The movie brushes against some of India's worst social ills, but it's essentially a fairy tale.

Characters occasionally address the camera, which helps disentangle the competing story lines of madness, adultery, and betrayal.

There's some striking camerawork by Christopher Doyle (in 35-millimeter) and Rain Kathy Li (in Super-8), though this doesn't alter the overall feeling of random, nihilistic drift.

Much of it is awful, but it's almost impossible not to be taken in by the narrative sprawl: like many big, bad movies, Giant is an enveloping experience, with a crazy life and logic of its own.

Out of Sight engaged me less and less, until by the end I no longer cared which of the characters lived or died. Not even the engaging Jennifer Lopez, George Clooney, Albert Brooks, Don Cheadle, and Ving Rhames or the talented secondary cast can survive the abbreviations and last-minute shoehorning their characters receive.

A ferociously creative 1985 black comedy filled with wild tonal contrasts, swarming details, and unfettered visual invention--every shot carries a charge of surprise and delight.

The astronaut interviews are fun and occasionally moving, but the real reason to see this is the remastered archival footage, some of it previously unseen and all of it spectacular.

Terse and fatalistic.

Here the director is more self-conscious about his didactic aims, which limits him in some respects, but there's an engaging roughness about his visual approach that keeps this movie footloose and inventive.

Despite Scorsese's efforts, there just isn't much to look at, and the film plays less like a movie than an illustrated record album.

The film gradually devolves into action-adventure, then the equivalent of a war movie. But the filmmaking is pungent throughout, and the first half hour is so jaw-dropping in its fleshed-out extrapolation that Cuaron earns the right to coast a bit.

The film is full of relevant insights into the kinds of compromises, trade-offs, and combinations of skills and personalities that produce media, and the personal stories are deftly integrated.

Writer-director Gotz Spielmann (Antares) avoids the clutter and manipulation of most thrillers, escalating tension almost solely through the characters' turbulent emotions.

Often coming across as simultaneously out of control and self-possessed, Borchardt can't have been an easy target, but the filmmakers seem to have nailed him.

Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki perfects his trademark formula of deadpan humor and arctic circle pathos in this brilliantly ironic 2002 comedy.

Allen's conception of character is as banal and shallow as ever, but the lively performances of some of his actors—mainly Davis, Pollack, and Juliette Lewis (as a creative writing student of Allen's who has a brief flirtation with him)—and the novelty of the film's style make this more watchable than many of his features.

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.

Elaborately rhetorical at the end, this 1961 film nevertheless develops its theme lucidly and with some of Bergman’s most unforgettable sequences.

Trained in Sanford Meisner's acting techniques, the director wrests surprisingly emotional disclosures from his subjects.

This film's extraordinary unity of style, theme, and plot is what sets it apart from the superficial historical epic. Behind all the color, movement, and elaborate decor of this "commercial" film lies an exceptionally taut structure.

Leigh displays a passionate affection for and commitment to his leading characters that never precludes a critical distance.

Charles Chaplin’s 1952 film is overlong, visually flat, episodically constructed, and a masterpiece—it isn’t “cinema” on any terms but Chaplin’s own, but those are high terms indeed.

The film represents a studied, sophisticated approach to instinctual emotions: it's carefully, calculatingly naive, and amazingly it works.

This is arguably John Huston's best literary adaptation, and conceivably his very best film.

Striking for its performances -- especially Anthony LaPaglia.

Provost and cowriter Marc Abdelnour explore the mutable boundaries between spirituality, naivete, genius, and madness, showing how the two outsiders and polar opposites cultivated a mutual understanding.

Alec Guinness as the master pickpocket Fagin is the high point of David Lean's 1948 version of the Dickens classic.

This seventh installment is utterly fascinating.

A highly emotional epic about what it means to be both Chinese and American.

This 1946 film is a key work of the postwar period, dripping with demented romanticism and the venom of disillusionment. Tay Garnett directed, finding the pull of obsession in every tracking shot.

Traffic is a masterpiece in its own right—not only for the sharp picture of the frenetic and gimmick-crazy civilization that worships cars, but also for many remarkable formal qualities: an extraordinary use of sound (always one of Tati’s strong points), a complex interplay of chance and control in the observations of everyday behavior, and, in some spots, a development of the use of multiple focal points to articulate some of the funniest gags.

A brilliant satirical diagnosis of what's most screwed up about life in this country, especially when it comes to sexual frustration and kiddie porn.

The grafting of 40s hard-boiled detective story with SF thriller creates some dysfunctional overlaps, and the movie loses some force whenever violence takes over, yet this remains a truly extraordinary, densely imagined version of both the future and the present, with a look and taste all its own.

