Steven Spielberg's mechanical thriller is guaranteed to make you scream on schedule (John Williams's score even has the audience reactions programmed into the melodies), particularly if your tolerance for weak motivation and other minor inconsistencies is high.

This may be the most literate of all the spectacles set in antiquity.

The Warners-style slapstick and gentle Anglophilia charms children and adults alike, but what kills me are the fingerprint ridges that fade in and out of the characters' mugging faces, a reassuring reminder that handmade art can still captivate.

Though it's a good half hour too long, this belated, overblown spin-off of the 60s TV show otherwise adds up to a pretty good suspense thriller.

Both sad and darkly funny, the film is so sharply conceived and richly populated that it often registers like a Frederick Wiseman documentary, even though everything is scripted and every part played by a professional... This is only the second feature of Cristi Puiu, who claims to have been inspired by his own hypochondria, but he's already clearly a master.

This may be Reed’s most pretentious film, but it also happens to be one of his very best, beautifully capturing the poetry of a city at night (with black-and-white cinematography by Robert Krasker that’s within hailing distance of Gregg Toland and Stanley Cortez’s work with Orson Welles).

The depiction of her risky voyage and what happens afterward is highly suspenseful and entirely believable.

It's easy to suspend disbelief and embrace this historically creative fiction, whose clever relationship to what's known and what's unresolved is part of what makes it so intriguing and so romantic.

Long, heavy, and not particularly edifying Holocaust drama.

The film is watchable as well as informative...But I wish I had a better notion of what story he's trying to tell.

This is the kind of tasteful tearjerker that's often overrated and smothered with prizes because it flatters our tolerance and sensitivity.

Makes a powerful statement about the plight of unwanted children. But it also incorporates elements of melodrama, film noir, and even the fairy tale that engage our empathy and confirm the Dardennes' great compassion.

As with most Thalberg projects (the director of record was Frank Lloyd, but he barely matters), it's tainted by a fair amount of middlebrow stuffiness, but it's a fleet piece of storytelling and serves to enshrine one of the great ham performances of all time, Charles Laughton's Captain Bligh.

Robin Hardy's 1973 cult horror film passed through several distributors, several versions, and several bankruptcies, picking up a powerful reputation along the way.

It's something of a masterpiece: a confessional experimental documentary with echoes, both conscious and unconscious, of filmmakers from Andy Warhol to John Cassavetes, Stan Brakhage to David Lynch.

The footage is often fascinating, but when it comes to anthropomorphism I prefer the Disney live-action adventures.

Exhilarating.

This brilliant if unpleasant puzzle without a solution about surveillance and various kinds of denial finds writer-director Michael Haneke near the top of his game, though it's not a game everyone will want to play.

The film is a classic, and deservedly so: the conjunction of Tracy's sly listlessness and Hepburn's stridency defines "chemistry" in the movies.

A crisp, beautifully paced film, full of Siegel's wonderful coups of cutting and framing.

For me it felt like a good many weeks at a politically correct summer camp, though the talented actors--including Cecilia Roth, Eloy Azorin, Marisa Paredes, Toni Canto, Antonia San Juan, and Penelope Cruz--certainly seem to enjoy the taste of the characters they're playing.

The real protagonist of Moneyball, however, is Beane himself, played with great charisma by Brad Pitt. (With this movie and "The Tree of Life" competing against each other, Pitt could wind up cheating himself out of an Oscar this year.)

Stylistically fresh and full of sweetness that never cloys, this is contemporary Hollywood filmmaking at its near best.

The often unorthodox inventiveness of Tampopo registers like the dividend of a filmmaker who has found his ideal subject.

Funny and stirring, in quite unpredictable ways, with the usual Powellian flair for drawing the universal out of the screamingly eccentric.

This 1981 release is one of Brian De Palma's more interesting and better-made thrillers, though it's even more abjectly derivative than his Hitchcock imitations (borrowing mightily this time from Antonioni's Blowup, as the title suggests).

Set in the 19th century, it's one of Bergman's most tightly structured and frightening films.

The film offers a fascinating glimpse of the Iranian urban middle class, and though it eschews most of the pleasures of composition and landscape found in other Kiarostami films, it's never less than riveting.