Fisher neither wilts under the camera’s scrutiny nor succumbs to the temptation to stare it down. She gives precise form and delicate feeling to emotions and experiences that, despite the specificity of the circumstances, most everyone will recognize.

Subversive, provocative and unexpected, Exit Through the Gift Shop delights in taking you by surprise, starting quietly but ending up in a hall of mirrors as unsettling as anything Lewis Carroll's Alice ever experienced.

A complex, boldly experimental movie plotted like a thriller and paced like a farce, Kings and Queen is category-defying film that's as smart and emotionally resonant as it is entertaining.

Catches you up so firmly in its world that you find yourself accepting whatever Thornton presents right up to its deeply ironic finish.

Hadaway’s previous career as a sound editor is all over this piece, as is her personal experience as a collegiate rower. She has crafted this film as catharsis, and like her protagonist’s journey, it’s both harrowing and triumphant.

Beautifully observed, precisely directed and acted with wonderful conviction, it pulls us into the life of its protagonist in a deeply involving way.

Illusion and disillusionment entwine through the film like twin helixes, weaving a dreamy, free-form look at his life and legacy.

A charming, character-driven film that conveys enormous feeling for its people

The Ornithologist” is both an opaque narrative and a deeply inviting one. Even as the film commences a series of radical formal and dramatic mutations, you are held rapt by the steadiness of the camera’s gaze and the sublime, sun-dappled beauty that it invariably discovers.

In a season not noted for adult diversions, Mona Lisa could hardly be more welcome: a glorious, heart-shaped box of bittersweet chocolates for the grown-ups in the house.

The film is as much a provocative exposé of Franklin, who awaits trial on murder charges and has proclaimed his innocence, as it is a vivid portrait of a community long plagued by drugs, crime, poverty and desperation.

The young actress Haas is riveting in a performance far beyond her years. Princess takes its time, but patience pays off in this sensitive slow burn of a story.

Funny, but its lacking at the core. Judd Apatow's comedy takes the guy's side of things, but how does the woman feel about all of this?

Scenes of the Irish countryside are dazzling and Ford’s version of Ireland is all homey and warm-hearted, with a distinct Hollywood glaze.

Ghobadi uses the lack of resources and the surfeit of drama that had been the lot of the Kurds throughout Hussein's dictatorship and both Gulf wars much in the way De Sica and Rossellini used the European tragedies of the '30s and '40s,

Frequently excessive but never dull, The Departed is a little too much of a lot of the things that define Martin Scorsese films but it's also almost impossible to resist. Too operatic at times, too in love with violence and macho posturing at others, it's a potboiler dressed up in upscale designer clothes, but oh how that pot does boil.

It’s a movie about a citizenry at war with itself, hoping to keep the plates spinning for one more night. You watch it and think how easy it would be to envision an American remake — and wonder, too, if a filmmaker like Lapid even exists here.

There were greater rock festivals and there are greater rock movies, but nothing existed quite like this mobile bacchanal, nicely preserved in Festival Express.

As meditative and beautiful as its title would indicate. What is a surprise is the extent to which it manages to be involving if you can put yourself on its wavelength.

This is one grand adventure, and, animated or not, those are always welcome.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is an enormously impressive piece of work.

The Wild Robot has a lot to say and its own way of saying it. It’s a big-studio animated feature that has its own look, feel and identity, wrapped around an unusual story with ample humor and plenty of emotion — all of it earned. The movie’s vocal performances, especially from leads Lupita Nyong’o and Pedro Pascal, are excellent. It’s lovely on the outside and on the inside.

A Poet rides its wave of misfit compassion so beautifully because its contradictions live inside Rios’s howling, pitiable shambles of a character, who at times looks like someone sketched by a cynical animator but finished by a sympathetic colorist.

At a little over 90 minutes, Support the Girls has the brash trappings, if not the longevity, of a “Cheers”-style sitcom, and its generous humor is always in productive play with a tough, flinty realism.

What is different about Half Nelson is the execution, the kind of subtlety in writing, directing and acting (by costars Shareeka Epps and Anthony Mackie as well as Gosling) you seldom see.

Cat People sinks its claws into the psyche for an erotically tinged horror-thriller. [29 Oct 1998, p.F7]

Though Ida's life would become a torturous hell spent locked away in an insane asylum, the legacy left by her letters has made for an intense and intriguing, if at times uneven, film with Italian director Marco Bellocchio wringing every drop of emotion out of his actors and his audience before it is over.

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