By its bittersweet end, Fifi Howls From Happiness has stayed almost entirely in one apartment and yet somehow unveiled both a life in full and a blank canvas.

It rewards the attention of a committed voyeur, which all proper cineastes and many of our best provocateurs are anyway. The pinched of mind and the humorless need not bother. Invariably more welcome (one imagines Oren thinking) are those who enjoy their senses and perspectives pried open while their heads get a thorough scratching.

This is definitely animation for grown-ups - its look is voluptuous, sexy and sultry; its Latin-inflected Dizzy Gillespie sound is seductive; and its story of young lovers whose passions are tested is timeless.

Assayas has such a steady hand as a director, he knows precisely how to let all of Gilles' inner angst play out. His nostalgia for those past days can be felt in the affection and forgiving way the indiscretions of youth are portrayed.

In charting that road from disorienting fragility to determined independence, Ebrahimi serves up a memorably nuanced performance.

Murphy is back, and both his old gifts and some new ones are on engaging display in the rowdy, raunchy, inescapably funny Dolemite Is My Name, a gleefully profane biopic and a passion project the star has been nurturing for years.

A unique glimpse into the recovery mechanism of damaged hearts and bewildered minds, how a visage of hollowed-out sorrow after one year becomes a look of more peaceful acceptance down the road.

Blessed with a loose, anarchic B-picture soul that encourages you to enjoy yourself even when you're not quite sure what's going on, the scruffy "Guardians" is irreverent in a way that can bring the first "Star Wars" to mind.

"Ain't in It" offers a warm and largely satisfying look at a man and his music and, for some, the end of an era.

At its heart Lore qualifies as a coming-of-age story, but it is far from the ones we usually see.

It’s a haunting and masterful effort, but be warned: This is tough stuff.

Its imperfections and its beauties are inextricable from each other, and also from the sad, inspiring real-life story it has to tell.

The summer's uncorseted, unqualified delight. [14 July 1989, Calendar, p.6-1]

In a sea of one-note symphonies, this touching feature is bleak and comic, heartbreaking and affirmative, romantic and tragic, gimlet-eyed and sympathetic, all at the same time.

A recklessly emotional film that is so committed to feelings it occasionally overflows its banks. Which may be a little messy, but it's a lot more welcome than the drought-stricken alternatives.

Overall, Corsage shows a tantalizing way forward for the hopelessly staid biopic genre: honoring, provoking and upending with verve and humor as it liberates a complex woman from iconography’s deadening glamour.

Hara-Kiri builds and builds as well, but its revelations are more character-derived that action-oriented, so the film never reaches the cattle-on-fire craziness of its predecessor.

The ambitions toward '70s-era paranoia thrillers aside, as a connect-the-dots narrative, Dirty Wars is eye-opening, a fierce argument that there are chilling ramifications to endless, vague aggression.

A wild at heart, anarchic comedy that believes in living dangerously.

One of those special films that broadens and deepens as it goes on.

If people here feel trapped, despairing of a way out, it is Singleton's gift to make us empathize with their hopelessness, and make us wonder, along with them, how long this must go on.

Thankfully, filmmaker Bruce David Klein finds the sweet spot between admirer and honest broker with the warm, engaging tribute biodoc Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story.

Cohn’s slickly edited verité-style storytelling lets each person’s humanity rise to the top, just enough to mix expected poignancy with a simple clarity about the struggles of low-income, opportunity-challenged souls.

Red Rocket is both a laser-focused character study and a scrappy, scrupulously observed portrait of a tight-knit community.

James Mangold directs it with such energy and passion that it's as if he didn't know it's all been done before.

With Fassbender's charisma igniting his costar as well as himself, these sparring interchanges, both captivating and entertaining, are where this Jane Eyre finally catches fire.

Wolf Children is rather an odd story, told in a one-of-a-kind style that feels equal parts sentimental, somber and strange.

