This is still one of his (Berlinger) most ambitious films, vibrating with the same municipal unease as "Chinatown."

Censor wears its genre influences on its sleeve – The Shining, Cronenberg, Carrie and Peter Strickland’s similarly themed Berberian Sound Studio – but it’s very much its own thing.

The strength of Animal Kingdom is its slow-building fatalism; the criminals' luck runs out, but then finds depressing extension via an out-of-left-field collaborator. It's a movie that has very little faith in authority, not even in Guy Pearce's righteous detective. The only law here is Darwin's.

Like an updated The Commitments in rouge (liberally applied), Sing Street nails the details.

The mostly dialogue-free middle section is a scare-film master class - and when a becalmed smile does finally cross his lips, it's in the most giddily mordant of circumstances. As Arthur embraces the darkness, so does the darkness embrace us.

Actor-turned-director Olivia Wilde (shockingly, this is her behind-the-camera feature debut) shows off something rarer than technique or comic timing. She’s got loads of compassion and has somehow managed to make a high-school movie without villains.

The film isn't blinded by Candy's beauty and celebrity; it digs critically, if still empathetically, beneath.

Jean Gentil shares a certain searching quality that marked the best of Bresson's films - and for once, the inevitable analogy with his work seems appropriate.

This is a remarkable, piercing film, and central to an understanding of Ozu's work.

Alice Guy-Blaché was the first female filmmaker yet criminally overlooked by history – something Pamela B. Green sets out to correct in this educational and entertaining film.

The First Slam Dunk’s nimble storytelling and canny editing makes it work as both a sports movie, where you’re invested in the result, and a coming-of-age drama, where you care about the characters.

A 25-words-or-less pitch for The Day He Arrives - shot in luminous black-and-white - might go something like: "Hong Sang-soo does Groundhog Day."

Tarkovsky remains as much a metaphysician as anything else, and Nostalgia isn't an entertainment but an article of faith.

Showing how the dream of being a rich and beautiful princess curdled into a nightmare might sound like a hard sell, but Spencer pulls it off in heightened, claustrophobic and truly decadent fashion.

One token racism subplot aside, it juggles big ideas of social justice with more intimate moments of family life beautifully.

With just three actors, a boat, and a huge expanse of water, [Polanski] and script-writer Jerzy Skolimowski milk the situation for all it's worth, rarely descending into dramatic contrivance, but managing to heap up the tension and ambiguities.

First-time director Shaka King stages Hampton’s fiery speeches with a crackle and energy you can practically taste. He also has a nice eye for Scorsesian violence too, knowing when to lean into his film’s crime thriller elements, and when not to.

The story has a good dose of hokum, but the execution has an oppressive and sometimes feral quality that doesn’t just make the hairs on your neck stand up, it puts your whole body in fight-or-flight mode. An extremely impressive first film.

Selected readings from novels and short stories are imaginatively visualised, and the final sequences are profoundly moving. Vonnegut would have been proud of the finished film, although he did not live to see it.

Aided by a forceful performance from relative newcomer Midthunder, this Predator movie is full of surprises and that makes its alien monster actually scary again.

After a while, you adjust, or rather, you get tired of probing the slightly-off evidence of your eyes and the headache it produces. There’s a lot of fun to distract you.

It's all deliriously dark and nightmarish, its only shortcoming being its cynical lack of faith in humanity: only von Stroheim, superb as Swanson's devotedly watchful butler Max, manages to make us feel the tragedy on view.

A benediction is a prayer for divine help. For any lover of beautifully crafted cinema with real emotional charge, Davies’s latest will feel a lot like an answer.

This 1990 documentary does for voguing what David LaChappelle’s ‘Rize’ recently did for krumping: provides a fascinating portrait of a complex, materially disadvantaged subculture structured around intensely competitive aesthetic displays later plundered for a Madonna video.

Scorsese, that sly spiritualist, is out to make us sick on commerce and greed run rampant. He moves us beyond the allure of avarice so that we might take better stock of ourselves. What starts as a piggish paean becomes, by the end, an invigorating purge.

