28 Weeks Later lacks the streamlined thrust of its predecessor but makes for compelling, adrenaline-fueled viewing just the same.

Nothing in this gratifyingly focused movie feels excessive or gratuitous, and a situation that repeatedly threatens to spiral out of control is dramatized with the utmost assurance.

Concise, yet affecting, Chile ‘76 assuredly occupies the post as one of the finest Latin American productions to open stateside this year.

Ly surveys all his characters without judgment, but a longer, richer version of this movie might have distributed its sympathies to even more powerful effect.

Insomnia shows an equally welcome ability: a gift of creating intelligent, engrossing popular entertainment.

Bit by bit, line by line, she [July] nudges you onto her characters’ wavelength, navigating their world with matter-of-fact drollery and tethering even her weirdest flights of fancy to clear, accessible emotions.

Control keeps you riveted in ways that "24 Hour Party People" doesn't, primarily because of the investment of craft and conviction by all concerned.

Above all else expresses the timeless impact of Lily Bart's plight.

The singular achievement of Jonathan Karsh's graceful and rigorous documentary is that he enables his audiences to see his heroine's family through her very clear but always loving eyes.

An impeccably acted character drama revolving around a mother and her teenage twin sons, Private Property shows how strong and how terrifying the bonds within families can be. Directed by Belgium's Joachim Lafosse, it etches the line between love and hate with a savagery that is almost unprecedented.

The Boys is so heartfelt that it elicits a sense that complex creative relationships may ultimately elude explication, leaving Jeffrey Sherman to speculate that the friction between his father and his uncle was what brought their songs alive.

Unlike documentaries that tie things up in a tidy bow, Supreme Price wants viewers to understand that the status of democracy in Nigeria remains very much in flux.

Thoughtful, deeply affectionate and concerned more with essence than chronology, it recounts the band’s 30 years in a way that should enlighten diehards as well as the uninitiated.

Its dizzying strength is as a visceral journey, a detour from the privileged freedom represented by a horizon to the tragic limbo of displacement, an ocean that’s both a confinement and an abyss.

The artfully kaleidoscopic nightmare of a collapsed state has rarely been so imaginatively portrayed. The unintentionally awkward moments come from a few of the more overwrought voice-over performances, in conjunction with the often-pinched rendering of human faces.

The film has a marvelous first half. All of Zinnemann's best qualities -- tact, taste, integrity, quiet intellect and idealism -- shine through in the convent scenes, as does the acting. However, good as Peter Finch is (as an agnostic doctor), the second half seems hurried, over-reticent. [25 Mar 1988, p.22]

[A] tender, harrowing and beautifully modulated coming-of-age drama.

Thanks to Cruise and Kosinski’s unfashionable insistence on practical filmmaking and their refusal to lean too heavily on computer-generated visual effects, their sequel plays like a throwback in more than one sense. But the era that produced the first film has shifted, and “Top Gun: Maverick” is especially poignant in the ways, both subtle and overt, that it acknowledges the passage of time, the fading of youth and the shifting of its own status as a pop cultural phenomenon.

What emerges from the electronic noise and fussy aesthetic of “BlackBerry” is a compelling portrait of a company that flew too close to the sun.

If that wistful, cleareyed melancholy were its primary mood, Gas Food Lodging might have been a little masterpiece. It isn't -- but it's good enough. Anders gets the externals of her vision of Laramie: a world of high skies, searing deserts, dusty stores and roads that vanish into a flat horizon. And the internals: the bickering, hurts, dreams and little everyday epiphanies. If many movies avoid or disguise the world, shining it up beyond recognition, Gas Food Lodging takes the opposite approach, a better one. It jumps right into life, faces it with careless affection, clarity and courage. [14 Aug 1982, p.F8]

Intelligent, involving and conspicuously adult, Starting Out in the Evening is almost shocking in its distinctiveness, its ability to create high drama from an unlikely source.

I think that the filmmakers’ pessimism is inseparable from their compassion and that their compassion is inseparable from their rage.

To describe 3 Faces as a multi-generational portrait would not be entirely inaccurate, though it would risk divesting the movie of its quotidian poetry, its deep reserves of mystery and its rich rewards for an open-hearted audience. Sometimes, as these characters understand by journey’s end, it’s important to go and discover the truth for yourself.

