Olivier's best take on the Bard. [22 Feb 2004]

This is an instant classic, primal and immediate in its depiction of the death of a parent, firmly anchored in the Disney style while extending its boundaries with arresting new perspectives and a tough-mindedness simply not possible to its most obvious ancestors, Bambi and The Jungle Book. [24 June 1994, p.47]

The Little Mermaid is more than Disney Lite, as so many of the studio's animations of the last couple of decades have been. It offers a strong link to the classic Disney tradition while generating freshly hatched delights. And it puts Disney back in the animation game in a big way. [17 Nov 1989, p.85p]