Tár marks yet another career peak for Blanchett — many are likely to argue her greatest — and a fervent reason to hope it’s not 16 more years before Field gives us another feature. It’s a work of genius.

Lee's direction is utterly masterful: delicate, lively, rambunctious and spontaneous all at once. The performances are similarly splendid, particularly Sihung Lung as the embroiled father and Chien-Lien Wu as his careerist daughter. [03 Aug 1994]

This is a big, ballsy, serious-minded cinematic event of a type now virtually extinct from the studios. It fully embraces the contradictions of an intellectual giant who was also a deeply flawed man, his legacy complicated by his own ambivalence toward the breakthrough achievement that secured his place in the history books.

This is compelling storytelling by any standard, its supple rhythms hypnotic, its atmosphere potent and its prevailing hushed tone and intimate camerawork affording us the closest possible access to three characters who in turn are constantly studying one another. The actors playing those three points of a complicated triangle could not be better.

Saint Omer might be fiction, but Diop does not stray too far from her documentary roots. The film maintains a sense of naturalism even during its most tense moments. Diop’s directing style leans observational, as if she is watching and recording her screenplay’s effect on her performers.

It’s difficult to convey the multilayered beauty of Past Lives beyond just urging people to see it and lose themselves in its transfixing spell.

The action flows with the rhythms of play and labor, joy and grief, thanks to sensitive editing by Lucrecia Gutiérrez Maupomé and Huezo and the sound team’s evocative work.

It’s a modestly proportioned movie of quiet magnificence, one that feels spun of gossamer summer light and rooted in unshakeable depths.

Stuffed with rude delights, spry wit, radical fantasy and breathtaking design elements, the movie is a feast. And Emma Stone gorges on it in a fearless performance that traces an expansive arc most actors could only dream about.

Certainly The Snake Pit will go down in Hollywood annals as one of the must unusual subjects ever attempted, and what is more to the point, successfully accomplished. It is bold and original — a defiant answer to those who say that our American motion picture creators cannot evolve a mature dramatic subject.

Its perspective is entirely fresh, eschewing the standard, and more readily engrossing, nonfiction custom of first-person testimony and faces in dramatic close-up. Peering into the liminal place where history’s ghosts linger, McQueen stirs up something more complex than emotion.

At this point it doesn’t seem a stretch to say that Jonathan Glazer is incapable of making a movie that’s anything less than bracingly original.

Sora has made a work of magnificent minimalism. Its vision of immortality might be most stirring in the moments when Sakamoto’s elegant hands hover above the keyboard at the end of a piece. It’s as though he’s coaxing the final chords to resonate just a bit longer before they fade into something like silence but now, after his conjuring, much richer.

While it unfolds in a hazy dream state rooted in Adam’s loneliness and the emotional suspension that has blocked him from moving forward, it’s by no means a downer. It’s a thing of beauty, heartfelt and unforgettable.

The movie contains no non-diegetic music and even limits major camera movement to a relatively small handful of scenes. Nothing distracts from the tender wisdom of its unimpeachably unsentimental gaze and the vividness of its very specific New England milieu.

If cinema is an empathy machine, to paraphrase the late Roger Ebert, then Agnieszka Holland’s new film is one precision-tooled specimen.

The Peasants is a ravishingly beautiful visual triumph.

It’s a Gothic horror nightmare heaving with sumptuous visual detail, groaning under the weight of portentous dread, writhing with both convulsive violence and sweaty eroticism and leavened by sly hints of fiendish camp.

At times, the film feels like a musical nightmare full of sadness and raw angst.

In Queer, Luca Guadagnino meets William S. Burroughs on the iconoclast’s own slippery terms and the result is mesmerizing.

With A Real Pain, [Eisenberg] demonstrates impeccable judgment and great skill at balancing sardonic wit with piercing solemnity in a movie full of feeling, in which no emotion is unearned.

It is a frightening and galvanizing vision, Anderson putting away his complicated nostalgia for old (and more easily understood) days to confront, with disarmingly noble purpose, the here and now.

Ross, honoring the perspective shift that characterizes Whitehead’s novel, switches between Elwood and Turner’s points of view, remaining, at all times, in the subjective mode. The commitment to this way of storytelling imbues Nickel Boy with an overwhelming intimacy and becomes another way that Ross, as a filmmaker, stretches what it means to represent Black people.

It’s an earnest mash note to the power of music that resists over-sentimentalizing its sacrifices, or overstating its rewards.

Ultimately, Sabbath Queen isn’t interested in the headline-grabbing macro conflicts that embroil Jews globally, but the internal culture wars within Judaism itself: fascistic fundamentalism versus reformist progressivism; dominant cishet masculinity versus burgeoning feminine and gender nonconforming voices; hallowed bloodlines versus chosen family. It is one of the best films I’ve seen this year.

Poetic in its simplicity yet crafted with as meticulous attention to detail as Hujar’s reflections on his day, this is a singular meditation on the life of an influential artist for whom major recognition came only after his death. It has the feel of a rare find plucked from a dusty archive.

