A masterpiece of some kind, though clearly destined to be controversial and contested everywhere it shows—not only for the sexist, racist, and homophobic rage it exposes but also for its brilliant confrontational style.

Handsome and agreeable 2009 documentary.

Near the end Press poses a couple of personal questions that pierce the old man's defenses in the most painful and revealing way, suggesting a much more complicated emotional wellspring for the work that consumes his life.

Raunchy and profane.

Here the idea of sleep as the ultimate threat is still fresh and marvelously insidious, and Craven vitalizes the nightmare sequences with assorted surrealist novelties.

The video is narrated by Taylor, who magnanimously presents Newcombe as a Byronic hero, but ultimately proves that the pursuit of success and the pursuit of cool can be equally pointless.

This melancholy romance is the first Almodovar feature I’ve ever really liked, an expertly fashioned melodrama that steers mercifully clear of his usual puckishness and star-mongering.

You feel it in your nervous system before you get a chance to reflect on its meaning.

The acting is mainly horrendous, the English dialogue frequently awkward, but they're overcome by the beautiful colors and settings and a grim sense of the uncanny spilling over into twisted humor.

This is a uniquely plausible portrait of life in England, yet its appeal isn't limited to social realism—it also has a twist of buoyant fantasy and romance.

The performances are strong (my favorite is Deborah Harry as an older waitress) and the sense of eroded as well as barely articulated lives is palpable.

Zuniga's support is winningly low-key.

Funny, smart, and complacent.

Modeling the movie after the show itself grows problematic near the end, when Stern and Del Deo, anticipating that climactic, gold-suited kick line, try to whip us into a frenzy on opening night.

Rapaport keeps things lively with a hip-hop-tinged aesthetic, shuffling rhythmically between old and new footage. However engaging, though, the visuals have little to say about Tribe's legacy when compared with the original score, contributed by the great producer Madlib.

A few too many moralistic foreshadowings, but most of the time Cox's situations and characters develop on their own eloquently entropic terms.

A superior nail-biter.

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.

I don't much like movies about junkies...but this is easily the liveliest and most inventive I've seen since "Drugstore Cowboy" (1989).

Very slickly and glibly put together, with a sharp eye for yuppie decor and accoutrements; even Woody's habitual, fanciful vision of an all-white New York is respected.

The result is a blend of kitchen-sink and magical realism: sentimental, but well acted and freshly observed.

An unholy mess that becomes steadily more incoherent -- morally, dramatically, and conceptually.

A respectable entry in the Bicycle Thief school of art-house cinema, which uses a child's coming of age to explore an era of political and social turmoil.

Singleton shows some genuine talent in handling character and action, and equal amounts of confusion and attitude when it comes to matters of gender and ghetto politics.

Rudolph’s off-center characterizations and looping dramatic rhythms keep the tone complex and varied, and the film has a lovely choreographed quality that’s only slightly marred by some indifferent cinematography.

Period westerns are so unfashionable and costly that they usually require a top-drawer script to get off the ground -- and this one, adapted from an Elmore Leonard story and its 1957 movie version, travels with an arrow's clean arc.

The new version of Jane Eyre is far and away the best I've seen, thanks largely to the skilled young actress Mia Wasikowska.

Equally impressive is Duncan's stylish handling of decor, dialogue, narrative ellipsis, and pacing, all of which call to mind the Hollywood master Ernst Lubitsch.

Possibly the touchy-feeliest cowboy movie ever made.

Pegg and Wright are out of their depth in the second half, when they try to engage the more disturbing elements of Romero's movies, but their disaffected slacker take on the genre is a welcome alternative to the usual bloodbaths.

This is intelligent, committed, and politically provocative, though its narrative puzzle box may prompt you to throw up your hands and let Exxon go on running the world.

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

Without his comic underpinnings (there's only a crude pie-eating fantasy as comic security) Reiner seems lost in his own cinematic wilderness—button-down careful, almost afraid to move. His only storytelling strategy involves crosscutting from one talking head to another, and he leaves too many literary ends dangling from the Stephen King novella on which this 1989 film is based.

Hassan Yektapanah's first film attests to the deceptive simplicity of Iranian cinema, transforming the most minimal of props, scenes, and stories into a complex journey of discovery.

