Meticulous care is evident in every aspect of the film. All three actors playing Pi are outstanding.

What comes out of this unlikely comparison between astronomy and history is a totally new perspective, something broader, with glimpses into deeper meanings.

Makes everything in the rival Marvel universe look thoroughly silly and childish. Entirely enveloping and at times unnerving in a relevant way one would never have imagined, as a cohesive whole this ranks as the best of Nolan's trio, even if it lacks -- how could it not? -- an element as unique as Heath Ledger's immortal turn in The Dark Knight. It's a blockbuster by any standard.

Lucas Belvaux's Rapt is two movies, both excellent, for the price of one.

Crisply shot and edited, with effective use of Ashutosh Phatak’s graceful music, this is a powerful documentary that demands to be seen by as wide an audience as possible.

At once the most realistic and beautifully choreographed film ever set in space, Gravity is a thrillingly realized survival story spiked with interludes of breath-catching tension and startling surprise.

Driven by a brilliant, ferocious performance by Michael Fassbender, Shame is a real walk on the wild side, a scorching look at a case of sexual addiction that's as all-encompassing as a craving for drugs.

This is a gorgeously made character study leavened with surrealistic dimensions both comic and dark, an unsparing look at a young man who, unlike some of his contemporaries, can’t transcend his abundant character flaws and remake himself as someone else.

The film's power steadily and relentlessly builds over its long course, to a point that is terrifically imposing and unshakable.

The film is terribly smart in every respect, with ne'er-a-false note performances and superb craft work from top to bottom.

It's very much an art piece, to be sure, but it feels like a genuine one that, while meditated, speaks fluently and truly for the place, people and culture it so indelibly depicts.

Two things stand out: the extraordinary command of cinematic technique, which alone is nearly enough to keep a connoisseur on the edge of his seat the entire time, and the tremendous portrayals by Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman of two entirely antithetical men

It’s a non-stop blast from beginning to end, jam-packed with a wacky irreverence, dazzling state-of-the-art CGI (courtesy of Animal Logic) and a pitch-perfect voice cast headed by Chris Pratt, Elizabeth Banks and Will Ferrell.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes manages to do at least three things exceptionally well that are hard enough to pull off individually: Maintain a simmering level of tension without let-up for two hours, seriously improve on a very good first entry in a franchise and produce a powerful humanistic statement using a significantly simian cast of characters.

The Impossible is one of the most emotionally realistic disaster movies in recent memory -- and certainly one of the most frightening in its epic re-creation of the catastrophic 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

Exhilarating, opaque, heartbreaking and completely bonkers – French auteur Leos Carax's so-called comeback film, Holy Motors, is a deliciously preposterous piece of filmmaking that appraises life and death and everything in between, reflected in a funhouse mirror.

Magnificent in its simplicity and its relentless honesty about old age, illness and dying, Michael Haneke's Amour is a deliberately torturous watch.

Citizen Kane is a great motion picture. Great in that it was produced by a man who had never had any motion picture experience; great because he cast it with people who had never faced a camera in a motion picture production before; great in the manner of its story-telling, in both the writing of that story and its unfolding before a camera; great in that its photographic accomplishments are the highlights of motion picture photography to date, and finally great, because technically, it is a few steps ahead of anything that has been made in pictures before.

This is one hot, provocative, revelatory and astonishing documentary, one sure to provoke enthralled interest and controversy wherever it is shown worldwide.

The work Richard Linklater and company started in 1995's Before Sunrise retains a clarity of spirit undimmed by 18 years.

A highly original film of uncompromising, other-worldly beauty. Leviathan demands to be seen, even if it means you never eat seafood again.

An infectious blast of funky jazz played by a terrific cast and a director at the top of their respective games.

This is a beautifully crafted work and an acute evocation of its period both in look and attitude, and it’s no less deeply absorbing for being somewhat muted in tone.

A riveting first feature of startling maturity and intelligence.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, David Cronenberg should be feeling pretty chuffed with son Brandon’s big-screen debut, a petri dish of high-concept perversity and cultural commentary teeming with lo-fi ickiness.