The passage of time is somehow both fluid and jagged in Clint Bentley’s soulful film of the Denis Johnson novella, Train Dreams. It flows or ambles or bumps along, passing over moments of joy, shock, discovery, lonesomeness or devastating sadness, but just as often over seemingly mundane experiences that only later reveal their significance when we look back.

Seeds is not a journalistic investigation but a poetic contemplation.

There’s never a false note from the young actors, all of whom have deeply moving scenes. But Young Mothers is also captivating when it’s simply taking in the quotidian responsibilities of new parenthood — feeding, diaper changing, bathtime — or when it catches an expression of wonder or joy as a mother gazes into the tiny face of the child she has created.

Schilinski doesn’t spare us all their pain and suffering, nor does she hide the joy and wonder they sometimes experience. Her brave girls carry their forebearers within them from one generation to the next, surging toward the future both damaged and victorious.

It’s a major achievement, and for my money, sure to be one of the best films of the year.

Sentimental Value is uncommonly rich in emotional rewards and contemplative in its reflections on the places where we live becoming a permanent repository for our memories, remaining there even after we move on. The movie’s poignancy accumulates gradually, every supple turn expertly modulated as the presence of generations past becomes more tangible.

One of del Toro’s finest, this is epic-scale storytelling of uncommon beauty, feeling and artistry.

Eight years since her last feature, Kathryn Bigelow returns with an unrelenting chokehold thriller so controlled, kinetic and unsettlingly immersive that you stagger out at the end of it wondering if the world will still be intact.

For a three-part piece, it gains a gorgeous fluidity from the gossamer ribbon of melancholy threaded through it. Like Paterson, it’s a film whose simplicity, sweetness and unvarnished ordinariness make it seem almost a miracle.

Time stands still and leaps across the epochs in Below the Clouds, which reveals how much our world has been transformed over the millennia, while also remaining the same.

Calling the movie an archival doc or concert film might be accurate but somehow seems almost reductive. Much more than that, it’s a transcendent theatrical experience, an exhilarating party, a giddying visual and sonic blitz that will be an elixir to the Elvis faithful and an unparalleled primer for those who have never quite grasped what all the hysteria was about.

Gray and his superb cast are in blazing form and full command here in a bruising movie that reveals the heavy price of pursuing the American Dream too recklessly.

The beauty of the film is that it doesn’t judge viewers for what they do and don’t know, but rather encourages us to open our minds to history and see the connections between then and now.

It is immaculately performed by Zischler and especially Hüller, grounding the film throughout with an uncanny, expressive stillness.

Tensely action-packed and muscularly directed by Kathryn Bigelow, this tale of an elite U.S. army bomb disposal unit in Baghdad is a familiar story in new clothes, targeted at the young male demographic.

Anderson has created a world as stylized and inventive as anything he's done... "Fox" is a visual delight.

Three superb performances by Helen Mirren, Christopher Plummer and James McAvoy should have Oscar handicappers drooling.

What this strange yet strangely beguiling film does is capture one of pop culture's great entertainers in the feverish grips of pure creativity.

A piercingly funny, twisted "whatever-happens-in-Vegas" caper.

Bright Star may not be a joy forever but it will do until the next joy comes along.

Raimi's still very much up to his old tricks, retaining that deliriously over-the-top brand of Grand Guignol horror that he had abandoned by the mid-'90s in pursuit of other genres.

This is a marvelous family story, tapping into all sorts of childhood dreams and nightmares involving Mommy, monsters and heroic youngsters. Selick's imaginative sets and puppets are in perfect pitch with Gaiman's fantasy.

Most of all, Earhart wanted to be able to fly free as a bird above the clouds, and director Nair and star Swank make her quest not only understandable but truly impressive.

Polished, funny and utterly charming.

Downey plays off his own bad-boy image wonderfully. The writers give him great lines to work with and ditto that for his Girl Friday, Gwyneth Paltrow's Pepper Potts, whose own svelte lines cannot be improved on.

The filmmakers were right to believe that a live-action version of this story would have failed to achieve the universality Persepolis does.

Apatow's gleefully raunchy movies are, in an odd and charming way, extremely family-friendly.

Now Eastwood turns on a dime and tackles not just his first war movie but two war movies of considerable scope and complexity. If he doesn't nail everything perfectly, he nevertheless has created a vivid memorial to the courage on both sides of this battle and created an awareness in the public consciousness at a most opportune moment about how war feels to those lost in its fog.

Spicing up the entire package is a screenplay by Canet and Philippe Lefebvre that bristles with wit and energy.

The filmmakers succeed brilliantly in weaving these stories together, taking time to explore depth of character and relationships. The suspense builds throughout as everyone involved becomes lost in a place they don't understand with people they don't know if they can trust.

Firing on all cylinders as a creepy thriller, police procedural and "All the President's Men"-style investigative newsroom drama, the smart, extremely vivid production oozes period authenticity.

It is more sad-funny than funny-funny, but Jenkins has enough empathy and wit to realize that even the sad parts are, somehow, funny.

A glorious new addition to martial-arts cinema.

Working with non-pro actors, Hammer pulls authentic performances from the trio that are at times almost too painful to witness.

