The combination of archival bounty with Salles' touching analysis has a hypnotic effect, serving up the past plus reflection, garnished with a resonant melancholy about the ebb and flow of uprisings.

Like its determined heroine, Night Comes On burns with a smoldering fire, a heat that is no less intense, no less effective, for remaining largely beneath the surface.

Sophisticated, uncompromising and refreshingly original, it is one of those rare films which is likely to mean as much to teens as it does to their parents.

An utterly pleasant surprise...Lordy, is it tenderly acted, with an unyielding spine of honesty to all its characters.

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.

If Young's work here is another master class in painterly under-lighting, then Pfeiffer's brilliantly self-effacing performance feels like something sculptural by comparison. Remarkably, she doesn't compete with the movie's rigorous visual scheme; she completes it. Her powers of expression, far from being obscured by all this darkness, are instead enriched and heightened by it.

Lucas is as irresistible as its slight, brilliant, bespectacled 14-year-old hero (Corey Haim), a kid who in his spare time catches insects in a net--but only to study them, not to kill them.

A dreamy, compelling, often wry look at a writer.

Museo is a fun, stylish, singular heist flick that’s about so much more than the theft itself.

It’s the superbly acted interplay between the embattled Alice and Joe that drives this lean, gripping, often profoundly tragic tale.

Thorough, impressive and smartly put together, joining dynamically edited verite footage with a series of thoughtful interviews, Breaking Point serves a pair of interlocking purposes.

Great use of an eerie Southern California landscape and some fine, naturalistic acting emphasizes how the ordinary can sometimes seem threatening — and vice-versa.

In adding feature-film directing to her formidable list of accomplishments, poet and author Maya Angelou tells first-time screenwriter Myron Goble's absorbing and far-ranging story with simplicity and directness while guiding a splendid ensemble cast to an array of impressive portrayals.

The Guardians is an intimate French epic, elegantly made and quietly emotional, a family story filled with characters whose lives we sink into, feeling the hope, the sadness, the sorrow and the joy right along with those on the screen.

Chiklis is first-rate as Adrian’s tough, deceptively aware Vietnam-vet father, while Madsen’s gentle, luminous portrayal of a deeply adoring mother is heartbreakingly authentic — and utterly award-worthy.

Jinn is a familiar story, told in a cultural context rarely depicted on film, and Mu’min’s approach is so lyrical and empathetic that it feels completely fresh and new. It’s a remarkable film with sensitive and stirring turns by Renee and Missick in the mother-daughter roles.

Cummings’ achievement is too singular to be reduced to a simple political reading; and in much the same way, Jim’s hard-won final scene is too ambiguous to be read as either celebration or damnation. If, by that point, there’s even any meaningful difference.

Director Yoonessi and deGuzman perfectly balance the contrast between Joy’s cuteness and innocence and the darkness and sexuality of her experience.

I can't think of a current movie in which every element is in such balance: Martin seems unfettered, expansive, utterly at ease, capable of any physical feat (except possibly drinking from a wine glass without a straw). There's a tenderness to him that's magnetic. Daryl Hannah's Roxanne, an astronomer, is smart and sublimely beautiful all at once, her skin apricot-colored in this mountain sun, her face rhapsodic as she talks about muons, gluons and quarks.

Ward's "Map" is a wildly ambitious film and, often, a wildly beautiful one--and if it isn't quite a masterpiece, if we sense that Ward's resources aren't enough for the World War II London scenes, in the end, any flaws or lapses simply may not matter. Movies, especially ones with a broad epic canvas and international logistics, don't often get this intimate. They don't give you such a sense of nerves stripped raw, joy or misery nakedly expressed.

This rape revenge story swaps points of view, but it doesn't break the mold. The characters, archetypes and beats are familiar, which allows Fargeat to play with symbolism in a bold, pointed manner.

The Hit is something special: thoughtful, perfectly performed and carrying the clear stamp of an extremely interesting director.

Awe-inspiring visuals and equally stirring orchestrations combine to fittingly majestic effect in Mountain, a unique portrait of mankind's enduring fascination with the world's most formidable summits.

An eternal nurturer, the black mother whom Allah dissects and praises in this transfixing hymn of a movie about the place where the woman that gave him life was born is far more than just a homeland but a direct link to the answers about existence.

It's a simple, cumulatively shattering record of life as we rarely see it captured in narrative or documentary cinema.

Cage's naturalness as a nice guy in a big jam lends the film considerable substance while Hopper's wily foil, Boyle's tough dame and Walsh's minor-league baddie provide much amusement. With Mark Reshovsky's sleek camera work, authentic locales and William Olvis' mood-setting score, Red Rock West has style to burn.

Made in 1979, The China Syndrome proved to be one of the most prophetic films ever made, having been released shortly before the Three Mile Island catastrophe. At once a fervent anti-nuclear protest and an edge-of-the-seat thriller. [27 Nov 1988]

Scary, yet darkly funny, this thriller of the supernatural from the director of the terrific Fright Night moves with the speed of a bullet train and with style to burn. The film is a stunner--in all senses of the word.