You won't come out of it indifferent, and even if it winds up enraging you (I could have done without most of the ending myself), it nonetheless commands attention.

The most astounding cinematic testament to flock mentality since Hitchcock's "The Birds."

The implied critique of progressive, bohemian parenting is devastating--wise and nuanced, with the painful hilarity of truth.

The kids, all real musicians performing, are wonderful, and so is Black; Joan Cusack is both charming and funny as the principal.

A relatively mindless thrill ride that would have made the old NBC execs grin from ear to ear.

A key film noir of the 40s, this was Nicholas Ray's first film as a director, and the freshness of his expressionist-documentary style is still apparent and gripping.

After trying her hand at Thackeray with "Vanity Fair," director Mira Nair has found a literary property much closer to her heart: Jhumpa Lahiri's best-selling novel about a Bengali couple and their children trying to find their place in American culture.

The movie's dreamlike spaces and characters are sometimes worthy of Lewis Carroll.

I've never read Stella Gibbons's popular English novel of 1932--a parody of the romantic rural novels that Mary Webb wrote during the 20s--but director John Schlesinger and adapter Malcolm Bradbury have gotten plenty of enjoyable mileage out of it.

The fulcrum of this deeply humanist work is an extended two-shot of the strike's leader, Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender), as he converses with a priest (Liam Cunningham); the virtuosic sequence encapsulates the whole sorry history of a horrific civil war.

Kiarostami's brilliantly suggestive script, which is quite unlike anything else he's written and is marred only slightly by one of his obligatory sages turning up gratuitously near the beginning.

Gervasi has tapped into a powerful if much-overlooked truth: humanity rocks.

The movie offers enough good one-liners, both comic and ruminative, to hold one's interest, but don't expect much else.

This 1955 example of kitchen-sink realism about the awakening love life of a Bronx butcher (Ernest Borgnine) and his shy girlfriend (Betsy Blair), directed by Delbert Mann, has never been popular with auteurists, but Paddy Chayevsky’s script, adapted from his own TV play, shows his flair for dialogue at its best, and the film manages to be touching, if minor.

Like the first two movies, this is loaded with computer-generated imagery, but for the first time there's a sense of dramatic proportion balancing the spectacle and the story line.

Like "The Verdict," this is a big, crowd-pleasing Hollywood redemption drama in which the lonely hero not only thwarts the corporate villains in the end but silences them with a killer riposte.

Under the harsh lights of the meticulously re-created, claustrophobic bunker, that scrutiny is relentless.

Gregory La Cava's improvisational style received its highest critical acclaim for this 1936 film, a marginally Marxist exercise in class confusion during the Depression.

Woo's third Hollywood movie, Face/Off, is the first to balance his visual imagination with the emotional intensity of his Hong Kong films.

The Scandinavian moodiness of the first half gives way to a series of jolting set pieces in the second.

One of Penn's best features; his direction of actors is sensitive and purposeful throughout.

It seems meant to recapture Allen's lost audience: the verbal wit is fast and frequently hilarious, and the grating self-pity that has come to mar his films has been tempered.

A triumph not of reporting but of synthesis.

Cox's style is a step beyond camp into a comedy of pure disgust; much of the film is churlishly unpleasant, but there's a core of genuine anger that gives the project an emotional validation lacking in the flabby American comedies of the early 80s.

Leone brought back a masterpiece, a film that expands his baroque, cartoonish style into genuine grandeur, weaving dozens of thematic variations and narrative arabesques around a classical western foundation myth.(Review of Original Release)

Something of a tour de force, this adaptation of Joe Simpson's nonfiction book about his climbing the 21,000-foot Siula Grande mountain in Peru, breaking a leg, and eventually making it back alive is remarkable simply because the story seems unfilmable.

Demme's moving documentary turns the story of his dead friend into the story of Haiti.

The film is especially comforting if you love old movies, as Kaurismaki does: his deadpan humor and deliberately flattened images evoke silent comedy, as usual, and his rosy depiction of proletarian camaraderie recalls the 30s and 40s work of Marcel Carné (particularly Le Jour se Leve).