An epic success and a history-making production that finishes with a masterfully entertaining final installment.

The chemistry between the men is palpable, but what's more important, they convey their characters' complex emotions, expectations and thoughts without necessarily opening their mouths.

It is a tremendous achievement that shines a light on the way many countries use criminals to further their domestic and international goals. Politically informative, it also offers great drama with excitement and suspense, and no little tragedy.

Berliner crafts a quietly touching and illuminating memento mori from the steady dying of an intellectual light.

The steadily accumulated emotional weight of the film dissipates rather quickly as it reaches its abrupt ending. Still, Blue Heron is an affecting, promising debut feature.

Marriage Story puts you through the wringer, but leaves you exhilarated at having witnessed a filmmaker and his actors surpass themselves.

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.

The film abounds with pinpoint insights into its mildly rebellious heroine's hunger to shed the restraints of home and Catholic school and bust into an independent life, and does so with a wealth of keenly observed detail.

Directed by Howard Hawks with his sly sidearm grace, this is top-of-the-genre stuff.

There’s plenty of sadness here, but also lots of humor and female camaraderie.

Lee's knack for distilling the energy of live performance is no secret, for example in his terrific 2009 film of the unconventional Broadway musical Passing Strange. But the synergy here between filmmaker and subject — from the avant-funk grooves to the spirit of inclusivity and the urge to heal a broken nation — is simply spectacular.

This small film is a thoughtful addition to his parables about happy and unhappy families (Nobody Knows, After the Storm), studded with memorable characters and believable performances that quietly lead the viewer to reflect on societal values.

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 film stays close to its subjects and testifies to the resilience of the Masafer Yatta community. It takes courage and conviction to rebuild after every act of destruction.

The Safdies and the cast go deep enough here to make the film a genuinely human one.

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.

This rigorously well-made, grippy-as-a-live-squid, toska-steeped work is Zvyagintsev’s most openly critical commentary on the motherland’s current political, spiritual and moral malaise, a denunciation never said in so many words but expressed with intricate layers of irony.

The stories in Simon’s doc live in a French context, but the plight of its participants is near universal. In the face of resurgent attacks on bodily autonomy around the world, Our Body is an urgent and political project.

Viewers may worry that Bazawule's starkly gorgeous pictures aren't going to add up to anything, but Burial satisfies in prosaic as well as poetic terms, supplying an end that makes sense of its beginning. It will leave many who see it eager for the young filmmaker's next fable.

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.

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

Daniel Day-Lewis stuns in Paul Thomas Anderson's saga of a soul-dead oil man.

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.

Any way you judge it, Thing reaffirms Lee's position as a filmmaker with audacity, courage and ideas.

Arriving amidst a tidal wave of overblown and frequently charmless big studio efforts, Sita Sings the Blues is a welcome reminder that when it comes to animation bigger isn't necessarily better.

Skillfully juxtaposing private revelations with public documents, co-directors Berlinger and Sinofsky have created a mesmerizing portrait of the American justice system and revealed an insight into this country's nature -- throughout, there is the feeling that people take care of one another, and neither laws nor outsiders can quell inherent qualities of decency. [02 May 1994]

Sankofa’s marvels range from Gerima’s meticulous editing style and electrifying use of music to his liberating nonlinear storytelling techniques. But I find myself most consistently drawn to the film’s fluid embrace of language, what it reveals about rebellion and how it deepens our understanding of Gerima’s characters.

Panahi’s stoical presence at the center of all this is rattled, forcing him to contemplate the repercussions of his work both to himself and to even his most guileless collaborators. The sobering final image resonates with the unspoken cry of an artist exiled in his own homeland, saying, “Enough.”