Mosallam’s incisive and heartfelt, if occasionally on-the-nose, approach to matters of love, religion, family and culture sets the film apart.

A gloss on the disillusion that came with the embracing of communist ideals that is part playful farce, part dark satire, this unclassifiable film, both comic and strange, always holds your attention even when it doesn't seem to know where it's going.

"Monster" is almost too ambitious to be completely realized. But when it works, which is most of the time, its story has a power which lingers in the mind.

The film is deeply moving yet never maudlin in telling this hard-knocks-but-hope-infused story.

It never succumbs to making poverty a graphic ornament.

It's a grisly but sweet ode to friendship, love and the George Romero zombie trilogy.

Their Finest is a treat that has something on its mind, a charming concoction that adds a bit of texture and bite to the mix. Genial and engaging with a fine sense of humor, it makes blending the comic with the serious look simpler than it actually is.

Creepy uses silence as a tool of terror, following its characters through long, tense scenes where everything’s a little too quiet, and where each creak sounds like a scream. The director has always excelled at making the ordinary seem unsettling.

The movie naturally pulses with life and energy, invigorated by its narrative sweep, its nimble camerawork and propulsive musical score composed by Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans. But Bahrani scrupulously resists the temptation to turn India into a flashy, exoticizing spectacle, as more than a few critics accused “Slumdog Millionaire” of doing.

A fearless and ambitious piece of work, made with equal parts passion and calculation, an unapologetically entertaining major studio release with compelling real-world relevance, a film that takes numerous risks and thrives on them all.

For anyone missing this summer’s Tokyo Olympics, postponed to March, Rising Phoenix is a fitting bridge for one night, resoundingly demonstrating that an athlete is an athlete. You will never watch the games in the same way.

With the help of some vivid old photographs, their documentary reconstructs a world that was both darkly dangerous and strangely liberating.

As Lane wends her way to a conclusion of her own, it’d be a mistake to view “Confessions of a Good Samaritan,” with its serious curiosity balanced by a quirky theremin score and humorous asides, as Lane turning personal experience into public advocacy. She’s cagier than that.

Silent Souls is a marvel. Fedorchenko's expressive powers and his visual prowess are astonishing, and though the film's conclusion is abrupt and confounding, it feels right.

Stand By Me is the summer's great gift, a compassionate, perfectly performed look at the real heart of youth. It stands, sweet and strong, ribald, outrageous and funny, like its heroes themselves--a bit gamy around the edges, perhaps, but pure and fine clear through. It's one of those treasures absolutely not to be missed.

A fascinating hybrid of a film. Even though its purpose couldn't be more serious, its style could hardly be more pulp.

Heineman’s trust in what his camera reveals — in the forlorn faces of U.S. soldiers, in the slump of Sadat’s demeanor, in the distraught eyes of a mother caught in that Kabul airport scrum of the desperate — tells its own necessary story of war wreckage.

Hittman's debut isn't just a brilliantly tactile study of the mounting sexual curiosity and frustration of 14-year-old Lila (Gina Piersanti); it's also an important landmark in the oft-ignored subgenre of realistic movies about female adolescence.

Dreamgirls is the entire musical package, a triumph of old school on-screen glamour, and we wouldn't want it any other way.

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.

A more impartial filmmaker might have understood the need for other voices to balance against all that attitude, might have understood how hungry the film makes us for even a single non-adulatory moment.

While it’s instructive to witness the luxuries enjoyed by the lofty and powerful — the tea, the wine, the pastries — in contrast with the soldier’s miserable starvation diet, it’s ultimately a mistake to cut away from Bäumer and his comrades, removing us from the physical and psychological hellscape to which they’ve been abandoned.

While Cruz wins us over with her emotionally charged amateur sleuthing, the weight of a constant struggle to not just gain acceptance, but survive fighting for it, gives France’s documentary a stirring poignancy.

A solid, often engrossing film that doesn't engage us overall the way Denzel Washington's work does.

