An entertaining and atmospheric revenge tale.

Clint Eastwood's ambitious 1988 feature about the great Charlie Parker (Forest Whitaker) is the most serious, conscientious, and accomplished jazz biopic ever made, and almost certainly Eastwood's best picture as well.

This is a fascinating and easy-to-take set of musings on a fascinating artist.

Clint Eastwood wisely chose a strong, simple thriller for his first film as a director (1971), and the project is remarkable in its self-effacing dedication to getting the craft right—to laying out the story, building the rhythm, putting the camera in the right place, and establishing small characters with a degree of conviction.

This sequel to the apocalyptic splatter flick "28 Days Later" . . . (2002) is still well equipped to rip your face off.

Pacino is typically excitable but also strangely sad, as if the case could take all he's got; Williams, on the other hand, tries playing against type but still goes over the top.

The cast as a whole is astonishing--especially Gillian Anderson as Lily and Dan Aykroyd in his finest role to date.

Isabelle Huppert gets a respite from her usual ice queen roles with this shattering psychological drama about the danger of children staying too long in the nest.

Wyler lays out all the elements with care and precision, but the romantic comedy never comes together - it's charm by computer. [Review of re-release]

Sam Riley is fascinating as Curtis, a hypersensitive young man hobbled by his incurable disease, and Samantha Morton is poignant as his put-upon wife.

Part of Morton's achievement is to present all four people through the viewpoints of the other three; Wagner can't do that, but the performances are so nuanced that the characters remain multilayered, and they're not the sort of people we're accustomed to finding in commercial films.

The film's storytelling and heartfelt pantheism are both impressive.

Elliptical, full of subtle inner rhymes...and profoundly moving, this is the most tightly crafted Kubrick film since "Dr. Strangelove," as well as the most horrific; the first section alone accomplishes most of what "The Shining" failed to do.

The drama is developed without recourse to flashbacks or cutaways, and it is done cleverly and stylishly, though it lacks Hitchcock's usual depth. At times, the film seems on the verge of rising above its frankly propagandistic intentions, but it never really confronts the Darwinian themes built into the material.

The loose, graceful script is by Preston Sturges (one of his last before he turned to directing), and it partakes of a softness and nostalgia that seldom surfaced in his own films. Mitchell Leisen, the director, serves the material very well with his slightly distanced, glowing style.

The acting in Out of the Blue is galvanic, conveying extreme emotional states with raw power, and Hopper often presents scenes in long takes that preserve the intensity of the performances. Watching the film, you get absorbed in the characters’ self-destructive behavior even though you know it will come to no good.

Director Faith Akin has skill and panache, and the lead actors are likable. But the film's high energy can't compensate for the muddled conception.

One of many clear advantages this funny and scary 1989 fantasy-adventure has over most Disney products is its live-action visual bravado, evident in both the stylization of the witches and the profusion of mouse-point-of-view shots.

The film is funny in a way few of these toothless exercises are. The gags aren't exactly clever, but there are a lot of them, and the cutting finds a fast, effective tempo. Joe Biroc's witty cinematography gives the picture an authentically flat, artificial Universal look, and Lloyd Bridges, Peter Graves, Leslie Nielsen, and Robert Stack are around for added iconographical persuasiveness.

You'd have to be a real curmudgeon not to enjoy a show with Ruth Brown, Mavis Staples, Solomon Burke...

A pretty watchable and always interesting period film, well photographed by English cinematographer Freddie Francis.

Watchable enough on its own terms.

With the devout collaboration of the cast, Williams blurs the boundary between experience and storytelling as if the distinction were not only irrelevant but presumptuous.

Sumptuously hued in its emotional and visual tones, this drama is also a fairy tale, its plot contrivances beautifully justified by its minimalism.

Full of adventure, spectacle, light romance, and the kind of suspense that doesn't require an unpredictable outcome to make your spine tingle.

An entertaining if humdrum 1993 documentary...Seeing the actual deliberations behind image making has a certain built-in interest, but I expected more surprises.

This drama about an obese, illiterate black teen in Harlem practically guarantees some emotional uplift. But when it arrives, eventually, its authority is unimpeachable, so deeply has director Lee Daniels (Monster's Ball) immersed us in the depths of human ugliness.

Bujalski has a knack for the genuine moment.

This 2005 feature is demanding to say the least, but its pulse-slowing rhythms leave a real sense of peace.

A funny, offbeat superhero flick.

