What makes The Wailing so unusually disturbing is the almost palpable aura of evil it radiates from calm start to sorrowful finish. More disturbing still is the way that evil can seem indistinguishable from compassion.

Though drawn together by the thrill of infatuation, fostered by Isherwood's penchant for emergent male youth and Bachardy's awe of fame and glitz, the pair developed a durable love strengthened by nurturing and patience. In recounting this journey, directors Guido Santi and Tina Mascara make rich use of the couple's glamorous home movies.

Like everything else about this lovely film, life, love and emotional growth are marked out in lush, languid, luminous terms.

That so packed (and pictorially arresting) a scenario is not only well-acted — from the kids to the elders — but handled with emotional intelligence and even eye-rolling humor, speaks to Rauniyar’s narrative gifts regarding matters of his homeland.

Fortunately, both the film’s gorgeous look and its meticulously choreographed action sequences keep us more than occupied until the plot pieces fall into place.

What “Edge” is especially good at is detailing how Costa gradually began to see things differently, to see the corruption investigation as an attempt by the oligarchy to reassert itself, to take power via a kind of legislative/judicial coup because it could not do so by the ballot.

Filmmaker Leon has deftly structured Gimme the Loot as a picaresque tale, an anecdotal, observational film that introduces us to all manner of eccentric and original characters. Will Malcolm and Sophia get what they want, what they need, or something in between? The only sure thing is that being along for the ride is pleasure of the most unexpected sort.

As we watch these once-marginalized artists thrillingly bring their past to bear on tense times, so does this look-and-listen complement the urgency of our newly charged civil rights moment.

Tarantino's palpable enthusiasm, his unapologietic passion for what he's created, reinvigorates this venerable plot and, mayhem aside, makes it involving for longer than you might suspect. [27 Oct 1992]

Directed with bristling immediacy by Rashaad Ernesto Green (“Gun Hill Road”), Premature could be classified as a love story, a coming-of-age drama, a cautionary tale (the title offers a clue) and a portrait of young black women and men finding their way in contemporary New York. But it also strikes me as a movie about the uses and occasional uselessness of language, with stop-and-go verbal cadences that seem particularly attentive to what its characters say and don’t say.

Tchoupitoulas is a jewel-bright whoosh of a ride through nighttime New Orleans.

Imamura's mastery of tone has always matched his capacity for compassion and acuteness of observation. [18 Sep 1998, p.F16]

In Skyfall, Mendes has given us a thrilling new chapter in a franchise that by all rights should have been gasping for air - which really makes him the hero of this saga.

Though it sometimes overplays the sentimentality, Thunder Soul gets not just the music but also the sense of possibility for this post-civil-rights generation.

Most of all, Davies proves himself to be a poet of the commonplace whose art is the exalting of the everyday. He may rail against "the British genius for creating the dismal," but his own work is anything but.

As much as Amanda may seem like an irredeemable antihero, you come to appreciate her unspoken dream of finding fulfillment in the company of at least one other person on her crooked wavelength.

With its startling mix of 16-millimeter-shot, handmade animation styles using stop-motion, sketches, collages and models, along with uncensored characters often resembling cadaverous marionettes, this twisted look at life in a faded Appalachian town is one decidedly idiosyncratic ride.

Despite its intimate focus, Memoir of a Snail is a towering achievement. This touching animated film serves as a reminder that Elliot is a humanist who clearly sculpts his “clayographies” (as he dubs his films) from the very essence of life itself.

What really resonates are the memories of women helping women by talking openly about the specific economic and health concerns that the male-dominated establishment typically ignored. JANE’s supportive atmosphere opened eyes, showing a possibility of a world where everyone, regardless of social status, could be seen and heard.

There are moments here that arrest you with their hallucinatory power.

The movie’s spirit is by turns energetic and serene, impetuous and wise, its wild shifts from comedy to tragedy to romance revealing themselves not as tonal swings so much as variations in a larger cosmic pattern.