Stylistically, the film is a dream. But in every case, the style has a reason. [12 Aug 1988]

Because of its strong dialogue and convincing acting, 99 Homes stays on point for quite some time, artfully disguising the film's increasing reliance on plot devices.

What French writer-director Mia Hansen-Love has created is an extraordinarily empathetic humanistic drama, a film of love, joy, sadness and hope that understands how complex our emotions are and does beautiful justice to them.

The Trial of the Chicago 7, smoothly entertaining as it is, may also elude clear consensus. Democracy is a messy business, but an element of real, lived-in messiness seems beyond this movie’s purview.

The journey to that lethal, rolling boil is, in the hands of Japan’s premier suspense director, certainly a nail-biting one, a tale of carefully weighed clicks that lead to a lot of rashly pulled triggers.

The blurring of real testimony with a compassionate filmmaker’s inventions is so compelling that when the documentary portion arrives, the movie can’t help but sink a bit.

It’s almost unbelievable that Carney pulls off films like this, which could easily tip over into maudlin. Instead, the winning Flora and Son is an utterly irresistible emotional ear-worm.

One thing that makes Lunchbox so strong is that a touch of melancholy hangs over its sweetness. Finally this is a film about the wheel of life, about what helps us cope with its turns and find our way in its unforgiving labyrinth.

Citizen K uses Khodorkovsky’s story as a way to guide us through the thickets of modern Russian history, a tangled, through-the-looking-glass world that the film surveys from the days of Boris Yeltsin in 1991 to today’s increasingly autocratic reign of Vladimir Putin

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.

Shine a Light may not be the last Rolling Stones movie, but it's likely to be the last one with a touch of the poet about it.

A most-affecting experience, an impressive accomplishment in all its aspects.

Their instincts as filmmakers override their instincts as moralizers. Menace II Society is best--and most shocking--when it just sets out its horrors and lets us find our own way. [26 May 1993, Calendar, p.F-1]

Succeeds because it turns out not to be the movie it might so easily have been.

Even with its drawbacks, Blue Car remains an intimate, thoughtful drama, with a performance no one is likely to forget.

Surprisingly compelling viewing.

A resolutely odd, occasionally absurd movie, but it's as charming and stylish as one could expect from this pair - if you like that sort of thing.

Dynamic, informal and observant yet, while never grueling, it offers a constant provocative contrast between backgrounds of spectacular and beautiful natural scenery and primitive living conditions.

In The Death of Louis XIV, Léaud shows us stray glimmers of the droll conversationalist and irrepressible bon vivant the Sun King once must have been. But his performance is finally a magnificent stare into the abyss, a sustained contemplation of things we would rather not dwell upon but will ultimately have to face.

The film's concerns are profoundly therapeutic, but it nimbly avoids every therapy-drama cliché.

With careful craftsmanship, Half the Picture is an important piece of testimony in the fight for the civil rights of female directors in Hollywood.

Say Her Name doesn’t have answers, but it does re-emphasize how unnecessarily tragic Bland’s death was, and why her name should be a boldfaced one in the nationwide call for police reform.

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.

What gives this slender movie its appeal is how Minnelli and writers Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett check out all the huge and tiny steps in the complicated process with such gleeful, and usually wry, detail. [23 Jul 1992, p.13]

The point of DiMaria’s absorbing and passionate documentary is there was much more to his uncle than being one of the “others” in an infamous murder spree.

Inextricably rooted in lead Arndis Hrönn Egilsdöttir’s quietly defiant performance, The County tells an immersive, timeless David vs. Goliath story set against a contemporary backdrop of shifting societal norms.

Hanging over the narrative is a sense of futility, that this can and will happen again and again. Another lawsuit, another life lost, another workaround. But for a moment, one man on a bike with a few expertly wielded weapons can wreak holy havoc on corrupt cops, and damn does it feel good to watch.

If the key to price in real estate is "location, location, location," the key to success in vérité-style documentaries is "access, access, access." Which is what Cartel Land has in compelling amounts.