Warren Beatty's shapely 1981 epic, based on the life of radical journalist John Reed, is a stunningly successful application of a novelistic aesthetic—a film that makes full and thoughtful use of its three-and-a-half-hour length to develop characters, ideas, and motifs with a depth seldom seen in movies.

An explosive but scrupulously journalistic drama about the radical group that terrorized Germany for nearly 30 years.

This grim drama packs a punch.

Elegant, unabashedly theatrical, and packed with lush concert scenes and period-perfect costumes.

Propulsive and highly satisfying documentary.

Postwar Disney (1953) and not quite up to snuff. Disney's depersonalizing habit of putting different teams in charge of different sections of the story really shows up here, with work ranging from the flat and cloying (the animation of Peter himself) to the full-bodied and funny (Captain Hook and his alligator).

Cecil B. De Mille in anachronistic decline, though a few critics insist it’s his most personal film.

The movie is never less than entertaining, but it fails to satisfy—it gives us too little of too much. Oddly, much of its pleasure is in the acting, which up to this point hadn't been Carpenter's strong suit: Donald Pleasence, Adrienne Barbeau, and Harry Dean Stanton offer excellent turns.

Francis Coppola's stylish and heartfelt tribute to the innovative automobile designer Preston Thomas Tucker turns out to be one of his most personal and successful movies.

The movie remystifies as much as demystifies presidential politics, but an overall mood of sweetness may help one to forgive the archaic and childish aspects of the would-be analysis, which splits everyone between angels and devils.

The bitterly beautiful black-and-white industrial and residential landscapes reflect the sense of anonymity felt by the characters.

This shocking, violent, and unsentimental (albeit sensationalized) drama about a second-generation drug dealer (Turner) and the callous world he lives in, produced by "To Sleep With Anger's" Darin Scott, is terrifically acted.

The scenes of family squalor are memorably persuasive, but any filmmaker ending her movie with the heroine throwing a crumpled poem into the ocean needs a few more writing courses.

Fascinating and instructive throughout.

Sacrifices compelling drama for gratuitous whimsy and big-budget spectacle.

Months after seeing this, I still feel I know most of these people as if they were old friends.

Possibly the most daring and honest drama about sexuality I've ever seen.

Naturally, age and infirmity are a major subtext of Shine a Light (and, really, any movie featuring Keith Richards). No matter how cadaverous the Stones appear, they keep climbing onstage, and I’ll miss them when they’re finally gone.

Free of grandstanding and sentimentality, this powerful 2008 documentary follows missions to Liberia and the Congo undertaken by volunteers for Medecins Sans Frontieres.

Siegel avoids the cliches of the butterflies-and-brotherhood school (cf All Quiet on the Western Front), opting instead for a study of the brutalizing power of sanctioned violence.

One of the bleakest films of a bleak decade.

It’s exactly what you’d expect: tepid, artsy, and grayish, though it has surprising bursts of sincere sentiment.

There's nothing really new...but it has craft, pacing, and an overall sense of proportion, three pretty rare classic virtues nowadays.

At the center of the film is a keenly understated performance by Michael Shannon (Bug, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead) as the eldest of the cast-off sons.

As a truthful account of the life of Tina Turner or as a faithful adaptation of her as-told-to autobiography, I, Tina, this 1993 film can't be taken too seriously. But as a powerhouse showcase for the acting talents of Angela Bassett (who plays Turner) and Laurence Fishburne (who plays her abusive husband, Ike) and as a potent portrayal of wife beating and the emotions that surround it (in this case, Ike's professional envy and Tina's stoic acceptance of abuse), it's quite a show.

One of the few white vocalists to play the Apollo, O'Day does fabulous things with her hands as well as her voice when she sings. Her talent and will to survive (in the late 60s she kicked a 16-year heroin addiction) are reasons enough to see this film.

Akin perfectly captures the antic pace, eccentric personalities, and fickle fortunes of the restaurant game, and his vision of the Soul Kitchen as an all-night bacchanal is irresistible.

The most elegant title for a sequel in film history belongs, happily, to one of the most elegant sequels.

Director Laura Dunn presents a surprisingly sympathetic portrait of Bradley, but her advocacy is clear enough in the primal images of natural beauty and her subjects' heartfelt statements of respect for the landscape.

Danish director Susanne Bier elicits wonderfully intimate performances from her actors, and this 2004 drama has so many genuine, low-key encounters it manages to overcome a contrived and familiar plot.

