Gremillon seems the master of every style he attempts, but his genius lies in the smooth linking of those various styles; the film seems to evolve as it unfolds, changing its form in imperceptible stages.

One of the most striking of Ozu’s American-style silents.

This is one of the greats, and I’m too much in awe of it to say much more than: See it—as often as you can.

A Conradian parable of a man succumbing to the wild, the film is remarkable for its raw, pointed depiction of human behavior.

A breathtaking study of the relationships between life and theater, mime and tragedy, the real and the imagined, sound and silence. It runs 187 minutes, and it's worth every one of them.

It's a masterful succession of images, tickling the viewer's curiosity with the characters' curiosity. The fantasy emerges little by little—through hesitant, feline steps, if you will—until the floodgates open.

A proud, forthright indictment of national and personal corruption, as evoked through a young reggae singer's odyssey from country to city, from innocent to outlaw.

Anne Dorval gives an extraordinary performance as the mother, who lashes out at the boy but can't disguise her own suffering when he lands an emotional punch; their scenes together reminded me of Paul Schrader's Affliction for their sense of familial love gone hopelessly sour.

The original antimarijuana film, offering the true inside story of the devil weed that drives men to savage lusts and women to unspeakable depravities, along with a little bit of dumb fun.

In the end, his deadliest weapon turns out to be other people’s trust, something with grimmer philosophical implications than all his acts of violence combined.

Buñuel conjures with Freudian imagery, outrageous humor, and a quiet, lyrical camera style to create one of his most complex and complete works, a film that continues to disturb and transfix.

Winterbottom, a Brit who's shot several films in India, carefully notes the local customs and mores that contribute to the young woman's tragic fall.

Jannicke Systad Jacobsen, a documentary maker directing her first fiction film, demonstrates a sure sense of tone, and Bergsholm is memorable as the misfit teen.

"The whole universe depends on everything fitting together just right," declares Hushpuppy, the fierce, nappy-headed girl at the center of this extraordinary southern gothic.

Unfortunately for Polley, Take This Waltz is a good film serving mainly to remind us that "Away From Her" is a great one.

This fourth installment is a complete reboot, returning to the web-slinger's creation story, and Garfield, more than any other factor, contributes to the sense of a bleaker vision along the lines of "The Dark Knight."

The dance numbers, choreographed by Allison Faulk, are inventive and athletic, but not really erotic; Soderbergh never lets you forget that, for these men, dancing is above all a job.

MacFarlane gets an impressive amount of comic mileage from having a plush toy talk like a Boston low-life, though for gut laughs nothing compares to the brutal, frantic, and completely wordless fight scene between Wahlberg and his little buddy in a cheap hotel room.

The movie develops into a painful story of one generation inflicting its selfish compromises on the next. The three leads are uniformly excellent, and the strong supporting cast includes Mark Duplass and Philip Baker Hall.

Dick focuses on a handful of women who were sexually assaulted while on active duty, but they're only the tip of the iceberg; according to the film, which draws all its statistics from government reports, more than 20 percent of female veterans have been assaulted.

Unlike most literary adaptations this one actually conveys the pleasure of fiction, lingering suggestively on small details of character and place. The movie casts such a seductive air of mystery that the resolution feels anticlimactic, yet there's plenty to enjoy along the way.

In movies like "Happiness" and "Storytelling," Todd Solondz has staged some pretty horrifying courtships, but the one in this seventh feature is surprisingly gentle.

Scafaria, making her feature debut as writer-director, scores numerous laughs off the social dislocation that follows as people realize the apocalypse is imminent (there's a funny sequence at a suburban house party where no taboo goes unbroken).

The thing runs more than two hours, but this is the sort of project that's indemnified against charges of excess.

In some mumblecore movies the semi-improvised dialogue can be engulfed by hipster irony, but the acting here is so skilled, and the emotional terrain so rocky, that Shelton manages to break past the genre's narrow social parameters to a moving story of grief, betrayal, and devotion.

As usual, Anderson's densely imagined mise-en-scene contains many allusions to movies, music, and literature (Benjamin Britten's orchestral work being a key touchstone); what's different this time is that most of the cultural references grow naturally from the characterization.