A sleek, accomplished piece of work, meticulously controlled and completely involving. The dark end of the street doesn't get much more inviting than this.

A vibrant and joyous new documentary.

Set in the high-rises of the Cabrini-Green housing project in 1992, when the beleaguered complex’s decline was palpable, it sounds like a recipe for doleful poverty-gazing. But in Windy City native Baig’s solid hands, it’s a resolutely poetic, at times even golden-hued portrait of lives unafraid to hope amid growing despair.

An Honest Liar isn't simply a career recap or a fond portrait; the movie takes exhilarating turns as directors Justin Weinstein and Tyler Measom follow present-day developments in Randi's personal life.

An understated gem. Writer-director Jeff Nichols, making his feature debut, has created a richly textured world.

Kahn is a quiet filmmaker, and he gently prods his sources to go beyond the typical art world hyperbole of “gorgeous” and “wonderful.” And in a cool, clear-eyed way, he reveals how the $400-million sausage is made, how capitalism has turned art from idea into inventory.

You may not respect What’s Love Got to Do With It, but enjoying it is inescapable. A high-energy mixture of spectacular music, vigorous acting and cliched situations, this is a rough-and-rowdy fairy tale with a feminist subtext, and if that sounds perplexing, Love so pumps up the volume you won’t have much time to think about it.

There's no denying that Soul Kitchen is a film that delights in contrivance and improbability, but it does so with such a big-hearted sense of fun that it is hard not to be swept away.

The mishmash that results is by turns creepy, silly, inventive, darkly funny and, at one point, mind-blowingly bloody. Still, some smart streamlining would have sharpened the focus and amped up the power of this well-shot and edited spookfest.

While director Penny Lane (not a pseudonym) energetically goes about shattering our preconceived notions at every intriguing turn, the film is at its most potent tracing society’s history of “satanic panic,” from the Salem Witch Trials to the rise of the evangelical lobby on the shoulders of the Red Scare to the 1980s when Dungeons & Dragons was viewed as a demonic gateway game.

While After the Thin Man offers Powell and Loy plenty to drink and lots of fine banter, it doesn't hold up as well as the first picture. [13 Nov 1997, p.F15]

That measured approach, exemplified in star Billerbeck’s arresting simplicity and the many fine supporting turns around him, allows us to clock Nanning’s growing awareness of what matters to others, what’s impossible to ignore and how to interpret an unjust world that’s still full of beauty and kindness if you know where to look. Which, of course, includes inside himself.

It’s a lot of fun — and often quite funny — while it lasts, though I could have used less gunplay and more whistling, an element that, more than anything else here, speaks to Porumboiu’s gift for deadpan absurdity.

The film is a real "whew"-factor yarn, a hearty soup of thick accents, bold personalities and complicated motives, with an unmistakable taste of charismatic, ornery American hedonism.

As funny and ferocious as much of Zola is, it’s let down by an increasingly haphazard script that doesn’t know how to either sustain its humor or negotiate its turn into darker territory — and so, disappointingly, it waffles.

Make no mistake, "We Steal Secrets" is a sprawling, ambitious, major work — a gripping exploration of power, personality, technology and the crushing weight that can come to bear on those who find themselves in its combined path.

Even when Talk to Me flirts with incoherence, Wilde pulls it back from the brink. More than just a great scream queen, she makes vivid sense of Mia’s ravaged emotions, revealing her to be a captive less to the spirit realm than to her own inconsolable grief. She’s the movie’s revelation, hands down.

The film’s as eclectic as it is eccentric, and it stays true to its own twisted sense of poetry, all the way to an epilogue that’s somehow even odder than anything that came before.

Midnight Special announces the arrival of a filmmaker in total control of his technique as well as our emotions. A bravura science-fiction thriller that explores emotional areas like parenthood and the nature of belief, it's a riveting genre exercise as well as something more.