The key scene -- is typical of the film's fanciful narrative approach but also its grating pretentiousness.

A heartfelt, passionate, tragic musical suite made up of these formulas, which the film both celebrates and wryly examines to discover their inner logic: how they actually work, what they do and don't do.

Extraordinary 2008 French drama.

A delicious bit of Americana (1941) by Raoul Walsh, capturing superbly the 1890s ambience of Walsh’s own early years.

A powerful piece of social protest, skillfully written, directed, and acted...Hilary Swank as Brandon and Chloe Sevigny as his girlfriend Lana are especially fine.

The action sequences are as suspenseful as any in the director's career; the most impressive scenes, though, may be the slower ones, which consider how humanity might evolve after driving itself to near extinction.

The animation seeks to dazzle, but with a self-consciousness that's relatively new to the Disney studio. The results are fun and fast moving, but far from sublime.

Mesmerizing.

Masterfully charted and acted.

This erotically charged drama may not be quite as great as the original, but it's an amazing and beautiful work just the same.

I'm not prone to like socially deterministic films of this kind, yet Loach is so masterful at squeezing nuance and truth out of the form that I was completely won over.

The surface activity keeps one occupied, but never adds up to much because none of the characters is developed beyond the cartoon level; and the snobby sense of knowingness that's over everything is uncomfortably close to what the movie is supposed to be dissecting.

To my knowledge there's no one anywhere making films with such a sharp sense of contemporary working-class life -- but for the Dardennes it's only the starting point of a spiritual and profoundly ethical odyssey.

Compared to "My Neighbor Totoro" and "Kiki's Delivery Service," this is one of the anime master's weaker efforts.

A tough-talking, sparely directed effort by Hal Ashby, with an immaculate performance by Jack Nicholson as the arrogant and salty (but feeling) sailor who tries to stay in charge of the odyssey, and almost doesn't.

When the interrupters do succeed, the results can be riveting.

Z doesn't communicate anything—except for the doubtful propositions that pacifists are more threatening to right-wingers than communists and that fascist terrorism and homosexuality go hand in hand.

Under Minnelli’s direction it becomes a fascinating study of a man destroyed by the 50s success ethic, left broke, alone, and slightly insane in the end.

An accomplished, effective, grisly, and exceptionally sick slasher film that I can't with any conscience recommend, because the purposes to which it places its considerable ingenuity are ultimately rather foul.

"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.

Disappointment, inhuman work schedules, sluggish exports, and the crush of a two-day rail journey ratchet up the familial tensions, which finally explode over a holiday dinner.

Ingmar Bergman's best film, I suppose, though it's still fairly tedious and overloaded with avant-garde cliches.

There's not much story here, but the characters are substantial: a single mother (nicely played by Juliette Binoche) who runs a local avant-garde puppet theater and is preoccupied with such matters as a downstairs tenant who refuses to pay rent or leave, her neglected but mainly cheerful son, and his Taiwanese nanny, a filmmaker in her spare time.

Beautiful, absorbing, and touching, this film is a mind-expanding experience not to be missed.

Unlike the classic noirs, this is grounded in neither a recognizable social reality nor a metaphysical sense of doom--just a lot of sexy attitude, humping, and heavy breathing.

Freely adapted from Conrad's The Secret Agent, this 1936 study of murderous intimacy is ripe for reevaluation as the masterpiece of Alfred Hitchcock's British period.

An impressive piece of filmmaking, with lively and suggestive depictions of pre- and postrevolutionary Cuba (shot in Mexico).

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

Exciting and innovative feature.

The film embraces proletarian chic but still gets its laughs by abusing waitresses.

James Jones's antiwar novel was blandly realized by the usual bunch of Hollywood do-gooders in 1953...Sominex is cheaper and probably safer.

This adaptation of Robert Ludlum's third and last Bourne thriller doesn't have much story left, so director Paul Greengrass has to keep it moving all the time.

Cinematographer Eduardo Serra underscores the sense of dread with a rich charcoal palette, and the outstanding CGI and 3D effects make the otherworldly threats more corporeal.

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.

Lonergan's validation of big-minded small-town life has been neatened up to the point of blandness.

The results are masterful, admirably unsentimental, and never boring, if also a little stodgy.

As in all Altman films, winning is losing; and the more Altman reveals, in his oblique, seemingly casual yet brilliantly controlled way, the more we realize that to love characters the way Altman loves his, you have to see them turned completely inside out.

