I have no idea how this movie’s source material, a play by Claudine Galea, might have worked onstage, in part because Amalric seems to have so fully unlocked the story’s cinematic potential.

A stunning, stylish detective mystery in the classic Raymond Chandler/Ross Macdonald mold. [02 Sep 1990, p.72]

How this all played out in terms of the Austrian election will surprise no one, but seeing how much the situation came to prefigure the contemporary house of mirrors in Europe as well as America still comes as something of a shock.

This moving, probing, beautifully written film doesn’t completely eschew nostalgia, but like Ernaux’s books, it treats the past as a prism, casting varying light depending on how, when and where it’s held.

As viewers of his Enron film will testify, Gibney is a scrupulous director, and Taxi to the Dark Side is filled with detailed factual information.

While there is barely a story to tie it all together, The Mirror finds connections in the longings of Alexei. He longs to understand his past, his land, his family, his inspirations and fears, and that’s what the movie is able to convey in its abstract but persuasive way.

The real skill in Lane’s colorful tale about self-made millionaire, “inventor” and maverick John R. Brinkley is that it revels in how fun it is to believe in the unbelievable, and how sinisterly effective the mixture of fact and fiction can be. That includes, Lane eventually reveals, documentaries themselves.

Fresh, virulently funny, with an eye on life that's as offbeat as the early Beatles movies, the talents behind the bizarre and irreverent Repo Man are a real discovery. [16 Nov 1986, p.5]

It lacks the control of Guadagnino’s earlier work — or rather, I should say, it takes subtlety and restraint and thwacks them over the fence and into the bushes.

Pig is a rich character study, marked by several riveting Cage monologues.

Give Me Liberty is remarkable not just for its authenticity but for the way it serves up that authenticity sans self-congratulation. There are no showboating gestures here, only a bone-deep commitment to showing us the lives of individuals often relegated to the cinematic sidelines, to the extent that the movies even notice them all.

Beautiful untruths and half-truths abound in Michael Almereyda’s quietly shimmering new movie.

As a stripped-down, minutely detailed portrait of the daily grind as back-breaking Sisyphean ordeal, “Sorry We Missed You” is engrossing and bluntly persuasive. I was less convinced by the family dynamics.

The film is a vital historical corrective, inscribing the names of these women into history as the innovators, independent thinkers and trailblazers they were.

This two-part, three-hour film is marked by immediacy and breadth, as if an on-the-fly news bulletin had naturally morphed into the richest of character-driven sagas.

Steve Jobs is a smart, hugely entertaining film that all but bristles with crackling creative energy. What it is not is a standard biopic.

What Marley and its wonderful performance footage leave you with most of all is the joy the man took in the music that set him free and enchanted the world.

Director Demme has done other potent and meaningful films, but The Agronomist defers to none of them in its effectiveness and its power.

It's a nervy, quasi-documentary scheme that's often successful, perhaps more so than you'd expect for this kind of a hybrid endeavor. But Macdonald's technique eventually turns out to be as distancing as it is involving, paradoxically undercutting the reality as often as it enhances it.

Buster Keaton isn't dead, he's alive and well in Finland, where under a new identity he pursues his own particular brand of deadpan absurdism to wonderful effect. If the name Aki Kaurismäki doesn't mean anything to you, it should, and Le Havre may be the film to make it happen.

The Holdovers is a flat, phony, painfully diagrammatic movie masquerading as a compassionate, humane one.

For how well this finely crafted work captures the pressures of inner-city poverty, single-parent families and abusive relationships, one of its strengths lies in its ability to also gracefully locate the drama in filling out a college application.

A migrant worker’s journal opens up a world for a disaffected teenager, and us, in Araby, a beautifully turned Brazilian movie that carries on as if a social-cause documentary and a folk song confessional had entered into a poignant embrace.

By zooming in and out of his protagonist’s consciousness, Marder casts aside any pretense of omniscience; he empathizes, but he also knows when to detach. Ruben’s journey is a privilege to witness, but it’s one he’ll ultimately have to walk alone.

