By the end, you almost want every recording artist with Springsteen’s compassion and lyricism to introduce their newest material the way he does in “Western Stars,” like a docent of everyone’s damaged soul, pointing to the parts that make not just the music, but the musician, too.

Dallaire is not only the protagonist of Shake Hands, he is a compelling reason to see it.

When I Walk is extraordinarily accomplished, poignant, and wise.

This is intensely physical filmmaking, drenched in Florida sunshine and magnetized by the beauty of the actors’ faces and bodies. But it is also deeply rooted in its characters’ consciousness, alert to the feelings of dread, shame, rage and despair that threaten to bring these fast-moving lives to a standstill.

The Martian is a film that respects the geekiest among us, and that pays off all around.

It would seem impossible that anyone looking into the heart and the clear intent of the film would fail to see Scorsese's passion for his subject. And if our world is becoming so dangerously constricted that we're forbidden even to look, that is something we should all worry about. [12 Aug 1988, p.1]

The languid pace and barnyard earthiness won't be to everybody's taste, but it's hard to deny Mascaro's vision. Where some look at a rodeo and see sweat and dirt, he sees a poignant struggle, which he illustrates meticulously.

Communion is a heartbreaking example of a classic documentary genre — the immersive, observational film that takes a bold leap and embeds itself with a small group of people.

Rian Johnson’s darkest, funniest and best installment yet in his three-film detective series.

In recording life as it unfolds in the course of a year, On the Ropes not only defies prediction as to its outcome but is in some ways downright confounding...as involving and suspenseful as the best fictional films.

If there is one moment in The Language of Music that will thrill old rock fans, it's watching Dowd, his fluid hands moving with a surgeon's grace, remix for the film's benefit the 24-track sub-master of "Layla."

Witty, intelligent and quintessentially French, it is an unusually involving costume drama that takes us into a decadent world few will know existed, a place where “vices are without consequence but ridicule can kill.”

Williams' performance is remarkable not only for its depth but for its stillness.

Despite their clear affection for these women, the Dardenne brothers never sugarcoat their characters’ unenviable circumstance or latch onto phony bromides to alleviate our anxiety. And yet Young Mothers contains its share of sweetness and light.

A most unusual musical and a genuinely remarkable movie.

It would be a mistake to call X a misfire — in its artisanal, period textures and delight in old-school atmospherics, it’s too well made. But it’s better at teasing than following through.

If you care about Sparks, this movie is heaven, a long-overdue answer to the group’s 1994 song “When Do I Get to Sing ‘My Way.’” (With this doc, Ron and Russell have to feel, at least a little bit, “like Sinatra felt.”) If you don’t know about Sparks, Wright has created an introduction that gleefully demolishes any barrier you might think you have toward their music.

Shouting in all-caps about unions and shortages of food, Călinescu symbolizes the power of individuals that dare to discern from their own personal trenches, regardless of how insignificant they may seem.

With sun-kissed cinematography by Paul Guilhaume and the construction of the story in miraculously intimate closeups of touching moments, “Little Girl” plays almost as if it were an aesthetically verité, yet scripted fiction film from the Dardenne brothers. It’s only the handful of interviews where the family speaks to the camera that breaks the spell.

The Wrestler doesn't add up. It's constructed with great care around a lead performance that is everything it could possibly be, but the picture itself is off-putting and disappointing.

A splendid film. It uses all the resources of cinema -- masterful writing, superb acting, directorial intelligence, an enveloping score, top-of-the-line production design, costumes, cinematography and editing -- to make a film whose cumulative emotional power takes viewers by surprise, capturing us unawares in its ability to move us as deeply as it does.

It all comes together on election night, as Lears shadows Ocasio-Cortez and captures her disbelief as she nears her post-election party and suddenly realizes she has in fact won. It’s precisely the kind of you-are-there moment, one of many, that makes Knock Down the House so satisfying.

