Suspenseful and ingeniously directed.

Weir's offbeat directing makes the most of Andrew Niccol's inventive screenplay, which includes large doses of surprisingly sardonic satire aimed at today's entertainment trends.

It’s no secret that the best animated movies can enthrall us in ways every bit as immersive as any live-action film. Flow is a triumphant case in point.

This restraint of acting and filmmaking results in a story that's all the more powerful. While many films try to force the audience into laughing and crying in the right places, Au Revoir les enfants invites us simply to watch, think, and feel according to our own perceptions. The result is touching in a way no manipulative film could equal. [12 Feb 1988, p.21]

Lively documentary about McGovern's disastrous run for the US presidency. The interviews with him are worth the price of admission.

A mix of war film, road movie, and romantic comedy-drama, this peripatetic yarn is less resonant than Ghobadi's beautiful "A Time for Drunken Horses," but it has enough energy to keep your eyes popping and your toes tapping.

See it with an open heart and a tapping toe.

Thoughtful and reflective, it stands with the most exquisitely crafted films in recent memory, joining eloquently conceived images to an uncommonly literate screenplay. [17 Sept 1993, Arts, p.11]

Touching, transfixing, unique.

This delicious fable reflects Merchant's great love of language, his delicate visual sense, and his ability to make you think and laugh out loud, often at the very same time.

The movie is true to its own fierce vision and it's the better for it. I haven't seen a stronger or better American movie all year.

Made near the end of Buñuel's career, it's not his greatest movie, but it contains some of his most memorable moments.

Weerasethakul's latest has received mixed responses on the film-festival circuit, yet while it's anything but commercial, it's also anything but unadventurous.

A supremely cranky and lyrical feat.

This wry comedy drama has excellent acting and surprises galore.

A major treat for the eyes.

Extravagant and funny it is, and also quite dark at times.

In the end, the finest achievement of Wright's movie is that it fully captures what Martin Amis, writing on Pride and Prejudice, said of Austen: "Money is a vital substance in her world; the moment you enter it you feel the frank horror of moneylessness, as intense as the tacit horror of spinsterhood." All that, and a great love story, too.

Yang favors a gentle and introspective style that shows how deep and strong everyday emotions can run. A memorable treat.

Content and style dovetail superbly in this offbeat drama, where images continually change in size and shape, evoking the story's message that human experience is always a pathway, not a destination.

What makes the movie powerful is Timoner's decision to structure it via Taylor's perspective on his competitor, with no holds barred.

A hilarious and harrowing cautionary tale.

Tuneful, colorful, delightful.

Stillman brings his usual sharp wit to this exploration of upper-middle-class angst, completing the comic trilogy he began with "Metropolitan" and "Barcelona."

First and foremost a very funny film, and a very pleasant one that doesn't really have a villain. Credit for its hilarity goes largely to Black, who gives the performance of his career as a character who might have seemed merely coarse and crude in less gifted hands.

The latest installment is packed with surprises and emotion for people who've seen earlier stages of the project, but even newcomers will be fascinated by the vivid glimpses it provides of everything from love and family to political action and the pervasiveness of class distinctions in British life.

The story is so powerfully observed that it does indeed become larger than itself – an American tragedy.

From its star-studded cast to its indelible camerawork by the legendary Giuseppe Rotunno, it's an unforgettable experience by a revered master of European cinema.

This sometimes harrowing, often delightful drama stands with his (Sembène) most compassionate, colorful, and artfully filmed works.

Look for realism, and you'll find The Cooler disappointing. Look for a far-fetched yarn that's as unpredictable as a throw of the dice, though, and you'll find it engaging fun.

Florence Foster Jenkins isn’t really about how passion trumps art. It’s about how life is more important than art.

A heartbreakingly powerful masterpiece.

What makes this small-scale drama so compelling is Pontecorvo's treatment of the main character.

There's a new visual idea every second, each teeming with energy, pitch-dark comedy, and inspired cinematic lunacy.

Movie-style romance may never look quite the same. Neither will flower petals.

A complicated story that demands your full attention; Mr. Gondry unfolds it at a mind-bending pace. This alone makes it a hugely refreshing respite from ordinary multiplex fare.

The director's cut of this 2001 cult fantasy is a deliriously subtle exploration of storytelling possibilities, and a deliciously wry teen-pic to boot. Brilliant.

A riveting movie.

Almereyda's movie is riveting for several reasons: its inside look at Shepard in action, its vivid account of how a challenging play is brought from printed page to public stage, and its glimpses of Shepard's troubled youth.

It's hugely ambitious, with a sweeping range of character types, frequently shifting moods, stylistic flourishes of many kinds, and some mighty wry satire, aimed largely at the world of psychotherapy.

A pungent pleasure from start to finish.

Most of the way this ranks with the Coens' most immaculately crafted work. Cain would have loved its dreamlike chills, and so will audiences nostalgic for the movies of half a century ago.

One of the sweetest and most heartfelt movies ever made about a life in the theater.

It's a strange, one-of-a-kind film that was to be Benacarraf's only full-length feature.

Funny, sad, and skeptical in about equal measures, it announces writer-director Dylan Kidd as a filmmaker with a bright future.

Tykwer's style gives the movie an explosive energy that never quits, marking him as the most ingenious new talent to hail from Germany in ages.

Most powerfully, Berg also films a number of O'Grady's victims as they recount their trauma and, in some cases, loss of faith.

By holding the shot, as she so often does in this film, Takesue is encouraging audiences to take a deep, long look at things they might otherwise miss.

Absorbing.

