Gripping, sobering, inspiring stuff.

Cartel Land offers a chilling glimpse into a world of violence and vigilantism.

Explosively exciting film.

The real joy of Tyler Measom and Justin Weinstein's documentary is not the copious amount of file footage - such as clips from The Tonight Show when Johnny Carson could still smoke at his desk on camera - or Randi's inherent charisma, or even his acts of escape and magic. No, it's his relationship with his partner of 25 years, Jose Alvarez.

There's real joy in O'Day's eyes - and larynx - as she bobs and weaves through an amazing songbook.

Zany screwball farce.

The most amazing thing about 1936's After the Thin Man is not that it remains a sparkling, engaging entertainment almost 70 years after its release, but that it is nearly as good as 1934's The Thin Man, the first movie based on Dashiell Hammett's husband-and-wife detective team of Nick and Nora Charles. [06 Aug 2005, p.D07]

It's complicated. And it's fascinating.

How the film plays out, and what happens to the boy and the adults in his company, may prove a revelation, or a disappointment, or something in between. But getting there is thrilling and wondrously strange.

It's fun, exciting, freakish filmmaking.

Brothers is about how people change, how they can rise to an occasion, or sink to one. It's a tale of love and allegiance, of truth and the cruelties that men can bring to bear on one another.

Set exactly a century ago, The Last Station is a droll tragicomedy starring those battling Tolstoys, whose family is unhappy in its own way.

The filmmakers don't bother hammering home a backstory or explaining why David is crazy. They just throw us in the deep end and dazzle us with a series of violent encounters that ends with a deadly chase in a surreal fun house maze of mirrors.

It's hard to feel compassion for these Masters of the Universe. I'm not even sure Chandor wants us to, but if he doesn't, then what's the point?

Deschanel does what she does seemingly without effort, managing to convey Summer's mixed-up messed-upness.

Although Me and You and Everyone We Know requires patience on the part of the viewer - to get past the faux naivete of its grown-up characters, to get past its deadpan arty tone - Miranda July's feature debut is worth the time.

Scott and Davis bring heart-rending sadness and telling detail to their roles, and imbue Secret Lives with something real and true.

The Revenant is exhilarating cinema.

A small, beautiful film exploding with big ideas.

Safe, disturbing and edgy and grounded by Moore's riveting performance, resonates with uncertainty.

The 85-year-old Chilean-born auteur returns this week with his latest directorial attempt, The Dance of Reality, an intensely personal, deeply felt, if at times solipsistic autobiographical work about his childhood in Tocopilla, a seaside town at the edge of the Chilean desert.

A story with a beginning and end but without a middle. Two slices of bread without the sandwich meat, I wrote in my notes.

Ain't no mountain high enough to keep the Funk Brothers from getting to you.

A somber piece of film poetry about men so invested in a rigid notion of honor and revenge they become trapped in an endless loop of violence.

Buscemi has pulled off a deft feat: He doesn't romanticize his characters, but he doesn't condemn them as losers either. They're just people. [25 Oct 1996, p.12]

The vampires in What We Do in the Shadows are symbolic of something else altogether: epic unkemptness.

Wickedly clever nightmare entertainment.

There's an icy chill, a detachment, to A Dangerous Method, too. Of course, there are no talking cockroaches (Naked Lunch), no naked steambath knife fights (Eastern Promises), and that may have something to do with why this all feels so un-Cronenbergian.