If you come to this expecting the philosophical depth and psychological detail of Tolstoy’s work you’re sure to be disappointed, but as an actors’ romp it’s delectable.

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.

The visual monotony of talking heads and stock footage is interrupted occasionally by the spectral charcoal drawings of veteran Si Lewen, though his art is used to full advantage only when he describes the liberation of Buchenwald.

On the whole, enjoyable nonsense.

The artificial plotting is all Christie’s, but the film eventually becomes Wilder’s—thanks to a trick ending that dovetails nicely with a characteristic revelation of compassion behind cruelty. His theatrical mise-en-scene—his proscenium framing—serves the material well, as does Charles Laughton’s bombastic portrayal of the defense attorney.

Visually witty, flawlessly played romantic comedy.

The film is uncharacteristically rigid and pious for Hitchcock; it feels more like a work of duty than conviction.

These characters are touching and sympathetic to the extent that they're lonely, and that's what most of them are most of the time.

The film is equally good in handling the discrepancy between skilled and unskilled parents.

Morton DaCosta’s straight translation (1962) of the Broadway blockbuster is pretty dismal in its desperate exuberance; but at least it boasts the slick charm of Robert Preston, who nearly saves it with his graying-at-the-temples boyishness.

Famous in its day for reuniting real-life former lovers Alain Delon and Romy Schneider on-screen, this forgotten 1968 psychological thriller by Jacques Deray deserves to be rediscovered for its darkly sensual story.

Its particularities are the best thing about it.

Not quite up to "Airplane!" or "Top Secret!," but there are still laughs aplenty.

A decent piece of do-good cinema...Director Norman Jewison stages their confrontations for effectively flashy, immediate effects, though he unnecessarily neglects the action-movie underpinning.

Even though I appreciate this movie's craft, I wish I hadn't seen it. It's a heady, progressive -- or perhaps elaborately conservative? -- romance, but it's also a tale of terrible suffering.

There's no denying the music's magic.

This 1973 feature is one of the finest examples of action montage from its period, a dynamite piece of work.

Peter Weir, the standard-bearer of the Australian Tradition of Quality, is on hand to smother all the contrivances in his solemn, academic style, and the result is a moderately effective, highly affected thriller.

Over too soon.

This 1962 thriller is better than the Scorsese remake—above all for Robert Mitchum's chilling performance as a vengeful ex-con and an overall brute force in the crude story line—though it's arguably still some distance from deserving its reputation as a classic.

Hopelessly inadequate as a reading of Dreiser's great novel, and as usual Stevens seems too preoccupied with the story's monumentality to have much curiosity about its characters.

It is a moving and entertaining work, executed with high finesse by a master cineast.

The film is an impressive technical achievement: the full-figure animation is dimensional and elegant, the perspectives imaginative, and the color design superb. But without the (old) Disney genius for emotional structure and character design, the results are rather flat—the film concentrates on Disney horror and trauma without the relief of Disney charm.

Individually these elements are powerful, but they fail to mesh or collide with one another in any satisfying way, and the movie's score only exacerbates the problem.

Though the film occasionally conveys some of the sweetness of early Cassavetes it has none of the mystery: these characters are enjoyable types but not a lot more. Certainly the cast has fun.

Never really delivers on that promise, mainly because its scenes of two brilliant men discussing the nature of the subconscious can't compare with Cronenberg's visual rendering of that subconscious in earlier movies.

John Cameron Mitchell directed, making an impressive detour in style and subject matter after his flamboyant "Shortbus" (2006) and "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" (2001).

Fortunately, this time around the Ivy League characters project less of a glib sense of entitlement, making them more fun to watch, and Stillman himself gives more evidence of watching rather than simply listening.

With one of these two alpha males anchoring nearly every scene, Scott really can't go wrong, but the lead characters are pretty thin, a fact highlighted by generic subplots.

Far and away the funniest comedy in town.

This began as a one-man show, but Lepage has transferred it beautifully to the screen, where its cosmos of ideas hangs weightless.

Bernardo Bertolucci's visually ravishing spectacle about the life of Pu Yi is a genuine rarity: a blockbuster that manages to be historically instructive and intensely personal at the same time.

A stiff in spite of an interesting cast.

Ayoade owes a debt to Wes Anderson (Rushmore), but the parents here are so beautifully written, and Hawkins and Taylor particularize them so well, that the movie manages to hold its own.