The story provides great roles for Jack Black as the sunny title character, Shirley MacLaine as his dyspeptic victim, and Matthew McConaughey as the good-old-boy D.A. who prosecutes the crime. But some of the best performances come from real-life residents of Carthage as they share their recollections on camera.

As with the earlier movie, this one turns in on its own morality like a Möbius strip, endorsing kindness by practicing slaughter, and pulls us along for the ride. Detractors will call its reasoning ridiculous, and they'll be right - though I doubt that will bother Goldthwait, who makes a living being ridiculous.

This may conjure up unpleasant memories of Guy Ritchie's "Sherlock Holmes" movies, but Ritchie could learn a lot from director James McTeigue (V for Vendetta); this is multiplex fare to be sure, but McTeigue manages to popularize 19th-century literature without completely vulgarizing it.

Beneath the surface lies a carefully considered argument about the irrelevance of organized religion in modern society. Though skeptical, the film isn't at all mean-spirited: Moretti takes such pleasure in living that the impulse to consecrate it seems absurd.

Waititi's comic vocabulary hasn't changed much-there's a lot of voice-over narration illustrated with ludicrous, cartoonish tableaux - yet the kids' genuine longing for their no-good dad elevates this above simple deadpan humor.

Into this cauldron walks the title character, a gentle Algerian refugee with his own history of terrible loss, and as he tries to take over the dead woman's class, his rocky relationship with the kids pushes both him and them to new levels of empathy, understanding, and forgiveness.

One of the more admirable qualities of Robert Greene's Fake It So Real, is how it creates such a rich sense of place with such a mundane setting.

This period action comedy by Jiang Wen (Devils on the Doorstep) is great fun in the Shakespearean tradition, stuffed with lively characters, dramatic stand-offs, and stolen-identity subplots.

Because the first narrative is so crushingly generic (which turns out to be the point), most of the amusement derives from trying to figure out what the second one is all about. I'm not sure I ever did, but the climactic one-two punch of special-effects chaos and meta-movie chin stroking should have the fanboys trembling with delight.

It's clichéd, ridiculous, and very entertaining.

The most interesting moments, however, belong not to the chef but to those who labor in his shadow. "Jiro's ghost will always be watching," observes one interview subject as he imagines Jiro's eventual passing and its probable effect on his 50-ish son, who follows in his father's footsteps but will never be considered his equal.

Singh is much more skilled as a visual artist than a storyteller, and his artistic fortunes seem to rise and fall with the inspiration of his screenwriters. In this case he's lucked out with Mellissa Wallack and Jason Keller, whose witty script retells the story of Snow White from the perspective of the wicked queen.

Seann William Scott is the best comic Neanderthal in Hollywood (American Pie, Role Models), and he's found the perfect story in this fictionalized adaptation of a memoir by minor-league hockey brawler Doug Smith.

Davies adapted a classic 1952 play by Terence Rattigan, whose centenary is being celebrated in Britain this year, and though you might have trouble sorting out the film's competing levels of authorship, one element attributable solely to Davies is the strategic use of music and quiet on the soundtrack.

Makes a powerful statement about the plight of unwanted children. But it also incorporates elements of melodrama, film noir, and even the fairy tale that engage our empathy and confirm the Dardennes' great compassion.

Even as a hagiography, though, it's pretty interesting: Fishbone predated-and outlived-the early 90s "alternative" boom that provided it with a brief marketing hook, yet the band truly embodied alternative music's underground ideal, challenging listeners of all races and musical persuasions.

Her (Westfedlt) directing debut is a funny and emotionally credible.

Being taken under Apatow's wing may have been a big career break for writer-director David Wain, but this lacks the sharp personality of some of his earlier movies.

Their inexperience with thrillers is evident here in the cluttered exposition at the beginning and wholesale revelations at the end. In the middle, though, there's a pretty suspenseful stretch.

The rudimentary 2-D animation doesn't allow for much character nuance, and the story isn't exactly fresh. But directors Fernando Trueba (Calle 54), Javier Mariscal, and Tono Errando conjure up some vibrant set pieces.

This structure persuasively depicts combat and recovery as two sides of the same struggle, and Dennis strengthens his argument by maintaining a constant perspective throughout: the camera is always within a few feet of the subject.