Born in Hamburg to Turkish parents, director Fatih Akin brought an unusual cultural perspective to "Head On" about a marriage of convenience between a beautiful Turk and a suicidal German. In The Edge of Heaven, his first dramatic feature since then, the characters navigate the same cultural divide, but here Akin is more preoccupied with the sense of responsibility that links parents to their children (or vice versa).

Disappointment, delusion, dementia, death--did I mention this is a comedy?

A strong example of the cinema verite style at work, yet few films of the school show up the crisis of its "noninvolvement" policy more tellingly.

This British drama is handsomely textured and beautifully acted, though the script often feels giddily out of touch with the essential creepiness of the scenario.

Samuel Maoz drew from his own war experiences to write and direct this searing drama, which ranks alongside "Platoon" and "No Man's Land" as an antiwar statement and recalls the claustrophobic despair of "Das Boot."

Without becoming manipulative, sensational, or trite, the movie lets us know what became of the animals -- many dogs and one stowaway cat -- on the ill-fated ship.

The most delicate and nuanced of film noirs, graced with a reflective lyricism that almost lifts it out of the genre.

Strange and wonderful.

Some have suggested that the whole story, including the emergence of Mr. Brainwash, is an elaborate hoax engineered by Banksy to satirize the commodification of art. If so, it’s a brilliant one.

Arnaud Desplechin's best movie to date.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing here is Thornton's nuanced performance, but the film has other rare virtues: all the characters are fully and richly fleshed out (with some unexpected turns by John Ritter and singer Dwight Yoakam), and the story's construction is carefully measured.

So accessible and entertaining.

The characters are gently and warmly rendered, and a climactic action sequence involving an unmoored dirigible hints at the stately grandiosity of Miyazaki's masterpiece Howl's Moving Castle.

It's a very funny, very moving work, graced by the cinema's cleanest, most classical style.

The masterpiece of the Disney Studios' postwar style. The animation has been stripped down, in accordance with economic imperatives, but what the images lose in shading and detail they gain in strength and fluidity.

Director Neil Jordan (Danny Boy, The Company of Wolves) does a good job of re-creating the dark romanticism of American film noir, and if the project does feel a little like a hand-me-down, it is graced by Jordan's fine, contemporary feel for bright, artificial colors and creatively mangled space.

The film may be a relic now, but it is a fascinating souvenir - particularly in its narcissism and fatalism - of how the hippie movement thought of itself. [Review of re-release]

Funny, honest, and generous, this is mainstream American comedy at its best.

John Ford’s 1952 Oscar winner is a tribute to an Ireland that exists only in the imaginations of songwriters and poets like Ford, a fairy green place where people really do say “faith and begorrah.”

There's no denying his (Ghobadi's) talent for suspense or his ability to get riveting performances from nonprofessionals.

The Departed is completely engrossing, a master class in suspense. But in moral terms it may be the least involving story that Scorsese -- an artist much preoccupied with morality -- has ever taken on.

Wise, gentle, and simply constructed.

The concert footage is generally quite good, and Joplin is astonishing, but with so many hours of footage you'd think there would be more unexpected moments.

Like the earlier film, this one has an airless quality, much of the action taking place in the hushed and colorless offices of "the Circus." But whereas the dank tone of "Let the Right One In" served to heighten the moments of poignance and shrieking horror, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy begins to seem phlegmatic after a while.

A dedicated, charismatic, crack-addicted history teacher is the most believable protagonist in an American movie this year.

More a film about unreasoning fear than the supernatural, this work demonstrates what a filmmaker can accomplish when he substitutes taste and intelligence for special effects.

This pared-away comedy-drama, which concentrates exclusively on the three characters, has plenty of old-fashioned virtues: deft acting, a nice sense of scale that makes the drama agreeably life-size, a good use of Seattle locations, fluid camera work (by Michael Ballhaus), a kind of burnished romanticism about the music, and a genuine feeling for the characters and their various means of coping. And Pfeiffer turns out to be a terrific singer.

Almost cagily creating understated drama from high-stakes reality.

This 2005 masterpiece by Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov transforms the story of Emperor Hirohito at the close of World War II into a melancholy meditation on power and its loss.

Victim, for all its compromises, offers a rich mosaic of minor characters, none of them particularly complex but each articulating some British attitude toward homosexuality and the law surrounding it.

Devastating.

Dworkin unobtrusively uses small moments to build an engrossing story of courage and hope most narrative films can't match.

