Rice's style is pitched somewhere between Merchant Ivory and Wes Anderson, favoring shots of sad, pretty people looking bereft in elaborately elegant rooms. But it's Jones and Treadaway, both seething volcanoes trapped behind artfully pallid faces, who turn what could've been a candy-coated comedy of manners into a complex, melancholic farce.

The White Ribbon comes dangerously--wonderfully?--close to playing like an evil-kid flick.

It charts an unexpected success story that leaves you hopeful others will embrace its lessons.

The movie has the proportion of a fable but the scope of a mythical lifetime.

It's here, in a keenly captured Forest Hills, Queens, land of low-lit bars and manicured lawns, that Roadie soars as a gently comic drama about living the dream - or trying to.

Given Robert Rossen's strikingly literate script, Sol Polito's wonderfully eerie camerawork, and Robinson's terrific performance - all pulling together to elaborate the Luciferian motto borrowed from Milton by which the captain lives, 'Better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven' - this is one of Curtiz's best movies.

It’s horror hokum told with unswerving commitment.

This intelligent, honest documentary explores his complex personality without getting tacky or tabloidy, or ignoring McQueen’s dark side.

A film made with cold courage by the victim of a sexual assault, this gripping Japanese documentary plays like a ’70s conspiracy thriller.

The future of the murder-mystery looks bright with movies as bold and boundary-breaking as this.

Those first 40-odd minutes are unbearably tense. Ferguson is a standout in a strong ensemble cast

The characters of 20th Century Women, more interconnected than most, generate a group narrative that’s just substantial enough to keep you in thrall by how uninhibited a movie can be.

A thriller of real psychological and emotional depth, Triet’s film is a treat. Watch it with a partner and argue about it afterwards.

Tarkovsky goes for the great white whale of politicised art a history of his country in this century seen in terms of the personal and succeeds. [18 Aug 2004, p.90]

Kirk & Co return to present-day San Francisco to save the whales in the most enjoyable film of the series so far, also returning to the simplistic morality-play format that gave the original TV series its strength.

The film builds to a shattering climax that works precisely because all involved fully embrace the melodrama. Be sure to bring Kleenex.

That’s a lot of years to wrangle into one biography – even before you take in the rags-to-riches, zero-to-hero-to-popular-villain arc of his life – but this snappy and searching doc makes a very solid fist of it.

Ajami is Israel’s submission to the Oscars, and like the gritty "City of God" before it, it takes harrowing, tricky circumstances and illuminates them with Scorsesian snap.

Writer-director Freida Lee Mock’s concise and potent chronicle uses a wealth of archival video and numerous new interviews with its subject to properly contextualize Hill’s testimony as a landmark moment in the fight for gender equality.

Sol Tryon’s dark, irrepressibly hilarious fable offers highbrow absurdism and low-budget filmmaking at their most clever and outlandish.

It's all very humorous and engaging, if only for proving that American whodunits don't have to have car chases and brutality; and it has a wicked eye for the vacuity of middle-class good life and what it may conceal. Lots of feelthy girl talk, too.

It’s full of symmetrical Anderson-like compositions, memorable characters and offbeat laughs. And stitched in are some smart, fly-on-the-wall observations about the often-abrasive relationship between capitalism and tradition too.

Clearly, Pixar’s genius for adventurous storytelling continues unabated.

The situation in Myanmar remains tense and ethnic cleansing continues, yet Snow Hnin finds grace notes of optimism to offset the bitterness of the film’s backdrop. It makes Midwives a thoughtful, empathetic and powerful insight into the region – and its women.

Pretty irresistible, nevertheless, with Rogers doing a beautiful job of dovetailing sexual provocation and demure innocence.

The message is that there is no message; if this isn't action cinema in its purest form, then it's pretty close.

For once, a genuinely psychological thriller.

This colorful, cranium-bursting film isn’t about one specific tale so much as the endless ways you can present narratives; it’s nothing less than a kitchen-sink deconstruction on the art of storytelling.