The combination of archival bounty with Salles' touching analysis has a hypnotic effect, serving up the past plus reflection, garnished with a resonant melancholy about the ebb and flow of uprisings.

Like its determined heroine, Night Comes On burns with a smoldering fire, a heat that is no less intense, no less effective, for remaining largely beneath the surface.

Sophisticated, uncompromising and refreshingly original, it is one of those rare films which is likely to mean as much to teens as it does to their parents.

An utterly pleasant surprise...Lordy, is it tenderly acted, with an unyielding spine of honesty to all its characters.

Duplass' puppy-dog affect may seem softer than you'd expect for a character who spent 20 years behind bars, but the actor's quietly wrenching performance gives the lie to any easy assumptions about the experience of the incarcerated. And Falco...gives a performance of aching depth and subtlety.

If Young's work here is another master class in painterly under-lighting, then Pfeiffer's brilliantly self-effacing performance feels like something sculptural by comparison. Remarkably, she doesn't compete with the movie's rigorous visual scheme; she completes it. Her powers of expression, far from being obscured by all this darkness, are instead enriched and heightened by it.

Lucas is as irresistible as its slight, brilliant, bespectacled 14-year-old hero (Corey Haim), a kid who in his spare time catches insects in a net--but only to study them, not to kill them.

A dreamy, compelling, often wry look at a writer.

Museo is a fun, stylish, singular heist flick that’s about so much more than the theft itself.

It’s the superbly acted interplay between the embattled Alice and Joe that drives this lean, gripping, often profoundly tragic tale.

Thorough, impressive and smartly put together, joining dynamically edited verite footage with a series of thoughtful interviews, Breaking Point serves a pair of interlocking purposes.

Great use of an eerie Southern California landscape and some fine, naturalistic acting emphasizes how the ordinary can sometimes seem threatening — and vice-versa.

In adding feature-film directing to her formidable list of accomplishments, poet and author Maya Angelou tells first-time screenwriter Myron Goble's absorbing and far-ranging story with simplicity and directness while guiding a splendid ensemble cast to an array of impressive portrayals.

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.

Chiklis is first-rate as Adrian’s tough, deceptively aware Vietnam-vet father, while Madsen’s gentle, luminous portrayal of a deeply adoring mother is heartbreakingly authentic — and utterly award-worthy.

Jinn is a familiar story, told in a cultural context rarely depicted on film, and Mu’min’s approach is so lyrical and empathetic that it feels completely fresh and new. It’s a remarkable film with sensitive and stirring turns by Renee and Missick in the mother-daughter roles.

Cummings’ achievement is too singular to be reduced to a simple political reading; and in much the same way, Jim’s hard-won final scene is too ambiguous to be read as either celebration or damnation. If, by that point, there’s even any meaningful difference.

Director Yoonessi and deGuzman perfectly balance the contrast between Joy’s cuteness and innocence and the darkness and sexuality of her experience.

I can't think of a current movie in which every element is in such balance: Martin seems unfettered, expansive, utterly at ease, capable of any physical feat (except possibly drinking from a wine glass without a straw). There's a tenderness to him that's magnetic. Daryl Hannah's Roxanne, an astronomer, is smart and sublimely beautiful all at once, her skin apricot-colored in this mountain sun, her face rhapsodic as she talks about muons, gluons and quarks.

Ward's "Map" is a wildly ambitious film and, often, a wildly beautiful one--and if it isn't quite a masterpiece, if we sense that Ward's resources aren't enough for the World War II London scenes, in the end, any flaws or lapses simply may not matter. Movies, especially ones with a broad epic canvas and international logistics, don't often get this intimate. They don't give you such a sense of nerves stripped raw, joy or misery nakedly expressed.

This rape revenge story swaps points of view, but it doesn't break the mold. The characters, archetypes and beats are familiar, which allows Fargeat to play with symbolism in a bold, pointed manner.

The Hit is something special: thoughtful, perfectly performed and carrying the clear stamp of an extremely interesting director.

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.

An eternal nurturer, the black mother whom Allah dissects and praises in this transfixing hymn of a movie about the place where the woman that gave him life was born is far more than just a homeland but a direct link to the answers about existence.