The Secret of NIMH is exciting, engaging, and often magnificent to look at. Add it up, and you have what is probably the best cartoon since the bygone heyday of the Walt Disney studio.

What distinguishes Girl With a Pearl Earring is its combination of refined filmmaking and Johansson's exquisitely understated acting. It partakes of Vermeer's spirit and style, and that makes it one of the year's best movies.

In addition to its own merits as a social and cultural document, Broomfield's film continues the welcome trend of more and more nonfiction movies finding their way to theater screens and attracting wide general audiences.

This masterpiece of 1952 is one of the gentlest, subtlest tales from one of Japan's all-time-great filmmakers, combining the sweep of a novel with the intimacy of an elegy. [10 Jan 2003]

Ultimately “Ex Libris” demonstrates that libraries are about people, and what gives the film its great and accumulating force is that people are infinitely complex.

At times the film is so supercharged that it glosses over the story's thematic richness and turns into a very high-grade action picture. But if that's the worst thing you can say about a movie, you're doing all right. The best thing to be said about Children of Men is that it's a fully imagined vision of dystopia.

Enriched by allusions to biblical stories of fathers, sons, and sacrifices, subtly woven into the movie's moodily photographed fabric.

In the acting department, there's nobody on the current scene with more sheer talent --- or offbeat charisma -- than Philip Seymour Hoffman, in whose bearish body nestles the heart of a lithe and limber artist.

This is epic filmmaking on a profoundly human scale, directed to perfection and magnificently acted by everyone in sight.

This is a brilliant, if challenging, film.

The film's final seven-minute shot is one of the great denouements in film history.

Every shot plays a part in the director's underlying scheme - to probe the actual and symbolic roles of money in society, and grander yet, to explore the relationship between matters of the flesh and the human spirit, as manifested by the struggle between aspiration and corruption. [22 March 1984, p.21]

Not that Honda's original Godzilla is a message movie first and foremost. It's a horror flick, and an ingenious one at that, with visual effects so vivid that gimmicky spin-offs became an enduring staple of popular film.

In Panahi's case, he is insuperably handicapped by his current constraints. And yet, despite everything, here is This Is Not a Film, which is emphatically a film – and an extraordinary one.

All give heartfelt, unflashy performances that help make Shattered Glass one of the season's most thoughtful offerings.

Reveals a key aspect of fascism's cynical use of art and architecture to mesmerize a weak and vulnerable society.

The credo of Italy's fabled neorealist movement was that movies rooted in real, unadorned experience carry more dramatic impact than studio concoctions can dream of, and this 1952 masterpiece exemplifies that argument brilliantly.

Arguably the subtlest, most carefully textured film of Cronenberg's career.

Visually stunning animation.

Polanski's directing is marvelously assured and Depp is always fun to watch.

Cinema's greatest surrealist is at the peak of his powers in the last movie of his unparalleled career.

This is the kind of movie that literate viewers pine for, laced with gracefulness and wit.

It's an ideal match, and Eastwood deserves accolades as both director and star of this powerfully made picture.

The extraordinary tact and compassion with which Victor dramatizes Agnes’s assault and its aftermath allows us to see this story for what it truly is – a diary of personal reclamation.

What emerges most strongly, though, is a staggering degree of ignorance among everyday Americans about the basic meanings of democracy, liberty, and national security. [20 Aug 2004, p.15]

It's all deliberately homemade and raggedy, and that's where its charm comes from, along with the delightful old-music score.

The director of "Rushmore" and "The Royal Tenenbaums" scores his most funny-sad movie to date.

Easily the best American film so far this year, Far From Heaven is close to perfect.

Technical virtuosity and entertainment ingenuity.

This is a Holocaust movie that is so relentlessly observed and so aware of woe that it never feels like it belongs to a genre.

Written and directed by a brilliant screen artist at the peak of his powers, it's an utterly original comedy-drama.

Spellbinding.

And yet the great conundrum of the Holocaust is that it was perpetrated by human beings, not monsters. Few movies have rendered this puzzle so powerfully.

This is moviemaking on the highest dramatic, psychological, and moral plane.

Amir Bar-Lev's documentary is fascinating on all kinds of levels: as a movie about the nature of art, the lure and pitfalls of celebrity, and the complicated conundrums of parenting.

Moore makes no pretense of being "fair and balanced." He makes a passionate case for his own perspective, and invites us to agree with him or not. "I fulminate, you decide" could be his motto.

The irony of Afterimage is that it champions an avant-garde artist, warts and all, and yet Wajda’s stylistics here are conventional and understated.

Required viewing for anyone interested in the struggle for American racial equality.

It's illuminating and nostalgic and for anyone who lined up for American movies in that bygone golden age.

The first feature-length movie from Bhutan tells its lighthearted story through smart performances, appealing images, and unfailing good humor.

Mood, atmosphere, and character are more important than story twists in this unassuming, acutely observant drama.

This astoundingly beautiful Korean production is poignant, original, and engrossing.

A must-see account that casts a harshly illuminating light on a key period of recent American history.

Hollywood censors made Wilder reshoot one scene, but the original version has been rediscovered; while it's tame by today's standards, it makes the movie's caustic social commentary more potent than ever.

Superbly cast, evocatively directed.

Everything about this subtly directed drama enhances its pathos and humor, especially an astonishing performance by Gorintin, a 90-something woman only a few years into her acting career.

The filmmaker keeps things lively by roaming far and wide with her camera, returning to the statesmanship side of the documentary often enough to let us follow relevant events as they unfold.

A lousy title for a marvelous movie.

It reconfirms Marker as one of the most serious-minded and artistically gifted filmmakers in France, or anywhere else.