Amore satisfying use of the medium would be difficult to imagine.

Sun-drenched Luzzu is an unaffected triumph with a simmering power, the type of deceivingly familiar film that helps us sail into a place and a lifestyle most of us ignore but that are made vividly compelling in the hand of a new storyteller with classically honed sensibilities.

In a superb cast of mostly unknowns -- with the exception of Matthew Modine and Dorain Harewood -- D'Onofrio, who put on 60 pounds for this pivotal role, and Ermey are exceptional. [26 June 1987]

Stanwyck deftly handles the film’s mix of pathos, comedy and romance. Remember the Night also demonstrates how capable MacMurray could be as leading man.

Impeccably made, uncompromising in its implacable vision of the deranging power of love, sex and controlled substances, this savage and staggering film knows how to take our breath away.

Unlike many “adult” moviemakers, Henson believed his core audience capable of appreciating wit, irony, topical humor, idealism, intense emotion and bemused reflections on real life and all its complexity. All these, and more, are present in The Witches.

One terrific concert film.

Each new segment of All That’s Left of You is its own self-contained drama, but they build on one another, the past’s invisible weight bearing down on children who cannot fully comprehend the sorrow that came before, but have grown up knowing nothing else.

Warfare is strictly the facts, and those alone are terrible, brave, intense, random, tedious and captivating.

An eloquent, heart-tugging Civil War epic about the first black infantry regiment to march off to battle for the Union. And epic is the word. Not since John Ford has a film maker created such dramatic large-scale Civil War battle scenes in a major theatrical film.

Exquisitely made with a mesmerizing sense of style, it shows the wonderful things that can happen when traditional material is both handled with care and adroitly updated.

It could have done with fewer plot devices, but it is ultimately far more satisfying than countless less ambitious and risky films.

All of this romantic back and forth unfolds gradually and in charming ensemble style. As the characters think about seducing each other, as they inevitably complicate their lives without being able to help themselves, the film is simultaneously seducing us.

Writer-director Jay Bulger combines warts-heavy interview footage of Baker with vivid archival bits, concert clips, jaunty animation and chats with various musical greats to paint a lively portrait of yet another brilliant but wildly self-destructive artist.

Women Who Kill is delightfully specific in its approach to its characters and their community. It takes a familiar theme of romantic comedies — the fear of commitment — and gives it new life by adding a morbid element to the mix.

Intimate in the telling, sweeping in the implications, Loznitsa has created an unusually incisive film.

What A Bug's Life demonstrates is that when it comes to bugs, the most fun ones to hang out with hang exclusively with the gang at Pixar.

A documentary that's admirably frank about the difficulties of insightfully portraying such a widely lauded — and subtly cagey and habitually self-effacing — figure.

The Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside of the Arkansas governor’s presidential campaign, with Carville playing Huck Finn to Stephanopoulos’ Tom Sawyer, these lively presences lit up Clinton’s drive to the White House and turn The War Room into a tiptop political documentary that offers a candid and entertaining backstage look at a most unlikely electoral Juggernaut.

Nothing quite prepares you for the rough-cut diamond that is Precious. A rare blend of pure entertainment and dark social commentary, this shockingly raw, surprisingly irreverent and absolutely unforgettable story.

As David Rakoff once wrote, "Youth isn't wasted on the young. It is perpetrated on the young." Exactly how is brilliantly captured by Andrew Bujalski in his debut feature, Funny Ha Ha.

A brazen mix of head-through-the-glass violence and pie-in-the-face slapstick, with a dash of Capra-esque working-class comedy for good measure, Police Story is remarkably seamless in tone and execution.

Izaac Wang’s performance of this tortured teenage soul — so young, still in braces — is a sensitive expression of the insecurity Chris feels around others and anxiety about how he will be perceived. Wang’s performance is mirrored by Chen as his mother, a housewife with an artist’s heart. She delicately balances steeliness and vulnerability to deliver a heartrending performance.

This cautionary tale couldn't be more timely or essential.

The experience of watching it produces readily identifiable flavors and associations: It’s a gentle-toned family drama and a moody futuristic fable, with a faint techno-paranoid aroma, a melancholy mouthfeel and a lingering aftertaste of existential unease.

