A fascinating nonfiction voyage into rural and urban France, focusing on idiosyncratic individuals who live off things the rest of us throw away, from food to furniture.

A lot of emotional weight is packed into this seriocomic ramble if you know where to look.

Politics and humanism find an engrossing balance in this ambitious drama based on the life of Reinaldo Arenas, a gay Cuban poet who was persecuted by the homophobic Castro regime.

Few American filmmakers put more faith in the ability of words to stimulate mind and heart.

Lowery never needed to convince audiences that Gawain was worthy; Patel did all that himself, extracting the dignity that was within Gawain from the beginning.

Montgomery Clift is at his very best as Pvt. Robert E. Lee Prewitt, a career soldier stationed in Honolulu just prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, in this 1953 adaptation of James Jones's classic novel, directed by Fred Zinnemann with the utmost grace. [3 March 2006, p.12]

Director Paul Greengrass downplays the movie's travelogue aspects by repeating the bobbly, hand-held camera style he used on "The Bourne Supremacy." It's not a style I'm fond of.

Begins frighteningly and gets progressively more so.

Farhadi’s new film, The Salesman, isn’t his best, or even second best, but it offers up glints of what, at times, makes him one of the best directors around.

Wittily written and deliciously acted, Lonergan's debut film is a clear cut above the average.

Has a sense of emotional urgency and deep-dwelling grief.

What makes Get Out more than just a slam-bang scarefest is that, in its own darkly satiric way, it is also a movie about racial paranoia that captures the zeitgeist in ways that many more “prestigious” movies don’t.

Despite its blunt characterizations and simplifications, City of Life and Death, through the inexorable pileup of gruesome detail, achieves an epic vision of horror.

Spielberg and Kushner were right to bring modern attitudes to this beloved warhorse. Their movie, at its best, isn’t just a remake. It’s a rethink.

The plot may be a bit too busy, but a great wash of transcendent imagery floods the screen. If I had to recommend the best children’s film out there for all ages, this one, and “The Tale of Princess Kaguya,” would easily top the charts.

A powerful, and powerfully sad, experience.

Intermittently powerful drama explores a cross-cultural estrangement.

As thin and jokey as this movie often is, I prefer it to the serioso treatment that usually encrusts this type of material. At its best, The Savages captures the lunacy that comes with coping with sorrow.

The topic is well-suited to the Maysles brothers, who helped pioneer reality-centered "direct cinema" techniques.

Bracingly perceptive about the human comedy.

This is not the sort of movie that offers up immediate gratifications, though there are some of those. Instead, it moves along with a steady grace. Its ruminative power creeps up on you.

Burnham avoids most of the “Mean Girls”-style tropes in favor of a more gently humorous and nuanced approach.

Whatever it is, Exit Through the Gift Shop is an original.

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.

One of the most dreamily unsettling documentaries ever made.

The interaction between soldiers and captives becomes a microcosm for an entire culture. It's a wisp of a movie but it has stayed with me longer than much supposedly weightier fare.

Bob Hoskins doesn't succeed at making the hero's wild mood swings credible, but Cathy Tyson makes the most stunning screen debut in recent memory. The movie seems genuinely saddened, moreover, by its own nasty view of London lowlife. [13 June 1986, p.25]

Sweep aside the gross-outs and you've got the family values comedy of the year.

Superb acting and authentic details energize this rare Iran/Iraq coproduction.

DiCaprio's performance is a revelation only for those who have underestimated him. In Scorsese's previous films, "The Gangs of New York" and "The Aviator," he seemed callow and miscast, but here he has the presence of a full-bodied adult. He's grown into his emotions.

Kim's movie conjures a sense of spiritual discipline as suspenseful as it is stunning to watch and exhilarating to contemplate.

Full of bright colors, offbeat people, tuneful sounds.

It's a beautifully modulated performance of a man whose presence, at times, seems on the verge of vanishing – not a bad attribute for a spy.

