With tender skill, Moretti illuminates Samuel Beckett's phrase "I can't go on -- I'll go on."

Thornton seems born to play the sort of slow-witted poet of the mundane that the Coens find worthy of their condescending affection.

It's good to see a gay relationship treated no differently than a heterosexual one would be.

The action sequences are expert studies in controlled chaos.

Directed by John Hillcoat, this Aussie feature perfectly re-creates the charbroiled landscapes and cruel psychodrama of the old Sergio Leone westerns, with John Hurt particularly fine as a raging old mountain goat.

But these achievements and others—including an undeniable erotic charge to some of the scenes—add up to less than the sum of their parts without a strong enough overall vision to shape them. When Kaufman reaches beyond the novel to flesh things out—with the old-fashioned musical taste of Russian officials, the sexual exploits of the hero, or the expanded part of a pet pig—he usually flattens rather than enhances what's left of the material

You feel for the first time that Scorsese is trying to distance himself from his characters—that he finds them grotesque. The uncenteredness of the film is irritating, though it's irritating in an ambitious, risk-taking way. You'd better see for yourself.

Deep down inside, a very good film.

Compulsively mainstream as only 50s Hollywood could be, and never very funny.

This beautifully understated feature (2004) revolves around sex, but it's neither erotic nor puritanical; its young characters are governed by their urges, but the experience itself seems as neutral and mysterious as sleep.

A welcome return to the Disney tradition of 2-D animation, this lively musical spices up Hans Christian Andersen's "The Frog Prince" by transplanting it to New Orleans in the early 20th century.

A lesbian love triangle becomes a schema of sexual power plays in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s most harshly stylized and perhaps most significant film.

The intimate performance footage ranges from more traditional sounds to Turkish iterations of global styles like rock, hip-hop, and electronica, delivering commentary on the nation's conflicted status as a bridge between Europe and Asia that's even more poignant than the passionate and informative interviews.

Juicy, adroit, and likable.

The long odds against Smith only make his unexpected surge against Carnahan more exciting, and Popper sticks close to the fierce campaigner and his young, mostly inexperienced staffers, capturing all the energy, idealism, dour humor, and unreasoning hope of a Cinderella candidacy.

This meticulous restoration dazzles with crisp, formally rigorous black-and-white images and a complex sound mix, as its minimalist story of three families of manual laborers unfolds against a harsh, barren peninsula.

The film is only superficially superficial, and it grows in meaning and resonance as it progresses.

If you want to waste a couple of hours, you can surely do much better looking elsewhere.

Much of this fractured drama and dark fantasy takes place inside the mind of Charlie (Futterman),

Jonathan Demme's picaresque joyride across the American landscape is still arguably the best thing he's ever done.

The pace is blistering, and Wilder's deep-seated hatred of Germans has never been put to more comic use.

There's something almost wearying as well as exhilarating about the perpetual brilliance of Bosnian-born filmmaker Emir Kusturica.

The mise-en-scene tends toward a painterly abstraction, as Hitchcock employs powerful masses, blank colors, and studiously unreal, spatially distorted settings. Theme and technique meet on the highest level of film art.

Between the kinetic and often exciting chase scenes, screenwriter David Koepp plays with every teen's yearning for a secret identity, and Tobey Maguire is charming as the insecure superhero.

The film has little to do with art, intelligence, or values (except for the kind found in department stores).

Kitano has his problems; for instance, he hasn't quite figured out how to create fully dimensional, interesting women. But at a time when action movies typically hand us a canned experience, his pictures carry a charge of originality.

Despite the exotic locale and the photogenic moppets, that's not enough for a satisfying movie.

One of the funniest awful movies ever made.

Director Erik Van Looy skillfully profiles both the assassin (Jan Decleir, suggesting a tougher, over-the-hill version of Michel Piccoli) and the Antwerp detectives investigating his crimes.

Simultaneously quite watchable and passionless.

Ludicrous and inept, this low-budget 1985 splatter film directed by former Chicagoan Stuart Gordon tries to compensate for its complete failure to establish even a sliver of credibility by inflating the usual quotient of giggly camp humor and squishy gore effects...It's this kind of flat-footed stuff that gives garbage a bad name.

John Frankenheimer directed, too much in love with technique, though he ably taps the neuroticism of Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, and Fredric March.

Scenes that should have been uproarious are weaker than many of the movie's smaller moments.

There's not much humor to keep it all life-size, and by the final stretch it's become bloated, mechanical, and tiresome.