With compelling and charismatic performances by Keira Knightley and James McAvoy as the lovers, and a stunning contribution from Romola Garai as their remorseful nemesis, the film goes directly to "The English Patient" territory and might also expect rapturous audiences and major awards.

Audiences will eat it up: This is a postmillennial spy-action movie pitched to a large international audience. You hardly need subtitles.

A visually enthralling undersea travelogue.

Thrillers don't get much smarter than The Interpreter.

Not only a great cautionary tale, it's a civics lesson that should be seen by every concerned citizen.

Everyone involved -- actors, crew, director Susanne Bier and screenwriter Anders Thomas Jensen in their second collaboration -- are in peak form in this unflinching look at repressed feelings and emotional devastation.

A superb portrait of a father and son disguised as a docu about Haskell Wexler.

The final episode of George Lucas' cinematic epic "Star Wars" ends the six-movie series on such a high note that one feels like yelling out, "Rewind!" Yes, rewind through more than 13 hours of bravery, treachery, new worlds, odd creatures and human frailty.

For Christopher Nolan to turn Batman Begins into such a smart, gritty, brooding, visceral experience is astonishing. Truly, Batman does begin again.

A grand story of redemption, laced with barbecued wit and slopped with intrigue, Chrystal is a high heaping of brilliant storytelling.

That rare beast, a terrific movie that boasts intelligent wit, expert storytelling, delightful characters and grown-up dialogue plus suspense and a wicked surprise ending.

Obscene, disgusting, vulgar and vile, The Aristocrats might be the funniest movie you'll ever see.

Atom Egoyan has delivered a big, slick and sexy mystery in Where the Truth Lies, turning the Rupert Holmes novel into a sumptuous tale of show business hype and duplicity.

There is no denying the emotional impact of the story, which is powerfully conveyed in this important, deeply moving documentary.

A bold film both in its storytelling strategies and its filmmaking logistics.

Neil Marshall's horrifically terrific The Descent cannily recasts 1972's "Deliverance" as a female-bonding thriller with some "Hills Have Eyes"-style mutant terror tossed in for truly harrowing effect.

What is lightly sketched in the novel, where much is left to the imagination, blossoms into full-blown, richly detailed life in the movie.

The gorilla is great, the girl terrific, sets are out of this world, creatures icky as hell, and the director clearly does not believe in the word "enough."

A mesmerizing, richly nuanced inquiry into Israel's revenge of the Munich massacre of its athletes.

Haneke echoes the theme of Hitchcock's "Rear Window": Moviemaking is basically an act of voyeurism. We secretly examine people's lives in every movie. But in this one, there is a hidden camera, a movie within the movie as it were, forcing us to observe a character along side a mysterious stranger.

Fateless is both haunting and poetic. It also is visually stunning.

Confrontational, raw and always compelling, Little Fish is a film of rare power and conviction.

The word "community" has become a cliche, but this party, both backstage and before the crowd, illustrates a specific sense of cultural community and the singular bliss of standing on a city street in late-summer rain for a once-in-a-lifetime concert.

Deep Sea 3D, along with the recent Imax films "Coral Reef Adventure" and "Volcanoes of the Deep Sea," is a glorious example of educational entertainment at its best.

With a cast of Scottish, German and French actors all speaking their own language, writer-director Christian Carion has fashioned a deeply moving and uplifting piece.

This is the mother lode all action/suspense directors search for and Lee, who usually doesn't work in that genre, has hit it.

Whatever one's opinion of Johnston's art, this is documentary filmmaking at its finest.

To pull this kind of thing off you need exceptional performances, and the two leads rise commandingly to the challenge. Wilson, best known for his work in the screen version of "The Phantom of the Opera" and HBO's "Angels in America," keeps his true colors effectively muted throughout the bulk of their face-off, but it is Page who astonishes.

Exquisite storytelling, acting and visuals.

Not since Woody Allen's "Radio Days" has anyone created such a cinematic Valentine to the wonderfully imaginative medium of radio as A Prairie Home Companion.

An affectionate and intimate celebration of the acclaimed troubadour in stirring music and words.

This is a film of terrific selectivity. By focusing on two of the few who did survive the collapse, the film achieves emotional power and an uplifting ending.

A work of terrific imagination, visceral punch and gothic beauty.

A heartwarming and moving adventure that does excellent justice to the classic character.

Foulkrod's film is not about taking a political side, though it is clear she is strongly opposed to the war in Iraq. Her focus instead is on the dehumanizing of eager young men and their transformation into killing machines.

It didn't seem possible, but Johnny Knoxville, Bam Margera, Steve-O, Chris Pontius, Wee Man and company might just have cooked up a sequel that's even wilder, funnier, extra-depraved and more gag-inducing than the seemingly incomparable "Jackass the Movie."

Providing richness of detail and metaphor, elegantly blueprinted themes and impressive mastery of a constantly shifting tone, Little Children does just that. It is a deeply satisfying film.

Michael Apted's landmark films documenting the lives of a disparate group of Brits in seven-year intervals have always been fascinating from a sociological perspective. But the latest installment proves that they are undeniably brilliant cinematically as well.