Beautiful, strange, disturbing, Embrace of the Serpent is a film with a lot on its mind.

In artist Titus Kaphar’s emotionally knotty, semi-autobiographical directorial debut about hurt and resilience — and, of course, making art — we get a refreshingly bone-deep view of how someone can be saved by the act of creation, yet flummoxed by its therapeutic limitations.

A nearly three-hour talkfest that plays out in something close to real time may sound daunting on paper, but if you can make it past the opening shot, you will find yourself gripped for the duration.

If Alfred Hitchcock's 1926 "The Lodger" lacks the intense suspense and dynamic fluidity of the Hitchcock classics, it is nonetheless a remarkably assured third film and the first he considered truly his own. [13 Aug 1996, p.F10]

Working from an excellent screenplay (by Chika-ura and Keita Kumano) that’s a finely tuned model of narrative empathy, and boasting an all-timer portrait of decline by the great Tatsuya Fuji (“In the Realm of the Senses”), it conveys both keen insight into a tough situation and, at the same time, intriguingly lets some workings of the heart and mind remain impenetrable.

The tonal shifts can be so abrupt as to induce whiplash, not to mention a kind of moral and narrative chaos, which seems to be very much to the movie’s point. The rich, tumultuous history of Black life over the past century could certainly find a worse cinematic analogue than this heady swirl of wry comedy, seductive music, ferocious argument and devastating carnage.

A patchwork of impressions, ruminations and unsolved mysteries, The Last Black Man in San Francisco teems and even overflows with life and love, some might argue at the cost of narrative focus or momentum. That strikes me as precisely the point.

As directed by Rachid Bouchareb, himself born in France to Algerian immigrants, "Days of Glory" is a kind of a North African "Saving Private Ryan," a taut, involving film that delivers all the things we look for in war movies and does so with intelligence and integrity.

Two teen girls forge an explosive connection in a compelling Pawel Pawlikowski film.

If there is a reason to cherish this often captivating, sometimes irritating, unavoidably perplexing movie, it's that its mere existence seems to defy rational explanation. It is by turns savage and soulful, mangy and refined, possessed of an unmistakable pedigree and yet boldly resistant to categorization. It's a shaggy Frankenmutt of a movie, dressed in artisanal fur and infested by bespoke fleas.

Filmmaking at its most fearless, with Ostergaard creating a suspenseful, harrowing account of his original key subject, known only as "Joshua."

While the plot twists in Read My Lips may be too intensely melodramatic for some tastes, the performances of the two leads are impeccable, just about compelling our belief.

While most films are fortunate if they succeed on any level, The Return works easily on several, making as powerful a mark emotionally as it does visually and even allegorically. Yet the film so catches you up in its compelling story, you're almost not aware of how masterful a piece of cinema you're watching.

People fall in love in every country, but nowhere is the experience put on film with the flawless style, empathy and emotion the French provide. Mademoiselle Chambon is the latest in that line of deeply moving romances, an exquisite chamber piece made with the kind of sensitivity and nuance that's become almost a lost art.

The storytelling is straightforward, with a classical sheen, even as mischief and hallucination puncture the serene surface.

Masterfully keying the compact performances into a striking lighting scheme that often bathes the musicians and dancers in warm golden or somber indigo hues representing the cycle of life, Saura's spare, elegant staging and the fluid, intimate cinematography by the great Vittorio Storaro ("Apocalypse Now") create an intoxicating effect.

Reichardt has never been one to reduce her characters to an easy emotional or dramatic equation, and here the everyday challenge of being female in a male-dominated profession is just one element on an extraordinarily fine-grained human canvas.

Awe-inspiring visuals and equally stirring orchestrations combine to fittingly majestic effect in Mountain, a unique portrait of mankind's enduring fascination with the world's most formidable summits.

A film that understands childhood-to-adolescence as few films do, with dark and loving affection. [12 July 1987]

In an era when AIDS research still seems in its infancy and bacteria and viruses seem to now be able to outwit science's most powerful arsenal, there may be lessons to be learned here. And they're told with great feeling and fine craftsmanship. [15 Apr 1994, p.F24]

As the summer heats up, let Frozen River wash over you; let its bracing drama and the intensity of its acting restore your spirits as well as your faith in American independent film.