A rare example of a successful documentary in the mode of Frederick Wiseman made outside the United States.

Beautifully shot in black and white by Pawel Edelman (The Pianist), this 2000 feature is both funny and unexpectedly touching.

This extraordinary Italian thriller is a study in contrasts: light versus dark, youth versus maturity, the playful versus the lethal.

Insofar as one can distinguish the investigative research from the career move, this Sundance prizewinner is effective muckraking, but it lacks much of a political program apart from the message that we're poisoning ourselves.

The film tackles more than it can master, but it's never less than fascinating, and all three leads are exceptional.

An entertaining product that presents a powerful artistic vision.

As storytelling it isn'’t always as clean as it might be, but this 1998 first feature by writer-director Lisa Cholodenko is an interesting debut for its nuanced sense of character and its terrific sex scenes--scenes that actually serve character development for a change.

Director Sidney Hayes can be needlessly rhetorical at times, relying on a campus statue of an eagle to create a sense of menace (the UK title was Night of the Eagle), but this is still eerily effective.

Kon Ichikawa’s 1956 antiwar film was widely hailed at the time of its release for its power and commitment, though by today’s standards it’s likely to appear uncomfortably didactic.

Juliette Lewis plays the out-of-town girl Depp takes a shine to once he starts getting tired of the married woman (Mary Steenburgen) he's involved with, and while the picture is too absentminded to explain what it is that makes Lewis move in and out of town, she and Depp make a swell couple. There are other rough edges as far as plot is concerned, but I liked this.

Kidman and Zellweger are uncommonly good, and I especially liked the timely treatment of war as universally brutalizing: even the outcomes of battles are ignored, as are the motives behind the conflict.

This is probably Alan Parker's best film, in part because it's one of his most modest.

The languid yet precise cinematography throughout gives it the seductive power of a drug-induced dream.

Quietly written and convincingly played, this coming-of-age story mines its rueful laughs from a thick vein of performance anxiety, in both senses of the term.

Griffith's talent, energy, and sexiness give it some drive and punch.

Miller's work has been compared to Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns, but where the Leone films are about amorality, the Mad Max movies are purely and simply amoral—some of the most determinedly formalist filmmaking this side of Michael Snow.

Donzelli, a busy actress in France, directed this drama from a script she wrote with Elkaim, which may explain why the parents become the center of the movie while the ostensibly suffering boy never takes shape as a character.

All the macho men who let down their guard for Blaustein can be proud of the loving deconstruction of violence-as-entertainment that resulted.

The wavering style and tone fragment the movie, undermining both characters' development, though each retains her power as a symbol.

Has its faults, but it's Barbet Schroeder's most relevant and interesting film in over a decade.

Its resolution reeks of phoniness and self-congratulation, even if some of the narrative strands leading up to it are fairly absorbing.

The special effects are beautifully handled and the reflections on death attractively peaceful.

Realist fairy tale.

Riveting cinematic essay.

This film doesn't really clear the bar, but it's handsomely mounted and proves that heartless manipulation of the weak and gullible never goes out of style.

Johnny To is considered one of the best action filmmakers in Hong Kong, and in this smart, stylized gangland thriller (2005) he looks at the messy inner workings of a triad.

Eastwood is still a primal force on-screen, but his unusual practice of shooting scripts as written, which served him well on "Unforgiven" and "Million Dollar Baby," here leaves him exposed to Nick Schenk's familiar situations and awkward dialogue.

The Wilder ironies and favorite themes—sexual deception, innuendo, the power of words to slice up and serve a character—are all present in abundance.

At 116 minutes, it's a test not of speed but endurance.

Standard-issue liberal feel-good fodder.

Writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick wring a surprising amount of juice from the familiar premise, and director Ruben Fleischer heaps on the gore without burying their character-based comedy and surprisingly heartfelt moments. This is worth seeing just for the title sequence.

As long as Miller simply crosscuts between the machinations of the three mothers, the sociological and psychological parallels are intriguing, but when they're forced to share the same story line, the contrivances and coincidences begin to seem fussily elaborate.

In short, I never quite believed the story, but this movie is more about feeling than thinking.

I suspect an account of all the complex business transactions would be more fun than anything in the movie, where you can't see a blue sky that isn't made up to resemble the Dreamworks logo.

Sleekly tooled but eminently forgettable thriller.