It's a simple, cumulatively shattering record of life as we rarely see it captured in narrative or documentary cinema.

Cage's naturalness as a nice guy in a big jam lends the film considerable substance while Hopper's wily foil, Boyle's tough dame and Walsh's minor-league baddie provide much amusement. With Mark Reshovsky's sleek camera work, authentic locales and William Olvis' mood-setting score, Red Rock West has style to burn.

Made in 1979, The China Syndrome proved to be one of the most prophetic films ever made, having been released shortly before the Three Mile Island catastrophe. At once a fervent anti-nuclear protest and an edge-of-the-seat thriller. [27 Nov 1988]

Scary, yet darkly funny, this thriller of the supernatural from the director of the terrific Fright Night moves with the speed of a bullet train and with style to burn. The film is a stunner--in all senses of the word.

A fascinating film that is as thorough as it is idiosyncratic.

Drawn from the director's personal memories of post-1968 excitement and disillusionment, the drama moves from surging emotional highs to melancholy lows, but it also pulses with a vibrant, moody energy that a 24-year delay from American screens has done nothing to diminish.

The Snapper is amiability itself. Good-humored and sassy, it is one of those charmingly off-the-cuff films that doesn't let its small scale stand in the way of pleasure. [03 Dec 1993, p.F1]

A soulful, atmospheric travelogue that toggles between immersing in and removing itself from the chaotic beauty of teeming humanity, El Said's movie gives a humming, on-the-edge metropolis its heart-pumping, reflective due.

See How They Fall"shows an ambitious director well on his way to being the master of his game.

Smart and provocative.

Such is the intensity of Ceylan's vision that a perfectly natural, even casual, course of events, which is what the film consists of, makes Kasaba utterly compelling. [30 Sep 2004, p.E13]

Even if the dramas and dictates of couturiers and catwalks mean little to you, it is hard to resist the propulsive energy that director Ian Bonhote and co-director and writer Peter Ettedgui bring to the story of a designer whose background, beliefs and gifts were not what one would expect.

Sachs' ability to draw deeply affecting, completely open and unself-conscious performances from Chan and Gray and other nonprofessionals as well is most impressive and highly effective. Working with masterly New York cinematographer Benjamin P. Speth, Sachs has created in The Delta an achingly poignant portrait of alienation and longing so evocative that it is poetic in its impact. [15 Aug 1997, p.F4]

This is a different kind of monster movie, no doubt. It’s beautiful and magical, and as aware of the real world as it is of classic Hollywood. Good Manners is a haunting tale of love — and the burdens that come with it.

Just as sports mirror society, so do the best sports films not only take us inside games and those who play them but also provide insight into our world and how it works. “Wrestle,” a superb sports documentary, does exactly that.

Impudent, grandiose, a multilevel crowd-pleaser--almost returns the Disney animated features to their glory traditions of the '30s and '40s.

It's a brisk, smart satirical comedy from the writers of "Police Academy" and the director of "Valley Girl," set in a Caltech-like institution for the whiz kids of the sciences. How refreshing it is to see young people depicted as having a capacity for thought as well as emotion.

Birds of Passage tells a story of a traditional culture fighting for its life against incursions from the outside world, of how insidiously clan ways and spiritual values can be compromised, and it certainly has familiar elements. But the electric filmmaking, sense of tragedy and cultural specificity are far from usual.

A peculiarly potent story about life’s unexpected little ruptures — those odd coincidences, repetitions and shifts in perspective that can set off aftershocks in the human heart.

Happy as Lazzaro is slow to reveal its full shape: It’s a realist snapshot of downtrodden lives that gradually takes on shadings of fable and myth, a deceptively plain story that, by the end, all but glows with wonderment and surprise.

Vidal-Naquet’s film knows that every wound and balm to the flesh is also one to the spirit.

What's bracing about Sorry Angel is that it refuses to allow the specificity of its characters — specifically drawn and superbly played — to be obscured or flattened by the drama of terminal illness. Neither man is made nicer or more palatable than he has to be.

The movie is undeniably long, talky and dense, but it is never uninteresting. You might call it slow too, though at the risk of mischaracterizing the speed of its verbiage and the dizzying complexity of its ideas.