Although the subject matter is inherently disturbing, it’s hard to imagine any audience remaining unmoved by this mournful tale.

Only Lovers Left Alive is an addictive mood and tone piece, a nocturnal reverie that incidentally celebrates a marriage that has lasted untold centuries.

Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi pursues his exploration of guilt, choice and responsibility in a superbly written, directed and acted drama that commands attention every step of the way.

Less concerned with classic storytelling than with creating virtual performance pieces on screen, the film features dozens of extended sequences of Adele and Emma both in and out of bed—scenes that are virtuously acted and directed, even if they run on for longer than most filmmakers would allow.

The visuals here...are never less than stunning in their impact, yet always seem well within the realm of possibility. It is also to Spielberg's credit, however, that despite all of this visual opulence, his actors are never dwarfed.

At once heartbreaking and uplifting.

Mesmerizing in its incremental layering of a bizarre, tragic and thoroughly warped character study, Foxcatcher sees director Bennett Miller well surpassing even the fine work he did in his previous two films, Capote and Moneyball.

A very honest film from a great Japanese artist.

A career high point for Ralph Fiennes as both an actor and director, this unfussy and emotionally penetrating work also provides lead actress Felicity Jones with the prime role in which she abundantly fulfills the promise suggested in some of her earlier small films.

Gloria is a work of maturity, depth and emotional insight. There’s not a single false note here.

Derki and his experienced editor Anne Fabini have crafted a sober, sobering bulletin of unambiguous intention and undeniable power.

Alternately haunting, inspiring and dreamily meditative, this is a visually majestic film of transfixing moods and textures.

Featuring superb performances by the principal actors, Big Bad Wolves is mesmerizing from start to finish.

The film's exhilarating originality, black comedy and tone that is at once empathetic and acidic will surely strike a strong chord with audiences looking for something fresh that will take them somewhere they haven't been before.

It's the selective but cumulative use of seemingly arbitrary but significant experiences that gives Boyhood its distinctive character and impressive weight.

Midnight Special confirms Nichols' uncommon knack for breathing dramatic integrity and emotional depth into genre material.

Anchored by a masterful performance by Timothy Spall in a role he was born to play, and gilded by career-best effort from DoP Dick Pope, working for the first time on digital for Leigh to bridge the gap between the painting and cinematography, Mr. Turner manages to illuminate that nexus between biography and art with elegant understatement.

Visually, intellectually and emotionally, McDonagh’s film is one to savor.

A gloriously inspirational film documenting music’s healing power in Alzheimer patients.

Particle Fever succeeds on every level, but none more important than in making the normally intimidating and arcane world of genius-level physics at least conceptually comprehensible and even friendly to the lay viewer.

Frame by frame, Ida looks resplendently bleak, its stunning monochromes combining with the inevitable gloomy Polish weather and communist-era deprivations to create a harsh, unforgiving environment.

In all fairness, this swill's swells are in the action: car chases, foot chases, wipeouts, shootouts, brawls and falls -- and they're terrific. Director Kathryn Bigelow pumps up the action to, indeed, full adrenal dimension. [12 July 1991]

Where many filmmakers would have underlined the bleaker, harsher aspects, Girlhood presents the characters' grim reality without surrendering its lightness of touch, its compassion or its hope.

Simultaneously a modern essay on suffering, an open-ended thriller, and a black social comedy, it is most importantly of all a thinly-veiled political parable drenched in bitter irony that takes aim against the corrupt, corrosive regime of Vladimir Putin.

An exceptional animated feature from Spain, Wrinkles imaginatively and sensitively explore one of the major issues confronting most of the developed world: how to look after senior citizens in a rapidly aging population.

Hogg achieves remarkable results with the most minimal of means. Camerawork and editing are consistently on the money, while performances and dialogue feel utterly fresh, spontaneous and believable.

It’s a lovely piece of work.

A superbly sensual character study of a young woman navigating emotional and professional crossroads.

Both a powerful allegory for post-war regeneration and a rich Hitchcockian tale of mistaken identity, Phoenix once again proves that German filmmaker Christian Petzold and his favorite star, Nina Hoss, are clearly one of the best director-actor duos working in movies today.

