It's small. It's real. And it's deeply moving.

Irma Vep is over before you know it, which is both a tribute to the talents of Assayas - he draws you in completely, his film never lags - and a bummer. You want to follow these people around a little longer, see what happens to their movie (although we do get to see something that happens, and it's weird and dazzling) and what becomes of them all. This a film about thievery - the character of Irma Vep is a jewel thief, the director is stealing from the past - and in its own very cool, very brash way, Irma Vep steals its audience's heart. [13 June 1997, p.10]

This is a story about legacy, the sins of the father, the restlessness in our souls. It's powerful, it's bold, it hits you hard.

The final third of Audiard's drama falls into crime-drama mode. It is tense and violent. But even if it feels true, given Dheepan's history with the Tamil Tigers, it also feels a little beside the point.

Heartbreaking? Sometimes. Involving? You bet.

Hirokazu Kore-eda's After Life is a minimalist, mesmerizing allegory set in a limbo. It is not a memorial to the dead but an extraordinary consideration of what memories mean to the living. [11 June 1999, p.12]

A small but moving film that gets the details right (life in a sleepy burg, sidewalk chats between old high school pals) and gets at the heart of human longing for family, for love.

Shines with weird, whimsical invention.

Boasts rich texture, sly vision and rueful humor.

Plays with cultural stereotypes, and upends them as well. The picture starts as one thing and turns, dramatically, movingly, into something else.

Smart and novelistic and spiked with more than a bit of The Catcher in the Rye, Steers' movie is a prickly coming-of-age tale in which everybody -- but especially Culkin -- shines.

1971 is a testament to a generation's idealism, heroism, foolhardiness, fearlessness.

The imagery is uniquely that of Oshii, who deserves a place in the pantheon of visual artists.

Remains rooted in the real world, which makes its story all the more satisfying -- and chilling.

Where Denys Arcand's delightful 1986 comedy "The Decline of the American Empire" celebrated the good life, his profoundly funny sequel The Barbarian Invasions heartily toasts the good death.

The result is a film that deeply engages us on multiple levels. Not only do we wonder what Maisie knows and how she knows it, we want to get this seedling to a place where she won't have to be transplanted every day.

The script is shrewd about the problems that money can and can’t solve. Wild Rose also threads the needle between the genre expectations and its own brand of realism, grounded in the very palpable heartache Rose feels as she tries to survive in the space between her family obligations and her artistic ambitions.

It's a haunting, scary, funny, sad portrayal from Rourke.

This cunning and provocative Romanian film requires patience, but its rewards are many: It's hard to imagine how a scene in which a police captain barks an order to bring him a dictionary can be loaded with suspense, but, really, it is.

Featuring seasoned warriors reflecting on whether we can best fight violence with violence is enormously compelling.

In an extraordinarily inward and moving performance, Gere sheds every vestige of his silver-screen persona.

Stranger Than Fiction is slicker than Kaufman's work - and Forster's direction is certainly more studio-ish than Kaufman collaborators Spike Jonze's or Michel Gondry's. But it's a clever idea, and you feel a little smarter watching the thing unfurl.

Think "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," but then think fun.

Reverberates with the power and passion of Greek tragedy.

Not only is Bossa Nova a lovely romance, but one can say, as one can about few films, that it is restorative as a vacation.

Ridiculously funny, ridiculously charming.

A devastatingly funny portrait of a wildly dysfunctional clan, Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums is a movie about how people never really mature in ways that matter.

Baker's life, like his music, was as sad as it was beautiful. And Weber's movie - obsessed with Baker's image as much as with his songs - hits all the right notes.

The movie is a winner. One of the commuter ferry men declares, as he starts plucking people out of the water, "No one dies today." And no one does. If that isn't hopeful, I don't know what is.

Ghosts haunt Heart of a Dog - but so, too, does love.

The haunting mastery of Leviathan comes not from these broad indictments of a social order, but from the specifics of the performances, the actors wearing their hurt and rage, their defiance and dread, like well-worn clothing.