Holofcener's work is often classified as comedy of manners, but at her best she trades in something much more resonant--the comedy of mores. Here she dives into the fascinating matter of why some people impulsively give and others compulsively take, and how people are taught to second-guess and quash their own generous impulses.

Fontaine and Jacques Fieschi collaborated on the screenplay, and Jocelyn Pook's chilly string score nicely evokes the menace underlying the film's plush settings.

Old-fashioned, beautifully crafted biopic of painter Jang Seung-up.

Despite the rich associations, the film finally makes little more of its central figure, a hideously deformed young man, than an object of pity.

The children are not exactly reporters -- they bring back no shattering images of sexual servitude -- but their photography, like much children's art, is fresh and sometimes startling.

Sweet and warm as well as manic, this is full of loopy surprises, and the supporting cast (including Penelope Ann Miller, Bruno Kirby, Steve Bushak, Maximilian Schell, and Bert Parks, playing himself in his film debut) is uniformly fine.

One regrets the pounding Muzak of Tangerine Dream, but this is on the whole a striking directorial debut, at once scary and erotic, with lots of sidelong touches in the casting, direction, and script .

On the whole, the adaptation is faithful but some of the qualities of Dinesen's language are lost in translation or through abridgment, and the politics have been needlessly simplified.

This may not have gotten much publicity, but it's a lot more engaging than most movies that have; Forster alone makes it unforgettable.

An impressive mix of entertainment and social comment, spinning a great mystery even as it confronts an ugly world.

At times Hirsch seems afraid to trust the material's inherent drama and becomes unnecessarily manipulative, staging performances in striking landscapes and playing the footage in slow motion.

I wouldn't have minded even the Hollywood schlock lurking behind the studied weirdness if I'd believed in any of the characters on any level.

Strange, unpredictable, and sometimes magical.

Not even the crude ethnic humor--Billy Crystal's Mel Brooks-ish Miracle Max--pricks the dream bubble, and the spirited cast has a field day.

Fleet, gripping documentary.

This 1927 silent feature won the first Academy Award for best picture, establishing a tradition of silliness that hasn’t been broken to this day, but there is some thrilling flying footage and impressively expensive spectacle.

This may have its occasional dull stretches, but in contrast to "Saving Private Ryan" it's the work of a grown-up with something to say about the meaning and consequences of war.

Alan Rudolph redreams the dream of film noir in this dense, beautifully executed, highly stylized romantic fantasy.

David Lean's studied, plodding, overanalytic direction manages to kill most of the meaning in E.M. Forster's haunting novel of cultural collision in colonial India.

The gaudy Freudianism of this 1945 Hitchcock film, backed by a dream sequence designed by Salvador Dalí and an overexcited score by Miklós Rósza, can make it hard to take, but beneath the facile trappings there is an intriguing Hitchcockian study of role reversal, with doctors and patients, men and women, mothers and sons inverting their assigned relationships with compelling, subversive results.

This poses some tricky moral questions, and its troubling ambiguities rank a cut above the dubious uplift of "Schindler's List."

The mesmerizing narrative recounts a media circus of unrivaled malignance.

Jensen's dramatic structure is so visible this sometimes seems like a late Rod Serling teleplay, but Bier has proved highly adept at merging conventional drama with the immediacy of the Dogma 95 movement.

The script, by Nolan and his brother Jonathan, takes a few vague pokes at Wall Street and the financial elite but mainly revives the ponderous psychodrama of the first movie.

What's most memorable about it is the period flavor, including a detailed and precise account of the jim crow complications blacks had to contend with.

More grim and less sentimental than other Iranian films featuring plucky children, this strikingly photographed work stresses the harshness of daily life in Iranian Kurdistan.

Set in the blue gray gloom of industrial China, this cunning noir focuses on two ruthless coal miners.

Gleeson makes the movie worthwhile and fun, in spite of its occasional overuse of Leone-Morricone spaghetti-western riffs.

As the perfect crystallization of 50s ideology the film would be fascinating enough, but the special effects in this 1953 George Pal production also achieve a kind of dark, burnished apocalyptic beauty.

Classic 1943 canine weepie.

One of the loveliest of Nick Ray's movies: this 1952 feature begins as a harsh film noir and gradually shifts to an ethereal romanticism reminiscent of Frank Borzage.

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

There's a lot less here than meets the eye.

Fans of director Lynne Ramsay's first movie, the bleak Ratcatcher won't be surprised that this little existential exercise makes The Stranger look like a funwagon.

Every frame is dense with life, with children and animals running in and out, yet it's not messy. Instead it's highly focused--and something of a small masterpiece.

