It’s the moral imperative of the found-footage formalism that sets REC apart, transforming Angela’s camera from a visceral instrument of voyeurism into a tragic, last-gasp tool of truth and justice.

Rather than take a histrionic approach, Lee trusts his four-hour running time, allowing the evidence of governmental indifference and incompetence to quietly pile up until it becomes cumulatively enraging.

It’s probably unwise to come to Leone looking for too much in the way of feminism. Instead, Once Upon a Time in the West offers quintessential examples of the things he was better known for, including another blustery Ennio Morricone score. Visually, he mostly vacillates between extreme close-ups of intense faces and vast widescreen compositions, a technique that is lurching but also luridly beautiful.

By the movie’s end, the aching mixture of loneliness and desire transcends the immanent to embrace the metaphysical, a move that is a Weerasethakul signature.

Dark—with a black wit to match—this serial-killer thriller from director Bong Joon-Ho functions clinically as a genre exercise, while also holding persuasive power as a stark meditation on police corruption.

Wild is a relative term for Wong Kar-wai, the master of cinematic languor. You can feel the tension in his second film between genre excitement (there are jarring bursts of violence) and the languid sort of yearning that would become his trademark. These Days of Being Wild are both electric and exhausted.

Ramsay, whose Ratcatcher was noxiously obsessed with the miseries of life in a 1970s Glasgow housing complex, finds a locus in Morvern’s stunned grief. Morvern Callar is equally bleak, but to a purpose.

The movie manages both senses of scale—the intimate and the expansive—with equal majesty, merging them into something moving, mesmerizing, and poetic, in a way only Lean movies could really manage.

Andersson catalogs misery of many kinds, and aside from the moments of humor in the film he offers no balm.

Considering this is a remake of a superior 1997 Norwegian film, director Christopher Nolan doesn’t create anything nearly as inventive as his Memento, but at least Insomnia is expertly conventional.

The movie’s best moments – especially those involving the futile acorn hunt of a squirrel/rat – are those in which [Wedge’s] wicked wit shines through.

Ramsay has a gifted eye—the opening shot, of a boy twisting himself in a lacy curtain, is a stunner—and she establishes an undeniably vivid sense of place, yet there is a gravitation toward the tragic and repugnant that goes beyond description and toward a place of awed fascination.

Nothing that occurs is out of the realm of ordinary experience—there is a wedding, a grandmother’s stroke, money troubles, a funeral—yet it all reverberates with meaning because of the camera’s careful attention and the sensitive performances by every actor in the ensemble cast.

It might be corny, but the basketball nerd in me can’t resist their rivalrously romantic games of one on one, which is a sweet motif throughout the film.

Does Close-Up reveal the truth? I’d prefer to say it reveals the beauty of distortion.

The deeper American Beauty tries to get, the shallower it reveals itself to be.

Children of Heaven is a simple film – it has bold, childlike colors and a narrative that turns on unremarkable, everyday events – yet Majidi and his young actors invest it with such basic truth about the inner lives of children that the movie feels as big as the universe.

Even for a Wong Kar-wai film, Fallen Angels is lavishly stylized.

Wong captures this in his usual, expressive style, employing black and white at times and staggering the frame rate to accentuate heightened moments (including an aching slide into slow motion as the two men share a cigarette).

There’s no denying that Cage and Travolta are having a blast with what is essentially an acting thought experiment. They’re both fantastic.

Campion’s camera captures the sort of things most costume dramas are too fussy to notice: mirrors and windows that bifurcate Isabel’s distressed face; the bleary darkness of her home with Osmond, where the doors close behind her like those of a tomb; a slide into slow motion when one character smells a flower that has been given to her and another character crucially notices.

There are enough issues here for three films by a perennial provoker like Lee, and critics will undoubtedly accuse him of throwing too much fuel on the fire. But this time, aided by Reggie Rock Bythewood’s thoughtful script, Lee’s ambition pays off. With 15 men squeezed together on a single bus, issues such as racism, homophobia and responsibility are tackled as they would be in real life: fitfully, passionately, derisively and, above all, hilariously.

Scales glisten, legs scuttle, antennae unfurl, all in a symphony of exquisite shapes and inhuman motion. Watching the movie is like peering into a living kaleidoscope.

With or without special effects, Twister delivers the same sort of suspense that’s been a staple of good drama since storytelling began.

Right out of the gate—and even working within the modern Hong Kong gangster genre—Wong Kar-wai burst onto the screen as a strikingly unique talent. This is clearly a filmmaker less interested in plot and dialogue than he is in movement, music, and color—no matter the time, place, or story.

James and the Giant Peach is a wondrous interpretation of Dahl’s book that revives the magical possibilities of film while liberating our own imaginations as well.

Everything we see in Welcome to the Dollhouse is filtered through Dawn’s heightened perspective. There is one explicit fantasy sequence, but really the whole movie could be taken as a hormonal exaggeration. Solondz and Matarazzo may offer the cringiest middle-school experience imaginable, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

Whatever ineffable thing Wong Wong Kar-wai does—let’s call it despondent extravagance—he distilled it into its purest form with Chungking Express.