A middlebrow domestic drama beating its wings against an experimental frame.

Accomplishes the nearly impossible trick of updating viewers on the prevalence of genocide in the 20th and 21st centuries without rubbing our noses in our failure to stop it.

The tales told are bitter, horrific in detail...yet often leavened with irony and humor. Rupert Everett's low-key narration serves the film well.

Josh Aronson's thoroughly engrossing documentary Sound and Fury is as much about children's rights as it is about the impact of cochlear-implant technology on a family in which deafness runs through three generations.

A minor triumph of atmosphere and nightmare imaginings.

Panahi is a maestro of anxiety. Whatever its political significance, this is a dark, sustained, and wrenching film.

If Otar is, finally, a mite thin and predictably structured, that takes little away from the filmmaker and her cast, who work hard at fashioning the most outlandish special effect of all: believable human life.

An almost ridiculously ebullient Bollywood-meets-Hollywood concoction--and one of the rare "feel-good" movies that actually makes you feel good, as opposed to merely jerked around.

Juliet is never less than eye-catching, but is rarely more.

What’s terrifying about The Work is that this introspection is merely the first step. It’s a snapshot, not the full picture of men becoming more in tune with themselves and ceasing to filter all emotional processes through outward aggression. What’s comforting about The Work, then, is seeing society’s forgotten and discarded beginning this journey.

A heady plum pudding of a movie--studded with outsized performances and drenched in cinematic brio. The concoction is over-rich, yet irresistible.

A crash course in history, politics, and social science, Valentino's Ghost is both sobering and illuminating, and its execution is thrilling.

The pleasing circularity of Gus Van Sant's masterful Paranoid Park is not only a function of the film's narrative structure but reflects the arc of its maker's career. Few directors have revisited their earliest concerns with such vigor.

Key to Giant‘s enduring appeal is the meshing of outsize stars with Ferber’s characters: Closeted sex symbol Hudson’s towering Bick fills the big boots of his ranching family while struggling with the demands of traditional masculine authority. The taboo-breaking Taylor is the seductive, whip-smart Leslie, an assured reformer who views the injustices visited upon the ranch’s Mexican workers with maternal concern...And then there’s Dean’s most mannered, complex performance: Jett is at once transparent and enigmatic, hardening with age while the other characters mature. The actor’s death — a year before release — adds a keen poignancy to the character’s lost potential.

It remains a stunning achievement, if nearly as exhausting and frustrating as the Tex Avery bureaucracy it roasts, but Gilliam's stylistic dysfunctionalities, art-directed out of junkyards, are what still percolate in the forebrain.

In the Shadow of the Moon recalls the wondrous moment when America had the entire world looking up, up, and not away.

Shot on city streets but unfolds in the world of the movies--in a Godardian touch that anticipates Godard, the Ventura character is identified by the cops as "an old pal of Pierrot le Fou." The new titles are flavorsome, and the restoration is up to Rialto's previous high standards.

Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz proves Andrew's point by gathering so much talent into one theater that the stage buckles and the subject drops out of sight.

One of the year's best films.

It's a measure of Cuarón's directorial chops that Children of Men functions equally well as fantasy and thriller. Like Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" and the Wachowski Brothers' "V for Vendetta" (and more consistently than either), the movie attempts to fuse contemporary life with pulp mythology.

Revanche gets its hooks into you early and leaves them there.

This may not be Kaurismäki's masterpiece, but it is a movie of sustained stylistic integrity -- and it has the power to make you laugh.

Although I don't begrudge Borchardt his year of fame, what he doesn't seem to understand about his exploitation creeps me out.

I walked out of After the Storm wanting to be a better person — and further convinced that Hirokazu Kore-eda isn't just one of the world's best filmmakers, but one of its most indispensable artists.

Shot on Super 16mm, the visible grain giving each image a wonderfully tactile depth and life, Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom is, in a lot of ways, the ur–Wes Anderson film.

A dazzling, long-overdue tribute to the true stars of Latin music.

By journey's end, Yung has found, in the Yangtze, a brilliant natural metaphor for upward mobility in modern China: Whether they hail from the lowlands or the urban centers, everyone here is scrambling to reach higher ground.

There is no test of behavioral range in Limelight that Chaplin does not pass superbly. [01 Oct 1964, p.15]

The difference between McQueen and the standard tortured genius documentary lies in the kind of artist McQueen was: Behind the (sometimes incendiary, sometimes infantile) provocations in his designs was a clear humanity, his garments the unfiltered expressions of his emotions and ideas.

The scenario eventually becomes so coincidence-choked that the filmmakers have no choice but to play it for mild snickers.

