This ode to the peculiar strength and flexibility of love, romantic and platonic, is simultaneously perverse, overwrought, deeply creepy and truly moving, a high-wire act that finds humor in the grotesque and hope in emotional malformation.

By inflating the life of a common shop girl into a musical spectacle, Demy succeeds in turning a tedious existence into a fantasy, yet he and cinematographer Jean Rabier and art director Bernard Evein do so without creating a false world. [review of original release]

THE STRAWBERRY BLONDE is a delightful romantic comedy which combines a strong cast, great production values, and a good musical score with professional direction by Walsh in a skillfull entertainment.

Swank's nuanced performance is remarkable and it's a powerful film.

In this very personal portrait, Davies, the artist, has re-created universal experiences--familiar passions and needs--that draw us to his family's humanity.

Aladdin is a fairy tale with an edge--a popular children's story that will have even the most media-savvy parents straining to keep up with Williams's machine-gun delivery of quips, allusions and imitations.

Thom Andersen's idiosyncratic, three-hour masterpiece is both a dazzling work of film criticism and a fascinating piece of urban anthropology.

British director Shane Meadows' strongest film to date is also his most personal: A stylish fictionalization of his own wayward youth, spent among a group of working-class skinheads in Thatcher's England.

A beautiful, slow-motion melodrama.

Dabbed with sentimental touches, the film nevertheless avoids facile victim psychologizing and pulls no punches.

A hilarious and deftly convincing satire.

The results are a harrowingly intimate connection with a torn, tormented father, and an uncommonly powerful film.

The Last Detail is a gritty look at the military life and the people who are attracted to it. It is dark in its message and gray to the eye. Locations are all washed out as though there were a thin membrane of filth spread across everything except the leads, who pop out colorfully like three strawberries in a bowl of Cream of Wheat.

Only Angels Have Wings is a powerful character study, and director Hawks and his fine, predominantly male cast carefully develop the personalities of an interesting collection of characters. Though much of the dialogue is predictable, the story is strong, the acting is outstanding, and Hawks's cameras move with fluid grace through the confining sets.

A chilling, manipulative rollercoaster ride.

This quintessential movie on movies is an engrossing, seductive Minnelli epic, graced with superb performances.

Hopkins plays the cannibalistic doctor with a quiet, controlled erudition, lacing his performance with moments of black humor. His Lecter is a sort of satanic Sherlock Holmes whose spasms of violence are all the more terrifying because they erupt from beneath such an intelligent and refined mask.

Leaves you wanting much more.

This is Ingmar Bergman's chaste exploration of psychosis. It's not a horror story but a poem, and remarkable for that. This is one of the director's masterworks.

One of the ultimate expressions of Paramount Studios chic, Desire remains one of its desirable star's finest films.

Not surprisingly, we're left with characters that feel only half sketched and fail to resonate on their own -- but onto which much can be read by Hou's most ardent fans -- in a poetic looking film that's ultimately as inflated and empty as the balloon itself.

It's a humbling way of life, and one that, as Varda discovers in this wonderful, 80-minute essay, has survived in surprising ways.

A dark, expertly contrived display of paranoid nastiness; it's so gleefully mean that only the most tender-hearted viewer could resist going along for the ride.

A tense and chilling espionage picture, Sabotage contains one sequence that many consider among the director's most excruciatingly suspenseful.

One of the most original, visually stunning, and provocative films of the 1970s, Walkabout is timeless in its beauty and unique approach to a classic coming-of-age story. The film is arguably director Nicolas Roeg's finest achievement.

Bardem's performance is simply shattering.

The film’s only flaw is a minor one: Some of the stylistic devices, such as the rapid-fire montages of vile and depraved images, have aged poorly. But that in no way detracts from the visceral power of the backslide into the abyss that we experience along with the central character.

A collection of interconnected vignettes shot as live-action digital video footage which is then 'fed into' computer animation software, Linklater's latest film is an audacious, ambitious undertaking. There's a surreal yet consistent logic to it, which is the film's biggest accomplishment.