Whenever the film focuses on Gary, it’s O’Connell’s show. And the actor’s ability to quietly express a whole range of emotions with his body language and his eyes, is staggering — especially since, for much of the film, he’s limping and covered in blood.

The documentary could hardly be more timely or essential.

The film is a triumph of technology and safe “family” storytelling. It’s dazzling — almost no one will dislike it.

Bloody hell, the Brits do low-key, paranoid procedural dramas like Official Secrets well, with a pervading chill and no flash: The crispness cuts like a knife.

For all the artfulness, the feel of the film is rough-hewn, almost primitive. It’s a fabulous tree house of a movie.

It’s great not just because we’re eavesdropping on two rock survivors, but also because we’re seeing, in these living legends, the handiwork of the two unsung men to whom this film pays tribute.

That title would suit a melodrama with an emphasis on doomed love, which is not what Loach has crafted. There is a (chaste) love story and plenty of bloodletting. But what engages him and his screenwriter, Paul Laverty, is the growing tension between brother Irish rebels.

This is no antique show: Faced with an audience, they are still amazingly vital and sometimes amazingly lewd.

Kohn’s gripping Manda Bala is the opposite of a high-school science doc. It’s a free-form portrait of a place--Brazil--with scary running motifs: kidnapping, mutilation, plastic surgery, bulletproofing, and frog farming.

Tim’s Vermeer starts off in a playful fashion, but as he soldiers on, our intrepid, mild-mannered technologist finds himself getting emotional. In the presence of art, something happens. By the time it’s over, don’t be surprised if you’re more in awe of the work of an artist than ever before. Maybe this is Penn and Teller’s final, subtle rug-pulling moment: An attempt to demystify the artistic process ends up posing even greater mysteries.

Theron breaks through with a ferocious performance--a real career-changer.

Red Lights is the most ambiguously compelling romance around.

The unexpected element is a series of letters (some never before heard) Joplin wrote to her family back home in Port Arthur, Texas, read by Chan Marshall (a.k.a. Cat Power) in a voice that captures the cadences of Joplin’s speech without being an imitation. The letters are heartbreaking in their own way.

It's hard to do justice to Hawkins's acting, because you never actually see it: Her Rita simply is.

Stillwater is the new movie from director Tom McCarthy, and it feels like one he’s spent his career preparing for — an enthralling, exasperating, and, above all else, ambitious affair that doesn’t soften or demand sympathy for its difficult main character but does insist on according him his full humanity.

James Scurlock's documentary Maxed Out, tells the bone-chilling, bloodcurdling, hair-raising story of a country (guess which one?) that's up to its eyeballs in credit-card debt.

Even given the spate of post-apocalyptic and dystopian films that rule the multiplexes, this is the bleakest “franchise” in human history, and I’m curious if there will be any balm whatsoever in the next close encounter of the furred kind.

What makes the movie such an unexpectedly potent little number is that Adventureland comes to stand for Stagnationland; the real roller coaster (i.e., life) is just outside the park.

The film’s driving ideas, which transform over the course of the picture, are replete with ironic potential, but Flanagan ably navigates the tonal minefield, never presenting the whole thing as a wink-wink joke on his characters. They feel real, both in their conception and in how they deviate from our preconceptions, which is quite an accomplishment given that most of them aren’t even onscreen for that long within the movie’s frescolike structure.

By the time this twisty, probing, altogether enthralling movie hits its final notes, the crimes against the Constitution and humanity have been upstaged by personal demons. Which is our woe as well.

By the end of Heaven Knows What, you see Ilya’s fragile, unguarded soul through Harley’s eyes, and the film’s discordances sound like the music of the spheres.

Ted runs out of invention in its last act (the bear is coveted by a chillingly deadpan sociopath, played by Giovanni Ribisi, and the villain's fat son), but I can't think of a better movie to see if you're male and want to get high and relive your idiot adolescence.

A startling achievement, but its lack of psychological dimension prevents it from making much human contact with us. It ends where it begins: in a state of shock.

Lafleur’s film is a quiet trifle that sneaks up on you, like a pleasant dream you might have and then gradually forget. Its very slightness is its greatest weapon.

Since washing out as a pretty-boy leading man, Law is what he always should have been: a high-strung character actor. In Black Sea, he’s convincingly hard, like Jason Statham with more vocal colors and without the shtick.

Young Edie Martin, with her chaotic swarm of red ringlets and deadpan dutifulness (she has few lines, but they’re goodies), is the movie’s sign of eternal spring--the butterfly atop the just-opened blossom.

One of the letdowns of Vera Drake is that once Vera is arrested, we lose her voice.

By the time the movie is over, we feel, perhaps for the first time, like we’ve gotten to know this legendary, almost mythical figure. Despite the tumult of her life and her singularity as both a person and an artist, this Frida seems downright familiar.