If Malik doesn't remind you of Al Pacino's Michael Corleone on his journey from innocence to corruption in "The Godfather" saga, well . . . he should. A Prophet is similarly, startlingly momentous.

Crowe is so good on mood and milieu that when Elton John's bubblegum ballad "Tiny Dancer" swells on the soundtrack, in this context it sounds like a hymn.

This simple story of a Guy and a Girl and their music is very appealing.

Paterson is easily one of Jarmusch’s most accomplished films. He portrays the life of the mind and the workings of the creative soul as a kind of secret love affair, a deep, hidden well inside the most ordinary, mundane existence.

Like its lead Royalty Hightower, whose performance is just as spectacular as her name, The Fits is impossible to look away from. It's gorgeous, poetic, and opaque, and I've never seen any other movie like it.

[Chaplin] has done for comedy what Victor Herbert did for "jazz." [22 Sep 1925, p.8]

It's Greengrass' way of asking a question that looms large in these post-9/11 days: Are we all praying to the same God, or is one man's God better than another, and one man's God vastly more terrifying?

Isn't like the classic Japanese drama "Rashomon," which suggested that one person's perspective of an event gave him a different truth from the person standing elsewhere.

Big hair. Big mouths. Big scams. Everything about American Hustle, David O. Russell's wild and woolly take on the late-'70s FBI sting operation code-named Abscam, is big. And the biggest thing of all is the love story that beats at the heart of this rollicking disco-era ensemble piece.

A visually dazzling mood piece.

Persepolis, the superb film based on Satrapi's graphic memoirs of the same name, is a riveting odyssey in pictures and words. It's unlike any journal you've read or any animated movie you've seen.

It's a trippy but tender examination of human emotions, relationships, all-consuming love.

Whiplash is writer/director Damien Chazelle's hyperventilated nightmare about artistic struggle, artistic ambition. It's as much a horror movie as it is a keenly realized indie about jazz, about art, about what it takes to claim greatness.

Lives is a best-foreign-film nominee competing in a year that at least three movies in this category are stronger than Oscar's best-picture contenders.

It's action opera, sword-and-sorcery song-and-dance, and it's a heart-pumping, jaw-dropping thrill. OK, so I kind of like the thing.

The Dardennes are aces at these small-scale human dramas, and Two Days, One Night is almost without flaw.

He had the fearlessness of a 104-story man and something more than a daredevil's brass.

That rare thing, a Hollywood teen flick transfigured into something like pubescent scripture: In the beginning, there was lust; in the end, there is knowledge.

Strictly speaking, Elle is a comedy, a blacker-than-death social satire about bourgeois values, set in contemporary Paris. It’s viciously, demonically funny in parts.

Pitch-perfect and profoundly moving.

Baron Cohen brings scary conviction to the performance.

Lucid, concise and devastating account of what went wrong in Iraq, patiently counts those 500 ways.

By turns touching and funny, King George is the wittiest film in a long time, and anyone who savors the language will rejoice in its company. The cast is a top-flight representation of talent from the British stage and screen, but the film is dominated by Hawthorne. [27 Jan 1995, p.03]

There is intrigue. There is suspense. Guilt - a man's guilt, a nation's - hangs heavy in the air.

A quietly soulful study of two very different men.

Strangely, wonderfully, The Artist feels as bold and innovative a moviegoing experience as James Cameron's bells-and-whistles Avatar did a couple of years ago. Retro becomes nuevo. Quaint becomes cool.

Less famous perhaps than some of Alfred Hitchcock's other wartime thrillers, this 1940 spy yarn is possibly one of his best. [07 Mar 2014, p.W15]

One of the great war movies - or antiwar movies - of all time.