It’s like watching a first-rate standup routine transformed into fiction, or in this case auto-fiction, as Rock has more on his mind than just making us laugh, offering up a witty celebrity satire that doubles as a love story set during one long and eventful New York City day.

Blending fiction with documentary and exquisite film craft with playful improvisational freedom, Andrei Konchalovsky delivers what might be the most captivating screen work of his post-Hollywood career with The Postman's White Nights.

Pushing both brutal realism and extravagant visual poetry to the edges of what one customarily finds in mainstream American filmmaking, director/co-writer Alejandro G. Inarritu, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and a vast team of visual effects wizards have created a sensationally vivid and visceral portrait of human endurance under very nearly intolerable conditions.

Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa’s Maidan harkens back to the heroic, journalistic roots of documentary-making and yet feels ineffably modern and formally daring. It’s a tiny marvel of a movie.

An extraordinary ride through Bollywood’s spectacular, over-the-top filmmaking, Gangs of Wasseypur puts Tarantino in a corner with its cool command of cinematically-inspired and referenced violence, ironic characters and breathless pace.

While there are implicit references to the horrors of the Soviet and post-Soviet state and to the 20th century in general, this monstrously overflowing film seems to aim even higher.

A remarkably vibrant and frank look at one precocious teen’s emerging sexual life — a film with the stuff of life coursing through its veins and sex very much on its brain.

A smart-ass charmer, merciless tearjerker and sincere celebration of teenage creativity.

For American viewers of an intellectual/historical persuasion, there could scarcely be any documentary more enticing, scintillating and downright fascinating than Best of Enemies.

Classily and classically crafted in the best sense by director John Crowley and screenwriter Nick Hornby, this superbly acted romantic drama is set in the early 1950s and provides the feeling of being lifted into a different world altogether, so transporting is the film’s sense of time and place and social mores.

The violence of the inter-American drug trade has served as the backdrop for any number of films for more than three decades, but few have been as powerful and superbly made as Sicario.

James D. Cooper’s rollicking film is a heady return to Swinging Sixties England at the height of the Mod explosion that’s packed with primo archival material and killer tunes. It’s also a vigorous testament to the rewards of creative collaboration, shining a spotlight on two highly unorthodox, self-invented rock entrepreneurs.

The film is a captivating, sobering look at the world’s endangered aquatic species, but it’s also a frightening revelation of what methane and carbon are doing to the ocean.

In every sense, The Great Museum (Das grosse Museum) imparts a feeling of privilege — privilege on the part of those (the Hapsburgs) who built and opened Vienna's extraordinary Kunsthistorisches Museum in 1891, privilege among those lucky enough to work at such a rarified establishment and privilege on the part of any viewer of Johannes Holzhausen's wonderfully evocative and droll documentary.

Youth is a voluptuary’s feast, a full-body immersion in the sensory pleasures of the cinema.

For Chazelle to be able to pull this off the way he has is something close to remarkable. The director's feel for a classic but, for all intents and purposes, discarded genre format is instinctive and intense.

Its bursts of lightning-fast swordplay interrupt long, still stretches of misty moonlit landscapes and follow a pure literary style more than current genre expectations.

It’s a surprising and often thought-provoking effort from a filmmaker who has never chosen to take the simple path, confirming Larrain as one of the more genuine talents working in cinema today.

Equal parts ethnographic and poetic, this eloquent drama's stirring soulfulness is laced with the sorrow of cultural dislocation but also with lovely ripples of humor and even joy.

It's as honest and clear-eyed about the past as its predecessor, another in a filmography of unpredictable gems. It may be most like Dazed in that the public could take a while to appreciate it for what it is.

Muylaert does a deft job here of plotting her story and setting up her characters and their predicaments in ways that immediately invite reflection.

This is a wonderfully odd consideration of those questions about love, pain, solitude and human connection we all ask; its emotional power creeps out from under the subtle humor and leaves a subcutaneous imprint that lingers long after the movie is over.

