Like those early shorts, then, Marcel the Shell With Shoes On is essentially a mockumentary, though one with a far more complex visual scheme and a more ambitious tonal range.

Promises takes a simple idea and just about breaks your heart with it.

A beautifully calibrated movie in the most traditional sense of the word -- the ideal marriage of topic, talent and tone.

At once a swift, relentless chase thriller and an exhilarating mood piece that recalls the great, gritty crime dramas of Sidney Lumet and Abel Ferrara, Good Time is also exactly what it says it is: a thrill, a blast, a fast-acting tonic of a movie.

Essential viewing.

An exquisite film, as elegant and precise as an impeccably cut diamond. It's small in scale but wholly mesmerizing, holding us captive as it demonstrates how much enveloping richness can be conveyed with a minimalist style.

Set in an enchanting locale where the potential for magic is everywhere, this impeccable animated film puts its complete trust in the spirit of make-believe.

One can even detect, in this brilliant, captivating Reichardt gem about fortune and fate, a what-if attached to her disaffected male protagonist: Would today’s version of James, just as adrift and arrogant, steal art to assuage his emptiness? Or, thanks to the internet, succeed at something much worse? “The Mastermind” may be an ironic title as heists go. But it also hints at the male-pattern badness still to come.

Because Sauper views himself as a storyteller first, as political as "We Come as Friends" may be, it is always dramatic, never didactic.

Trengove’s direction keeps things firmly grounded in the play of glances and intimacies under shelter of nature’s seclusion — dusk-lit silhouettes stealing moments, a waterfall rendezvous.

This film beams and buzzes inside its closed loop with the hard-won wisdom of acceptance. And it does so while staying in awe of what can never be understood, only appreciated — and if we’re lucky, enjoyed.

It is the fancy, frenetic and ethereal footwork of Astaire and Rogers that propel this frothy romance. [22 Oct 2006, p.E14]

This is a heartbreaker about mothers and daughters, the cruelty of repression and the slippery but revealing nature of performance. And to the end, it remains steadfast in its conviction that a woman’s truth and her beauty are never at odds.

For Fernanda Montenegro, who bears more than a passing resemblance to Italy's late Giulietta Masina (Federico Fellini's wife and frequent star) in appearance and talent, "Central Station" is a personal triumph and a rich cinematic experience.

It’s a difficult movie to get a fix on, but the difficulty is what makes it special.

Tomas is an inimitably singular creature. Loathsome and magnetic, infuriating and unforgettable, he is, by several bed lengths, the most dynamic protagonist Sachs has given us, a vessel of pure, untrammeled id.

In Greenfield's canny and compassionate view, their post-collapse reality check is an emblem of consumerism as affliction, and surprisingly relatable.

it's Nowar's ability to tell his tale so firmly from the viewpoint of his quickly growing-up protagonist, and to elicit so unforced a performance from Eid, that may be the most impressive achievement of this intimate, well-paced film.

The past is where all the intrigue of the movie lies, and that is where the film is at its most compelling, with the present sometimes wilting in the desert heat.

The mellow, serendipitous The Parrots of Telegraph Hill is here to show you just how magical happenstance can be.

As worthy and moving as The Color of Paradise is, it is not entirely free of the manipulative, the arbitrary and the downright punitive.

Deliciously funny and fiendishly clever con-man comedy that begins on a note of ingenuity that it then sustains with the tension of a high-wire act.

A convulsively funny affair.[15 July 1988, Calendar, p. 6-1]

With lines drawn along politics, class, race and economics, the strange-bedfellows issue of top-dollar killing and queasy conservation is one that Trophy...lays bare with gruesome, grim exactitude.

Though it would be unrealistic to expect "Incredibles 2" to have quite the genre-busting surprise of the original, it is as good as it can be without that shock of the new — delivering comedy, adventure and all too human moments with a generous hand.

It is hardly the fault of this breathless, incisive and thoroughly infuriating movie that it already feels a touch out of date. How could it not?

She's Beautiful When She's Angry, director Mary Dore's incisive portrait of so-called second-wave feminism of the late 1960s, is an exceptional chronicle, its mix of archival material and new interviews bristling with the energy and insight of one of the most important social movements of the 20th century.

If this film portrait stirs deep emotions, they spring from a breathtakingly unsentimental embrace of life at its most challenging.