It's hard to know whether this is a function of the sympathetic screenplay or of Krieger's sympathetic direction - or both - but Celeste and Jesse are endearing even when they do unsympathetic things.

The Painted Veil is rich with history and heartbreak. It's stirring stuff.

Dazzling and delirious, The Fall is a celebration of cinema, of old-fashioned storytelling and globe-hopping spectacle.

Rees tells Alike's story in vignettes that are sometimes slapstick, sometimes heartbreaking, always tender.

The animated French family film April and the Extraordinary World will have your imagination doing somersaults and cartwheels.

Lord knows how Holofcener got the performance she did out of Goodwin, but the child actor's Annie, rude and unmanageable, is an extraordinarily rich and complicated figure.

A super-taut and superbly acted three-character piece.

Hunger is daunting and powerful work.

Chronicle is full of smart writing that isn't too smart.

DuVernay, a low-key director sparing in her use of emotion and music, has made an existential drama that is European in its feel.

Extraordinarily sensual and extraordinarily bleak, Claire Denis' Nenette and Boni depicts a world of diffident youth, of estranged families and displaced souls. [02 May 1997, p.15]

It's a testament to Cage's canny performance and Jonze's seamless use of special effects that you believe Charlie and Donald are two entirely different people.

It can feel inchoate, dropping the viewer in the middle of events without much context, and it exacts an emotional toll. But its raw quality also makes it compelling viewing.

It's easy to mistake the simplicity of plot and theme here for simple-mindedness - this isn't Pynchon or Proust. Kung Fu Panda 3 has the economy of a Zen koan, not to mention its inner harmony and wisdom.

Stays with you like great movies tend to do. It asks you to examine the inner mechanisms of human beings, cheerful and miserable alike. It's not about looking at a glass half empty or a glass half full. It's about drinking down what's in that glass and letting it fill your soul.

The rare movie that manages to convey the inner soul of an artist.

It's a devilishly twisted affair.

Collins and Pacino plumb the depths of acting, of Shakespeare, of the difference between law and justice.

La Promesse is a compelling look at issues that - in a world where ethnic frictions grow more tense, even as national boundaries disappear - really are universal.

An immensely enjoyable, warmhearted, and gentle showbiz dramedy.

Chuan's unsettlingly beautiful black-and-white, wide-screen account of those nightmare six weeks, re-creates that horror in ways that are at once allusive and lucid, mixing cinematic impressionism with documentary-like detail.

Very few of us would like to think about the physical and emotional toll that life in captivity takes on these magnificent creatures. Gabriela Cowperthwaite's powerful, heartbreaking, and beautifully crafted documentary, Blackfish, forces us to do just that.

Proves that the most local story is sometimes the most universal, the simplest tale sometimes the most complex.

A story of companionship, loneliness, resilience. It's a small, artfully crafted thing, but it resonates in big ways.

Her life, and her work, transcended what we think of as "fashion."

Try not to let the film's overbearingly jaunty score get in the way. The Lady in the Van is quite a feat.

A far more trenchant - and funnier - satire of the fame-afflicted than Woody Allen's "Celebrity."

Ai Weiwei comes off as a man on a singular mission: to record the life around him before it is erased or distorted by a repressive government terrified by the smallest sign of nonconformity. His primary weapons: video cameras and Twitter.

Moss and Waterston are incredible, and even though Queen of Earth is purposefully not a readily digestible film, they keep it intensely interesting.

Although the pervading mood of Twin Falls Idaho - a beautifully shot, noirish thing - is one of sadness and loss, the Polishes' film is playful, too.

First-time filmmaker Kolirin paces his can-we-all-just-get-along? parable as if it were a silent comedy, which for long stretches it is. This movie about musicians has no soundtrack. Its musical moments are few, but potent.

Tcheng finds Simons in moments of haughty self-confidence and tremulous self-doubt.

A superb film that begins with death, ends in renewal, and finds almost as much to laugh about as to cry for.

A gorgeous confection, packed with gargantuan gowns and pornographic displays of pastrystuffs, Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette is also a sharp, smart look at the isolation, ennui and supercilious affairs of the rich, famous and famously pampered.