Once again, the overall premise is milked for some mild titillation involving the hero's sexual innocence, making one wonder if the genre's popularity might involve some deeply sublimated form of kiddie porn--arguably the distilled ideological essence of squeaky-clean Reaganism.

Todd Phillips is no artist, but his lowbrow comedies (Road Trip, Old School) always hit the mark because they're so psychologically true: the superego tries to control the id, but the id gets drunk and barfs all over it. Hilarious.

Walsh may not have been directly responsible for the structure (the second half is a remake of an earlier Warners melodrama, Bordertown), but his personal response to the material puts it across.

Claude Chabrol's capacity to make shopworn material seem almost new is especially evident in this 2007 drama, which he cowrote with his stepdaughter, Cecile Maistre.

Robert Aldrich dissects the underlying ideas with just enough craft and thoughtfulness to make the implications of this gritty 1966 war drama unsettling in not entirely constructive ways.

Not without its cruelties, but not without its beauties as well.

Hitchcock liked to pretend that the film was an empty technical exercise, but it introduces the principal themes and motifs of the major period that would begin with Rear Window.

It's not easy keeping track of all the contradictory tensions, and the film seems forever on the verge of spinning totally out of control, though whose control—Hunter's? Elmes's? anyone's?—it's hard to say. Still, it's more a success than a failure, if only because the confusions are so protean.

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

Bosnian-born director Emir Kusturica delivers a superb performance as the prisoner, a brutish cipher who gradually reveals his humanity, and the delicate lighting often produces silhouetted faces that evoke the ultimate incomprehensibility of human emotion.

Neve Campbell, who cowrote the story with scenarist Barbara Turner, plays one of the dancers; although her character isn't especially interesting, her story furnishes a minimal narrative thread to hold the rest together.

Differs from other authorized Hollywood musical biopics in one striking detail: its subject, still alive when most of this was made, is almost never shown as a likable person.

A colorful cast whose combined energy lifts the story off the ground.

This is classic Capracorn, with the greatest girl cynic of the 30s, Jean Arthur.

It's a lot more interesting than its source, thanks to the special effects and Jack Arnold's taut, no-nonsense direction.

This wryly mordant film achieved many firsts for the illustrious father of African cinema.

Feels a little soft and boomer-indulgent with its 10,000th rehash of the Nixon years and its soundtrack of trite 60s anthems.

Cheerful mess of a pulp-fiction parody.

This deserves to be seen and cherished for at least a couple of reasons: first for Joanne Woodward's exquisitely multilayered and nuanced performance as India Bridge, a frustrated, well-to-do WASP Kansas City housewife and mother during the 30s and 40s; and second for screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's retention of much of the episodic, short-chapter form of the books.

Streisand sings a fabulous version of “You’re the Top” behind the credits, and the busy script by Buck Henry, Robert Benton, and David Newman keeps things moving, but the spirit of pastiche keeps this romp from truly rivaling its sources.

Strikes an impressive balance between the gathering tension of its noirish plot and the philosophical implications of the characters' compromises. That balance slips in a morose and dreadfully lethargic third act, but before Ceylan goes all Kiarostami on us this is a substantial European entry in a genre that American filmmakers can't seem to master anymore.

Enjoyable but thin.

Malick still has an eye for landscapes, but since "Badlands" (1973) his storytelling skill has atrophied, and he's now given to transcendental reveries, discontinuous editing, offscreen monologues, and a pie-eyed sense of awe. All these things can be defended, even celebrated, but I couldn't find my bearings.

The video lapses into self-congratulation near the end, as many of the principals reunite for a 2002 retrospective, but for the most part this is a powerful tale of conscience, betrayal, and forgiveness.

Carell and Apatow collaborated on the script; it does manage a few laughs, but the characters seldom progress beyond the two-dimensional.

The movie evokes Howard Hawks (in spirit if not to the letter) with its tight focus on a snug, obsessive world of insiders and camp followers where the exchanges between buddies and sexes have a euphoric stylishness and a giddy sense of ritual.

The definitive road movie (1958), the well from which all the genre’s subsequent blessings flow.

Unfortunately, instead of the usual larger-than-life male figures--Marcello Mastroianni, Harvey Keitel, Bruno Ganz--of Angelopoulos's recent films, we get a distractingly vapid couple who tend to drain the emotional resonance of these extraordinary, ever-shifting tableaux.

The storytelling is so masterful that Hattendorf doesn't have to spell out the striking parallels between the persecution of Japanese after Pearl Harbor and the harassment of Muslims after 9/11.