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.

Best where it counts the most - in its recognition of how difficult it will be for Dan and Drey to turn their lives around.

An amazing, galvanic experience. It's about the hushed-up story of Benito Mussolini's first wife and child, but no one will ever mistake this movie for a standard biopic. It's too raw, too primal.

Excellent acting, a stirring screenplay, and crisply intelligent directing make this fact-based movie a great human drama as well as a riveting and revealing look at crucially important social issues.

As one of Booker's supporters notes, it's a sad day when academic success is used to denigrate an African-American.

Results are illuminating, harrowing, and riveting.

The movie is a portrait, not a polemic -- but I can't imagine an attentive viewer leaving Love & Diane without increased understanding and concern with regard to inner-city life.

Nicholson makes the movie so poignant that it's hard to resist, but I wonder if Payne and Taylor are rejecting the skeptical attitudes of their other films to become more popular, hoping a softer emotional tone will help this picture win the Oscars that have eluded their more tough-minded works.

A walloping entertainment, brimming with the magic-realist action that made Ang Lee's somewhat similar "Couching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" a hit.

The film periodically risks turning into a swoony fantasy. But it is a fantasy we can favor because it’s one we all can share.

All in all, a visual and musical feast.

The movie is admirable in its ambitions; in its execution, less so. The difficulty in making an “intimate” epic is that the characters have to fill out the frame in ways that are both highly individualized and symbolic. They have to be both lifelike and larger-than-life. In Mudbound, this combination works only fitfully.

The film is a real rarity, made even more so by the fact that what has moved us so profoundly are a bunch of pop-eyed plasticine figures.

Cameron's imaginative directing and screen-shaking performance give this rock musical plenty of oomph.

This is the kind of it-can-mean-whatever-you-want-it-to-mean art film that I usually run from, but Carax is such a prodigiously gifted mesmerist that, if you give way, you're likely to be enfolded in the film's phantasmagoria.

Plays out its drama with enough old-fashioned sobriety to lend the proceedings a classical air, offering the comfort of familiarity rather than the thrill of discovery. [13 Aug 1992]

This comic-book movie is more disturbing, and has more freakish power, than anything else I've seen all year.

The emotional stakes are large-scale, and Farhadi honors them by delving into their intricacies.

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

Vanessa Redgrave, as the adult Briony, appears at the very end in a monologue that rounds out the film with heartbreaking force.

If I had to give a two-word review of Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, it would be: "Wow! Huh??"

Spielberg is such a supersleek craftsman that what might have been intended as a deep dive instead comes across for the most part as a sprightly gloss.

Surely the best fiction film ever made on a jazz subject.

A cross between "Godzilla" and "Jaws," it manages to be both truly scary and truly funny – sometimes all at once.

There's some sexually tinged humor and a bit of foul language, but most of the action is lightheaded fun. The picture also has a striking visual style - showing what a strong talent Almod'ovar can be when he focuses his energy on cinematic values, instead of dreaming up provocative stunts that put his work beyond the pale for many moviegoers.

Because the war in Afghanistan is so much in the news now – it should always have been so – a movie like Restrepo is both a bracing document and, in a larger sense, a disappointment.

Directed by Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky with the same unearthly visual style, and the same mingled concern with technology and psychology, that he showed in his towering ''Solaris'' a few years ago.

This remarkably clever, often hilarious animation derives much of its humor from its satirical view of the 1950s.

Morgan Neville’s movie is more than just a chronicle of Rogers’s career. In some not-quite-definable way, the film itself is all of a piece with Rogers’s principled gentleness. It’s a love letter, but the sentiment and affection that pour through the film is honestly arrived at, even when, near the end, the film threatens to turn into the cinematic equivalent of a group hug.

For a movie about hard-driving pioneers, there is nevertheless much existential ennui in the air.