Edward Albee's vitriolic stage portrayal of domestic blisslessness translated grainily and effectively to the screen. Taylor gives what is probably her finest performance as the blowsy harridan Martha.

This sub-$100,000 exploitation movie fused the sleazy intensity of the grindhouse with the piercing intelligence of an art film, and remains a brutal but rewarding experience.

It’s an affable biopic about a great but troubled man, with plenty of artistic spirit of its own.

Above all, Blair Witch is a triumph of sound design. The cracks, crunches and rumbles from deep in the woods enhance a terror that’s pierced only by the beam of a flashlight.

Parents will feel heard by this movie in a way that few other films have tried. Everyone else should go for the kid, who's a rocket taking off. You want to be able to say you were there when it happened.

As Black Panther, Boseman is a hero in spandex; here he’s a hero with a badge and gun, who looks the devil in the eye, and stares down the evil in the system. It’s a smart way forward for an actor who has suddenly become extremely famous, yet wants to be perceived as more than just a cartoon. He’s got the chops to take us anywhere he wants.

It all adds up to a fascinating, amusing and enjoyably illusion-shattering study of the creative process, suggesting that modern art owes as much to opportunity and happenstance as it does to talent.

Cynthia Nixon commits wholly to her role’s maternal patience and scattered mental decay, but it’s Abbott who really dominates James White.

When a Hollywood comedy turns the crime of the century into a lark, you know a huge gamble has been chanced and won.

It’s a ruined community grappling with belated ethics; that’s the real story here.

Despite a loss of temperature through the flashbacks which let in some female interest, this is one of Dassin's best films

This debut feature from Seidelman (ex-New York Film School) may be small and unambitious, but its old tale of the little girl lost in the city is told with energy and verve. Seidelman's sure feeling for the squalor and glamour of urban decay, and her speedy, stylish editing, combine with a pulsating soundtrack from The Feelies to create a febrile sense of Lower Manhattan street life: fast living on a permanent adrenalin high.

Encanto has a few nifty plot pivots and surprising reveals, but it’s the animation itself that steals the show.

This is a sassy little comedy of wit and intelligence from the director of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. As Swell, Applegate is appealing and resourceful, while Coogan's dope-head Kenny contributes to a wonderfully dry, on-going marital spoof. Getz is the unctuous boardroom chauvinist to a tee, and Cassidy rounds off the picture's relaxed Cosmo-feminism as Swell's scatty boss.

Crisply photographed and directed with understated grace, the film can feel a little standoffish given the emotive subject matter. But with strong performances from the young leads and a vice-like air of mounting tension, it’s well worth revisiting.

This is a film equally grounded in realism and empathy, and a reminder that no two people have the same story.

Sasquatch Sunset’s mood sits somewhere between the queasy surreality of Jim Hosking’s The Greasy Strangler and the winsome daftness of Daniels’ Swiss Army Man. It’s easy to see this following in the (big)footsteps of those and acquiring its own cult following.

It possesses a mythic clarity, yet there's also a welcome complexity at work, in the vivid characterisations and the unsentimental celebration of community and collective action. The result is witty, astute, and finally very moving.

Del Toro and Amalric’s concentrated performances — the former resigned and shell-shocked, the latter agitated and servile — have an anguished grandeur.

The Arbor's pummeling second half begins with the collapse of its celebrity subject; the following spirals of self-destruction make you suspect that some childhoods are simply too hard to escape. Tough, worthy stuff.

Hitchcock's most sombre film, unrelieved by his usual macabre humour; the black-and-white photography and the persecuted Fonda's sharply chiselled features lend an impressive documentary feel.

Fantastical is what we get: Cameraman is filled with Cardiff's achingly beautiful work.

With MaXXXine, writer-director Ti West concludes his Mia Goth horror trilogy (following X and Pearl) with a thrilling slasher that’s both fond neon tribute to the genre’s ’80s gory heyday and a brisk, smart look at the role of women and power in Hollywood.

A gritty human drama evoking the residual vibrancy of a threatened culture.

