Hysterically hyperbolic and unpleasant if still witty dissection of family traumas.

Most impressive, Cantet tracks the racial and ethnic resentments that simmer beneath the classroom discussions but become harder to quell when the parents get involved.

Writer-director Pupi Avati has a such a fine sense of narrative proportion that this Italian feature unspools like silk.

Not even the crude ethnic humor--Billy Crystal's Mel Brooks-ish Miracle Max--pricks the dream bubble, and the spirited cast has a field day.

The obviously authentic love these couples shared should settle the question for all but bigots.

This taut thriller adds so many twists of its own it might be more appropriately cross-referenced with The Manchurian Candidate, even though it isn't nearly as daffy or as mercurial.

It's an edifying art history lesson, but it lacks the showmanship of, for example, Peter Greenaway's "Nightwatching."

Still about as good as Allen gets, a persuasive, nuanced, and relatively graceful portrait of an egotistical yet talented jazz guitarist of the swing era, astutely played by Sean Penn.

The dialogue is multilingual but largely incidental to the action; the physical comedy is gracefully rendered and often magical.

This is a deeply engaging portrait of a remarkable man and a brutally frank indictment of the West's moral cowardice in the face of a tragedy it could have prevented.

Quaid's buoyant earnestness complements the stunning, low-key performance by Caviezel, whose close-ups give new meaning to the idea that still waters run deep.

The equation of Gilliam with Quixote is so obvious to everyone involved that Fulton and Pepe can hardly be blamed for adopting it.

Roy's story is fascinating in its own right, exploring the hero's mingled shame over his class background and homosexuality, and painting a vicious portrait of Britain's coke-snorting upper crust in the late 70s.

A delicate balance of fantasy and realism, caricature and character study that isn't driven primarily by its plot or even the development of its protagonist.

A dubious proposition, but in Sturges’s hands a charming one, filled out by his unparalleled sense of eccentric character.

An adroit piece of storytelling from Irish writer-director Neil Jordan that's ultimately less challenging to conventional notions about race and sexuality than it may at first seem... The three leads are first-rate.

A wily and dogged inquisitor, Broomfield cajoles and confronts a variety of witnesses, charting a web of intrigue that also involved the LAPD, the FBI, and assorted gangbangers and rogue cops.

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

McDormand has never been better, but all the performances are interestingly nuanced, including Natascha McElhone's as one of Bale's fellow psychiatric interns.

The Maid may turn mostly on issues of housework, but it never feels trivial, because Silva is so skillful in exposing the alliances and levers of power inside the household.

In short, I never quite believed the story, but this movie is more about feeling than thinking.

Cheadle's quiet, superbly modulated performance as an ordinary man driven to heroism by hellish events reminds us that the slogan "no justice, no peace" has a private as well as a public dimension.

Friendship is portrayed here in its finest form.

Jensen's use of the conventions of documentary making -- and his undermining of them in ways both bold and subtle -- seems too canny and consistent for the form. Yet the harder I try to decide whether this is a documentary or a parody, the more I wonder why it matters.

Paul Newman tells 'em where to get off in this slick, popular antiestablishment drama set in a prison camp. Stuart Rosenberg's direction is a horror, but the cast teems with so many familiar faces that this film can't help but entertain.

Inspired by anthropologist Donald Thomson's early-20th-century photographs, this collaboration between a Western filmmaker and the native people of Ramingining is an impressive achievement of ethnographic cinema.

As an artist, Alfred Hitchcock surpassed this early achievement many times in his career, but for sheer entertainment value it still stands in the forefront of his work.

Turns out to be surprisingly layered.