The last great action movie filmed in black and white. [04 Nov 1994, p.F17]

A deceptively simple, deeply resonant story about the inherent loneliness of family, the odds against assimilation and the enormous distances that can divide two people.

This engaging and enlightening documentary is stuffed with anecdotes, history and information. It makes excellent use of both new interviews and carefully selected archival footage to reveal the building blocks of all this accomplishment.

Like those early shorts, then, Marcel the Shell With Shoes On is essentially a mockumentary, though one with a far more complex visual scheme and a more ambitious tonal range.

Promises takes a simple idea and just about breaks your heart with it.

A beautifully calibrated movie in the most traditional sense of the word -- the ideal marriage of topic, talent and tone.

At once a swift, relentless chase thriller and an exhilarating mood piece that recalls the great, gritty crime dramas of Sidney Lumet and Abel Ferrara, Good Time is also exactly what it says it is: a thrill, a blast, a fast-acting tonic of a movie.

Essential viewing.

An exquisite film, as elegant and precise as an impeccably cut diamond. It's small in scale but wholly mesmerizing, holding us captive as it demonstrates how much enveloping richness can be conveyed with a minimalist style.

Set in an enchanting locale where the potential for magic is everywhere, this impeccable animated film puts its complete trust in the spirit of make-believe.

One can even detect, in this brilliant, captivating Reichardt gem about fortune and fate, a what-if attached to her disaffected male protagonist: Would today’s version of James, just as adrift and arrogant, steal art to assuage his emptiness? Or, thanks to the internet, succeed at something much worse? “The Mastermind” may be an ironic title as heists go. But it also hints at the male-pattern badness still to come.

Because Sauper views himself as a storyteller first, as political as "We Come as Friends" may be, it is always dramatic, never didactic.

Trengove’s direction keeps things firmly grounded in the play of glances and intimacies under shelter of nature’s seclusion — dusk-lit silhouettes stealing moments, a waterfall rendezvous.

This film beams and buzzes inside its closed loop with the hard-won wisdom of acceptance. And it does so while staying in awe of what can never be understood, only appreciated — and if we’re lucky, enjoyed.

It is the fancy, frenetic and ethereal footwork of Astaire and Rogers that propel this frothy romance. [22 Oct 2006, p.E14]

This is a heartbreaker about mothers and daughters, the cruelty of repression and the slippery but revealing nature of performance. And to the end, it remains steadfast in its conviction that a woman’s truth and her beauty are never at odds.

For Fernanda Montenegro, who bears more than a passing resemblance to Italy's late Giulietta Masina (Federico Fellini's wife and frequent star) in appearance and talent, "Central Station" is a personal triumph and a rich cinematic experience.

It’s a difficult movie to get a fix on, but the difficulty is what makes it special.

Tomas is an inimitably singular creature. Loathsome and magnetic, infuriating and unforgettable, he is, by several bed lengths, the most dynamic protagonist Sachs has given us, a vessel of pure, untrammeled id.

In Greenfield's canny and compassionate view, their post-collapse reality check is an emblem of consumerism as affliction, and surprisingly relatable.

it's Nowar's ability to tell his tale so firmly from the viewpoint of his quickly growing-up protagonist, and to elicit so unforced a performance from Eid, that may be the most impressive achievement of this intimate, well-paced film.

The past is where all the intrigue of the movie lies, and that is where the film is at its most compelling, with the present sometimes wilting in the desert heat.

The mellow, serendipitous The Parrots of Telegraph Hill is here to show you just how magical happenstance can be.

As worthy and moving as The Color of Paradise is, it is not entirely free of the manipulative, the arbitrary and the downright punitive.

Deliciously funny and fiendishly clever con-man comedy that begins on a note of ingenuity that it then sustains with the tension of a high-wire act.

A convulsively funny affair.[15 July 1988, Calendar, p. 6-1]

With lines drawn along politics, class, race and economics, the strange-bedfellows issue of top-dollar killing and queasy conservation is one that Trophy...lays bare with gruesome, grim exactitude.