This documentary about Crazy Horse, the legendary Parisian nude cabaret, is so warm, colorful, and sensuous that it seems like a real anomaly for the highly disciplined filmmaker.

Pulses with feeling for childhood and nature and develops a surprising amount of suspense considering it takes place around a single suburban home.

A heart-wrenching performance from Brenda Blethyn sustains this 2009 drama by French writer-director Rachid Bouchareb.

Robert Wieckiewicz is good as the conflicted protagonist, but the most valuable player here is cinematographer Jolanta Dylewska, who turns in handsome work even though most of the action transpires in inky blackness.

Harrelson returns in Moverman's second feature playing a similar character, a bullheaded LAPD officer whose long career with the force is unraveling amid a succession of brutality complaints, and although the role offers the same macho quotient as the earlier one, it's counterbalanced in this case by funny, observant scenes of his gyno-centric home life.

As pulp sci-fi this Fox release is pretty good, but it's also commendable for its sensitive depiction of adolescent behavior: even the bullying scenes avoid the caricature of most studio films.

The interviewees are good storytellers--particularly the eccentric research scientists who tested the effects of nicotine on rats in the early 80s--and the editing keeps their stories moving at a lively pace.

Like Walter Benjamin, Bonello associates this insularity with both innocence and the 19th century; and when, in the final sequence of House of Pleasures, he dispenses with the security exuded by these subjects, the effect is like being shaken violently out of a dream.

Director James Watkins (Eden Lake) treats the material with surprising reverence, generating good clean scares from atmosphere and character revelations rather than shock editing or gore.

Ramsay seems to be seriously intent on probing the outer limits of a mother's love and forgiveness, but the boy (played by a trio of child actors) is so unremittingly evil that the movie begins to feel like a grotesque remake of that old John Ritter comedy "Problem Child" (1990).

Writer-director Celine Sciamma breaks little ground here, but her story is nicely scaled to the gender-rigid world of childhood, where boys playing soccer together take as much pride in their spitting skills as any scored goal.

Leth moves lightly and briskly, streamlining the weird material into something elemental and true; he's also assembled a knockout supporting cast.

Like Anthony Mann's "The Naked Spur" (1953) or "Man of the West" (1958), the movie draws on the terrifying beauty of the natural world and generates tension from the volatile dynamics of a carefully observed group.

The movie is hugely compelling on a moral and emotional level - I was completely hooked - yet it also revealed to me in numerous small and concrete ways what it's like to live in a contemporary theocracy.

Bale admirably shoulders the burden of Western identification figure, but the heart of the story is the ongoing tension between the schoolgirls and the hookers, who see in each other aspects of womanhood that are out of their respective reach.

The movie he (Wenders) went on to make with her Tanztheater Wuppertal is more than an elegy; his meticulous use of 3D endows the performances with a corporeality and intimacy hitherto unseen in a dance film.

There's a good deal of pleasure to be had in the clockwork precision of her hand-to-hand combat, which Soderbergh often shoots in profile to showcase her wall-climbing backflips. The story surrounding it is comparably smooth, skilled, and mechanical, though a lot less memorable.

The dialogue is superior, though, and director Roman Polanski has cast the characters well; Foster is particularly impressive in a stridently unattractive role, as the pinched, angry liberal who's orchestrated the meeting but doesn't get quite the apology she wants.

This conceit works precisely because Thatcher's popular appeal was so deeply rooted in nostalgia for the days of empire, and Streep, no fan of Thatcher, nicely undercuts the poignancy of her current condition with flashbacks that reveal her brittle arrogance in office.

In this heady documentary, TV footage of left-wing social critic Paul Goodman being interviewed by conservative host William F. Buckley Jr. in 1966 makes one realize how low public discourse in America has sunk since then: despite the men's political differences, their freewheeling discussion, touching on topics from education to pornography, is playful instead of rancorous.

Kitano is clearly enjoying his powers as a master of the form, and the movie invites the viewer to share in his enjoyment.

The movie is quite enjoyable, though, redeemed by Crowe's trademark sincerity and assured handling of oddball character actors.

This effort often manages to duplicate the magical pantomime of the era; a lovely scene in which Bejo drapes herself in the arms of a hung jacket as if it were a human lover could have come straight out of a Marion Davies picture.