An explosive combination of highly personal moral drama and a wider, scathing portrait of a country in which corruption and greed seem to be the only shared values left, this well-oiled narrative machine is further aided by a clever ticking-clock mechanism that actually ratchets up the tension the longer the characters’ vodka-soaked, blame-game speeches are allowed to go on.

Rarely are documentaries as powerfully polemic and jaw-gapingly spectacular as Sherpa.

Deliberately detached in its observational style, yet as probing, subtle and affecting as any psychological drama could wish to be, this is an elliptical film that trusts its audience enough to peel away exposition and unnecessary dialogue, uncovering rich layers of ambiguity.

Frame by Frame is a work of profound immediacy, in sync with the photographers’ commitment and hope.

Representing a dazzling artistic leap forward for LAIKA, the stop-motion animation studio’s fourth feature — and first full-blown fantasy — is an eye-popping delight that deftly blends colorful folklore with gorgeous, origami-informed visuals to immersive effect.

Dunkirk is an impressionist masterpiece. These are not the first words you expect to see applied to a giant-budgeted summer entertainment made by one of the industry's most dependably commercial big-name directors. But this is a war film like few others, one that may employ a large and expensive canvas but that conveys the whole through isolated, brilliantly realized, often private moments more than via sheer spectacle, although that is here too.

The performances are impeccable. Sachs is a master of expressive understatement, and that applies both to the young actors playing the boys — there's not a false moment from either of them — and to the adults.

Expectations are fully met in Park Chan-wook’s exquisitely filmed The Handmaiden (Agassi), an amusingly kinky erotic thriller and love story that brims with delicious surprises, making its two-and-a-half hours fly by.

To Kill A Mockingbird is a product of American realism, and it is a rare and worthy treasure.

According to the most basic laws of cinema, Toni Erdmann, Maren Ade’s third feature as a writer-director (she has five times that many credits as a producer), shouldn’t work. It’s practically one long string of nesting, oxymoronic self-cancelling paradoxes: here is the world’s first genuinely funny, 162-minute German comedy of embarrassment.

The movie is a small marvel of impeccable craftsmanship.

Confidently dovetailing three strands that depict present and past reality, as well as a dark fictional detour that functions as a blunt real-life rebuke, the film once again demonstrates that Ford is both an intoxicating sensualist and an accomplished storyteller, with as fine an eye for character detail as he has for color and composition.

Barry Jenkins' Moonlight pulls you into its introspective protagonist's world from the start and transfixes throughout as it observes, with uncommon poignancy and emotional perceptiveness, his roughly two-decade path to find a definitive answer to the question, "Who am I?"

An ultra-naturalistic slice of rocky adolescent life that combines violence and sensuality, wrenching loss and tender discovery.

An extraordinary motion picture, greater in dimension and significance than any similar film of our time, Ben-Hur is more spectacular than any of the previous spectacles. More importantly, it is at the same time a highly rewarding dramatic experience, rich and complex in human values: a great adventure, full of excitement, visual beauty, thrills and unsurpassed cinema artistry.

Personal footage interacts intriguingly with reportage here, sometimes making it more than the greatest-hits montage it initially seems.

Extraordinary in its piercing intimacy and lacerating in its sorrow, Jackie is a remarkably raw portrait of an iconic American first lady, reeling in the wake of tragedy while at the same time summoning the defiant fortitude needed to make her husband's death meaningful, and to ensure her own survival as something more than a fashionably dressed footnote.

The Woman Who Left is an immensely immersive and engaging tale about a wronged individual's grueling struggle between reconciliation and revenge.

The beauty of the feature lies in its ability to stir the imagination with eerie, resonant hand-drawn animation.

Captivating, funny and possessed of a surprise-filled zig-zag structure that makes it impossible to anticipate where it's headed, this is a deeply humane film that, like the best Hollywood classics, feels both entirely of its moment and timeless.

Disney's 30th animated feature, Beauty and the Beast stands at the pinnacle of animated accomplishment, even when weighted against the excellencies of its lineage.

The unique charm of Isle of Dogs is its bottomless vault of curios, its sly humor, playful graphic inserts and dexterous narrative detours.