The image that finally lingers is one shown repeatedly: a close-up of fingers gently pressing a piece of fish onto a handheld oblong of rice, painting it with a single brushing of sauce and laying it on a plate, after which the preparer steps back. We're left to contemplate the pristine creation and envy Jiro's lucky customers.

Longlegs is a conjuring of dark, poetic cinema where the devil is definitely in the details.

There are several excellent performances, including Wayne Hapi as Potini’s hardened brother. But Curtis is the most memorable part of The Dark Horse.

The Gift stretches things a little too much for it to be a first-rate thriller. Still, among second-rate thrillers, it’s one of the best.

With a zippy soundtrack and breezy editing style, Every Body comes off as an up-to-date declaration that being intersex is something to be celebrated. In the end, we can’t help but share in the enthusiasm.

The true soul of the New York mob is portrayed in Donnie Brasco, a first-class Mafia thriller that is also in its way a love story -- perhaps director Mike Newell's best.

The director is barely a kid, yet this is such a ferociously accomplished, beautifully nuanced and endlessly surprising film, you'd think the guy had been directing for decades. [13 June 2010, p.Q25]

Obviously, no one should wish all films were shot like this. But the approach suits this story and these characters, and that’s all it had to do.

Denzel Washington is riveting.

Suffice it to say that this is good family fare with plenty of decent gags (visual and otherwise), and it’s nicely acted by all the principals. In addition, Julie Walters, Peter Capaldi and Jim Broadbent turn up in smaller but still lively roles.

Women Talking has a remarkable cast — Rooney Mara, Jessie Buckley, Claire Foy, among others — and it’s grounded in dramatic real-life events. But it’s mannered in its conception and wooden in its execution, and has little to do with living, breathing people.

Coppola infuses her movie with a dreamy poetic tone, and deftly translates the essential metaphors of youth, sexuality and death without sacrificing an earthy humor.

Dosunmu is an up-and-coming director; Mother of George is his second film after the much-lauded "Restless City." He's got the visual part of the job down for sure.

Wetlands, an in-your-face story about bodily fluids and the collateral damage of a family gone wrong, is crass, vulgar and brilliant.

A solid family movie, "Fly Away Home" is a constant feast for the eyes, with rich photography by Caleb Deschanel.

Renders the juicy bits of the artist's life in two hours of pulsing highlights that suggest a man who never really had any emotional or psychic downtime.

The movie's soul isn't its plot but the relationships among the girls.

Block's hypnotic documentary, among the finest of the year.

A deceptively simple but enchanting story about a father who bonds with his young son on the Mexican sea, accomplishes something quite complex: It provides a breathtaking sense of place, chronicles in intimate detail a way of life, and touches us with a relationship that develops naturally, right before our eyes.

What makes the movie succeed is that Dorman doesn't only focus on the life of Aleichem (who had a tendency to build fortunes and then lose them), but a look at a society long gone and the legacy and traditions they and Aleichem left to Jews around the world today.

The movie rarely, if ever, feels mechanical. Instead, you may find yourself marveling at the fertility of an imagination that could allow itself to toss so many vivid characters and stories—enough to supply four or five movies — into one generous package.

A quite interesting and irresistible movie, a sort of cross between Paul Schrader’s recent film of spiritual crisis, “First Reformed,” and Steven Spielberg’s “Catch Me If You Can.” An impostor as anguished priest.

After watching her belt, blast and harmonize with power and precision through wildly diverse styles of music like an Amazon heroine, to see her struggle her way through this short piece is the kind of heart-string moment documentary filmmakers can only hope to catch.

Still, I’m not sure Kiarostami really intended this film to be a movie. It seems more like an art installation. Of note is the terrific sound design; the sound is credited to Ensieh Maleki, who captures full, rich, peaceful sounds of nature.

It's a strong film, but apart from its stunning images, it doesn't linger in your mind's eye the way you would like it to.

There are some nice things to be said about Hairspray, the John Waters movie which opened over the weekend, but not enough to explain all you've been hearing about it. It's a fairly run-of-the-mill teenage dance movie, set in Baltimore in the early '60s, with a certain oddball humor that only occasionally lifts it out of its class. [29 Feb 1988, p.F3]

One must be very, very, very, very, very interested in Yorkshire, circa 1980, to embrace and enjoy The Red Riding Trilogy. And yet ... there is something to be said for an enterprise this specific and uncompromising.

And you thought Hamlet was a melancholy Dane. Compared with this gloomy group, he's Pee Wee Herman.

A "Rocky"-like tale of determination and long odds that will appeal even to those who are turned off by most rap music.

A movie that's lean, unsentimental and hard around the edges -- a gut- grabber that stays with you for days afterward.

Here's another thought: This old man who can't leave the house has just made the first important film of 2010.