The disparate themes never quite come together, but with many fine performances—John Turturro and Lonette McKee are especially good—you won't be bored for a minute.

A beguiling combination of agrarian ode and “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” deepened by Peterson's square sincerity as he struggles to find himself in relation to his family's land.

For what it is, it's fine.

In general, the dogs-as-mirrors theme--the crazy things people do with and in relation to their pets--is what keeps this going, and the laughs are sporadic but genuine.

Moving documentary.

Impressive for its lean and unblemished storytelling, but even more so for its performances.

Hadzihalilovic, the wife of cinematic agent provocateur Gaspar Noé and his sometime collaborator, has created a work of limpid beauty and eerie menace that some undoubtedly will dismiss as kiddie porn.

Despite its blatant mediocrity, this 1981 British film knocked 'em dead everywhere, which makes me suspect that audiences weren't responding to the film itself as much as to the attitudes that underlie it.

The deft arabesques of cinematographer Andrzej Bartkowiak juice up the suspense, and if you're not too put off by the sheer ridiculousness of the story you won't be bored.

Sidney Kingsley's Broadway hit, modeled a little too clearly on Greek tragedy, becomes a solid film d'art under William Wyler's supple, impersonal direction.

Subplots are woven stealthily into the story, taking the pressure off the central drama, allowing it to be affecting rather than melodramatic, and heightening the atmosphere of the lush Louisiana setting.

All of the elements of the formula are there, but in pleasing moderation.

Howard Hawks's 1941 version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is a delight.

The last act is rushed and soapy, but this is still a singular observation of American life.

This is almost as close to neorealism as to noir—the details of working-class city life are especially fine.

Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker, the directors of the smash Airplane! and the underrated Top Secret!, here turn their hands to a more traditional character comedy, yet this film's funniest effects still come through their imaginative, frequently astonishing manipulations of the narrative line. It's a rare kind of craftsmanship, and it produces a rare kind of pleasure.

Provocative and entertaining.

Breillat may be serious about creating period ambience, but she also can't resist patterning her heroine after Marlene Dietrich's Concha in "The Devil Is a Woman" (even though Argento sometimes suggests Maria Montez in the pleasure she takes in her own company).

Guy Maddin has reached a new expressive plateau with The Saddest Music in the World.

Arguably Stanley Donen's masterpiece, and undoubtedly one of the most stylistically influential films of the 60s.

The plotting of this 1978 biopic is contrived, and director Steve Rash's feeling for Buddy Holly's time and place is virtually nil, but Gary Busey's performance is astonishing—less as an interpretation than as a total physical transformation.

A quantum leap in ambition from "Hard Eight" and "Boogie Nights" and is, to my mind, much more interesting.

Miraculously, De Niro and Grodin turn this sow's ear into a plausible vehicle for a buddy movie, and thanks to both of them, this movie springs to life.

Steidle had virtually unrestricted access to settlements that were under siege from the Janjaweed, Arabic mercenaries of the Sudanese government, and became the first person to photograph the annihilation.

One could have plenty of quarrels with this as an adaptation of the Herman Melville novel, but it’s still one of the better John Huston films of the 50s.

The movie might have amounted to no more than a sunny eco-parable, but it begins to bite harder when the catadores, captivated by their sudden importance, face the unhappy prospect of returning to their previous existence.

George Cukor carefully avoids the obvious effects in telling this story of a husband (Charles Boyer) attempting to drive his wife (Ingrid Bergman) insane; instead, this 1944 film is one of the few psychological thrillers that is genuinely psychological, depending on subtle clues—a gesture, an intonation—to thought and character.

Using archly staged interviews and reconstructions that draw attention to the components of the documentary form, Morris does justice to the complexity of hot-button issues by suggesting several layers of subtext at once, portraying the articulate Leuchter as both rational and prone to rationalize.

Tavernier gives the children vivid, sharply delineated voices; working with a largely nonprofessional cast, he strips bare the characters' frailty but grants them a decency and honesty that redeems them despite the mounting hardships and tragedies.

I was hooked from the start.

Julie-Marie Parmentier is fetching as the vulnerable younger sister, and the duo generate considerable erotic tension; unfortunately Denis' detached and indifferent camera never gets inside the story, its characters, or its milieu.

While never boring and sometimes quite gripping, Bielinsky’s manneristic style becomes distracting; he seems more concerned with generating an ominous atmosphere than with telling a compelling story.

Not always successful, but packed with energy and a lively Oscar-winning performance by Burstyn.