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.