A beautifully organized documentary (befitting its subject, urban planning), Matt Tyrnauer’s elegant profile sets up its iconic NYC showdown along geometric lines.

Hardly the heady stuff of "Frost/Nixon"--or then again, maybe exactly the same thing. This one’s more rude and fun.

An eerie, neglected classic of its kind.

Even the stoniest face will crack when Aladeen sums up our cultural moment in a rousing, uproarious climactic speech worthy of both Chaplin and Team America.

The deep cynicism would be depressing if it weren't so riveting.

A blistering take-down of the social media-driven celebrity culture, The Moment combines the anxiety-inducing mayhem of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You and the omnishambles clusterfuck of The Thick of It. It works because the satire’s coming from inside the house.

It’s as pure an expression of Tarantino’s voice as he’s ever mustered—easy to savor, even if the aftertaste leaves a trace of nasty bitterness.

All of the performances are knockouts, especially The Visitor's Richard Jenkins as a damaged Texas spiritualist who steeps the movie in intimacy.

It would be a Christmas miracle save for one lump of coal: an ear-shattering Justin Bieber song over the end credits. Gotta sell something to the kids at Yuletide.

At 77 minutes, it's short – but it will stay with you for a long, long time.

In Frankenheimer's hands, the whole paraphernalia of trains, tracks and shunting yards acquires an almost hypnotic fascination as the screen becomes a giant chessboard on which huge metallic pawns are manoeuvred, probing for some fatal weakness but seemingly engaged in some deadly primeval struggle.

The third, and along with Road to Utopia, probably the best in a series which began in 1940.

Some of that tension dissipates in a more low-key third act that foregrounds the excellent Foïs and Colomb as a mother and daughter at loggerheads, but The Beasts is still a compelling, tragic study of human conflict in a scarily believable context.

Every line of dialogue is calculated bliss, the chemistry between the leads is magnificent, and the backdrop of Depression-era America allows for a prescient and amusing subplot about how well-heeled urbanites are compelled to misbehave when they have no money in their designer pockets.

A fascinating experiment is about to happen, and who doesn't want to be part of a little fun? That rarest of birds - a b&w silent film - is set to swoop into multiplexes. Trust us, it won't bite.

Horror film director Hessler and special effects man Ray Harryhausen combine brilliantly to trace Sinbad's mystical voyage. The effects aren't simply fascinating for their own sake - they genuinely convey a sense of the magical and otherworldly.

It’s an exercise in mindfulness that asks you to give yourself over to it lock, stock and barrel. If you’re willing to do that, you can cancel that meditation course.

It’s rare for something this necrotic to feel this fresh.

If the movie falls just shy of our highest mark, this is because Cronenberg is tamping down on his usually naturalistic performances - everything feels vaguely mad-scientist-ish.

It’s a film class, yes, but the most invigorating one you’ll take.

Gifts of civility small and large mark Steven Spielberg's latest film, a deeply satisfying Cold War spy thriller that feels more subdued than usual for the director—even more so than 2012's philosophical Lincoln—but one that shapes up expertly into a John Le Carré–style nail-biter.

I’m Still Here takes you right into the machinery of a repressive regime, showing just enough of its dank jail cells and casual cruelties without overwhelming its deeper story of loss.

Austrian filmmaker Sebastian Meise manages to find romance amidst the dirty needles and dirty toilets, delivering as many memorable tender images as he does unpleasant ones.

Quintessential Capra - popular wish-fulfilment served up with such fast-talking comic panache that you don't have time to question its cornball idealism.

A spectacular tribute to the American flyers of World War I, born of Wellman's and John Monk Saunders' own experiences with the Lafayette Flying Corps, it's distinguished by matchless aerial photography, logistically-detailed battle scenes and dogfights, a unique blend of 'European' directorial touches with Hollywood pace, and solid performances holding the straightforward love/duty/camaraderie plotline together.

Though Stranger by the Lake leans a bit too heavily on its long-take, slow-cinema bona fides, there’s a clear purpose to Guiraudie’s rigorous perspective. He’s out to unearth the very potent (and often terrifying) emotions underlying every explicit act, sexual or otherwise.

