No Greater Love gets at the camaraderie — and the contradictions — of military service in a way that few films ever have.

You keep waiting for the movie to clarify, to settle down to its archetypal purity: icon of psychotic evil against icon of neurotic good. Music by Wagner in his "Götterdämmerung" mood, screenplay by Nietzsche, with additional lines by Babaloo Mandel. Oh, what a great big movie wallow, what a transformational blast of cine-pleasure. It never quite arrives

As small and specific as it is, Everybody Wants Some!! feels improbably expansive, even universal.

Many thematic ingredients come together in Farhadi’s rich stew of a story: jealousy, resentment, betrayal, forgiveness, healing. The filmmaker stirs them, with the touch of a master, into a dish that both stimulates and nourishes.

Black Bag is a movie about pros made by a pro, and either you’re up to the challenge or you’re not.

One Child Nation covers a lot of a territory, and many of its topics need to be covered in more depth. But the directors structure the narrative effectively, and they deftly expand from the personal to the historical. This is an important film, if often a difficult one to watch.

The manic swirl of characters (most speaking in thick Northern accents that are sometimes muffled and incomprehensible) may leave you exhausted and confused.

Shocking and relentless, the movie pioneers an unholy border between Rembrandt and pornography, finding a transcendent unity in the abasements and attainments of man.

For all its stunning, poetic imagery, it's almost impossible to sit through.

Nothing comes easily in Atonement, especially its ending, which, both happy and tragic, is as wrenching as it is genuinely satisfying. How fitting, somehow, that a novel so devoted to the precision and passionate love of language be captured in a film that is simply too exquisite for words.

At its best, The Tree of Life makes the viewer lean forward, eager to enter Malick's own dreamy, poetic consciousness. At worst, it leads to the vague feeling that we're listening to the meanderings of someone who's not sure we're smart enough to keep up.

Needlessly complicated and at times almost impossible to follow, its narrative inscrutability often coming across less as the result of nonlinear storytelling than as simply a cinematic affectation.

The frequent, mundane talks -- which Alexandra engages in with her grandson, Malika and the base camp's enlisted men -- are not so much about politics as they are about people.

There’s lots of hurt, past and present, in “Daughters,” as well as a huge measure of healing and forgiveness. Those feelings are palpable and contagious; they jump off the screen.

The Fabelmans does it all, with an expansive spirit and that quintessential Spielbergian combination of honesty and sentiment. It tells the truth, at a honeyed, ameliorating slant.

This is 90-proof, single-malt stuff. You sip it neat and you don't handle heavy machinery afterward. This movie will stay with you long after you've seen it, thanks to Thewlis's performance, Leigh's direction, Andrew Dickson's haunting bass-and-harp soundtrack, cinematographer Dick Pope's indelible images -- and the unalloyed, naked conviction of it all.

It's an incredible show of flexibility on Tavernier's part, as improvisational and exploratory as the be-bop itself. "Round" is living sound, as "Sunday" was canvas come to life.

It's the last thing anyone expected: an old-fashioned monster movie with a heart.

Unlike Hollywood's hygienic undersea dramas, Das Boot graphically depicts the nasty intimacy of a long mission.

This is painless sexual politics, a fiendish comedy full of prickles and pain and the bright shiny pinks of a matador's cape. The farce falters from time to time, the pace is imperfect, but who can resist this "Twilight Zone" of limitless coincidences?

It’s not often one can have a genuinely spiritual experience watching a movie. But that’s precisely what’s on offer with The Departure, Lana Wilson’s quietly galvanizing portrait of life, death and the thin places in between in modern-day Japan.

Beyond Utopia contains background material on the history, culture and travails of North Korea that’s necessary but clunkily presented. The filmmakers also take an irksome turn toward the predictable during some of the travel sequences, adding conventional piano-and-strings movie music. But the rest of the movie is fresh and compelling.

Still, the movie -- as beautifully drawn, as sleek and engaging as it is -- has the annoyance of incredible smugness.

A mostly empathetic tale of war’s cruelty as it affects both those who fight and those who merely look on. That empathy is conveyed through haunting performances, stunning direction and a sense of detail that elevates it beyond standard historical drama.

Neville has created a film that operates both as a dewy-eyed nostalgia trip and stirring appeal for civility.

A mesmerizing cinematic journey that is often as arduous and spare as the lives of its hard-bitten protagonists.

Although Rohmer's adaptation, shot in German with a cast of actors drawn from the German stage, is pedantically faithful to the letter of the original - almost word-for-word as well as scene-for-scene - it substitutes a style that seems woefully wrong. Rohmer's approach is too static and repressed to release the comic ironies Kleist perceived in the very premise of an honorable man's lapse leading to an honorable woman's distress and built into his brilliantly objective story-telling style. [21 Jan 1977, p.B15]

What makes it a must see is its timelessness.

Walter Salles’s I’m Still Here is an epic within an epic: a teeming family drama contained within the melodrama of a country going insane.

The sprawling cast, the naturalistic, overlapping dialogue (here by screenwriter Jenny Lumet, daughter of director Sidney) and the swirling action: it seemed pure Robert Altman.

But for the most part, The Last Days fails to play as a document of the survivors' lives, or even as their memory of that time. Rather, it feels removed, distant, a document of an attempt to re-create a memory.

Editing these unwieldy stories into a cohesive, meaningful way must have been a massive undertaking. Editors Jenny Golden and Karen Sim did such an impressive job that even at two hours — an eternity for a doc — the movie never feels too long.

In its brisk way, it's a devastating piece of work, and very brave too.