Drugstore Cowboy, an electrifying movie without one misstep or one conventional moment. [11 Oct 1989]

The gently transcendent, tear-inducing conclusion that “Little Amélie” reaches suggests that memory serves as our only remedy for loss. As long as we don’t forget, what we cherish won’t become ephemeral.

Heal the Living reveals a gift for joining skillful visual filmmaking with moving, affecting storytelling, all in the service of a story that unfolds in surprising ways.

In the hands of two of the craft's best, the most ordinary of moments become illuminating, penetrating.

The geopolitical landscape has changed dramatically in the last few months since this sleek, smartly assembled and almost indecently entertaining movie premiered at the Sundance Film Festival (where it won two audience awards), and as a result, it can feel timely and outdated, relevant and redundant, disturbing and escapist all at once.

“Girl” is a welcome reminder that animation doesn’t have to be synonymous with realistically rendered CG, but can be a means of artistic expression as uniquely personal as a signature.

Combining Hou's patient, observant style with a historical martial arts tale, the film is a fascinating hybrid of craft, genre and story. Beautiful to look at and with deeply felt emotions, the film has a meditative aura punctured by sharp bouts of fighting.

[A] fascinating film.

Late Marriage will assuredly rank as one of the cleverest, most deceptively amusing comedies of the year.

This utterly compelling behind-the-scenes account of that horrific event unfolds with a potent sense of authority and authenticity.

It's a highly enjoyable spree that doesn't add up to a whole lot by the end. But you don't necessarily want it to add up to anything -- that's part of its charm. [24 Sept 1993]

The film's septuagenarian director deserves his share of the credit for bringing this human story to the screen with engaging B-movie modesty and no small measure of chops.

Madeline’s Madeline is the product of a lengthy, improvisation-heavy collaboration between Decker and her star, an astonishing teenage discovery named Helena Howard. It is also a skillful and imaginative blurring of fact and fiction, albeit one that insistently calls the act of such blurring into question.

In its subtlety, complexity and dexterity, Requiem is a notably original work.

The piercingly realistic Captain Phillips will exceed your expectations.

A masterpiece of bromantic woes, the movie subdues toxic masculinity and makes a case for men’s often dismissed necessity for platonic companionship.

The ability to pull off that kind of moral reversal, to draw you into an almost Hitchcockian complicity with characters at their lowest ebb, is one of Farhadi’s signature strengths as a storyteller.

Off-and-on cynical and sentimental, Russell's darkly comic tale shows how much can be done with familiar material when you're burning to do things differently and have the gifts to pull that off.

Like his memorable period freakouts “The Witch” and “The Lighthouse,” though on a vastly more ambitious scale, The Northman is both a dazzling display of film craft and a sly retooling of genre, a movie that delights in fulfilling certain conventions while turning others on their artfully severed heads.

Sentimentality and violence have gone hand-in-hand from the beginning of the movies, but seldom have they been carried to such extremes and played against each other with such effectiveness as in writer-director John Woo’s The Killer (Nuart), an example of the highly addictive, supercharged, go-for-broke Hong Kong cinema at its most deliberately outrageous.

The sly genius of Întregalde is how readily its characters — who can be cruel and decent, self-serving and well-meaning, often in the same instance — encourage the viewer to take their own moral inventory.

In its focused glimpse into a strange, funny-sad friendship, it’s almost mesmerizingly nonjudgmental as it treks to a very dark place.

Although informed by the busy workings of history, politics and personal affairs, Neruda proceeds like a light-footed chase thriller filtered through an episode of “The Twilight Zone,” by the end of which the audience is lost in a crazily spiraling meta-narrative. Who exactly is the star and author of that narrative is one of the film’s more enticing mysteries.

In an attempt to be both modern and traditional, this gorgeously made film ends up betwixt and between.