As Wilde, descending from would-be-doting husband and father to follower of his own 'nature', and finally ruined and disgraced martyr on the tree of English hypocrisy, Fry is utterly convincing.

First in the wondrous series of B movies in which Val Lewton elaborated his principle of horrors imagined rather than seen, with a superbly judged performance from Simon as the young wife ambivalently haunted by sexual frigidity and by a fear that she is metamorphosing into a panther.

If you’re even remotely a fan, you need to see this.

The plot’s tired blood is jumped up considerably by style; all in all, it's an intoxicating blend of eerie horror and ’80s pop, made by an artist to keep an eye on.

The film plays like a Trump-state "Big Lebowski," as Ruth and Tony’s amateur sleuthing teases out a much deeper conviction, perfectly stated by its main character.

Reviving the musical's fortunes in one fell swoop, Bacon and Busby Berkeley's backstage saga set the benchmark for the putting-on-a-show subgenre not by means of plot (a thin and hackneyed affair about a young understudy finding stardom when she covers for the temperamental diva) but through sassy songs and dialogue and dazzling mise-en-scène.

Scorsese’s doc appears like one thing but sounds like another. It totally gets it.

His (Fatih Akin) new movie, an occasionally shouty comedy, is easily his most fun.

There's a wild, "Miami Blues"–like dreaminess to the movie that's addictive. If anything, it shows up exactly what "Little Miss Sunshine" lacked: plenty of ammo.

With this quick-witted and sexually supercharged espionage caper, Steven Soderbergh and his screenwriter David Koepp (Jurassic Park) have just remade Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy for the Industry generation.

Like Hawks, Altman feels rather than thinks his way into a subject, with a special interest in how people relate to one another in moments of crisis. In the process he shows more of what's happening in America than most newsreels, coaxes jazzy and inventive performances out of his actors (Prentiss and Welles are particular treats), and asks for a comparable amount of creative improvisation from his audience while busily hopping from one distraction to the next.

Spelling may not be Quentin Tarantino’s forte, but his grasp of language (both verbal and visual) is peerless.

The film glows with the kind of sweetness last seen in John Crowley’s "Brooklyn." All it asks of you is an open heart.

Women Talking imagines female emancipation as an honest, raging, caring experience.

The film survives cuts to deliver some great, gross, comic book capers. And rock history gets its most intelligent illustration since Mean Streets.

The film is a beguiling window into a distant world – one that at times evokes such claustrophobia as to feel more like a peephole.

Ruffalo, a master of rumpled befuddlement, finds his signature role here—it can't be overstated how deftly he eases into the tricky creation, a blue-blooded slacker who aches when the world won't hug him back.

What follows is pulp made near-profound through director Jonathan Mostow’s sure-handed guidance.

It’s a trial run that puts many of his peers’ masterpieces to shame.

The film gets so many exquisite details just right—the vacuous party guests, Hayek’s slightly self-righteous pose, the happy clink of the wine glasses—that it’s a letdown to realize the movie doesn’t have a proper ending. You take it home with you and argue about it.

Filmmaker Victor Nunez pairs evocative locales--beatnik Bay Area, bucolic rural New Mexico--with fleeting asides of poetry (penned by the Santa Fe–based writer Joe Ray Sandoval); these meditative detours both elevate a routine story arc and tap into tangled, twisted familial roots.

Mike Mills delivers a naturalistic and unconventional homage to the bond between children and adults.

An Arabic-German coproduction, it is a rare movie shot entirely in Saudi Arabia, which has no cinema industry to speak of, and the first feature by a female filmmaker from that country. Forbidden from mixing with the men in her crew, Al-Mansour often directed via walkie-talkie from the back of a van.

Gay conversion therapy gets the indictment it deserves, from an insightful script based on a you-are-there tell-all, and an outstanding cast.

It’s a film of deep empathy, but a tough one, too.

Thompson's imagination-she's also the screenwriter-knows no bounds, and she does a brilliant job of connecting the fantastical elements to the sobering realities of life during wartime.

More subdued and much more honest that any of John Hughes' egregious forays into adolescence, the film's only drawback is an artificially upbeat ending.

