Close-Up is perhaps the emblematic work of the so-called Iranian New Wave, summing up its methods and preoccupations and also bringing together two of its key figures, Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf.

The reality of François' classroom is so intense that it holds our interest even while the film's dramatic focus is building so quietly under the surface that we don't notice it at first.

[Stone] succeeds with an immediacy that is frightening. War movies of the past, even the greatest ones, seem like crane shots by comparison; Platoon is at ground zero.

An intense, nihilistic thriller as well as a model of implacable storytelling, this is a film you can't stop watching even though you very much wish you could. That's because No Country escorts you through a world so pitilessly bleak, "you put your soul at hazard," as one character says, to be part of it.

For 20 years, Claire Denis has been among France's foremost filmmakers with her acute yet subtle observations of the ebbs and flows within relationships. Her perception and understanding seem to grow only richer over the years, and her newest film, 35 Shots of Rum, is surely one of her finest -- and thereby one of the best films of the year.

The story, like "Frankenstein" and "Dracula," has taken on the significance of a modern folk tale, layered with obvious moralizing and as familiar as personal history.

Creates magic of a completely different sort. It makes the unlikeliest subject unforgettable, finding drama, beauty, even poetry in simple things and simple lives.

If film means anything to you, if emotional truth is a quality you care about, this is an event that ought not be missed.

It’s the tension between hardscrabble realism and buoyant fantasy — and the understanding that they are both, in fact, vital aspects of the same experience — that makes The Florida Project so powerfully unresolved.

The screenplay — by the French Mauritania director and Malian co-writer Kessen Tall, in her feature debut — is a mesmerizing blend of the horrific and the humorous as it boils ideology down to the personal level.

It’s a tale of profound isolation and thrilling connection, alert and alive and gorgeously sensual even as every moment carries a bittersweet reminder of time’s inexorable passage.

It's a mind-bending film, devastating and disorienting, that disturbs us in ways we're not used to being disturbed, raising questions about the nature of documentary, the persistence of evil, and the intertwined ways movies function in our culture and in our minds.

Part Frederick Wiseman-esque medical study, part endoscopic-horror tour de force, it is a thing to be experienced, ideally in a theater — a movie theater, not an operating one, though the filmmakers have a particular genius for blurring the difference.

Seeing E.T. again reminds us of how much we've remained the same, how gratified we still are by a film that connects so beautifully to our sense of wonder and joy. [2002 re-release]

What was impressive 22 years ago seems even more so now; what was problematic seems less important. Changes in us as an audience, changes in filmmaking fashions, changes in the times we live in, they've all combined in making this "Apocalypse" feel more impressive, more of a revelation than it did before.

The movie’s sympathies, much like its political convictions, couldn’t be clearer. But paradoxically, what makes “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” so forceful — and certainly the most searingly confrontational American drama about abortion rights in recent memory — is its quality of understatement, its determination to build its argument not didactically but cinematically.

Made with intelligence, imagination, passion and skill, propulsively paced and shot through with an aged-in-oak sense of wonder, the trilogy's first film so thrillingly catches us up in its sweeping story that nothing matters but the vivid and compelling events unfolding on the screen.

The conclusion that Glazer arrives at, with a sudden formal rupture, is shattering in ways that defy easy description. More than any movie I’ve seen this year, or perhaps any year, The Zone of Interest leaves you pondering the magnitude of what the banality of evil has wrought — and the terrible, inconsolable void that it leaves behind.

"Let It Fall" understands the value of allowing its interview subjects to talk at greater, more involving length than is usual for documentaries, a technique that illuminates the complexities of reality and gives listeners a sense of the emotional textures of these people's lives.

So it is an especial triumph that Quiz Show, directed by Robert Redford and written by Paul Attanasio, turns that footnote of television history into a thoughtful, absorbing drama about moral ambiguity and the affability of evil. Sticking moderately close to the facts and using real names whenever possible, it succeeds by pulling back and looking at the situation through an unexpectedly subtle and wide-ranging lens.

A dazzling epic of love, guns, gangsters and cigarettes.

This film becomes the kind of love note to movies we want and need.

If The Souvenir seems to move assuredly to its own unconventional rhythms, it’s because Hogg isn’t telling a straightforward story; she’s showing us, piecemeal, how an artist’s sensibility comes into being.

That rare comedy that is as completely entertaining now in its re-release...as it was back then.

GoodFellas is "Raging Bull" squared. [20 September 1990, Calendar, p.F-1]

Alphaville is more than quintessential Godard. Despite its age it's that rare science fiction film that doesn't seem to have dated at all.

Maitland’s experimental approach to a tricky subject leaves viewers with a deeper understanding of a terrible moment in American history.

If Mendonça Filho overstuffs his accomplished picture, it’s a fitting rebuke to a violent regime that would have tried to tamp down his voice. He finds a worthy partner in Moura, who embodies the rugged sex appeal and muffled anguish of a principled individual in a world gone mad.