Séraphine's dependence on her patron--a cultivated but emotionally detached homosexual, who knew a fellow outsider when he saw one but came and went in her life without warning--is almost as unbearably moving as her inevitable unraveling--when money and fame cut the artist off from her creative wellsprings and drove her over the edge.

Moving and ambitious in scale like nothing else in cinema, Michael Apted's Up films began in 1964 as a BBC news program exploring an old Jesuit maxim: "Give me the child until he is seven, and I will show you the man."

Campillo’s focus on these charismatic characters, who bicker constantly but pick one another up the second they fall (sometimes literally), makes their present so thrilling that we don’t focus on what bleak future may await them.

Bland and nasty, American Beauty has the slightly stale feel of a family sitcom conceived under the spell of "Married . . . With Children."

Just as in the best old-school, Cain-style noir, Fukada’s film is eloquent about the fragile privileges of modern urban life and the hidden lies it can be built upon.

Elaborate exercise in frustration.

A supremely intelligent pastiche.

A mordant battlefield allegory with an absurdist edge.

Confident and brash, Lagaan may be high-concept New Bollywood, but it plays like well-crafted Old Hollywood.

Her documentary sporadically locates profound truth amid its myriad musings about the momentous and the everyday. Often, however, Anderson's hushed-tone articulations of her thoughts on these subjects prove affected, and her stream-of-consciousness style, though acutely constructed, is more alienating than inviting.

Finlay tells this story with the usual doc techniques. The interviews are marvelous, especially the ones with Ellis's exes, who attest not just to his weakness for groupies but to his collection of trophies.

Informative, revelatory, and full of astonishing photography, Frame by Frame is about embedded journalists (the photographers) fighting the power, not kowtowing to it.

It proves to be not just interesting in how it foreshadows the filmmaker's more mature works, but also a gripping piece of storytelling in its own right.

I guess that’s ultimately what Reed and Gunn wanted to provide: a view of African Americans that’s messy, complicated, dramatic, and, most important, honest. It’s also a fascinating artifact of black people getting together and making their own art — mainly because they wanted to see themselves properly represented onscreen.

Quite possibly the only film ever made focused on the centuries-long enslavement of the Romani in Eastern Europe, Aferim! plays like a sleight of hand, amusing us at a distance with vulgarisms and entrancing us with countryside while the bloody work of civilization grinds on out of the corner of our eye.

Nguyen's matter-of-fact storytelling proves to be the right match for a life of extraordinary suffering. In art, lives like Komona's are all too often given an alien sheen. Here, they feel unnervingly plausible.

Darwin's Nightmare strings together cruel ironies into a work of harrowing lucidity. It illuminates the sinister logic of a new world order that depends on corrupt globalization to put an acceptable face on age-old colonialism.

In the course of this clanging, spectral memoir, all of the artist's previous movies--from his underground mock epic "Tales from the Gimli Hospital" through his faux–Soviet silent "The Heart of the World" to his period spectacular "The Saddest Music in the World"--come to mind.

Detailed yet oblique, leisurely but compelling, perfectly cast and irreproachably acted, the movie has a seductively novelistic texture complete with a less-than-omniscient narrator.

A sumptuous austerity, paralleling Mishima’s disciplined decadence.

Boldly facetious and monstrously clever.

Matching the precision of the film's title, remembrances of things past-whether destructive or salutary, quickly mentioned or dilated upon-are shaped by just enough exacting detail.

The Witch purports, at times, to confront ignorance and hysteria, but in the end, for horror thrills, Eggers's film sides with the preachers and executioners. It literalizes the fevered terrors of our God-mad ancestors — and then brags that it's all steeped in research.

Thrilling in its deft juggling of complex narrative elements, utterly clear in its presentation, and unfolding with what feels like serious moral purpose, Looper still can't help but suggest that its larger ambitions are something of a put-on, a nice thematic polish to set off its interpersonal drama.

From its opening image — of a distraught woman battling massive ocean waves on a moonlit night — to its surprisingly ambiguous final shot — of what, I won't say — Kubo and the Two Strings sears itself into your brain.

For all the deadpan comedy and eccentric characterization, Kaurismäki anchors the film in Khaled’s story and his immigration anxieties, all depicted with quiet humanity that never feels exaggerated. It’s a beautiful companion piece to Le Havre, and a film that will gently warm your cold, cynical heart.

If Old Joy is more laid-back and contemplative than "Mutual Appreciation," it's because the characters are more weathered. Open-ended as it may appear, it has a crushing finality. For all the wool-gathering and guitar-noodling, this road movie is at least as tender as it is ironic.

Achieves an abrading, intimate, primal force his later films only hint at. It's difficult to imagine the Euripides original ever being more eloquently adapted.