[Labaki] finds a magically resonant space between documentary-like vibe and dramatic performance that honors the characters’ inherent humanity while memorably framing the wretched circumstances that dictate their actions.

This magical, erotic, disco-tinged horror-thriller is like cinematic candy.

In the end, Audiard plays to his past strengths as a poet of wounded masculinity; in its most touching moments, The Sisters Brothers is like a hangout movie on horseback.

Kore-eda furthers his storied reputation as an artist humanely attuned to what transpires between those who know each other all too well.

The cystic fibrosis-themed romantic drama Five Feet Apart feels like a real evolution in the sick teen movie genre, because it’s actually a great movie that just happens to be about sick teens, and it doesn’t condescend or try to cheer up anyone.

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.

It’s hard to imagine a true-life underdog tale more engaging than Heading Home: The Tale of Team Israel, a winning David vs. Goliath baseball documentary that covers all the crowd-pleasing bases.

This seedy Barfly is beautifully written, acted and directed. It may be full of dank desire, wasted love and jesting misery--but it blooms. Whatever its flaws, it does something more films should do: It opens up territory, opens up a human being.

One of the pleasurable discoveries of this continually surprising movie is that artifice can be the most direct route to the truth.

Smart and winning, this sixth Muppet feature film comes closest to recapturing the pure joy of the 1979 original, "The Muppet Movie." Kids will like it; parents who grew up with the Muppets may like it even more. [14 July 1999, p.F6]

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.

Well-nigh flawless, with scarcely a moment's lull. [18 Dec 1990, p.F1]

More than anything, this is a film in love with its characters’ passions, a rich and effortlessly vibrant examination of the four March “little women” (so called by their father) and the ways, at least initially, they’re practically bursting with the innocent it’s-happening-right-now joy of being young and alive.

What a relief it is to discover that Wayne's World 2 is just as hilarious as last year's original, which was one of the best, most distinctive American comedies in years. [10 Dec 1993, p.F14]

Working closely with master editor William Goldenberg, Greengrass has given 22 July a relentless, remorseless quality, insisting on a matter-of-fact style that allows no escape from reality even while refusing to push anything too hard.

Beautifully performed and penetratingly photographed, Jalilvand’s assured second feature bears the probing precision of one of those meticulous autopsies.

Propelled by lovely, engaging writing and wonderful performances, Stan & Ollie, the story of the bittersweet final bow of legendary duo Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, should move and delight fans of the beloved performers while enjoyably exposing the less initiated to these comedy giants.

Dafoe’s work, the look in his searching, despairing eyes, feels beyond conventional acting, using intuition as well as technique to go deeply into the character, putting us in Van Gogh’s presence.

Richly imagined, gracefully written and delicately realized. [10 Mar 2001, p.F15]

Crime + Punishment is a quiet documentary but a potent one. Though its approach is low key, its passion, drama and concern for exposing wrongdoing is unmistakable.

As salty and sexy and unhousebroken a movie as you could hope to find.

Hale County This Morning, This Evening, is a poetic documentary with a gift for making enrapturing imagery out of what sound like ordinary, everyday events.

Even as it borrows a few beats and riffs from the coming-of-age drama (and from Sotomayor’s own childhood), Too Late to Die Young is marked by a fascinating open-endedness, a strange and intriguing reticence as to who and what it’s really about.

Charlie Says is a fascinating and feminist exploration of Manson’s first victims: the girls themselves.

In Fabric unfolds in a twilight zone where capitalism is a kind of dark magic, people become slaves to shopping, and the language of corporate-speak casts its own cultish spell.

What makes High Flying Bird so welcome and unexpected is its combination of immediacy and drama, its provocative creation of here and now energy and smart dialogue around the unlikely subject of professional sports in general and pro basketball in particular.

Solemn in tone and indispensable in significance, the latest from an artist with a track record for surveying marginalized Americans is structured like a collage of incendiary and heart-wrenching moments that toe dip into social justice issues without staying long with any one idea.