Something large and abstract is stirring here, though the film's ultimate implications are chilling

The old surrealist created another masterpiece in this, his final film.

while the war-as-insanity metaphor clearly fits the cruel, heartbreaking story, its force is undercut by a succession of character types -- ambitious television journalists, outmatched UN peacekeepers, overbearing politicians.

Isn't as lavish or flashy as the typical Bollywood product, and cricket aside, there's little to distinguish the plotting and wide-screen visuals from more traditional Hollywood musicals--though few recent American musicals are this fluid or engaging.

This brilliantly and comprehensively captures the look, feel, and sound of glamorous 50s tearjerkers like All That Heaven Allows, not to mock or feel superior to them but to say new things with their vocabulary.

This slick and entertaining 1975 film of Ken Kesey's cult novel will inevitably disappoint admirers of director Milos Forman's earlier work.

Alan Pakula's pedestrian 1976 recap of Watergate is a study in missed opportunities.

Huston does a reverse take on the material, underplaying the grotesque situation until it turns into a parody on the problems of the average working couple, but the pacing is so lugubrious that the laughs never materialize.

The music is great, and the film would be memorable for its goofy, syncopated opening sequence alone.

Fascinated by the technology of movies as much as by the technology of space—it presents film as a fabulous, exciting plaything, reviving Orson Welles's observation that a movie set is "the biggest electric train set a boy ever had."

The movie is dominated by Maddin's usual black-and-white photography, silent-movie syntax, and deadpan melodrama.

There’s no denying this is a coldly commanding tale in which Haneke’s signature obsessions--bourgeois control, sexual repression, emotional cruelty, cathartic violence--simmer quietly as subtext before bursting into the open in the final reels.

Typically overstuffed MGM prestige product (1940), but one that came out surprisingly well, with a minimum of Eng. Lit. posturing and some elegance of design.

Remains mired in a smart-alecky film-school sensibility.

Director James Cameron dumps the decorative effects of Ridley Scott's 1979 Alien in favor of some daring narrative strategies and a tight thematic focus.

This quiet, elegiac road movie hinges on a few beautifully underplayed scenes between Daniel London and Will Oldham.

But the acting's so good it frequently transcends the simplicities of the script, and whenever Day-Lewis or Postlethwaite is on-screen the movie crackles.

Hammer overplays his indie hand with an abrupt and unsatisfactory ending, but his three leads are so credible that their aching, tongue-tied characters linger in the memory.

This gritty melodrama is tempered by surreal black humor.

This 1956 feature, a casual yet meticulously detailed reconstruction of Japan’s routinized white-collar milieu, was Yasujiro Ozu’s first film after the exquisite Tokyo Story, as well as one of his longest works.

Michael Ritchie keeps his dead-end cynicism in check and produces a genuinely funny comedy about a Little League team managed by a lovably drunken Walter Matthau. Sometimes Ritchie goes too far in avoiding the family-movie cliches the subject invites and indulges in some pointless vulgarity, but all in all, it's one of his best films.

I can't say I remembered this 1995 feature too clearly a couple of days later; but I certainly had a good time as I watched it.

Alexander Payne has won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay (Sideways), but you'd never guess that from this clumsily written drama: characters keep explaining things that their listeners would already know, and the first couple reels are so thick with expository voice-over that you may think you're listening to a museum tour on a set of headphones.

Schwarzenegger is presented as a lumbering slab of dumb, destructive strength--the image is more geological than human--and Cameron plays his crushing weightiness against the strangely light, almost graceful violence of the gunplay directed against him. The results have the air of a demented ballet.

The narrative, capped by a brief bad dream and the capture of a mouse, isn't always legible, but it feeds into a monumental, luminous visual style like no other.

The material has been bowdlerized to the point of abstraction, which makes Richard Brooks's sweaty, emphatic direction look a little silly—there just isn't that much to get worked up about. But Burl Ives and Judith Anderson are highly entertaining as the nightmare parents, Big Daddy and Big Mama, and Jack Carson has one of his last good roles as Newman's competitive older brother.

One of the most memorable of Walt Disney's live-action films, perhaps because it stays so close to the traumatic family themes of the cartoon features.

Tati hasn’t quite solved the structural problem he posed for himself, but if the film isn’t wholly satisfying, it’s still a very witty and suggestive work from the modern cinema’s only answer to Chaplin and Keaton.

Leigh pushes the story in a more interesting direction, asking whether people find happiness or simply will it on themselves.

It's a welcome throwback to the carefully crafted family films of the studio era. The scenery is lovely, and the cast is entirely worthy of the enterprise (including the regal and athletic star).

A movie whose story may be even more innovative than the superreal solidity of the animated characters.

A better-than-average Bette Davis vehicle (1940), well constructed by that shrewd old hack, William Wyler, from a Somerset Maugham play.

