One of cinema's most absorbing fantasies.

Whether the title refers to the baby or the thief remains an open question, and the viewer is left to decide whether the theme of redemption should be perceived in Christian terms. This builds to a suspenseful climax, and as in Hitchcock's best work, that suspense is morally inflected.

Devoted to both the profound necessity and the sublime silliness of gratuitous social interchange, OHAYO is a rather subtler and grander work than might appear at first.

The premise of this South Korean import may call to mind that of another, Bong Joon-ho's recent suspense film "Mother," but Poetry is another bird entirely: true to the title, writer-director Lee Chang-dong is principally concerned with rendering emotions that seem inexpressible.

The film has a fresh and imaginative feel for period detail that the talented cast - which also features Gabriel Byrne, Christian Bale, Eric Stoltz, John Neville, and Mary Wickes - obviously benefits from.

This rarely screened, melancholy 1957 film, Yasujiro Ozu’s last in black and white, is one of his best.

The high-powered drive of both the storytelling and the music is riveting.

The extraordinary child actress Ana Torrent (Cria) made her debut here at the age of five. Much in the film is derivative, but Erice excels in precise evocations of childhood feelings.

It does have enough gritty insights and (for the time) strikingly accurate production details to keep the level of interest up.

The issues deepen in a subtle, natural way: the film begins as a trifle and ends as something beautiful and affirmative. A classic.

This is Capra at his best, very funny and very light, with a minimum of populist posturing.

Sheer enchantment, this 1989 animated feature is a key early work by Hayao Miyazaki. It exemplifies Ghibli's style of fanciful realism, paying close attention to minute details as well-drawn figures move across a fluid backdrop. It also deals straightforwardly with substantial emotions like fear of death, though at times it veers toward the heart-tugging cuteness of the Pokemon series.

Their use of multiple formats-including digital video, Super 8, and 35-millimeter slides-gives the movie the texture of a worn scrapbook.

James Whale's 1933 film plays more like a British folk comedy than a horror movie; it's full of the same deft character twists that made his Bride of Frankenstein a classic.

It binds up introductory lessons in music appreciation, Freudian psychology, and fanciful history with a pulp thriller plot.

The film is so inventive in its situations and humor that its shortcomings—the blunt ideas at its core—don't become apparent before several viewings.

Reportedly (and understandably) Youssef Chahine’s most popular film among Egyptians, this gritty and relatively early (1958) black-and-white masterpiece also features his most impressive acting turn, as a crippled news vendor working at the title railroad station.

In Ford’s superbly creative hands, it becomes perhaps the only avant-garde film ever made about the importance of tradition.

The secret of Sirk's double appeal is a broadly melodramatic plotline, played with perfect conviction yet constantly criticized and challenged by the film's mise-en-scene, which adds levels of irony and analysis through a purely visual inflection.

The problem with these feats is that they threaten to overwhelm the film's content, both as complex historical commentary and as aesthetic and theoretical gesture.

Given the breadth of the story, the characters never achieve much depth, but they're part of a larger pattern: the younger ones are eager to find their way into the organization while the older ones are desperate to find their way out

For better and for worse, this is seductive storytelling as well as investigative journalism, and I wasn't always sure which mode I was in.

Some of it is disturbing, some of it is embarrassingly flat, but all of it shows a degree of technical accomplishment far beyond anything else on the midnight-show circuit.

Though still realist in approach, its aura of bitter nostalgia places it squarely among Fellini's most personal and atmospheric works.

Medium Cool is also recognized as a pointed early critique of the news media, noting the amoral detachment of TV journalists and the collusion between their corporate bosses and the government to shape a political narrative. But for people who love Chicago, the film may be most valuable as a cultural document, recording a much younger city in the midst of a turbulent summer.

Watts and Harring even turn out to be the hottest Hollywood couple of 2001. The plot slides along agreeably as a tantalizing mystery before becoming almost completely inexplicable, though no less thrilling, in the closing stretches--but that's what Lynch is famous for. It looks great too.

Alternately superficial and profound, the film also enlists the services of Oja Kodar, Welles's principal collaborator after the late 60s, as actor, erotic spectacle, and cowriter, and briefer appearances by many other Welles cohorts. Michel Legrand supplied the wonderful score.

Underrated when it came out and unjustly neglected since, it’s not only the major French New Wave film made by a woman, but a key work of that exciting period—moving, lyrical, and mysterious.