Armed with an intimate tale and the true grit of Jandreau’s teeth, The Rider is the best film about searching for a new identity in the wreckage of the American dream since Kathryn Bigelow’s "The Hurt Locker" (2008). It is here to break your heart.

The adjective “inspirational” doesn't do justice to the quality of Schnabel's film.

There's a giddy, absurd charm to the story, in which the strange setting only enhances the comfortable familiarity of the narrative and characters.

The drama is an intricately constructed and intensely felt work that transcends the easy “coming-of-age” genre label that is so tempting to slap onto it.

Director Mouly Surya’s unwavering conviction in her material (co-written with Rama Adi and Garin Nugroho) and her star – Marsha Timothy plays Marlina as fearful and indignant but ever composed – create a film that is simultaneously charming and grisly.

It’s a delightfully cruel work of high tension, perfect in just how quickly and easily it gets under your skin.

Dive into a masterpiece.

The Image Book is worth seeing if only as an aesthetic experience – to let its images and sounds wash over you – while also offering itself up as an object to reflect on.

Once in a rare while a film comes along that is boldly original, communicates an important idea in an elegantly simple fashion and happens to be highly entertaining. Such is the case with Moolaadé.

More arduously, Riva is obliged to act out the physical decline while still registering a full spectrum of emotions. Remarkably, she does it all, even when reduced to communicating with her eyes alone. Hers is, in every sense of the phrase, a nakedly honest performance.

Mostly, Nebraska impresses for its sure rhythms and artful balance of comedy and melancholy, resulting in Payne’s most satisfying film since "About Schmidt."

This is a lovely, quirky and not a little poignant film from Agnès Varda.

There is no raunchier, more raucous, filthy and truly crass movie out this summer than Girls Trip – and I loved every minute of it.

It is rare for a first feature to be so well directed, thoughtful and entertaining.

If you’ve ever loved anyone or anything, A Ghost Story is going to break your heart. It is devastating – and devastatingly good.

A parable that concerns the monstrous conduct of humans, Tusk is a salute to storytelling, a comic send-up of Canadiana – with awesome references to Degrassi and Duplessis – and a terrorizing vehicle for sharply conceived absurdity.

Sissako’s point, while never heavy-handed, is hard to miss: Traditional Muslims are among the world’s biggest victims of Islamic militarism.

Rankin has a made a great film about Canada and an even greater one about the kinds of subjects somewhat contraband in our home and native land: unbridled romantic longing, living in fear of one’s own mother, a perverse desire to masturbate with a dirty work boot, political ambition and shame.

David Cronenberg's gelid masterpiece.

Delightfully inventive, consistently funny, clever but not slick, brisk yet never antic, Quick Change is the perfect cinematic date - a summer film for all seasons, the kind of sharp-edged picture that gives lightweight a good name. [14 Jul 1990, p.C3]

The accurately titled EPiC is the greatest concert documentary ever made.

Divided into five parts, the film is the most ambitious, realistic, thorough and scrupulous feature yet released by a major studio on the subject of cops and corruption...As portrayed electrifyingly - sometimes a little too electrifyingly - by Williams, Ciello's reasons for becoming a stoolie are as complex as his reasons for becoming a cop. [29 Aug 1981]

Foxtrot is an admirably precise yet dreamlike film, probing the trap in which contemporary Israel finds itself. It is deliberately designed, superbly filmed and affectingly acted by Lior Ashkenazi and Sarah Adler as the stricken Feldmanns.

MIAMI BLUES gleefully presides over the happy marriage of two solid but usually separate traditions in U.S. movies: film noir, with its emphasis on the sleazy and the powerless, and screwball comedy, with its celebration of the romantically eccentric. As darkly unpredictable as The Third Man and as bouncingly comic as Pretty Woman, Miami Blues deserves all the rave reviews it's going to get and all the tons of money it's going to make. [20 Apr 1990]

Mostly, though, A Dangerous Method is a suave chamber piece: a series of glimpses of two 20th-century intellectual titans, in friendship and separation, and the story of a remarkable woman who history had swallowed up, brought into the light again.

The final shot is one of the most poignant images I’ve ever seen.

Like Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut," Anderson's latest is enigmatic. But if you have eyes and can see, The Master it is unmistakably some kind of wonder. At least, it's an exhilarating demonstration of big-screen moviemaking in dreamlike colours and a sense-heightening 70-mm format.

As well as an engaging fable about a homeless orphan living in a train station, Scorsese's film is a richly illustrated lesson in cinema history and the best argument for 3-D since James Cameron's "Avatar."