A triumph of psychological drama, owing as much to Ms. Bier's sensitive style as to Anders Thomas Jensen's smart screenplay, based on Bier's own story idea.

Like all this adventurous filmmaker's work, it's truly one of a kind.

You run across animation this ingenious about as often as a moving castle comes your way.

A lyrical, yet intensely rooted, tragic vision.

A smart and scary voyage into the uncanny realm where hard realities,mind-spinning myths, and hallucinatory visions blur.

This low-key drama is a miracle of mood, atmosphere, and sensitivity.

Expressively filmed story of rivalry, romance, and cultural conflict.

Like its star, it's quietly sincere and compulsively watchable.

The rhythms are Latin; the beats come from the heart. Miranda’s character-based story culminates with a twist that illustrates that home isn’t a locale, it’s a state of consciousness.

Barbet Schroeder directed the ingeniously made film, which weaves fact, hypothesis, and conjecture into a harrowing yet continually gripping and often highly amusing narrative. [12 Oct 1990]

Smart, funny, and splendidly acted.

Brilliantly acted, sumptuously filmed, and overflowing with mellifluous music.

Helen Mirren gives the mostly subtly expressive performance based on a living historical figure that I've ever seen.

A quintessential Mike Leigh performance. It deepens as it goes along until, in the end, in its final close-up, it overwhelms.

Harrowing, extremely disturbing at times, but brought to the screen in dazzling pop-art images that make the movie's grim content very much worth watching.

A travelogue unlike any other.

This strikingly unusual movie is at once an old-fashioned melodrama, a boldly stylized spectacle, and a very grim fairy tale, acted and directed with originality and flair.

Well worth seeing on the wide screen before its video release next year. It's guaranteed to take your breath away.

The secret to enjoying 8 Women is to check your analytical mind at the popcorn counter and settle back for almost two hours of cinematic mischief.

Feisty, funny, and smart.

Acted as a drama, paced like a ritual, filmed as a slice of rural Iranian life.

The timeless fairy tale about a young woman who agrees to dwell with a mysterious monster, as interpreted in 1946 by one of cinema's most brilliant visual stylists and mythmakers.

The result is a history lesson both invaluable and horrific.

Concise, humane documentary.

Superbly acted, movingly written, and directed with a tough-minded lyricism rarely found in today's films. A summer movie to love.

Mastroianni gives what might be the greatest performance of his legendary career, making an ideal focus of attention for Fellini's cinematic pyrotechnics. [09 Apr 1999, p.14]

Stay far, far away unless you can handle the copious amounts of blood--and agonizing psychological problems-- that its participants face on what seems like a daily basis.

An astonishingly fine movie about the vagaries and frolics of childhood as seen largely through the eyes of its pint-sized protagonists.

Anderson fulfills the promise of his inventive "Bottle Rocket" with this quirky, often hilarious comedy, and Murray gives his most uproarious performance since the groundbreaking "Groundhog Day."

The movie elegantly mingles drama, comedy, and low-key spiritual resonance. It also has a splendid cast.

On the personal betrayals that accompany Capote's ache for literary transcendence. The betrayals were necessary to create "In Cold Blood." This is why Capote is such an unsettlingly ambiguous experience.

It is quite likely the greatest Shakespearean film ever and, except for Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, it’s also Welles’s greatest film – which is saying something.

Pure fun.

Riveting and revealing whatever views you have on the partisan issues involved.

Rohmer's films are renowned for their beauty, so it's surprising that he made a picture using digital video rather than film. But this was the right choice.

Soldier's Daughter thrives less on Hollywood-style drama than on nuances of personality, details of everyday life, and emotions so commonplace that conventional movies rarely take the time to acknowledge them, much less explore them with loving care.

Like all masterpieces, it speaks to later ages as powerfully and intelligently as to its own.

Iwai's ambitious drama is strikingly shot, poignantly acted by a splendid young cast, and enriched by surprising use of Debussy classics on the soundtrack.

One of a kind, turning Foreman trademarks such as self-satirical acting and out-of-nowhere music into powerful elements of an outlandish story.

A marvelous documentary that brings home the terror and heroism brought forth by the Katrina debacle.

Before Midnight is the fullest and richest and saddest of the three movies in the trilogy. Make it a quartet, I say.

Kaurismaki is Finland's greatest filmmaker, and never has he more artfully balanced his patented blend of deadpan humor, low-key melodrama, and toe-tapping music.

It's a transcendently uplifting tragedy.

This is as challenging as movies come, alluding to everything from philosopher Thomas Hobbes to the history of Western music.

Brett Morgen’s documentary Jane brings Goodall’s ineffable and incredible story to vivid life, starting with the aforementioned anecdotes as, now in her 80s and still seraphically beautiful, she recalls with an almost ethereal calm the extraordinariness of her days.

It's no accident that this movie is named after both the filmmaker and his subject. It stands with the most thoughtful releases of recent months, and will linger in memory.

A Separation is not the work of a constrained artist. It's a great movie in which the full range of human interaction seems to play itself out before our eyes.

I have rarely seen a movie that better expressed the revivifying nature of music. (Many of the women, not surprisingly, grew up singing gospel in church choirs and had preachers for parents.)

Such understated storytelling, sensitive directing, and avoidance of easy filmmaking tricks are all too rare in American movies. This is truly one from the heart.

This is a startlingly funny portrait of Gothic Americana.

Van Sant gives no pat or easy answers. Instead he makes us squirm, worry, and think. That's why Elephant is a must-see movie.

