Moore, who may be the most unpredictably talented actress in movies right now, plays Amber with an inseparable mixture of maternal feeling and lust that's flabbergasting.

The Kids Are All Right ranks with the most compelling portraits of an American marriage, regardless of sexuality, in film history.

And now in The Straight Story, no director has been so buzzingly alert to the emotional lives of those people or to the beauty of the world they inhabit as David Lynch.

My first thought was: It's a temple, a church, a cathedral -- maybe the first one ever built -- and the better-known ones in Rome and Jerusalem and Istanbul are just later versions of the same thing.

For all its flaws, In the Bedroom is an unusual accomplishment, a serious drama about violence and morality that plays out with a fatalistic intensity somewhere between Greek tragedy and film noir.

What he (Beauvois) conveys, through austere but spectacular visual language, magnificent liturgical singing and an ensemble cast headed by the terrific French veteran actors Lambert Wilson and Michael Lonsdale, is something of the "why."

The evident strengths and laudable intentions of Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (and even the appeal of Marisa Tomei in her undies) are overwhelmed by an implausible plot verging on unintentional comedy and a panoply of Noo Yawk dirt-bag supporting characters who might've seemed awkward on a 1993 episode of "NYPD Blue."

The Great Beauty is an ironic and passionate near-masterwork, like a nine-course dessert that makes you entirely forget the meal.

Emily’s sickness is ultimately what elevates The Big Sick above the echelon of enjoyable-but-generic rom-coms.

To Ben Affleck's credit, he's made a terrific, pulse-elevating thriller that will leave the audience cheering.

In the scorching new film Traffic, director Steven Soderbergh captures the hypocrisy -- and tragedy -- of the nation's unwinnable war on drugs. Traffic is a huge, determined movie in every way.

Talk to Her is much better than Almodóvar's "bad" movies. But it never soars as freely as his best ones do -- it has a very trim, manicured wingspan.

The magic of Summer Hours is that even in its elusiveness, it gives us something to hang onto.

The Master is often spectacular and never less than handsome, and it has numerous moments of disturbing and almost electrical power. I can't say, after one viewing, that I found it moving or satisfying as a whole, but I'm also not sure it's supposed to be. This is an almost apocalyptic tale of thwarted emotion - love cut short - set in a pitiless land of delusions.

Gripping, and it's moving, but it isn't particularly subtle. There's a strong thread of tabloid drama running through its core -- but at least it's sensationalistic storytelling with a heart.

One of the year's best movies...It's one of the simplest and best re-creations of downscale urban England during the gritty post-punk years ever put on screen, and it's both upsetting and very funny.

Whatever allure The Son has lies in its very remoteness, in its resolute refusal to show us all but the most delicate emotional vibrations. It also moves very sluggishly.

His (Miyazaki) stories, and often his character design, just leave me cold. I know I'm supposed to be magically transported by his fanciful tales and his whimsical grandiosity, but they make me listless.

A stereotype-shattering movie that's full of them, and one that may permanently change the way you think about violent crime in America.

The point of watching the film, and the only reason to see it, is the experience of watching it, which sounds tautological or something, but is just true. It's a powerful visual and sonic creation with unforgettable characters, set in a heartache-inducing imaginary vision of American community, worlds away from hyper-technologized urban existence.

Disturbing and extraordinary new documentary.

Burns has accomplished something both remarkable and reassuring. Remarkable because this is a compelling film, blending astonishing historical images with long-winded talking-head interviews, in vintage Burnsian style, and reassuring for almost the same reason.

It's both happy and sad. That's exactly the way to describe Hou's marvelous film as well.

Something of an odd bird, a cross between a documentary, an art film and a personal reflection on aging.

As good as it is, Before Night Falls might not work if Schnabel hadn't found a leading man to hold it together and the Spanish actor Javier Bardem has the understated charisma to pull it off.

It's simultaneously terrifying and hilarious, a full-on shotgun blast to the face of rediscovered 1970s weirdness, something like finding out that there's a classic Peckinpah film you've never seen, or that Wes Craven and Bernardo Bertolucci got drunk in Sydney one weekend and decided to make a movie together.

It's the perfect marriage of music and animated movement. But even when there's no music playing in Waking Life, the movie's lyricism is sustained by the way it looks and feels.

A great action movie, exhilarating and neatly crafted, the kind of picture that will still look good 20 or 30 years from now.