Rain is a quiet, disquieting triumph.

What gives North Country urgency is that it's about how a man comes to understand that it's bad for him and for his community to deny his daughter privileges and prerogatives he'd grant his son.

An amiable mix of "Grumpy Old Men" comedy and "Apollo 13" can-we-fix-this-jalopy-before-we-die? Drama.

David Ayer, the writer of "Training Day," director of "Street Kings," writer/director of "Harsh Times," does not make movies about princesses with witchy curses, about yuppie commitment-phobes, about talking plush toys. His territory is narrow, but he owns it: cops, in Los Angeles.

Tender but never sappy, Monsieur Ibrahim brings two people of vastly different age and background together in ways that are touching, and telling. It's a small, glowing gem.

For Kudlow, for whom "music lives forever" - it's never over. And the opportunity to seize the day continues to present itself in this deeply human documentary.

Far too good to be watched in one sitting.

Roiling with laughter, tears, drunken confessions, revelatory soliloquies, pain, sorrow, hospital visits, and various kinds of love, A Christmas Tale is a smart, sprawling, and sublimely entertaining feast.

A sly and surprisingly sublime little noir romance.

A gorgeous operatic tale of obsession and madness.

Macdonald's film brilliantly telescopes the '70s, an era when every physical action had its equal and opposite political reaction.

A beautifully mopey adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's much-praised novel.

Career Girls doesn't have the sweep of Secrets & Lies, nor the venom of Naked (which also featured the riveting Cartlidge). But in the small world it keenly describes, the film packs an emotional punch - silly voices and all.

Directed with tremendous style and vibrant, buoyant energy.

Corinne's journey begins with an act of blind faith. The movie ends, but you have a palpable sense that the journey does not.

Jarmusch’s movie serves both as a fine intro to one of rock’s great bands and as a window for longtime fans into what makes Iggy tick.

The way that power and wealth corrupt the spirit is a recurring theme in Huston's work, and it is served up here in a hugely entertaining fashion. [17 Mar 1995, p.11]

Next to the cheerleader grunts and aerobic struts that pass for dance numbers on most music videos, the sequences in the compilation film That's Entertainment! III are like treasures from a highly evolved ancient civilization. [06 Jul 1994, p.E01]

Underlines the nightmare of entrapment so vividly captured in The Day I Became a Woman.

The film treats the ensuing issues of conscience and compromise with subtlety and warmth.

It's a movie with a pulse. Sometimes, it flies off the chart.

Garfield melts into his Doss character in a performance that seems impossibly still and tranquil. He’s mesmerizing. It’s almost impossible to imagine he ever played Spider-Man.

A dynamic portrait of an artist by an artist, one as wry, audacious and erotically charged as its flamboyant subject.

Adapted from the devilishly clever 1955 novel by master crime author Georges Simenon, The Blue Room is a dazzling deconstruction of the mystery genre that turns its conventions on their heads.

Into the Abyss is a true-crime drama, to be sure, but in Herzog's hands it becomes something much more: an inquiry into fundamental moral, philosophical, and religious issues, and an examination of humankind's capacity for violence - individual and institutional.

A bruising, dark comedy.

Although it's set on the same frozen continent, Happy Feet Two is worlds away from its predecessor.

For those dazed and dazzled by surf anarchists Noll and Clark, Hamilton comes off as the sport's technocrat, but he boldly goes where no surfer has gone before.

A thinker and an educator, Zinn has led a life of commitment and compassion, and the film offers a loving tribute.

It's great to hear a director talking candidly about the actors he's worked with, dishing out good, juicy stuff.

What begins as Lafcadia's journey into the heart of darkness ends as his pilgrimage into the light. Stunning.

Does what the best movies can do: take viewers to what might be unfamiliar places, into a culture with unique customs and traditions, and show, through drama and comedy, how the fundamental truths of the human experience need no translation.

Crash fools around with chronology in a Tarantinoesque way that brings its story full circle. You could argue that as events, and people, merge, Haggis' spiky screenplay (cowritten with Bobby Moresco) gets to be, quite simply, too much.