A dynamic, fully visually realized experience. It's every bit as gory as "Batman" but more cohesive and its struggle between good and evil more tightly integrated. [11 Aug 1989, p.C6]

Easily the best of the '50s sci-fi thrillers, this one is subtle but still scary, with the suspense building slowly and steadily.[27 Oct 1989, p.F30]

Tito and the Birds is a small marvel. Only 73 minutes long, it marries an adventurous visual imagination with a darkly provocative political parable. Its heroes may be children, but its themes are definitely adult.

On Her Shoulders is an intimate, empathetic documentary, made with discretion and power.

They Shall Not Grow Old is a tribute paid by the present to the past, and what a gorgeous gift it turns out to be.

It’s a vital, singularly crafted film that simply tells it — or more specifically shows it — like it is through the eyes of a struggling African American single mother and the adolescent son she desperately wants to keep out of trouble against the mounting odds.

Capturing the pain and humor of genuine childhood feelings requires far more subtlety and skill, and this emotional depth makes Lady and the Tramp a timeless film that audiences will still enjoy 31 years from now.

As a transcription of Bogosian's theater piece, Talk Radio is tense, packed and crackling with life. As a dramatic investigation into Alan Berg and his murder, it's shallow and dubious. But as a synthesis of those two disjointed halves into a volatile whole--a comic-paranoid nightmare about media success, media myths, prejudice and the pathological relationship between performers and their audience--the film is an often dazzling success. Bogosian and the cast are bravura performers; Stone a director with guts and talent.

These four, like so many others, opened up to Claude Lanzmann, and the results speak eloquently for themselves.

A movie that draws you close to it like listeners around that glowing radio dial.

An acrobatic, larkish globetrotting adventure about paintings and psychotherapy that defies easy categorization save inclusion on any adult animation fan’s must-see list, its slinky, colorful pleasures and wittily referential joie de vivre are like a lifeline in a season when the art house is typically beholden to severe, award-seeking bids to depress you.

As savagely satirical as it is gorgeously surreal, The Great Buddha+ is something else again — an outrageous, poignant punk Taiwanese black comedy marking the feature arrival of fresh filmmaking talent Huang Hsin-Yao.

Though replete with amusing situations and clever lines, its strongest suit is the delicately pitched comic performances of its actors, most especially star Kevin Kline.

Late Night is that rare thing: a deft and intelligent entertainment that can touch on serious issues because being funny is something it never forgets to do.

Stand and Deliver itself, with its message of the soaring rewards of learning, aims high and delivers perhaps a B+. But it's already a better, less cliched film than La Bamba, with considerably more on its mind, and its strengths may pave the way for more complex, more demanding stories of the Latino experience for all audiences.

While this story is more likely to have impact for those who lived through the horrors of this period and Mujica’s eventual emergence as a political leader, A Twelve Year Night avoids the easy trappings of triumph-of-the-human-spirit narratives. Sometimes a human simply withstands what it’s subjected to, and that’s enough to rivet us.

Not only one of Kazan's richest films and Dean's first significant role, it is also arguably the actor's best performance. [10 June 2005, p.E12]

Once Bitten is that extreme rarity, a youth movie that's made the grown-up discovery of how sexy and amusing a situation can be if you leave things to the imagination.

Funan is a stunning piece of animation in which the beauty of the visuals and the horror of the situation are inextricably intertwined.

Though its form is complex, including archival scenes that include concentration camp-type footage, the film’s emotional through line is clear and direct.

The Breaker Upperers features a distinctly New Zealand style of comedy: dry, awkward and utterly hilarious. But directors, writers and stars Jackie van Beek and Madeline Sami still give this film a wild energy that’s absolutely their own, with jokes that take the audience from giggles to cackles to all-out shrieks.

A heck of a story splendidly told, Maiden succeeds by combining the athleticism of “Free Solo” with the enriching, across-the-board emotional appeal of “RBG.”

The considerable achievement of “Birth of the Cool” comes from the way it understands those words and places them in the context of American history. You’ll want to listen to Miles’ music after watching the film and, when you do, you might feel it a little deeper.

The spell that it casts is bright, dreamy and absorbing, but it is also in no particular hurry to come into focus, which makes its aftereffects all the harder to shake.