Strasberg’s doe-eyed dedication to her role and Douglas Slocombe’s brilliant black-and-white cinematography counterbalance the film’s increasingly ridiculous plot turns, which nonetheless have a crude, jaw-dropper effectiveness.

Funny, gripping, and expertly shot by Joe Valentine, it's a small but memorable gem.

Not a bad setup for a cops-and-robbers thriller, and in the hands of action-movie maestro Johnnie To, the result comes very close to greatness.

The film successfully leans into absurdity, offering a cathartic and darkly funny exploration of gender dynamics and control.

Society of the Snow is careful to memorialise the dead in a moving, meaningful way.

Too many movies come to us as preordained cult objects - this is the real deal.

You could spend a lifetime peeling the glass onion of Shirley Clarke’s merciless documentary, in which a born performer drops incinerating truth bombs while putting the con in confessional moviemaking.

It’s an astonishingly assured and emotionally engrossing debut. Grisi’s background as an award-winning photographer is evident in the composition of every shot, almost any one of which could hang on the wall of a gallery wall. Yet his narrative focus is always on Virginio and Sisa, whose expressions of intimacy and love are largely non-verbal yet deeply felt.

It doesn’t all work: The pace can feel a little slow, and there are points where Park tries to have his tasty feminist cake and eat it too. But mostly, this is smart, sumptuous and wonderfully indulgent.

At its best, this pomo oater gets within chaw-spitting distance of action-flick greatness; at its worst, the movie is simply unadulterated guns-and-guts fun.

Characteristically Kubrick in both its mechanistic coldness and its vision of human endeavour undone by greed and deceit, this noir-ish heist movie is nevertheless far more satisfying than most of his later work, due both to a lack of bombastic pretensions and to the style fitting the subject matter.

Okuno’s direction and Monroe’s performance, together, create a simmering anxiety that never really relents, not even when we know the answers to the questions that are consuming Julia: is that man really watching me and, if so, what does he want from me?

You do sense, though, that the people behind MIB3 (mainly veteran producer Walter F. Parkes and script doctor David Koepp) were smart enough to let the audience grow up a bit, enough to get the Andy Warhol jokes and one brilliantly weird creation, a delicate alien who can see every outcome at once.

Most impressive for its frantic pace and its suggestion that in times of Depression almost everyone is corruptible, it's also a perverse elegy to a decade of upheaval.

There's a darker, fanatical side to blindness too-and this is the movie to show it. Leave all judgments behind.

Wilson, a pop savant, was chasing some kind of dragon, and as the movie toggles years forward to the scared, overmedicated Wilson of the 1980s (John Cusack, absorbingly strange in the tougher part), you sense that the dragon bit back.

Anderson's romantic fantasia is after something much more complicated and profound-an ever-renewing balance between the hopes of youth and the disappointments of age.

What most distinguishes the redo is the often remarkable use of 3-D: Miike turns the format's inherent limitations, especially the tendency toward visual murkiness, to his advantage, fully immersing us in a world suffused with moral and ethical rot.

A wanton, playful film, belying the stated despair by its boiling energy.

The style of the film, lush and traditional, is nothing special, but the takeaway, a daily struggle for dignity, is impossibly moving.

Excruciatingly funny and streaked with coal-black humor.

Confining its view to the narrow corridors of China’s train system—soon to be the largest of its kind in the world—The Iron Ministry vividly speaks to the country’s impossible vastness by focusing on its tiniest and most transient details, cobbling them together into a captivating mosaic of life in motion.

Frances Hodgson Burnett's much-loved children's novel could all too easily come across on screen as the last word in period fustian, but the unforced approach of Holland and scriptwriter Caroline Thompson pierces to the emotional core of a still potent tale.

Apted once wanted to give us "glimpses into Britain's future," per the archival-footage announcer. With this installment, he's delivered an intimate portrait of settling down and finally making peace with one's well-publicized past.