As usual with the series, the movie combines a plot line a toddler could understand with gadgets that would baffle an engineering Ph.D.

Documentary maker Edmon Roch spins a zippy yarn of Pujol's improbable exploits from archival footage, talking heads, and clips from classic espionage dramas.

Rife with earthy details and poetic associations, the movie often advances like a daydream.

This is jammed with cliches but completely engrossing, in the manner of a movie ardently in love with its own bullshit.

Actor John Turturro follows his charming and colorful travel documentary "Rehearsal for a Sicilian Tragedy" (2009) with this assured and freewheeling look at the music of Naples (2010).

Unfortunately, this comeback movie, a labor of love for mush-headed screenwriter and star Jason Segel, errs on the side of sweetness and nostalgia; except for a few good zingers from balcony dwellers Statler and Waldorf, there isn't much here for mom and dad.

Scorsese transforms this innocent tale into an ardent love letter to the cinema and a moving plea for film preservation.

Apocalyptic visions are nothing new in cinema, but they're almost always epic in scale; Von Trier's innovation is to peer down the large end of the telescope, observing the end of the world in painfully intimate terms.

Herzog's wrenching interviews with the victims' relatives, may not turn anyone against capital punishment, but they're gripping nonetheless. Incidentally, the spiritual inquiry Herzog aims for here has already been rendered onscreen, in Steve James and Peter Gilbert's powerful documentary "At the Death House Door" (2008).

The one mystery Black and Eastwood can't solve is Hoover's love life - perhaps because the solution is too simple to be believed.

This indie drama starts off as a sexy little date movie, but once the lovers have been separated it grows steadily more complicated and mature.

The film is especially comforting if you love old movies, as Kaurismaki does: his deadpan humor and deliberately flattened images evoke silent comedy, as usual, and his rosy depiction of proletarian camaraderie recalls the 30s and 40s work of Marcel Carné (particularly Le Jour se Leve).

This time the quest plot involves Asian-American pals Harold and Kumar chasing after a Christmas tree to replace one they've accidentally burned down, but that's only an excuse for the relentless barrage of tasteless gags, most of them damned funny.

Clever and unsettling.

Still, this is irresistible as self-knowing camp: the players ham it up in high fashion and the script crams at least one lurid revelation into every scene.

Durkin reveals how the sisters have been pulled in opposite directions by the death of their parents. But the story structure also nurtures a creeping, finally unbearable dread that may have you looking over your shoulder all the way home.

It's an edifying art history lesson, but it lacks the showmanship of, for example, Peter Greenaway's "Nightwatching."

Chanodr has said that he wanted to portray the 2008 financial meltdown in all its complexity, assigning everyone a fair share of the blame. But the real strength of his debut feature is how persuasively it depicts the fishbowl world of high finance, whose executives seem incapable of seeing past their towering salaries and privileged lives.

A precious scrap of American history.

Though the parallels drawn between therapy and prostitution grow tiresome, the duo's interaction is peppered with inspired comedic moments.

Here's something you don't see every day: a genial, politically correct splatter comedy.

Writer-director Jeff Nichols maintains a cagey balancing act for much of the movie, refusing to specify whether his protagonist is a prophet or a madman, yet in the end this doesn't really matter: the storm inside him is plenty real.

This lacks the heft of "The Insider" (1999) or the snap of "Erin Brockovich" (2000), but it's a thoughtful entry in the growing subgenre of whistle-blower dramas.

Clooney directed with an actor's appetite for vivid star turns, and he certainly gets them from Ryan Gosling, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Paul Giamatti.

Even in its truncated state, this is pretty gripping stuff; just think of it as an epic commercial for the director's cut DVD.

Sentimental, obvious, but well-nigh irresistible, this jubilant comedy equates England's bland cuisine with its sexual inhibition and suggests we could all use something a little more tasty (at dinnertime, that is).

What begins as a one-night stand deepens, over the next two days, into a genuine romance as the young lovers embark on an epic dialogue that touches on the most profound questions of love, commitment, honesty, and identity.

Like many other comedies about serious matters, 50/50 grows more dramatic in its second half. What really impressed me, though, was how easily Reiser could pivot back to comedy at a moment's notice without seeming cheap.