Ailey weds forthright interviews and archival footage of abstract beauty with those sweeping dance sequences to conjure a haunting portrait of what it means to be an artist — from the triumphs to the empty, lonely feeling that you’re never as good as you’re supposed to be.

This may be Favreau’s best achievement — taking a beloved film guided by Walt Disney himself and crafting something distinct and memorable.

Bolt tries mightily to make this weighty subject digestible to the average civilian, with some fancy, intricate animated sequences to show us how CRISPR and DNA manipulation work, and while I can’t say I came away from this film being able to coherently explain it, Human Nature works as a glimpse into possible futures and a moral dilemma that doesn’t have easy answers.

As a call to action, The Hunting Ground truly goes to bat for rape survivors. As a documentary, the movie as a whole is much lesser than its individual parts.

While We’re Young is one step forward and two steps back for writer-director Noah Baumbach, whose movies are never less than intelligent but, at their worst, tend to settle for gestures instead of movements.

It's a movie that seems simple, yet its subtle and brilliant complexity is not to be denied.

Documentary filmmakers pray for something to happen to their subjects when the cameras are rolling, and two-time Academy Award-winning documentarian Kopple struck gold when Maines told a crowd on the opening night of the band's first European tour that she was "ashamed" that President Bush was from Texas.

It’s as if someone made a backstage musical without any musical numbers, just the backstage part.

Sly Lives! may not provide definitive answers, but the fact that it even asks those questions puts it a cut above most films in its genre.

The limits of Dallas Buyers Club are the limits most true stories come up against, which are the facts. A good story lands and reverberates. In real life, stories have a way of just stopping and leaving you a bit unsatisfied. The latter is what happens in this movie, but perhaps that couldn't be avoided.

Well, there’s one way for a biopic about a self-loathing, self-aggrandizing, self-pitying and self-involved music star seem different: Make him an ape.

Lumpy.

A sweet-natured reconsideration of one of San Francisco's most vital, if least widely recognized, creative fountainheads.

Centuries ago, the heath lands of Denmark were rough-hewn, expansive and notoriously unforgiving. In the new Danish film “The Promised Land,” those words could also describe the face of its star, Mads Mikkelsen. One of the great visages in movies, it has a landscape all its own.

It's hard to sell people on a movie about grief, but A Single Man deserves recognition for being about something real that usually goes unexplored: The grief from which there really can be no return.

A privileged glimpse into people's private pain, a drama shot with the simplicity and immediacy of a documentary.

Seems more appropriate for a science museum than the Metreon, but that's not the film's problem. The problem is that oceanic movies in actual science museums are far more interesting and nuanced than this documentary.

Suffers from Resnais' inability to open it up and give it the look and pulse of a film.

A one-of-a-kind cinematic experience. This musician may not be a genius along the lines of Brain Wilson, as Feuerzeig claims, but Johnston has a knack for revealing innermost thoughts in an offhand way that is eerie and uncanny.

There are some brief minutes when the tension drops and the story starts to sag, but Fukunaga almost always fills the frame with something worth seeing, and the story has a built-in suspense.

Haunting in its charm, Children of Heaven opens a window on both contemporary Tehran and the hopeful heart of childhood. This lovely, amusing film deserves a big audience -- especially families. It touches on the innocence of children with tremendous affection.

Early scenes are unnecessarily horrific, and the final scenes falter from a disconcerting shift in tone. But this still leaves a significant stretch of beautiful acting, thoroughly engaging action and vital history lessons about the brutality on which some supposedly civil societies were built.

Other than raising awareness for endangered wildlife, Mountain Patrol: Kekexili doesn't have anything profound to say, but it has a lot to show.

Lily Tomlin has been one of our best comedic actresses for the past 50 years, and she’s at the height of her powers in the beautifully observed dramedy Grandma. Her performance is funny, acerbic, touching — and ultimately, exhilarating.

The film is notable as the first English-language role of Peter Lorre, who is creepily appealing as the leader of the conspiracy. [03 Feb 2013, p.Q19]

It’s buoyant. It’s bright. It has lots of pop music on the sound track, none of it from 1991 or 1994, and almost all of it from the late 1970s, mostly 1977 and 1978. The movie’s mix of music and era doesn’t quite make sense, strictly speaking, but like everything in this loose, inspired and yet tonally precise film, it feels right.

Watching this film will leave you with some dispiriting questions about America and its values.

This is a different kind of girls' movie, and certainly not a pretty one, especially its horrific head-scratcher of an ending.

Worthy but dull.

Humanite isn't like any other film: It's uncompromising, eerily affecting and wildly unresolved.

The Rodriguez segment is terrific; the Tarantino one long-winded and juvenile.

Except for Patekar, the main actors are nonprofessionals, which works nicely here.

Delivers on the promise of its title. It shows us the world's most famous living painter, who turned 80 in February, at work with greater intimacy than any other film portrait of a contemporary artist provides.

There's a lot to process when watching The War Tapes, and that's probably why the documentary gets even better a few days later.