It is art ASMR of the highest order.

It’s a daring spin on history and the power, or otherwise, of the individual: a puzzle that is well worth trying to solve.

A delightfully nonchalant movie, complete with some nice satirical barbs aimed at contemporary French film culture, and fine performances throughout.

Perhaps marginally less beguiling than Great Expectations, but still a moving and enjoyable account of Dickens' masterpiece, which gets off to a memorable start with Oliver's pregnant mother battling through the storm to reach the safety of the workhouse.

Legendary Iranian director Jafar Panahi (Closed Curtain, Taxi Tehran) explores ideas of freedom, and what they mean to two very different couples in No Bears, his latest film about life in the homeland that currently has him cruelly incarcerated.

From the opening moments it is clear that The Extraordinary Miss Flower is the work of two artists utterly in command of their vision, and fully trusted and embraced by their collaborators.

The final third is a crush of genius, with several Nas tracks (including his lovely, Michael Jackson-sampling “It Ain’t Hard to Tell”) receiving the kind of detailed breakdowns rare in pop-artist conversations.

Maybe because the band enjoyed raves for its daring 2004 psychodrama, Some Kind of Monster, an experimental narrative is shoehorned in, involving a roadie (Dane DeHaan) doing bloody battle in a deserted city. Your heart sinks with every cutaway.

It’s certainly a new spin, but those who make the leap will do so vigorously.

It’s a document of a febrile time and a wake-up call for a fizzled revolution.

In live-action mode, Lilo & Stitch has some of the charm of an ’80s Amblin movie, like E.T. or Gremlins.

Chomet builds this beguiling symphony of sadness to a poignant finale that does ample justice to the many layers of Tati's tale, both in text and out.

The film flows like a Joy Division song: moody and ethereal until it escalates into a burst of sonic violence.

It’s a timely and galvanising telling of a remarkable story that every football fan should know, and one that will hopefully go some way towards ensuring that Copa 71 finds its way into the sport’s history books.

Relay is an old-school thriller with a drum-tight script and real style.

The director’s latest—a lighthearted romance set in 1920s Germany and France—won’t do much to sway proponents or detractors from their own perspectives, though taken at face value, it’s one of Allen’s most charmingly conceived and performed efforts.

The Mend finds the truths that bind families together, but it knows that everyone has to hack their own path to get there.

The Sisters Brothers may be a violent movie but it’s not an especially graphic one; the bad guys are coolly dispatched from a distance and with minimal Peckinpah-ish splatter. The one genuinely stomach-turning moment comes at the hands of a surgeon, not a gunman. Prepare yourself.

Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga bring music but zero merriment to a bold and often brilliant sequel.

The more Shepard & Dark rewinds through their shared history, the more the film blossoms into something far richer than a simple tribute to a long, beautiful friendship—it becomes an ode to a long-lost era of bohemia, an insightful look into male psychology and pathology, a valentine to the art of letter writing and an illustration of how the past is never dead, because it’s not even past.

Mercifully, the book has escaped the typical Disney demolition; Bakshi's version, using animation and live-action tracings, is uniformly excellent, sticking closely to the original text and visually echoing many of Tolkien's own drawings.

Well-paced and directed with gusto, On the Basis of Sex finds an accessible, near-perfect tone, balancing serious courtroom drama and frequent legal jargon with tastefully Hollywood-ized emotional embellishments.

Bravo’s movie is so pacy, so compelling that it doesn’t quite have space to land the full horror of Zola and Stefani’s situation. But what it does do is demonstrate that telling your story is a kind of performance, just like stripping is.

While Finding Dory is definitely the kind of visual pleasure we’ve come to expect from Pixar, its storyline doesn’t always reach the heights of inventiveness upon which the gigantic animation studio has built its reputation. The film lacks the psychological probing of Inside Out, the existential ponderings of Wall-E, the gentle, stoic sadness of Up.

Kinji Fukasaku's slick, sick nightmare is best left to the quasi-banned realm where it exists as a perfect satire; when brought into reality, it's a touch awkward.

