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.

The graveyard scene is still a shocker, the details are still astonishingly well assembled, and the performances are wonderful.

Beginning with almost no dialogue at all, Le samourai unfolds like a poetic fever dream.

Winter's Bone often seems to be unfolding in a world apart, with its own moral logic and codes of conduct. It might feel like prison if it weren't so obviously home.

Helen Mirren's flinty performance as Elizabeth II is getting all the attention, but equally impressive is Peter Morgan's insightful script for this UK drama, which quietly teases out the social, political, and historical implications of the 1997 death of Diana, Princess of Wales.

Three hours and 20 minutes of Al Pacino suffering openly, Robert Duvall suffering silently, Diane Keaton suffering noisily, and (every so often) Robert De Niro suffering good-naturedly is almost too much, but Francis Ford Coppola pulls it off in grand style.

A postnoir melodrama with metaphysical trimmings, it does remarkable things with mood and pacing, and the two matches with Gleason as Minnesota Fats are indelible.

As the older doctor, Toshiro Mifune is superb; and though the film has been criticized for its excessive sentimentality by some, it’s a masterful evocation of period and a probing study of the conflict between responsibility and idealism.

The movie's searing conclusion left me numb and overwhelmed.

Though ordained from the beginning, the three-way showdown that climaxes the film is tense and thoroughly astonishing.

I can't say that this feature by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, about the life and art of Harvey Pekar, made me want to run out and buy his comic books, but it does offer a highly interesting and original introduction to them.

Jacques Tati’s 1953 masterpiece features some of the funniest and loveliest slapstick imaginable, yet it is also a work of impressive formal innovation, casting off the tyranny of a plotline in favor of loosely associated tones, episodes, and images.

There are even more characters of interest here than in "Nashville."

As emblems of sexual tension, divine retribution, meaningless chaos, metaphysical inversion, and aching human guilt, his attacking birds acquire a metaphorical complexity and slipperiness worthy of Melville. Tippi Hedren's lead performance is still open to controversy, but her evident stage fright is put to sublimely Hitchcockian uses.

In many ways the ultimate Hawks film: clear, direct, and thoroughly brilliant.

Aquatic joyride.

Thoroughly researched, unobtrusively upholstered, this beautifully assured entertainment about Victorian England is a string of delights.

This outrageous comic fantasy may not sustain its brilliance throughout all of its 112 minutes, but it keeps cooking for so much of that time that I don't have many complaints.

The fun hardens into Fun after he's (Mr. Incredible) lured out of retirement and imprisoned in a remote island compound, though the sleek computer animation is spellbinding as usual.

To explain why Days and Nights in the Forest (1970) is a masterpiece is a bit like explaining why flowers are beautiful: the film’s glories are so natural and self-evident that describing them feels redundant.

Some have compared this French crime drama to "The Godfather," and though that may be a common critical touchstone, writer-director Jacques Audiard manages to replicate its most elusive element, not the dark comedy or the operatic bloodletting but the incremental corruption of a decent man into a willful, coldhearted killer.

This has much of the warmth and feeling for adolescence that Crowe displayed in his first feature ("Say Anything"), though the slick showboating of "Jerry Maguire" isn't entirely absent either.

Banned in France for 18 years, this masterpiece still packs a wallop, though nothing in it is as simple as it may first appear; audiences are still arguing about the final sequence, which has been characterized as everything from a sentimental cop-out to the ultimate cynical twist.

A dark, brutal, exhilaratingly violent film, blending comedy and horror in a manner that suggests Chico Marx let loose with a live machine gun.

I would nominate this authoritative 1962 adaptation of Ed McBain’s novel The King’s Ransom as Akira Kurosawa’s best nonperiod picture, though Ikiru and Rhapsody in August are tough competitors.

Undeniably provocative and reasonably entertaining, The Truman Show is one of those high-concept movies whose concept is both clever and dumb.

The songs don't advance the narrative lyrically so much as follow the two characters' uncertain relationship through the slow realization of their themes; in particular a scene in which they first jam together in the back room of a music store is a gem.

There's no real resonance between the two halves of the film, yet Allen keeps things moving quickly enough that the film only reveals its basic shapelessness once it's over.