In the hands of director and co-writer Santiago Mitre, co-writer Mariano Llinás and lead actor Ricardo Darín (“The Secret in Their Eyes”), Strassera is the slow-but-steady one in the story of “The Tortoise and The Junta: The Little Prosecutor Who Maybe Couldn’t, But Wouldn’t Quit.” He’s what one might call “endearingly competent.” The characterization they achieve is something rare and commendable: a lead who is interestingly uninteresting.

You feel the love in Love, Antosha, that’s for sure. But you also feel something else, a sadness that is close to overwhelming. How could it be otherwise?

A transcendent, transporting experience, a trance movie that casts a major league spell by going deeply into a monastic world that lives largely without words.

It almost seems that Moore discovered the film and character and decided she had to play Gloria, the way stage actors take on classic roles. Moore's take brings a new dimension not only to the story but also to her career.

A towering filmic achievement, Monos pulsates like an inescapable vivid trance, cosmic and terrestrial at once, fantastical and violently stark, about victims and victimizers. Like all dualities, those in this excursion are two bends that belong to the same river.

The film traces Cernan's career trajectory, going back to his days in San Diego as a hot-shot naval aviator, blending terrific archival footage with contemporary perspectives to quietly poetic effect.

The movie is among the filmmaker's most emotionally affecting.

A gripping psychological drama based on events more than half a century old, it has inescapable contemporary echoes. Laced with intensely emotional situations, it refuses to force the issue by pushing too hard. And it proves, yet again, that though moral and spiritual questions may not sound spellbinding they often provide the most absorbing movie experiences.

The film's exploration of the tenuous bonds within a community will surely prompt serious soul-searching.

Zhang uses quiet to suggest an active calmness, so when a particular sound punctures the air — gurgling water, the music on a videotape, a child’s questions — it feels like the notes of life, the stuff that’s supposed to spark us.

The film doesn't always follow up on its more interesting issues: safety, technique, financial hardship, even the sport's history. But the emotional dynamics of its trio of formative hopefuls, and their touching relationships with the parents or guardians who work hard at enabling their passion, set a solid pace.

The final moments of It Comes at Night go beyond the usual standards of horror-movie bleakness to achieve an almost unwatchable cruelty — a powerful accomplishment that also feels, in this context, like a limitation.

Del Toro is almost alone in his ability to re-create on screen the wide-eyed exhilaration and disturbing grotesqueness that is the legacy of reading comics on the page.

With her new film, the poignant and funny Please Give, Holofcener is at the top of her game.

Im recounts the painter's life in bold strokes rather than with the literalist's painstaking detail, and in the process tells us more about the mysteries of genius than a bushel full of quotidian fact.

Lumumba is potent stuff. Complex, powerful, intensely dramatic.

Truly, there can be nothing as complex as the simplest human relationships, and nothing as satisfying as a film that understands that as this one does.

It’s more than worth a look — not only for its careful illumination of the artist’s biography, plus an abundant representation of her luminous paintings, but for the way in which it exposes the obstacles af Klint and her legacy faced.

Hyde stages it all with an unfussy elegance that serves the material, and any lingering creakiness is dispelled by Thompson and McCormack, who always seem to be playing people rather than ideological mouthpieces.

Rocks in My Pockets is not an easy film to watch... But it serves as a striking reminder of the individuals who suffer similar pains in silence, and of the special power of animation to make the unseen visible.

David Lynch's superb and subtly ironic 1980 film reveals the shining humanity in a horribly disfigured--and horribly mistreated--young man who actually lived in England in the late 19th Century and was rescued by an enlightened Victorian physician.

[An] enlightening, life-affirming documentary.

Seven years in the making, it demands to be experienced not just because of the good it does but because of how unexpectedly good, even buoyant, it makes you feel.

The film captures the particular listlessness of youth in summer, the passed pipes and lazy swims in the gorge or the backyard pool. The adolescent posturing is equal parts toughness and vulnerability.

The entire piece is precisely woven together, from script to performance to execution, and the result is a chilling study of emotional annihilation and its aftermath.

The role is nothing more than an elaborate comic turn, but he invests it with such sly knowingness and reserves of feeling that he gives this dinky joke-book movie a soul. Brando is doing here what a lot of famous actors probably wish they could do to the roles that made them famous (or, in Brando’s case, famous again). He’s using the gravity of his performance in “The Godfather” for comic effect, bringing out the absurdity that was always just under the surface of the role.