Improbably, it's one of the most affecting films of the year, which once again demonstrates that all you need to make a good movie is talent.

Superbly acted.

Among the picture's many surprises is a superb robbery scene filmed in a near-total silence that contrasts exhilaratingly with the noisy flamboyance of more recent films in this venerable genre.

Pinter's screenplay offers an exciting mixture of psychological suspense and storytelling surprise, and the lead performances are close to flawless.

This documentary strives to fill the gap, and the result is memorable; viewing is mandatory.

Less a biography than an essay on theatrical illusion and the changing nature of comedy. Love it or hate it, you've never seen anything quite like it.

Riveting documentary about the early California cable outlet and its ingenious programmer, Jerry Harvey, whose unsettled life and tragic death provide a dramatic framework for the account.

On the screen, Burton turns out to BE the ideal filmmaker for this deliciously bizarre yarn. He's given free rein to his fantasies in past movies, but rarely as wittily and consistently as he does here.

The suspense isn't exactly breathtaking, but there are some mighty fine laughs in this clever Claymation cartoon.Family fun for all.

While this isn't a masterpiece on the level of his great "Chunhyang," it packs a sophisticated cinematic punch.

Like most of Sokurov's movies, this oblique parable is mysterious, elliptical, irresistible.

Morris's unique blend of realism and surrealism gives the film great resonance as a portrait of one eccentric individual and, more important, a study of the morbid proclivities that run beneath the surface of our supposedly civilized society.

Perhaps the most cogent and straightforward dissection of the Bush Administration missteps leading up to the current Iraq nightmare.

Excellent acting, intelligent screenwriting, and dynamic filmmaking give this Mexican production a forceful emotional and intellectual charge.

Chilling and instructive.

Contains amazingly candid views of warriors behind the scenes of battle.

Troell, at 78, continues to turn out films that will last for as long as there are movies. No wonder he feels such a deep connection to Maria in Everlasting Moments. The film is one hero's salute to another.

Three short documentaries about photography made by one of France's finest directors.

This masterpiece of poetic realism features one of Gabin's most renowned performances, a smart subtext about French colonialism, and enough exotic atmosphere to keep your head in the clouds long after the final scene.

The movie should fascinate anyone interested in politics, publishing, and the uneasy marriage between big money and mass communication.

It's dark, funny, ferocious, and vintage Wilder all the way.

Avoiding the clichés and condescension that characterize many films on religious figures, the movie is at once a compelling drama and a thoughtful look at faith-related issues on personal, social, and cultural levels.

Directed by Ulu Grosbard, who has never done a better job of filling the screen with superb acting, and shows great ingenuity at interweaving music with other aspects of the story.

At its best, A Home at the End of the World has great emotional strength. But it's not the towering achievement it might have been if Cunningham had stayed truer to his original inspiration.

Visually ravishing -- an exquisite movie.

Subtle filmmaking and true-as-life acting make this an acute psychological drama with an engrossing sociological subtext. It stands with Doillon's best work.

A fact-filled study that's also a full-fledged work of cinema art. [2 Sept 1988]

Provides an intelligent, deeply personal view of social and political issues that are longstanding and complex but not, she insists, intractable.

The Ballad of Wallis Island is both modest and magical. One of its co-stars, Carey Mulligan, has described its tone as a “gentle euphoria.” That phrase perfectly expresses how this wonderful movie – directed by James Griffiths from a script by Tom Basden and Tim Key – transports us.

Revealing and harrowing.

The legendary Mifune leads a superb cast, and Kurosawa's kinetic camera keeps the adventure sizzling with energy and wit from start to finish.

Gunda is one of the most immersive and eye-widening documentaries I’ve ever seen.

It’s the ultimate time-travel movie into the future, a “flowing time sculpture,” in Linklater’s own words.

The Wild Robot, above all else, isn’t just a life story. It’s a love story about community and intimacy, about what can be imitated, but never duplicated. It is the quintessential fable. Like any great parent, it offers lessons while remaining fun. The wilderness might be harsh, but we don’t have to be.

Movies don't come more original, inventive, or outlandishly entertaining.

Writer/director Peter Duncan's first film is darkly humorous, with dashes of slapstick, brilliant, and original material.

The film medium has often been discussed in academic terms as a vehicle to contain the passage of time. But “Three Minutes” does much more than that. Although it raises all sorts of issues about the nature of the film image and how it can affect us, it is also the least theoretical of movies. We are bearing witness.

It's great, fantastical fun.

Baker is a humanist – there is nothing exploitative about what he does here. He’s after deeper emotional truths.

Blurring all the lines between fiction and documentary, this gentle and amusing movie blends real, unrehearsed material with delightful storytelling scenes.

Junge's testimony is a salutary reminder that Hitler was like other people in ways, and that the evil he manifested could visit us again if more civilized humans don't remain watchful.

Thai filmmaking continues its renaissance with this moody, offbeat drama.

Fascinating.

Dumont's cinematic style is aggressively physical and philosophical at the same time. It irritates as many viewers as it inspires, but it prompts more thought than ordinary movies ever do.

Filmed and acted to near perfection, it's one of the year's most innovative and exciting pictures.

John Schlesinger's rollicking version of Stella Gibbons's novel is acted with the highest of spirits by Kate Beckinsale, Joanna Lumley, Eileen Atkins, Ian McKellen, Freddie Jones, and many others.

It takes time to grow accustomed to the docu- drama's stylized approach, influenced by Bertolt Brecht and Jean-Luc Godard. But this nearly six-hour movie is generous with time.