The only character in the film who seems to have the requisite gravity is Oscar’s mother, Wanda (the marvelous Octavia Spencer), whose scene with her son in San Quentin is as hard-bitten as the rest of the film isn’t.

I’m Still Here is a movie about remembrance – of a family and a nation. The necessity to acknowledge injustice is its timeless clarion call.

With a minimum of actorly fuss, Winger shows us the rage and hurt inside this overcontrolled woman. It's a great piece of acting – high drama at the service of the highest talent.

This first-person account of suffering and survival among Hungarian victims of the Holocaust contains much stirring and revealing material, although the conventionality of its style diminishes the freshness and urgency of its content to a degree. [05 Feb 1999, p.14]

Edet Belzberg’s documentary Watchers of the Sky, which was a decade in the making, reclaims the reputation of Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Holocaust refugee who not only coined the term “genocide” but also invented the concept of categorizing mass murder as an international crime.

Weir had a truly magical touch in early films like this 1977 masterpiece, which offers a transfixing excursion into the "dream time" of Australian myth.

Victimization of homosexuals during the Holocaust era has often been overlooked. Epstein and Friedman lucidly recount this woeful history, with help from Everett's articulate narration.

Suspenseful and ingeniously directed.

Rarely does a movie combine so much genuine human drama with such vivid exemplifications of "identity politics" and other sociocultural issues.

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.

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.

The entire film has the glibness of a music video. Boyle has managed to make dire poverty seem glossy.

Masina gives one of her most expressive performances.

I'd be more inclined to call this French dysfunctional family epic gabby and preeningly self-indulgent – in a word, annoying.

Much of the action seems more like warmed-over Quentin Tarantino than first-rate Steven Soderbergh.

After seeing this film, try reading Norman Mailer's "Of A Fire on the Moon," its perfect companion piece.

A first-rate crime thriller from 1960.

It's never been topped.

What I ultimately took away from the documentary is the deep love that can exist between owners and their dogs. In The Truffle Hunters, both are shown to be the custodians of each other’s happiness.

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.

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.

A reasonably effective comedy-drama that squarely fits the usual Allen mold. [18 Sept 1992, p.12]

This riveting drama takes courageous stands against the senselessness of war and the brutality of capital punishment, leading to one of the most ironic climaxes in British cinema. [17 Apr 1997, p.12]

The paradox of Tarantino’s oeuvre is that it is highly derivative of other movies, mostly genre pulp, and yet the films seem distinctly his. He is the most influential director of his generation because he ranges promiscuously through pop culture and brings to his borrowings an incendiary force.

There are times in this lovely, complacent movie about uncomplacent circumstance when I wanted to be shaken up, and wasn’t.

It makes you nostalgic for the pangs of young love.

A crowd-pleaser in the best sense, it overflows with empathy for its beleaguered people.

Like O'Connor's other novel, The Violent Bear It Away, and some of her best short stories, Wise blood has a fierce momentum and a savage wit that stand alone in contemporary literature. The movie makes a good try at capturing these elusive elements. But ultimately it loses its balance, and many viewers may wonder whether its rewards are worth all its perversities. [07 Mar 1980, p.19]

Perhaps most heartening about Writing With Fire is how the film doesn’t discount the personal toll on these women. Crusaders though they may be, they voice throughout the film their deep doubts and fears.

While the movie is well acted and creative, its story and style are too self-consciously clever to build a high degree of emotional power.

The scene is so emotionally ravishing that it breaks you apart. The peacefulness that finally descends on Séraphine in the film's final moments is more than a balm. It's a benediction.

The passage of time has rarely been more forcefully conveyed in a movie, as we see clips of the interviewees not only from today but also at seven-year intervals from the past.

A ruthless dissection of suburban malaise.

As before, the movie is more impressive for its finely detailed vision of Los Angeles as a futuristic slum than for its story, acting, or message. It's all downhill after the first few eye-dazzling minutes. [2 Oct 1992]

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