The Scent of Green Papaya, a film as delicate and evocative as its name, recognizes that out of illusion can come reality.

Firmly rooted in the filmmaker's esoteric, frustrating, provoking, demanding narrative style, the movie is also amazingly romantic - lush, ripe, rich, delicious.

You, the Living suggests that we would do well to discover the joy we find in each other that so often goes along with the pain.

Part science fiction scare movie, part offbeat romance, part completely unclassifiable, "Color" is also one-man filmmaking of a remarkable sort.

Every once in a while, a small, unheralded film comes along, so smart and funny, such a pleasure to experience, you can't believe your luck. Hunt for the Wilderpeople is such a film.

A captivating film that truly elevates the spirit, Ballets Russes is the most emotionally satisfying documentary since "Mad Hot Ballroom."

Boorman signals that he may not like what the real Cahill did, but as a storyteller with a proven affection for larger-than-life subjects, he can't resist him, either.

[A] vital, absorbing documentary.

It's not until Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire that a film has successfully re-created the sense of stirring magical adventure and engaged, edge-of-your-seat excitement that has made the books such an international phenomenon.

Kon's best work yet.

Made under unique and wrenching circumstances, it gained poignancy and a kind of purity from its troubles, and an already affecting film ended up suffused with emotion.

More disturbing than you expect, its story of innocence lost and perspective gained holds us and will not let go.

What it offers isn't really a nostalgic look at a "more innocent time" so much as a saucy wink at a casually vicious time that is constantly being sold to us as innocent.

In eschewing directness of intent for the artful massaging of space, sound and rhythm, Beshir’s film — a very personal project for the Mexican Ethiopian director, which she shot over 10 years — stakes a richer claim to our sense of the place and the effect of its most lucrative crop.

If this gently philosophical film has a lesson for Darious — and for us — it’s that life is long and things change. The choices made yesterday don’t always have to define who we are today.

Identifying herself with other minorities (whose members she mimics outrageously), Cho shatters racial and sexual stereotypes with merciless wit.

King Kong is an homage not just to the original but to the history of movies themselves.

It's Zeta-Jones who keeps you watching from start to finish -- You'd have to go back to Joan Crawford in her hungry prime, in films like "Rain" and "The Women," to find another female film star who grabs hold of the screen with such ferocity.

That’s Entertainment! III is the sunniest of memento mori, a showy tribute to the flabbergasting musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer that emphasizes both how delightful the genre was and how inescapably extinct it’s become.

A raucous, weird, occasionally fascinating entry in the genre of disease-documenting, a portrait of raw nerve in the face of deteriorating nerves.

The fact-based story, which is allowed to quietly unfold in a series of extended takes, has been stripped of all artifice, especially in regard to the pared-back performances of Harewood, a British actor with regular roles on “Homeland” and “Supergirl,” and Findley, who starred in Ava DuVernay’s 2012 breakthrough feature, “Middle of Nowhere.”

A poetic attempt to re-create a bygone culture as not only a role model for the present but also a positive mythology for the future, the movie's strong visual qualities and epic emotions make it a bracing remedy to swallow.

Beginning with a gentle lullaby and ending with a tightly packed wallop, Goodnight Mommy is one viscerally chilling, seriously unsettling horror film.

You might say this magical, intoxicating piece of work does not have an ordinary bone in its body, and what a delight that turns out to be.

The central mystery hinges on an audacious structural coup that produces a succession of giddy, breathless moments in the movie’s second half, as cinematographer Steve Yedlin and editor Bob Ducsay excel at reframing earlier plot points from revelatory new perspectives.

To ascribe easy labels to A White, White Day — to call it a study of masculine rage or a portrait of a community perched at the edge of the world — is to risk bleeding it of its elemental poetry.

Giving flair to the inevitable and imbuing those stakes with emotional heft are key to this type of patiently nasty, slow-boil noir. That Johnson understands this makes his feature debut a particularly confident and enjoyable one.