It’s a quietly shattering place All Shall Be Well goes to, in which a time of consoling devolves into petty matters of consolation.

An idiosyncratic, metaphysical meditation on tennis, cinema, human behavior, maybe even life itself, "Perfection" at times risks being too pleased with itself for its own good, but its one-of-a-kind credentials are never in doubt.

A Walk to Beautiful will leave you speechless two times over -- first with despair, then with joy. Neither unmentionable subject matter nor nonexistent commercial prospects can keep this documentary from having a power over your heart that is unparalleled.

The filmmaker constructs a growing sense of dread with the calculated precision of a classic horror movie.

Ten Canoes is nonetheless audacious and impressive, but challenging work, requiring steadfast concentration.

Franҫois Ozon, with abiding respect for the high-wattage brilliance of his countryman’s spartan masterpiece about an apathetic killer, has given us a movie adaptation that does daylight-noir justice to its alluring mysteries, while threading in some freshly necessary political context.

Suffused with a painterly tenderness and cruelty, the French film Gilles' Wife - based on a 1937 Belgian novel by Madeleine Bourdouxhe - stars the extraordinary actress Emmanuelle Devos.

Oliver Sacks: His Own Life is a moving portrait of a man taking deep stock of his life with great satisfaction and verve. It

The Maid has that particular gift of leaving you off balance in the best possible way, and whenever something like that comes around you owe it to yourself to check it out.

A film as arresting and at times as frustrating as the Pistols themselves.

The multiple perspectives in Hold Your Fire add up to a fascinating look back at a still-raging debate over the true purpose of policing.

By turns thrilling, disorienting and draining, Sicario exists in a border zone seemingly of its own devising between the art film and the action movie.

The resulting genre stew is rich and flavorsome, if also somewhat chunky and uneven. The characters are thinly drawn by design, but Mendonça Filho and Dornelles know how to use the magnetism of their actors to maximum advantage.

Those accustomed to the sort of grandly executed, tightly paced escape/rescue sequences that tend to go with the territory will have to acclimate themselves to the film’s more subdued rhythms, but in time, the quietly unassuming, character-rich approach pays some affecting dividends.

The film's not for everyone's tastes but is extremely well done. [04 Aug 2003, p.3]

An exceptional film, at once disturbing and elevating, deliberate yet powerful.

As the film focuses more tightly on [Ressa], it becomes a more gripping document. And it certainly is gripping, as the cloud of menace threatening her becomes firmer.

With its focus on domestic interiors (and interior lives), the movie doesn't simply recall Akerman's past efforts; it reveals their roots.

It may sound commonplace, but in the hands of master filmmaker Mike Leigh, the everyday becomes extraordinary.

It’s an insightful, deeply felt film that lets us in on a personal evolution.

An involving portrait of what's called "one of the world's most powerful knowledge-producing institutions" and an examination on how that institution is coping with a significant financial crisis.

As shaped by Villeneuve and his masterful creative team, especially production designer Dennis Gassner and cinematographer Roger Deakins, this film puts you firmly, brilliantly, unassailably in another world of its own devising, and that is no small thing.

Heartening and unashamedly emotional, it's a certified crowd pleaser that doesn't care who knows it.

Writer-director Michael Almereyda, whose "Hamlet" and "Cymbeline" boldly reimagined Shakespeare, takes a stylized visual approach in Experimenter, with bracing results.

No matter what is going on, Hansen-Love's talent for bringing us inside a specific world makes Eden an experience we all can connect to.

Their (Kim Bartley and Donnacha Ó Briain ) remarkable true-life footage makes this 74-minute film as potent as behemoths twice its size.

A rich, unnerving film, as comic as it is astringent, that in its own quiet way works up a considerable emotional charge. [8 Oct 1993]

The jokes would be funny even if they weren't perfectly timed, but what makes them come across as so poignant is the seriousness with which the director and his co-conspirators deliver their jabs and japes.

Angkor Awakens won’t wow you with artfulness, but as an analytical narrative of tragedy, testimony and a way ahead, it has an undeniable power.