It's a hell of a show, though none of the artists gets more than a single number, and most of Chappelle's comic interludes are half-baked. Funnier and more engaging are his perambulations around the neighborhood.

Blake Edwards's 1982 sex comedy has the most beautiful range of tones of any American film of its period: it is a work of dry wit, high slapstick, black despair, romantic warmth, and penetrating intelligence.

Compelling collection of three loosely connected vignettes.

Caine has already been cited as a likely Oscar nominee for his performance, which is clearly one of the most nuanced to date from this first-rate actor, and Fraser is funny and effective as a foil to the old pro.

It's chock-full of typical Wilder cynicism and the offhand transvestite humor that would reach its apotheosis in Some Like It Hot, but its wit falters as the melodramatic tension builds. The resulting letdown is terrific, but along the way there is some of the funniest men-at-loose-ends interplay that Wilder has ever put on film.

Much as Emile de Antonio's neglected "In the Year of the Pig" (1968) may be the only major documentary about Vietnam that actually considers the Vietnamese, this film allows the people of Iraq to speak, and what they say is fascinating throughout.

The performances, especially of Penn and Robbins, are so powerful and detailed (down to the Boston accents) that they often persuade one to overlook the narrative contrivances (particularly the incessant crosscutting), the arty trimmings (including Eastwood's own score), and the dubious social philosophy.

All-expert cast.

Directed by Louie Psihoyos, this well-intentioned documentary exposes the harvesting of dolphins by Japanese fishermen, yet its theatrics suggest a cross between reality TV and "Mission: Impossible."

One of Bujalski's gifts is his ability to give every part, no matter how big or small, a sense of intelligence and life that extends beyond the frame and running time, and in this his work recalls the best of both Mike Leigh and Richard Linklater.

Maddin takes on his first commissioned feature--an adaptation of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet's production of Dracula--and succeeds brilliantly, making it his own while offering what may be the most faithful screen version to date of Bram Stoker's novel.

A wonderfully complex examination of sexual and material politics that's full of bravely provocative, gently funny, and warmly human encounters.

This slam-bang remake of a 1963 feature by Eichi Kudo builds slowly, accumulating characters and themes, then explodes into a prolonged and masterful battle sequence inside a deserted town.

Robert Duvall, who played a similar character in Bruce Beresford's "Tender Mercies" (1983), turns up in a supporting role.

This is a highly personal and even religious expression of Hitchcock concerning the vicissitudes of fate, predicated on his lifelong fear that anyone can be wrongly accused of a crime and placed behind bars.

For all its minimalism, Tsai Ming-liang's 81-minute masterpiece manages to be many things at once.

The thematics are rather cloying, but the mood—profoundly relaxed, bemused—eventually conquers.

The virtues on display are very much those of the heroine: generosity, imagination, charm, and the capacity to keep an audience mesmerized with a good story.

The film does offer a good deal of engaging dark humor.

Finkiel (a French director who apprenticed with Godard, Tavernier, and Kieslowski) plants clues throughout the film suggesting that the women might be long-lost relatives but declines to wrap things up neatly. The very uncertainty--and the fading possibility of an end to their search--is what makes the film so eerie and poignant.

This is like a Ferris wheel--the ride's enjoyable but you've gone nowhere once it's over.

It's largely Kazan's authentic feeling for the locale, aided by Boris Kaufman's superb black-and-white cinematography, that makes this movie so special, combined with a first-rate ensemble.

Better-than-average sitcom stuff, enhanced by the lively performances, Doyle's own adaptation, and the able direction of Stephen Frears.

Good campy fun from the combined talents of Paddy Chayefsky and Sidney Lumet; Chayefsky was apparently serious about much of this shrill, self-important 1976 satire about television, interlaced with bile about radicals and pushy career women,

While not nearly the musical it's cracked up to be, this 1951 film is absolutely required viewing for anyone who wants to see the studio system (MGM style) at its gaudiest, most Byzantine height. Art and technology have never been in closer harmony than in this Vincente Minnelli-directed rendition of George Gershwin's concert masterpiece.

Given the movie's slow, careful development, I was hardly prepared for the cold-sweat suspense of the last half hour.

A must-see.

This obsessive movie, awarded the grand jury prize at the Sundance festival, may not quite live up to its advance billing; the subject is powerful, but the filmmaking often seems slapdash, and the final half hour dithers.

The light ribbing of conspicuous consumption in southern California and the Simon and Garfunkel songs on the sound track both play considerable roles in giving this depthless comedy some bounce. [Review of re-release]

This 1932 release was the first Marx film to take on the Depression, and the brothers manage to satirize everything from education to prostitution and bootlegging.