Loving Mandy means appreciating what’s special about it from start to finish: from the psychedelic opening to the speed-metal finale. This film is a fusion of kitsch and pulp, underscored with a genuine spiritual yearning. It shouldn’t even be shown in theaters; it should be projected onto the side of an old hippie’s van.

The resulting film does have a makeshift quality to it, with the new footage, old newsreel shots, circa 1974 interviews, film of the fight and the concerts stitched together in a kind of cinematic crazy quilt. But because a classic heavyweight championship fight, especially with these protagonists, epitomizes the drama inherent in sport, When We Were Kings always compels our interest.

A moving and joyous behind-the-scenes documentary about a world filled with big, bold personalities and the music they make.

Avatar's shock and awe demand to be seen. You've never experienced anything like it, and neither has anyone else.

Morgen has crafted an often brilliant, sometimes overheated but always humane documentary, one in which Nirvana’s music and fame is just the scaffolding to Cobain’s inner life.

The beauty of Bening’s performance lies in those marvelously suggestive layers — all the delicate, tendril-like emotional possibilities that she manages to tuck into the margins of any given moment.

Klondike is certainly not an easy watch, but it is a profound one — a film that feels both prescient and retrospective about Ukraine, locked in what seems a never-ending existential conflict with its neighbor.

This 1939 William Wyler version of Emily Bronte's passionate and inspired novel of l'amour on the lightning-lashed moors and gloomy heaths is the best and most successful on screen. [16 Oct 1994, p.65]

Whether you're familiar with Pina Bausch's work or not, the new film Pina is a knockout.

Faultlessly acted by top Australian talent, including Guy Pearce, Ben Mendelsohn and Jacki Weaver, Animal Kingdom marries heightened emotionality with cool contemporary style.

Made with a restraint that enhances the heartbreaking nature of its narrative, Rosie is also fortunate in having top-of-the-line Irish actress Sarah Greene, who is wrenchingly involving as a character teetering on the edge of complete desperation.

A virtually irresistible film. [21 March 1986, p.1]

The director's visually thrilling Hugo has real moments of 3-D magic. Sadly, they aren't quite enough to make this adaptation of Brian Selznick's celebrated novel, "The Invention of Hugo Cabret," a wholly satisfying experience.

The film perfectly understands the tentative experimentation and frequent self-loathing of adolescence, the difficulty of knowing whom to trust and how much to trust them, as well as how incendiary an age this can be, with uncertain psyches ready to explode at minimal provocation.

The Lego Movie is strikingly, exhilaratingly, exhaustingly fresh.

The power of “Ladybird, Ladybird” is inseparable from its weaknesses. Loach brings us up close to the misery but, in a larger sense, he stands back.

Between Lelio's ingenuity in staging the film, an extremely clever script co-written with his frequent collaborator, Gonzalo Maza, and the pumping disco that interjects its opinions and assessments of each situation, Gloria is one of the most enjoyable movies to come along in a while.

With that fire in his belly, Raimi's Drag Me to Hell does everything we want a horror film to do: It is fearsomely scary, wickedly funny and diabolically gross.

Obsession creates its own fascination, and never more so than in King of Kong, a sprightly new documentary that's as compulsively watchable as the vintage video game it focuses on is addictive.

A brilliant, often grotesquely bizarre allegory on life in Hungary from World War II to the present.

In an instance of director, stars and material melding flawlessly, Spider is a brilliantly realized depiction of a mentally ill individual.

The Selfish Giant is devastating social realism in the mode of Ken Loach's "Kes."

Expertly put together by editor Amy Linton, AKA Doc Pomus uses its wealth of material to create the sense of a man with a genius for putting undistilled emotion into his songs.

Even as it moves from tender ethnographic portraiture into a realm of hushed, intimate tragedy, Ixcanul quivers with a fierce if understated feminine energy.

This isn’t an idealized version of romance or L.A. millennials; Kotlyarenko and Nekrasova shine a glaring iPhone flashlight on their characters’ — and their generation’s — flaws.

It turns out that the screen provides a surprisingly hospitable frame for a musical that is quite purely and unabashedly — at times even downright earnestly — a work of theater.

After so fruitful a collaboration on “Drive My Car,” Hamaguchi and Ishibashi may have topped themselves with something even more compelling.

Akin, a Swedish filmmaker whose family originally hails from Georgia, knows this is a story tinged with sadness for lives that have been ostracized and marginalized. But his wider view starts from a place of optimism about what curiosity engenders.