Bell presides over this insightful, often droll survey like a sweeter, buffer version of Michael Moore, trolling gyms, universities, and Congress to grill assorted experts.

A pretty impressive horror film.

Blitz shows us these kids in all their quirkiness and dorkiness, letting them do much of the talking as he records them and their families at home.

The story is so black-and-white that one feels like hissing the villain (Kenneth Branagh) and cheering the heroines at every stage, but it's so amazing that the simplicity of the telling seems warranted.

If the heart of the horror movie is the annihilating Other, the Other has never appeared with more vividness, teasing sympathy, and terror than in this 1932 film by Tod Browning.

Time hasn’t been terribly kind to this 1931 gangster drama, which suffers more than it should from the glitches of early sound. But James Cagney’s portrayal of a bootlegging runt is truly electrifying (he’d already made three films, but this one made him a star), and Jean Harlow makes the tartiest tart imaginable.

Utterly fresh and beguiling.

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

Friendship is portrayed here in its finest form.

The first 20 minutes are masterful, as Cruise hunts down a killer-to-be; the last 20 are mediocre, as screenwriters Scott Frank and Jon Cohen untangle the mystery they've grafted onto Dick's story. In between lies a conventional but expertly realized cop-on-the-run drama.

The show has been the gold standard for satirical TV ever since it debuted in 1989. This long-awaited movie adaptation has plenty of laughs, plus an assortment of milestones for fans.

Nicely acted and inflected, this is a very fresh piece of work.

This is vicarious cinema at its best.

Certainly one of the director's most personal and obsessive works—even comparable in some respects to Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano in its bottomless despair and bombastic self-hatred, as well as its rather ghoulish lyricism.

A masterful 168-minute piece of storytelling that never ceases to be gripping in spite of its measured pace.

This unexpected masterpiece was assembled so quickly that it has an improvisational feel and a surrealist capacity to access its own unconscious—traits it shares with Feuillade's work.

Kolirin has a fine sense of where to place the camera and when to cut between shots for maximum comic effect, and his two lead actors--Sasson Gabai as the band's conductor and Ronit Elkabetz (Or) as one of the locals--are terrific.

Has its awkward and square moments directorially, but it's also uncommonly honest and serious.

I suppose the constant repetition is necessary (Matlin's character only communicates through sign language), but it points up the film/play's willingness to sacrifice situational truth for didactic accessibility.

This 2002 German documentary (in English) by Marta Kudlacek is the best portrait of an experimental filmmaker that I know.

Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa switches gears from supernatural horror to poignant social satire.

In its own quiet way this is an astonishing film, both as a medical detective story that sustains taut interest over an extended running time and as a piece of cinema combining unusually resourceful acting and direction. If any movie of recent years deserves to be called inspirational--a much-abused term that one hesitates to revive apart from exceptional circumstances--this one certainly does.

This farce eventually runs out of steam, devolving into a protracted docudrama about actor Steve Coogan (who plays the title hero as well as his father), but until then this is a pretty clever piece of jive.

The film adopts, somewhat insidiously, the myth that life was simpler back in 1953 and '54, and it offers Murrow as a lesson for today.

This sharp, convincing, and utterly contemporary political film calls to mind some of Ken Loach's work, full of passion as well as precision.

An exquisitely structured drama.

Lorna's sudden change of heart is a pointed example of what the Dardenne brothers' movies are all about. Capitalism may seem at times like a raging river, but every day, all over the world, people try to make it flow in the opposite direction.

Terrific escapist entertainment...It's a polished and exciting thriller, mercifully unburdened with heavy political/philosophical digressions.