It's sometimes uneven, but it's glorious, too, with constantly churning invention and the guarantee that you have never seen anything like it before -- unless it came from Winnipeg and Guy Maddin.

The tension between the comely and comforting manner of the film and its undecided and beguiling content is, arguably, Haneke’s signature touch.

Filled with wonderful performances, especially by Hedaya and Walsh, Blood Simple remains a tight, beautifully ugly, neo-noir classic.

The slowness and stillness in the film are, actually, a slow boil, and in Lie's taciturnity there is pain and even horror.

While the third act inevitably bogs down a bit in gunplay and chases, there are more than enough moments of visual wonder and storytelling surprise to make it worth the trip.

Perhaps the most indispensable cast member is the Jacobs' dwelling, their residence since 1966.

The overall thrust of the story -- that downtrodden folks in desperate circumstances have the capacity for goodness -- is one too rarely seen.

In Volver, the latest marvel to emerge from his sharp and joyful mind, Almodovar blends autobiography, gossip, melodrama, music, the supernatural and the suffocatingly quotidian in a story about a woman -- indeed, a tribe of women -- struggling through a life of pain and disappointment.

There are ample opportunities for the film to soak in pathos, righteousness, farce, or pictorialism, and Payne manages to nod at those pitfalls without falling into them. In a way, it's just like Matt King's world: enviably plush but filled with the real pain of real life.

Here's a movie that's jam-packed with bizarre sci-fi concepts, political allegory, a fascinating international cast and some truly over the top set pieces. But for just about everything maniacally cool in the movie, there's a flaw, sometimes a near-fatal one.

It's a delicate and ingenious film that skewers modern life without ever baring its nails or turning sour. [17 Dec 2010]

Funny, irreverent and moving, the unconventional Shrek may mock fairy tales, but in the process, creates its own.

It's the best kind of complaint. You can see why the $50 million man refers to something he gave away as "the best single day of my career."

The film reveals itself to be not so much a historical allegory as an Iliad of the heart. It's sad and smart and beautiful and true.

Nominated for an Oscar for best documentary feature, it's deeply humane and even more deeply unsettling, in a way that most documentaries about Iraq, which tend toward the polemic, never manage.

Eastwood has crafted one of the most powerful American dramas in years.

It's an exemplary and incendiary instance of documentary filmmaking as real-world advocacy.

The halting dialogue, full of awkward pauses and restarts, seems improvised in the way that only carefully scripted material can.

It may not be the most memorable saga put on film, but as far as Miike is concerned, it doesn't have to be.

Henry Fonda's perplexity is palpable. [26 Jan 2001]

You have to experience the thing to understand its simultaneous recklessness and care, its humor and sadness in the name of failure, its playful but dismal take on formulaic Hollywood endings.

For all the ostensible immaturity of its form, Fantastic Mr. Fox is the most grown-up thing the director has done in years.

One of those should-I-laugh-or-cry satires.

Gorgeous and saddening, Osama makes the human-scale claim for the overthrow of governments ruled by the iron hand of religious fundamentalism far more persuasively than any of the rhetoric coming out of the White House or No. 10 Downing St.

The Salt of the Earth presents not just a passing of time through one man's remarkable life but a change of perspective.

One of the purest instances of indie cinema this year. "Pure" meaning that in every aspect of filmmaking and intent this picture is peerless, so truly real, funny, poignant and sexy that it almost feels like a watershed cinematic moment.

What matters in '71 is the action, and the look on O'Connell's face when he emerges from a shed into the Belfast night.

Such a treat for the eyes, ears and funny bone that you feel cheated that it clocks in at less than an hour-and-a-quarter.