Ultimately, this is a memorable look at our desire to love and feel safe, to connect and belong — and the unexpected ways in which families can reshape and grow.

With Midnight in Paris, Allen has lightened up, allowed himself a treat and in the process created a gift for us and him.

The Guardians is an intimate French epic, elegantly made and quietly emotional, a family story filled with characters whose lives we sink into, feeling the hope, the sadness, the sorrow and the joy right along with those on the screen.

Master Japanese animator Mamoru Hosoda makes family films, but not in the way you think. It’s not that his films are suitable for all ages, though they mostly are. And it’s not even that the family unit is central to his work, though it is. Rather it’s that Hosoda’s films stretch the boundaries of both style and content within the family film rubric.

Like so many globe-trotting thrillers and big-screen tourist brochures, it’s also a gleaming advertisement for Hollywood itself, a celebration and a reminder of how profoundly the movies have shaped our views of the world.

Love and Death on Long Island is sharp, sophisticated and completely delicious, a purposeful comedy that focuses on the power of screen images to uproot lives and the poignancy of amour fou, totally mad love.

Benediction, Terence Davies’ achingly beautiful portrait of the English war poet and soldier Siegfried Sassoon, is a movie of acute sadness and intense pleasure. The pleasure and the sadness are inextricable, which seems fitting, given how closely aesthetic bliss and moral despair were entwined in Sassoon’s own art.

A War is a film done exactly right about a situation gone horribly wrong.

The concision of its story and the elasticity of its themes are crucial to its peculiar potency: Operating within tight narrative and budgetary confines, Seimetz seeks to reshuffle our perceptions, to alter our sense of how movies can represent the unrepresentable.

Nighy lures you into the impression that he’s sharing a private joke with you, a glimmer of comic insight into an unbearably sad situation.

Mixes satire and suspense in unexpected ways in a film that is as darkly amusing as it is bitterly critical of bourgeois society's indifference to suffering.

"Weeping" is a simple tale of animal estrangement and reconciliation that in its own quiet way manages to be soothing, hypnotic, even magical.

Audacious and witty, The World's End is a strange brew.

Top Spin grips, exhilarates and breaks hearts like the 1994 film "Hoop Dreams."

An enigmatic, if perhaps hopeful, epilogue caps this sad, strange, at times weirdly poignant portrait.

The lack of a strong narrative through-line makes for a film that is informative but dry. Nevertheless, it is an urgent plea for us all to make conscious choices in our consumption.

It’s valuable when any vérité documentary with such a vantage point is able to show us how many societal ills — from addiction to gun violence to poverty to gentrification to incarceration — can touch one family, keeping them in a near-constantly reeling state.

Reflected in its native language title (“My Lens”), Chinese Portrait is a personal reflection on the country’s past and present. Brimming with humanity, Wang’s contemplative, minimalist approach forces us to consider the day-to-day lives of these people, and perhaps our own.

Directed by George Marshall, Destry revived Dietrich's waning screen career, and her barroom brawl with Una Merkel is a classic. [25 Aug 1996, p.74]

As a slice of ultra-orthodox life, Menashe offers an unusual — and unusually sympathetic — look inside a world that is often hidden from view.

District 9 is very smart sci-fi, but that's just the beginning; it's also a scathing social satire hidden inside a terrific action thriller teeming with gross aliens and regrettable inter-species conflict. And it's a blast. . . .

A remarkable film.

Watching Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry is like experiencing a thrilling unfinished symphony: The story is enthralling, but it's not over, and there's no telling where it's going. Which makes what we see on screen all the more involving.

It’s with a gut-wrenching helplessness that we watch the ingredients assemble for what has become our seemingly most preventable modern scourge — someone far gone, armed with what’s all too available.

With a masterful melding of the serious, the comic, the ridiculous and the musical, Woman at War is joyful to experience though difficult to sum up.