Though it would be unrealistic to expect "Incredibles 2" to have quite the genre-busting surprise of the original, it is as good as it can be without that shock of the new — delivering comedy, adventure and all too human moments with a generous hand.

It is hardly the fault of this breathless, incisive and thoroughly infuriating movie that it already feels a touch out of date. How could it not?

She's Beautiful When She's Angry, director Mary Dore's incisive portrait of so-called second-wave feminism of the late 1960s, is an exceptional chronicle, its mix of archival material and new interviews bristling with the energy and insight of one of the most important social movements of the 20th century.

If this film portrait stirs deep emotions, they spring from a breathtakingly unsentimental embrace of life at its most challenging.

Though the film's final break-the-bank action sequence in Venice is worth waiting for, Casino Royale's 2-hour, 24-minute running time is long enough to exhaust all but the series' biggest fans.

If every picture tells a story, the body of work displayed in the hauntingly intriguing documentary “Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts” speaks volumes on the life and times of the artist in question.

Another indictment of pervasive corruption and perhaps Sembene's most celebrated film, it was heavily censored in Senegal on its release in 1974 and it is not difficult to see why. [01 Jan 1995, p.30]

Actors as well as athletes have a prime of life, a time when everything they touch seems a miracle. And the crowning pleasure of watching Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh in this rollicking version of Much Ado About Nothing is the way it allows us to share in that state of special grace, to watch the English-speaking world’s reigning acting couple perform at the top of their game.

Kokuho is a hearty melodrama with a little bit of everything — sex scandals, betrayals, unlikely comebacks, health scares — but the film’s gaudy plot twists (which shouldn’t be spoiled) belie the filmmaker’s unsentimental attitude regarding stardom’s perils.

As delicately and deliciously prepared as the dishes it features, Big Night is a lyric to the love of food, family and persuasive acting.

When JR turns his gaze toward a person and pastes their image on a wall, he’s inviting others not just to participate in this project but also to look their way, to pay attention to someone or something by seeing it differently in the world. It takes a village, but all they need is paper and glue.

An involving, stacked deck of a story plus strong acting and a mix of vital themes combine to make The Citizen a solid drama about immigration, nationalism and survival in an often unforgiving world.

A small western gem.

It's a shining valentine to the movies--full of homages, collages and swooningly romantic Ennio Morricone music--and it gets right at the messy, impure, wondrous way they capture and enrapture us. [16 February 1990, Calendar, p.F-1]

Bergman has never been an ordinary filmmaker, and what he's given us is no genial last hurrah but rather an intensely dramatic, at times lacerating examination of life's conundrums that is exhilarating in its fearlessness and its command.

You leave Ad Astra feeling dazzled and befuddled, moved and frustrated, and perhaps wishing that its maker had cast his own preoccupations aside and taken a deeper, headier plunge into the void.

A gritty, powerfully acted drama set in an overcrowded maximum-security prison. [04 Feb 1999, p.F48]

On the Beach at Night Alone isn’t as accomplished as Hong’s 2015 collaboration with Kim, the masterfully bifurcated “Right Now, Wrong Then.” But it’s more than worth seeing for Kim’s exposed nerve endings alone, and also for the way in which Hong’s typically playful sensibility seems to tilt at times into a surreal, menacing strangeness.

Though its protagonist is a 10-year-old girl, it is a crackling good tale with a sense of wonder and mystery strong enough to captivate any age group. [03 Feb 1995, p.F1]

That rare episode film that actually accrues a cumulative power and doesn't merely proceed from one segment to the next.

A one-trick pony, a movie that has a gift only for making audiences squirm.

Pohlad did not lack for ideas about how he wanted to portray Brian Wilson's life, but he is without the wherewithal to effectively put them into practice.

