As a history of this war of ideas and as an introduction to Jacobs, the film is essential. But it also pivots toward a great challenge: today’s global urbanization.

There is a distinct, and welcome, lack of sentimentality here, too, with Baumbach able to swerve the tone into a more cerebral version of National Lampoon’s Vacation franchise, of all things. Imagine if Clark Griswold studied fascism and carried around a teeny-tiny pistol, and you’ll start to get the idea.

Disclosure is a well-acted, slickly directed shell of a picture. The veneer is so polished that you look on with something approaching genuine satisfaction, and only after the final credits roll do you begin to feel the void.

Whiplash is an intense, unmelodious, highly amped and probably unrealistic drama set in the fictionalized Schaefer Conservatory in New York.

Slipping in references to everyone from Kubrick to Fellini, Gray creates a truly intoxicating experience, overwhelming in the best possible way. It is this close to being an all-time classic, if only Charlie Hunnam’s central performance as Fawcett didn’t slip out of Gray’s period trappings every now and then (you can’t help but wonder what Gray’s long-time collaborator, Joaquin Phoenix, would have done with the role).

John Frankenheimer created this eccentrically brilliant thriller, an exercise in mid-sixties paranoia. [12 Jan 2002, p.R25]

With Monsters, Edwards transcends the special-effects auteur label, creating a memorable sci-fi story in which the hero and heroine are true equals in the adventure. How's that for an alien concept?

It's fierce, it's lean, it's mean, and it has at least three first-pumping "Hell, yeah!" moments.

The Doors is excessive, unsubtle, emotionally brutal and stylistically sadistic, but that's exactly right for the dark side of the sixties Morrison and his band embodied. [01 Mar 1991]

Relentlessly dark but expertly rendered, it shares its cinematographer and quality of aggrieved compassion with another recent Romanian art house hit, "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu."

A film that transforms a popular work of teen fiction not just by faithfully exploring its themes but, more important, by proving those themes have a very grown-up resonance.

Like the stationary figures it portrays, Kicking And Screaming is alive at the edges; it comes with a vibrant border of trenchant asides, tossed-off remarks that blend the solace of protective irony with the sterner stuff of hard truth.

Like a Keret story, Jellyfish is economical – a mere 78 minutes – but it packs into its taut, intersecting storylines a charming melancholy and a surprisingly rich depth.

Polished, intelligent, impeccably well-bred, it's an upscale kids' flick designed to appease the fears of discriminating parents: If those stubborn tykes refuse to crack a book, then this is the next best thing - Young People's Masterpiece Theatre. [11 Aug 1995, p.C2]

At times, it approaches self-parody, but that’s just Woo having some much-needed fun.

Video-game developers: Geeks, nerds, socially adrift obsessives. Indie Game thankfully gets past such base introductions in a flash and graduates to far more engrossing levels – levels which open up into the real worlds of the best independent game developers working their craft.

The Love Witch handily achieves its goals, employing Biller’s strong sense of retro style and Robinson’s wink-wink performance to deliver a subversive homage to a host of out-of-fashion genres.

Is Neruda a cinematic play, a poem, a biopic? In this near-perfect homage to a literary giant, it’s all open to interpretation.

The Usual Suspects filled me with a highly unusual urge - to be a true "reviewer," to rewind the projector and figure out this humdinger once and for all.

A delightfully satiric comedy. [29 May 1987]

On shifting ground, it is McDormand's fine performance that holds steady here, her wit and her fury eliciting more admiration than pity for the unrelenting Mildred. McDonagh does not always conquer this heartland, but McDormand already owns it.

The film belongs to Whitman, who, fresh off a five-year stint on the now-defunct TV series "Parenthood," infuses her first big-screen leading role with a unique charm. If Whitman looks familiar, but you can’t quite place her, that’s about right.

It’s elegantly filmed and well constructed, building to a haunting climatic sequence that could sear your eyeballs.

The film’s many tiny dramas add up to a thoughtful, though sometimes shaggy, study of hopes and regrets, aspirations and reality. It is not groundbreaking, but it is funny and sad and completely relatable.

A documentary as inspiring as it is flat-out bizarre.

Besides the movie’s weight in our contemporary, post-Ferguson historical moment, Straight Outta Compton may also be the funniest, most exhilarating and flat-out best Hollywood movie of the summer.

The intelligence and wit of this glass-slipper heart-of-gold fantasy are shocking.

A French rat as a master chef? Absurd. But a brilliant French chef with an American accent? C'est grotesque!