The film’s refusal to tie up loose ends has already inspired comparisons to Bong Joon Ho’s “Memories of Murder” and David Fincher’s “Zodiac,” two of modern cinema’s great cold-case classics. Moll’s movie doesn’t leave behind the same deep, implacable chill of those earlier works, but its lingering rage and sorrow are no less easy to wave aside.

What makes Durkin’s vision so powerfully unsettling is its ease with ambiguity, its ability to make cruelty and tenderness seem like flip sides of the same human coin.

No filmmaker better understands the revelatory properties of small talk and soju, and few could make the art of repetition seem so rife with possibilities.

A barnburner of a motion picture that mainlines heart-in-mouth excitement and tug-at-the-heart emotion, Ford v Ferrari is made the way Hollywood used to make them, a glorious throwback that combines a smart modern sensibility with the best of traditional storytelling.

With Bad Education, Almodóvar is at his most breathtakingly complex and mature, and at his most pessimistic.

The movie is a powerfully blunt instrument of empathy. Ben Hania’s insistence on close-up melodramatics — faces in anguish, a handheld camera glued to them — sometimes overshadows a thirst for something more analytical. But it’s decidedly a vision, one steeped in roiling pain.

With a colorful blend of biting absurdity and copious dad jokes to offset the commonplace narrative, Rianda and Rowe optimize their dysfunctional family road trip for high-functioning enjoyment.

Not to go all Pauline Kael on you, but Bullitt -- the 1968 crime drama starring a Ford Mustang GT390 and some guy named Steve McQueen -- is a fairly tedious bit of Aquarian cinema: the chicka-chicka-waah soundtrack, the inscrutable plot, the anaerobic dullness of every second that McQueen is off-camera. Bullitt scrabbles to its minor footnote status in film history on two counts. The first: It marks the only time any man ever looked cool in a cardigan -- McQueen should have gotten the academy's knitwear award. The second is the movie's remarkable seven-minute chase scene, with real cars (the Mustang and a black Dodge Charger), real drivers and real stunts, no special effects.

It may feel as if these are loosely structured vignettes, but there’s an accumulation at work — the steady drip of dimensionality that the best movies about people at their jobs know how to turn into a complete picture.

Silver Linings Playbook is rich in life's complications. It will make you laugh, but don't expect it to fit in any snug genre pigeonhole. Dramatic, emotional, even heartbreaking, as well as wickedly funny, it has the gift of going its own way, a complete success from a singular talent.

Smart and provocative.

Being able to hear this kind of playing is a special moment in time, one we don't want to end and one that we're privileged to experience.

Whatever this woman is saying or doing, you want to be there to hear it and see it, and there's no better formula for an entertaining documentary than that.

The remarkable debut from writer-director Michelle Garza Cervera is as effectively blood-curdling as it is intellectually incisive.

Much of the film is told compellingly and heartbreakingly through the wide-eyed innocence of five children.

It’s worth your time, your discomfort, your possible scorn and your weirdly grudging affection, maybe all at once.

Bleak as it is, it’s remarkably devoid of bitterness or rancor, and even its most despairing passages are flecked with humor and hope. This is personal filmmaking with a diarist’s sense of detail and an artist’s generosity.

The film is utterly absorbing, anchored by the unpredictable performance of Taylor, playing a hopelessly complicated, but deeply caring woman.

Though Schwarz’s finished film provides unmissable and infuriating insight, it’s also disappointing that he never mentions the ongoing violence that the Israeli state commits against residents in the current Palestinian territories, including numerous documented human rights violations.

If we lived in a rational world, Fiennes’ bravura comic-manic performance would earn him an Oscar nomination.

The images captured by Herzog and cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger are dazzling all on their own, finding the disorienting psychedelia that is nature at its weirdest.

Starkly beautiful and exceedingly demanding, The Turin Horse, which Hungarian master Béla Tarr has said will be his last film, is both easy and impossible to define.