Granik builds her engaging, sympathetic characters in subtle increments.

Firth is exceptional in letting us into his dissolving pride.

Only Pedro Almodóvar could wrap a cry of pain about Spain’s inability to come to terms with its recent dark history into a gorgeous-looking melodrama about two mothers drawn by fate into a complicated, painful and ultimately nourishing relationship.

Shirkers is at its most gripping when it doesn’t overestimate Cardona’s narrative worth—the multifaceted women at the documentary’s heart are far more appealing.

James Cain's novel of the treacherous life in Southern California that sets house-wife-turned waitress-turned-successful restauranteur (Crawford) against her own daughter (Blyth) in competition for the love of playboy Zachary Scott, is brought fastidiously and bleakly to life by Curtiz' direction, Ernest Haller's camerawork, and Anton Grot's magnificent sets.

Yorgos Lanthimos’s feminist Frankenstein comedy is scabrous, smart and obscenely funny.

Alternating between stunning fixed takes and quick you-are-there camera movements, Bill and Turner Ross's portrait of their tiny Ohio hmetown (the title is its zip code) weaves a hypnotic tapestry out of everyday banalities.

The tone is quick-witted and appealing, with some of the smartest dialogue this side of Billy Wilder, and a wonderfully sure-footed performance from Jessica Lange (as her/his girlfriend). But the film never comes within a thousand miles of confronting its own implications: Hoffman's female impersonation is strictly on the level of Dame Edna Everage, and the script's assumption that 'she' would wow female audiences is at best ridiculous, at worst crassly insulting to women.

The film sits somewhere between the bogus virtue of Kramer's The Defiant Ones and the poetry of Laughton's Night of the Hunter, combining racial intolerance with the nightmares of childhood, born out of Kennedy's stand on civil rights and Martin Luther King's marching.

A groundbreaking view of the horror and pity of war, I can’t remember a cinematic experience quite like it. It’s devastating and extraordinary.

There aren't many films we'd describe as perfect, but Robert Zemeckis's oh-so-'80s time travel tale fits the bill.

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.

Delicately placed on a sonic bedrock of chirping birds and distant traffic, Cemetery of Splendour is a whisper of a film that can only cast its spell if you let your breathing slow and give yourself over to the urgency of its spectral dimension.

If there's a misstep here, it would be in the character of camp medic Maj. Clipton (James Donald). His overwrought dialogue---especially some Heston-like cries of "Madness!" during the finale---is too much of an on-the-nose contrast to the story's necessarily clinical existentialism. It slightly dilutes the film's piercing grandeur, but the nit is easily enough picked.

The Human Voice is the Spanish director’s first English-language film and you’ll inevitably go away yearning for more as soon as the half hour is up.

The movement of the story—from wrenching homesickness to blooming confidence and a smile on one’s stroll to work—elevates the movie into universal urban poetry.

The film can hardly contain itself with its catalogue of memorable songs, battery of dance routines, and strong supporting cast.

Subtly, the film draws you into the science. You’ll be nervously eyeballing ticking velocity numbers in the corner of the screen. But always, Apollo 11 is about people working together in a single-minded spirit of peaceful ambition.

A brimming sense of life, in other words, gradually transforms the small talk into a richly devious portrait of humanity being human.

Yun is quite simply spectacular as a woman who holds steadfastly on to her dignity and empathy, even in the face of unspeakable tragedy.

The resulting film is beautifully crafted and, despite what Hitch might say, definitely cinematic.

Tokyo Twilight' - [Ozu's] last black-and-white movie - takes him into unusually melodramatic territory, a dark disintegrating family saga that has broken marriages, unwanted pregnancy, gambling, prostitution, vice cops and so on. What's amazing, however, is that Ozu's narrative and visual ellipses keep sensationalism, hysteria and cliche at bay, so that it all rings true in ways undreamt of by most other directors. [10 May 2006, p.86]

A routine story perhaps, but McCarey transforms it , through his customary affection for his characters and taut pacing, into delightfully effective entertainment.

Two struggling souls come together to pull off a hoax on a world that's rejected them, in this powerhouse showcase for Melissa McCarthy and Richard E. Grant.

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.

Its historical import as a peripheral civil-rights document can't be understated.

An animated achievement almost without parallel.

The movie's true brilliance comes from its portrayal of how the world curls around you in the grip of heartache-every song on the radio, every face you see, every story you're told reflecting only what you've lost.