Much more deserving of plaudits is the secondary cast--Hope Davis as Schmidt's resentful daughter, Dermot Mulroney as the waterbed salesman she's engaged to, and, above all, Kathy Bates in a hilarious turn as the latter's New Age mother.

One of the first big caper films, this 1950 feature contributed much to the essence of the genre in its meticulous observation of planning and execution.

The result is both thrilling and thoughtful.

Here, as too often in his career, Stevens is aiming to have the last word on a genre: everything aims for “classic” status, and everything falters in a mire of artsiness and obtrusive technique.

Given what Young charges for concert tickets, all his organs could be gold. So I was even more grateful for this documentary of his August 2005 shows at the fabled Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, expertly directed by Jonathan Demme.

Mitchell, who also directed and wrote the screenplay, originally created this glorious rock opera for the stage with composer-lyricist Stephen Trask.

As a moral reconsideration of the role of violence in previous Eastwood films, this is strong and sure, and characters who play against genre expectations give the film a provocative aftertaste. The only limitation, really, is that the picture hasn't much dramatic urgency apart from its revisionist context.

A significant influence on Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, this grueling pile driver of a movie will keep you on the edge of your seat, though it reeks of French 50s attitude, which includes misogyny, snobbishness, and borderline racism.

The moral dilemmas are perfectly fused with the amped-up action and outsize characters, but they're impossible to miss: like all of us, the people of Gotham have to protect themselves from evil without falling prey to it.

This 1950 effort shows Disney at the tail end of his best period, when his backgrounds were still luminous with depth and detail and his incidental characters still had range and bite.

Coogan delivers a winning comic performance as the pompous impresario, but his story has little dramatic momentum of its own; he functions mostly as a pedantic narrator, imposing some cultural significance on the endless party and pointing out more intriguing personalities.

Imamura’s detached, almost scientific style forestalls any pat sympathy for the central character—he is not a sentimental “victim of society,” but the embodiment of its darkest Darwinian forces.

One of the forgotten masterworks of Disney animation...No other Disney feature achieved this level of exuberant abstraction, or displayed the same sheer pleasure in the magic of the animator's art.

As with Nostalghia, Tarkovsky’s previous work of exile, it’s possible to balk at the filmmaker’s pretensions and antiquated sexual politics and yet be overwhelmed by his mastery and originality, as well as the conviction of his sincerity.

Atonement is that rare combo: a good movie based on a good book.

A sense of reconciliation is Malick's great accomplishment in The Tree of Life, affording us equal wonder at grace and nature alike. 

On its deepest level it considers not a particular war but the complex feelings between mothers and the young men they send out into the world to kill or be killed.

Gordon’s remarkable as the emotionally disarranged, psychologically disintegrating jazzman, and when the little Frenchman calls him a genius, you suddenly realize what that overused term implies: not moral worthiness or superior personhood but a giftedness beyond accounting that hardly belongs to character at all.

The mix of dark humor, creeping suspense, and a sort of apocalyptic tenderness makes this the best horror flick in years.

Jean Gabin wasn't yet 50 when he starred as a big-time, high-style gangster hoping to retire, but he still looks pretty wasted, and this pungent tale about aging and friendship, adapted from a best-selling noir thriller by Albert Simonin, would be hard to imagine without his puffy features.

The film has no qualities beyond its formal polish--and its careful avoidance (or rather, displacement) of the moral and political issues involved can seem too crafty, too convenient.

The results are high-spirited, with nice ensemble work from Almodovar's team of regulars, but the playlike structure (originally derived from Cocteau's The Human Voice but drastically reworked) is disappointingly conventional.

The movie premiered in January at the Sundance Film Festival, too soon to include a tragic denouement: in April the U.S. command surrendered the Korangal Valley to the Taliban.

His mise en scene is mesmerizing, and the final scene is breathtaking. Not an easy film, but almost certainly a great one.

An E.T. spin-off, but it's a very likable and imaginative one.

Reichardt keeps this so hypnotic from shot to shot that you can easily get wrapped up in it as a sensory experience.

It's not a terribly disciplined exercise--the rehearsal dinner and wedding ceremony go on so long I felt like I was watching "The Deer Hunter"--but the performances are outstanding, especially Hathaway's and Debra Winger's in a small but devastating turn as her chilly, resentful mother.

Weir does manage to deliver the goods.

Most fascinating about this PBS documentary is the unflinching look at the dynamics of the three generations involved.