One of the sweetest, saddest stories Franz Kafka never wrote.

A transcendent, at times almost dangerous film.

Instead of uncovering artifacts from long ago, Homo Sapiens shows us our own relics in the making.

“Every love story is a ghost story,” David Foster Wallace wrote more than once. That evocative observation is probed in David Lowery’s A Ghost Story, a film that occasionally reaches a similar level of eloquence.

The conflicts, truths, and, ultimately, grace and dignity that bind these three together are brought to authentic life, without Hollywood-style exaggeration, through the quiet little miracles of performance that Hammer coaxes from his non-actors, especially the heartrending Riggs.

Almodóvar isn't what he used to be (who is?), but he's a master of the medium nevertheless, deploying color and light and shadow not merely to express emotions but to tap into ours, directing the blood flow of the audience as much as he directs the movie.

[A] powerful, exacting depiction of Egypt's struggle for meaningful change.

The cast is intoxicating.

Leonard Retel Helmrich's third documentary about the same Indonesian family is a dazzler in at least a couple ways.

Motherland opens with a 24-year-old woman already on her fifth pregnancy — just one of many such cases that director Ramona S. Diaz reveals in the vérité-style documentary, which recalls the observational techniques and insights of the films of Frederick Wiseman.

The film, a kind of hybrid between understated drama and essayistic tourism, approaches its subjects with uncommon patience and curiosity, lingering over objects and faces as if to savor their aesthetic qualities, eager to convey truths without authorial imposition.

Even though she never loses her focus on Nadia, Bombach subtly shifts her attention from Nadia’s specific requests from the international community to the thornier question of what happens to the Yazidis from here onward.

It left me cold. The pathos is as unearned as the protagonist's privilege.

Thoughtfully orchestrated and filled with visual wit.

The 1958 film Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is not a good adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s play of the same name. But as a portrayal of the depths of loneliness we create for ourselves, and an example of the power of star performance, it’s a great film.

Even as dystopian dramas go, the picture is arid and lusterless in its more serious moments and unpleasantly kitschy when it tries to soar over the top.

A comedy that is subtle, biting, observing, and above all, personal. [12 Nov 1958, p.6]

At the very least, the spectacle of Poppy's devotion and desire, not to mention her all-around sunny disposish, left this viewer feeling unaccountably happy--at least for the moment.

Lassie puts its trust in kids to be grown up, and appeals honestly (minus the usual knowing winks) to grown-ups by returning them to a state of childlike wonderment.

Desperately avoiding the risk of even a half-second of boredom, the movie is wall-to-window-to-door noise, babbling, and jokes.

This picture remains faithful to the underlying affability of both Chappelle and Gondry, orchestrating a feel-good homestyle vibe that, while peppered with moments of sly political commentary, never harshes its own, slightly bittersweet mellow.

Opens cute and poignant, turns wildly visceral, and ends in a burst of magical realism.

In short, this new Quiet American is not only true to Greene's novel -- it has the effect of making the novel itself seem truer than it has ever been.

Because stateside newspapers aren't enough, "The Battle of Chile" (possibly the most riveting and vital historical document ever put on celluloid) should be a prerequisite to Guzmán's new doc, The Pinochet Case.

Weiner is about as entertaining as a film about someone destroying a life and career can be. You can't turn away from the car wreck, and Weiner himself can't stop commenting on it.

Whether or not James Longley's boldly stylized reportage breaches public indifference, its enduring value is assured: When the war is long gone, this deft construction will persist in relevance, if not for what it says about the mess we once made, then as a model of canny cinematic construction.

An urban crime thriller of considerable gravitas.

Writer-director Rian Johnson has certainly made the busiest Star Wars film of them all, but he keeps it from becoming a slog by infusing it with humor, verve, and visual charm.

The Cove is properly enchanting, horrifying, and rousing, but it comes dangerously close to making the narcissistic case that dolphins deserve to be saved because they're cute and breathe air like we do.

Visconti's film remains a Euro-culture touchstone, though not nearly as convincing or visually stunning as its reputation insists.

Gently persistent in its ironies, "Funny Ha Ha" managed to be both charmingly lackadaisical and annoyingly smug; Mutual Appreciation, which Bujalski shot in grainy black-and-white in hipster Brooklyn (and is self-distributing), is even more so.

What makes The Waiting Room worth visiting is how well it does without the usual narcotizing documentary tactics.

An extreme, compassionate magnification of the minutiae of second-to-second existence (brushing teeth, counting money).

The actors, mainly newcomers, have an improvisational freshness well matched to the freewheeling camera work.

Maddin has created a fascinating hybrid--this enraptured composition in mist, gauze, and Vaseline is more rhapsody than narrative, less motion picture than shadow play.