Even by series standards, it’s an astonishingly staged and sustained panorama of violence, much of it mediated (and attenuated) by the usual inventive weaponry and bulletproof menswear, and meted out by international action stars including Donnie Yen and Hiroyuki Sanada.

The character designs and backdrops are amazingly imaginative; and though the movements and rendering are often glitchy, that only adds to the charm of the residents’ casual conversations.

Nature nurtured into an eerie consciousness by a celluloid craftsman, it feels like a throwback to “Wicker Man”-era folk-tinged freakouts — confounding enough to not be everyone’s cup of tea, but for those ready for a pot of its brew, plenty transporting and tingling.

The filmmakers cultivate a dynamic portrait of Egypt, with its dense social, political and religious layers.

Beneath its quiet surface, the Austin, Texas-set drama Barracuda thrums with menace and mystery from first moment to last.

Dumisa masterfully — and entertainingly — builds, twists and compounds the tension as events spiral out of control and lives hang in the balance.

Wang approaches storytelling through the internal weather of his characters and long, fixed takes marked by naturalistic dialogue — blink and you might not catch a time-fracturing, nuanced gesture, or crucial piece of information.

For two hours it places Bourdain’s voice alongside the voices of those who knew him, as if they were still able to converse on the same spiritual plane. There’s beauty and solace in that illusion, even if the movie can’t — and maybe shouldn’t — begin to answer the unbearably sad question that haunts every frame.

This time out, Spielberg has chosen to put an antic disposition on, and with the single exception of casting, his almost every decision has been disastrous. He has prettified or coarsened; he has made comic scenes broadly slapstick and tiptoed over the story's crucial relationship. The result, alas, is the film purpled.

Without doubt this strong documentary sheds a powerful light on this particular case while emphasizing the ultimate unknowability of absolute truth.

The term "inspirational" gets bandied about a lot, but Becoming Bulletproof is thoroughly deserving of that tag.

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.

Is The Humans a haunted-house movie? Maybe; Karam is not above unleashing a good jump scare or two. But for all the creeping dread he summons here through sheer formal concentration, the nature of the horror he’s addressing turns out to be much harder to pin down.

Scene by scene, it pulls us into a world that coheres not just through plotting and dialogue, but through the sharp rhythms of Benjamin Rodriguez Jr.’s editing, the hard shimmer of Alexander Dynan’s images and the humdrum precision of Ashley Fenton’s production design.

Happily absent are later-generation pop stars testifying to the band’s genius, or worse, singing their own versions of Beatles songs. Not even the Beatles testify to their own genius.

Bigelow gets a scary poetry out of these landscapes--and though the film is erratic, it has force and passion...It works on your nerves--not necessarily through its big shock scenes, but through the atmosphere it creates: the sense of dread, no exit, lives plunging out of control, the secret mad pull of murder and outlawry.

The delectable Babette’s Feast is a fable told with passion, intelligence and sumptuousness. Although it certainly has a feast at its center, it would be a mistake to think that its tribute is intended only for great cooks. No, it’s a deep reverence to all great artists--whether they make books, bowls or ballets, baskets, quilts, songs, poems, paintings . . . or films.

The immediacy with which it bears witness to injustice is powerful and affecting, as are the images of joy he captures amid the burning olive trees.

In the mythology of personal growth, liberating yourself leads invariably to increased happiness. Yet what characterizes the seekers in the powerful One of Us is nothing that straightforward.

A seamless model of form and content. (My only quibble is the poor quality of the digital video, which doesn't do justice to Johnson's work.)

It leaves you stirred and uplifted not only by its music but also by the determination and courage of the people who sang and danced it on the way to a freer life.

This is a film that insinuates itself deeply into our awareness. It's that rare pulp story with something on its mind, an unnerving, socially conscious thriller with a killer sense of narrative drive.

Charming and outlandish by turns, this misfit love story of disconnected people trying to find one another in an antagonistic world is a comedy of discomfort and rage that turns unexpectedly sweet and pure.

A very small film but a sweet one, an easygoing venture of the feel-good variety. What sets it apart is something even larger pictures often lack: an excellent performance by its star.