Maestro exposes a truth about marriage that I always knew but could never quite articulate: To be truly known and understood can actually be scary.

Zellweger has the most interesting new face in film, and she knows how to use silences to say what the heart wants to get across.

It’s a masterpiece of a family popcorn movie, with eye-popping hand-crafted production design and outstanding creature design and puppetry work. This is the kind of movie that could have been made in the era of moon landings and space shuttles, when the general public found science trustworthy and wondrous.

Just to re-emphasize, Relic is not a documentary about dementia, or a medically accurate look at the disease in the way that films such as “Away from Her” with Julie Christie or “Still Alice” with Julianne Moore were. It is a film that springs from the id, from deep-seated fear of a disease we don’t fully understand.

The straightforward, well-edited trial scenes speak volumes, not only about the defendant, but also about the racism that still haunts our country.

It's a sensational part for a young actress -- the film is told entirely from her point of view, using her journal entries as voice-over narration -- and Judd, in her first film, gives a subtle, delicate performance. [05 Nov 1993, p.C12]

In the end, Chi-Raq is a positive movie that wants to jolt us into doing something about the very real emergency in Chicago. Along the way, the execution of the narrative gets muddled, but there’s no denying that this risk-taking film has a pulse. A strong pulse.

While the end result, now directed by Soi Cheang (“Mad Fate,” “Limbo”), may not be quite as deliriously over the top as that version might have been, it’s nevertheless a solid entry in the ledger of Hong Kong crime sagas and was a huge hit when released in China earlier this year.

Thelma always emphasizes seniors’ capabilities, not their limits.

Not a great picture but an entirely entertaining one. [02 Nov 2008, p.N34]

There's a real commitment to key moments; a sense of depth and understanding. It has labor of love written all over it. [22 Aug 1990, p.E1]

As a lesbian thriller, the movie calls to mind the Wachowski’s “Bound” (1996), though “Love Lies Bleeding” is clumsier and more spontaneous, as though it were being made up on the spot. Though the spontaneity ultimately exhausts itself, it’s enjoyable most of the way.

One of the smartest and most impassioned films about Christianity in recent memory, though to say that might give the wrong impression. In tone and strategy, the film is low-key and subtle; and the story can be appreciated both for its surface qualities and its deeper intentions.

Jarecki takes a highly original approach to create a compelling, thought-provoking look at a highly relevant and controversial topic.

Rather than simply reveling in nostalgia, “Vinyl Nation” becomes a forward-looking story about connections: between artist, tradesperson, retailer and listener. And also between families, friends and strangers.

Equally fascinating, sad and scary.

One need not be a jazz aficionado to enjoy this film. All that’s required is a smile.

The pieces of the drama are put forth like the shapes of the five fingers of a hand, and finally they find a kind of awkward unity that was predictable from the start. And yet, the gesture of it all is utterly captivating, the way a dream would be if it ever really came true. [27 Feb 1987, Daily Datebook, p.74]

Jia is passionate about his characters, but that never compromises his considerable artistic control.

We can only describe the result, which is that this director — in her first feature film — has the ability to synthesize emotions and ideas through pictures. She shows you something; it means something, and you know what it means. She has an emotion, so she shows you something else, and you feel it, too.

It's a documentary that invites viewers inside its story to groove along with a genre that's changing the past, present and future of contemporary music.

This is almost Mel Brooks territory: The frontiersmen think the Chinese are Jews, while the white settlers think it's the Crow Indians who are. Whoosh!

Superb documentary.

It's a ton of fun, a totally irresistible tale of gambling, greed, love and violence. With gorgeous actors, designer clothes and thrilling action, it's fast-moving (even at 2 hours, 20 minutes) popcorn entertainment.

Presenting Princess Shaw looks and feels like a DIY project, which is fine because the documentary is really a hymn to self-reliance — although bolstered with a modest amount of plain old luck.

A hauntingly lyrical study of sexual awakening.

Philomena is a wiser movie than it seems, with much to say about justice and forgiveness and the healing of wounds over time. Actually, it says next to nothing about any of those things, just implies its messages with a light hand.

The movie's pleasures are acting pleasures, but the movie doesn't compel attention and never seems like more than the frame for a performance.

There are more enigmas than answers in Jauja, an artsy South American Western directed by Lisandro Alonso, an Argentine filmmaker who delights in undermining movie conventions.

An astonishingly beautiful, irresistibly grim movie.

The film is dreadfully slow without much in the way of rewards.

Detroit is a movie that will make you angry. It is designed to make you angry, and it does nothing to soften the blow or create some artificial uplift. But there is something about honesty that’s exhilarating. Detroit is tough, but it’s worth it, every minute of it.

Kirikou and the Sorceress is definitely a sunny spot in the mire of frenetic, violent and often dopey cartoon films produced by Hollywood. It's also far more imaginative that most.