The film probes that tricky-to-reconcile bridge between honoring the fallen and moving forward.

There's a strong elliptical quality to Kiarostami's style, which underlines the filmmaker's ability to maintain focus with considerable emotional force and depth and with great precision. [27 March 1998, p.14F]

Although the blandly nondescript title doesn’t exactly suggest the promise of deep intrigue, Philipp Stölzl’s Chess Story masterfully confounds expectations as a tautly calibrated, intricately constructed Chinese puzzle of a period drama set during Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria.

Levinson has always been a director who completely understands the concept of the American Dream, and his sensibility is perfect for this story of a man who cared so little about money that he was willing to stake everything he was or ever hoped to be on a crackpot scheme to turn a corner of Nevada desert into the pleasure dome of the American West.

It’s been a while since a film so powerfully evoked the thrilling possibilities and wasted pleasures of the open road.

Yes, You Hurt My Feelings explores the incident of its title and the risks and limits of total honesty in a relationship. But it’s also a funny and incisive look at middle-age malaise

“Black & Blues” isn’t a straightforward biography so much as a collection of engaging anecdotes and keen observations, meant to spark a renewed appreciation for someone too often misunderstood.

The result is surprisingly companionable and enjoyable, an unhurried look at a location that is in no kind of rush, a place that is concerned most of all with preserving the way it’s always been.

Peter and the Farm is ultimately a portrait of whatever the opposite of “getting back to nature” is: the cycle of the land as a circle of hell.

When Iris DeMent's impeccable version of the hymn is heard on the soundtrack as the final credits roll, it's the perfect touch to end a film whose aim is always true.

It's a jewel-like, minimalist film about a group of crisscrossing wanderers and outlaws on one lyrically strange day and night in Memphis--where haphazard-seeming events slowly merge into entrancingly complex figures and patterns.

Malick, a Christian philosopher-poet whose meanings can often be vague and elusive, seems to have been stung into an uncharacteristically blunt response, a forceful denunciation of the complicity of church and state.

"Meyerowitz” feels very much from the heart. It has an unexpected maturity and warmth, a compassion that seems to reflect Baumbach’s desire to dig as deeply as he can into the myriad conundrums of family life. And, as noted, it is often quite funny.

Raucously funny and surprisingly insightful.

A clever, entertaining stunt, no more, no less.

There is a lot of hope in the air in I Wish, but the film never feels sappy. The very appealing score by the Japanese indie-rock group Quruli brings a kind of upbeat energy that matches the clean, open style of director of photography Yutaka Yamazaki, a frequent Kore-eda collaborator.

The archival footage, the impassioned interviews, and the inspiring story of how warriors for solutions can overcome entrenched views on poverty and health, make for something genuinely stirring.

It’s a stirring and delicately reflective piece of work.

Within "Housekeeping’s” restless, naturalistic aesthetic, Stolevski crafts complex and poignant images, contrasting the playacting the couple is forced to do with their searing gazes.

Maysles' portrait of Iris Apfel, a 93-year-old self-described "geriatric starlet," is surprisingly memorable, graced with an unforced but unmistakable charm.

Though a definite improvement on the last three abortive Star Wars prequels directed by series creator George Lucas, The Force Awakens is only at its best in fits and starts, its success dependent on who of its mix of franchise veterans and first-timers is on the screen.

It’s raw, powerful, moving and candid. This is what it is like to be on the ground in Aleppo.

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is as fine a film as it is a brutally disturbing one.

An old-fashioned weepie tucked inside a fiercely indicting political thriller.

At a time when so many in this country are at odds about what represents America at its best, it's refreshing and then some to see a film that everyone can agree is an example of exactly that.

Though she’s a first-time director, Costin has put together a film that’s a savvy cinematic education as well as pure fun. If you care about the movies, don’t even think of staying away.

Sober and heartfelt, Union lets us see what Amazon and the world would soon discover about the power workers have when they invest in their dignity first.