The direction is lively and often overinventive, as was frequently the case during the early, experimental phase of his career.

Gremillon seems the master of every style he attempts, but his genius lies in the smooth linking of those various styles; the film seems to evolve as it unfolds, changing its form in imperceptible stages.

The film’s sophistication is compromised by the rather dumb plot, but some of the numbers—especially “Think Pink” and “Bonjour Paris”—are standouts.

One of the most striking of Ozu’s American-style silents.

This is one of the greats, and I’m too much in awe of it to say much more than: See it—as often as you can.

A significant influence on Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, this grueling pile driver of a movie will keep you on the edge of your seat, though it reeks of French 50s attitude, which includes misogyny, snobbishness, and borderline racism.

A Conradian parable of a man succumbing to the wild, the film is remarkable for its raw, pointed depiction of human behavior.

A breathtaking study of the relationships between life and theater, mime and tragedy, the real and the imagined, sound and silence. It runs 187 minutes, and it's worth every one of them.

It's a masterful succession of images, tickling the viewer's curiosity with the characters' curiosity. The fantasy emerges little by little—through hesitant, feline steps, if you will—until the floodgates open.

A proud, forthright indictment of national and personal corruption, as evoked through a young reggae singer's odyssey from country to city, from innocent to outlaw.

Anne Dorval gives an extraordinary performance as the mother, who lashes out at the boy but can't disguise her own suffering when he lands an emotional punch; their scenes together reminded me of Paul Schrader's Affliction for their sense of familial love gone hopelessly sour.

The original antimarijuana film, offering the true inside story of the devil weed that drives men to savage lusts and women to unspeakable depravities, along with a little bit of dumb fun.

The twist of making Bronson a genuine working man adds interest to the action-revenge formula, but not enough to lift this out of the programmer category.

This packaged tour through the great man's career is unenlightening and obfuscating, despite an adept lead performance by Robert Downey Jr.

Dismal Stanley Kramer morality play about a middle-class couple facing the prospect of their daughter's marriage to a black man (Sidney Poitier). A disaster on all counts.

On the whole there's not a lot of flesh on these cynically haphazard bones.

This isn't a major Dante effort, but his ability to make a good-natured satire that allows an audience to read it several ways at once is as strong as ever, and many of the sidelong genre notations are especially funny.

In the end, his deadliest weapon turns out to be other people’s trust, something with grimmer philosophical implications than all his acts of violence combined.

Buñuel conjures with Freudian imagery, outrageous humor, and a quiet, lyrical camera style to create one of his most complex and complete works, a film that continues to disturb and transfix.

The script, by Nolan and his brother Jonathan, takes a few vague pokes at Wall Street and the financial elite but mainly revives the ponderous psychodrama of the first movie.

Winterbottom, a Brit who's shot several films in India, carefully notes the local customs and mores that contribute to the young woman's tragic fall.

Jannicke Systad Jacobsen, a documentary maker directing her first fiction film, demonstrates a sure sense of tone, and Bergsholm is memorable as the misfit teen.

"The whole universe depends on everything fitting together just right," declares Hushpuppy, the fierce, nappy-headed girl at the center of this extraordinary southern gothic.

The true schism here, however, is between the brainless fun of the action plot and Stone's cheap exploitation of the cartels' real-life sadism.

Unfortunately for Polley, Take This Waltz is a good film serving mainly to remind us that "Away From Her" is a great one.

This fourth installment is a complete reboot, returning to the web-slinger's creation story, and Garfield, more than any other factor, contributes to the sense of a bleaker vision along the lines of "The Dark Knight."

The dance numbers, choreographed by Allison Faulk, are inventive and athletic, but not really erotic; Soderbergh never lets you forget that, for these men, dancing is above all a job.

MacFarlane gets an impressive amount of comic mileage from having a plush toy talk like a Boston low-life, though for gut laughs nothing compares to the brutal, frantic, and completely wordless fight scene between Wahlberg and his little buddy in a cheap hotel room.