Unlike most directors, style is hardly a side dish with Michael Mann—it’s the main entrée. No one captures city lights at night or luxury cars slinking down the highway like the creator of Miami Vice, and his conversion to digital video continues to yield breathtaking results.

The exquisitely framed images, the allusive script, the droll witticisms are counterbalanced by Dennehy's literally enormous performance, which threatens to tear the film's formal symmetries to vividly memorable shreds.

Milius filters his story through countless B movies and detective stories, indirectly paying homage to all the different media that have contributed to the Dillinger legend, but keeps things the right side of nostalgia.

Working from a script by playwright Darci Picoult, Dosunmu fashions a tale that’s realistic, melodramatic and culturally specific (we spend as much time ogling colorfully patterned dresses as we do admiring Gurira’s endlessly expressive face), yet unmistakably archetypal.

Inherent Vice, Anderson's sexy, swirling latest (based on Thomas Pynchon's exquisite stoner mystery set at the dawn of the '70s), is a wondrously fragrant movie, emanating sweat, the stink of pot clouds and the press of hairy bodies. It's a film you sink into, like a haze on the road, even as it jerks you along with spikes of humor.

The metaphor for the extra baggage these cousins carry should not be lost, but it’s also a constant reminder of their unsettled nature. Never Rarely Sometimes Always creates a deeply empathetic look at their shared suffering.

Handsomely mounted by Creed director Ryan Coogler and starring an enviable slate of black actors that makes cameoing comics godhead Stan Lee almost seem lost, the film is provocative and satisfying in ways that are long overdue, like its ornate, culturally dense production design and the deeper subtexts of honor, compassion and destiny.

The film offers little relief to the nerves, but it’s a surprising, curious drama, consistently thoughtful, artful and provocative.

The performances, the writing and the direction all conspire to make it feel fresh and specific, and as bleak as the settings may be, it has a delicious black comic streak and shares the buzz of personal re-awakening without ever feeling obvious or cheap. It turns out to be a beacon of warmth amid a frozen wasteland.

An oblique history of ’80s disarmament laden with revealing off-camera asides, The Reagan Show makes the glossy surface profound. It’s the most crucial and unique doc of the moment, apart from the one that’s unfolding on the news every night.

Feels like the kind of movie that would have been designed for Meryl Streep or Sigourney Weaver back in the day, ragged yet sumptuous, filled with moments for devastating monologues yet never so obvious as to be self-aggrandizing.

No other filmmaker on the planet can touch Evans for long-take beatdowns and wildly inventive flourishes.

Made the year after 'Bicycle Thieves', this is a less coherent but more exuberant film, with De Sica injecting a stiff dose of fantasy into what could have been another plangent tale of gentleman tramps and shantytown life. [07 Sep 2005]

The narrative's a bit perfunctory, but is neatly overbalanced by the joyously rule-breaking sequence of a boy, a bus and a time bomb.

This is prime Woody Allen - insightful, philosophical and very funny.

Sure, some of the historical detail is terrible (did Henry V really get crowned topless?) and Shakespeare purists may scream heresy, but director David Michôd has done something genuinely fresh and confident with this well-told piece of English folklore.

For all its structural ingenuity, The Five Devils is fundamentally a love story, and a surprisingly affecting one, largely due to a captivating central performance from Exarchopoulos, who, a decade after becoming the youngest ever winner of the Palme d’Or (for Blue is the Warmest Colour), gives a performance of such nuance and sophistication, the rest of the adult cast struggles to keep up.

Majewski's film is a dazzling master class in visual composition.

The effort is commendable and the complicated emotions of the piece (for a place and a people) come through loud and clear. To paraphrase the great Ms. Russell, the movie has the power to make you laugh and the power to break your heart in half.

Icky and unsettling, this British horror film crawls under your skin.

Adjust to the deliberate rhythms of this hiking movie-set on the lush slopes of Georgia's Caucasus Mountains - and the psychological payoff stings like a blister.

It will test your faith in humanity, but Hersonski's film is nonetheless a brilliant reminder of the importance of bearing witness.