The finest of three screen versions of PC Wren's tale of heroism in the French Foreign Legion (the others were made in 1926 and 1966, the latter a travesty). Pictorially ravishing, it features a memorable opening with a fort garrisoned by corpses, and the high adventure tone carries on from there.

Nothing about the movie is showy, except for Shelton's palpable love of good people making a mess of things. Barring some late-inning coyness, it's some of the truest, dinged-heart couples' circling of the year.

You don't get much explanation, and the overall plot may not withstand detailed analysis. But the atmosphere and pace are superbly handled, and the performances of the sinister, inhumanly intelligent 'children' never falter.

For all its eye-opening material, The Dog still feels unfinished, but for students of New York scuzziness, it’s an essential addition.

The film has its narrative flaws and, occasionally, distracting stylistic flourishes. Harrelson's portrayal of a swinging dick staring down the abyss, however, is perilously close to perfect; it's the finest, most harrowing thing he's ever done.

A monument to Australia's thriving music scene, it will have you whooping with joy one minute, then fighting back the tears the next.

Bloodlight and Bami defiantly reflects the experimental whirlwind of Jones’s existence: her ability to look and feel relevant decades since she started out.

Both a baroque thriller set in New York's ballet demimonde and a portrait of artistry as schizoid perfectionism, Darren Aronofsky's new film percolates parallel lines of fine madness-but then, doubling down on duality is this movie's raison d'etre.

The real-life setup is a knockout, both ancient and timely, and even though Rohrwacher never quite passes — she looks too much like Barbra Streisand’s "Yentl" — the movie is on to a larger point, namely about the fluidity of sexual identity and our universal penchant for self-reinvention. The film builds slowly but deserves an audience eager to discuss it.

With his first movie for a major studio, Meyer simply did what he'd been doing for years, only bigger and better. That's to say, he turned the homely story of an all-girl rock band's rise to fame under their transsexual manager into a delirious comedy melodrama, soused in self- parody but spiked with dope, sex and thrills.

It's one of the few truly major Westerns of the '70s, with a very clear vision of the historical role played by fear and violence in the taming of the wilderness.

This film's effectively wrought communion between once-spooked man and animal is more than enough for any entertainment. It rides easily into your heart.

As with the previous Knives Outs, the satire is applied in broad but enjoyable brushstrokes.

There are moments of jaw-dropping inspiration, and many that are just impenetrably odd. But this is immensely winning for the rawness alone.

Her whole life has been about beating the odds — it’s inspiring stuff.

It's after the sex friends go back to being just friends that the film really hits its stride, and that's also when the excellent Patricia Clarkson and Richard Jenkins enter the picture as loving but imperfect parents who help explain what's made both leads so gun-shy.

The Last Showgirl may begin – as its ever-romantic heroine exclaims – with a shiny celebration of ‘breasts and rhinestones and joy!’ But in Gia Coppola’s (Palo Alto) sensitive telling, the glitter swiftly disperses to reveal an elegiac meditation on memory and age, femininity and beauty.

Watching the formerly spry Harris struggle to maintain a normal life (he's frequently glassy-eyed and jacked on painkillers) emphasizes the underappreciated sacrifices our men and women in uniform make in the name of vaguely defined ideals.

Delon and Crenna paint an idealized portrait of masculine camaraderie, one that’s exposed at the end of Melville’s bracing last testament as a soul-shattering illusion.

Organizing the mercurial emotions and tics is director Joachim Trier, making good on the promise of his 2006 feature debut, the lit-related drama Reprise. This one's even better-it's about the honesty that often takes root in survivors, a rarely explored subject-but Oslo, August 31st is not an easy film.

With Slate, his co-creator, co-writer and ex-partner, director Dean Fleischer Camp charts a world in which a semi-orphaned talking shell not only makes perfect sense, but becomes a perfect vessel to share painful, relatable truths about life. Dementia, loneliness and heartbreak are all writ large in Marcel’s world.

Absolutely irresistible.

This is Seagal's best movie since Out for Justice.