A small film of surpassing beauty and sadness. Yet its bittersweet flavor isn't artificial, but rather the product of the slow ripening of character.

It is a fine picture, sweet and pathetic, witty and tender. [17 Apr 1981, p.19]

Filmed in Augusto and Pauli’s handsome brick-and-timber home in Chile, and punctuated by home movies and news footage of Augusto in his prime, The Eternal Memory mostly eschews voyeurism for its own maudlin sake.

As far-fetched as it sounds, such torque-y plotting works, catching the audience off guard, even if the quasi-feminist payoff is less satisfying than it should be, thanks mostly to the film’s puerile fascination with girl-on-girl action.

Through a donkey’s large and expressive eyes, Eo shows us the beauty of the world and the cruelty of humanity.

Like all good fairy tales, this outsize celebration of perseverance and moral triumph contains within it a deeper idea -- in this case, the relative nature of what we think we know, and what's worth knowing at all. No doubt Dickens himself would approve.

Even though it's pretentious and overlong, A Christmas Tale is still maddeningly engaging, thanks in large part to its attractive and gifted cast.

Van Sant is such an assured filmmaker that Paranoid Park is almost inescapably absorbing; he has found a particularly engaging leading man in Miller, whose expressive, even painterly face goes from blank to angelic in the blink of a long-lashed eye.

Jack is just one of a dozen enormously appealing personalities in Out of Sight.

Now, finally, we know what it was like to walk on the moon: unbelievably cool. Amazing. Fantastic. Scary.

Spike Lee's film is about a group of black men traveling from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., for last year's Million Man March. As in the real-life march one year ago today, this convergence of diverse black manhood is what is compelling about the film.

Devoid of muckraking sensationalism, it instead evolves into something more tactful, and compassionate, as teams of exhausted medical professionals do anything to save their patients’ lives, or at least grace their final moments with gestures of caring and connection.

Is "The Last Waltz" the greatest rock movie of all time? It makes its case persuasively in a restoration overseen by director Martin Scorsese and producer Robbie Robertson that's been released to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the concert it made famous.

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is decidedly and joyfully innocent. It’s refreshing to see a story about tween girls who are not depicted as children or shamed or sexualized.

This endearing, thoroughly entertaining movie might be what we all need right now: An invitation to stop and smell the roses — or, if you’re lucky, their far less showy fungal cousins.

Working with his longtime cinematographer Emmanuel "Chivo" Lubezki, Cuaron creates the most deeply imagined and fully realized world to be seen on screen this year, not to mention bravura sequences that bring to mind names like Orson Welles and Stanley Kubrick.

This is a throwback movie in the best sense of the term, asking the audience to consider the not-too-distant past of anti-Black racism as prologue to its similarly murderous present. It’s also a return to a brand of muscular, serious-minded filmmaking that has been virtually forgotten in recent years.

As it turns out, big secrets aren't revealed in Broadcast News, but the film is so ingratiatingly high-spirited, and the performances so full of sass and vigor, that in the long run it doesn't really matter much.

Spielmann doesn't move his camera much, but he doesn't have to. The uniformly crackerjack cast keeps things electric, yet always believable, even when behaving in ways that are shocking.

It's a gentle, surprising little movie whose rewards lie in what its characters don't say as much as in what they do.

As quintessential a story of American ambition as Welles' own "Citizen Kane."

For the first time in ages, it seems, there's something in an Allen movie to take home with you. I'm convinced, for instance, my wife will eventually leave me for Liam Neeson.

As overcrowded as it all sounds, “Flipside” never falls off the cliff into confusion or incoherence, thanks mainly to Wilcha’s superb grasp of his theme.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is often diverting to watch, and it’s been shot on 35mm film with lovingly expressive care by Robert Richardson. But true to its title, it plays like a bedtime story concocted by a petulant child who insists on getting his own back from the people who poisoned his most honeyed dreams.

[A] solid yet subtly sphinxlike new drama from filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda.

Moonrise Kingdom is already shaping up to be this summer's art house sleeper hit, and no wonder: It traffics in the very kind of escapist spectacle -- in this case of a thoughtfully composed world brimming with whimsy, enchantment and visual brio -- that the season was made for.

This is one fan's valentine to the music he loves. It just happens that the fan is a terrific filmmaker and the music loves him back -- and we get to see it and hear it all. What a treat.

The disparity between Cindy and Jerry is itself obscene, but less so than that illuminated by the customers of Farewell Cruises, whom Yung shows to be almost parasitic in the way they feed off the misery (albeit without knowing it) of those who serve them.

Like Cheung's ethereally plaintive voice, the movie is a siren song that's appealing at first, but held too long. It becomes an increasing whine.

Sinners gives sensuous, supernatural, often electrifying expression to the belief that we’re all simultaneously captive to our histories and capable of so much more.

Leigh has fashioned a limber style of political commentary that is part documentary, part cartoon and wholly novel in the movies.

McQueen makes the case that its subject was an artist whose clay was clothing. It also, despite giving short shrift to psychoanalysis, reminds us that everything you might want to know about the artist can be found in the art.

The Black Stallion is one of the few movies that justifies the word "sublime." It casts an immediate pictorial spell of wonder and discovery and sustains it until a fadeout that leaves you in a euphoric mood, lingering over images whose beauty and emotional intensity you want to prolong and savor. [9 Dec 1979, p.G1]

Earth Mama says a lot with very few words.

As Booksmart takes its shape, albeit haphazardly, Wilde’s filmmaking skills become more and more evident, bursting forth in a third act that builds into something beautiful and even transcendent.

Huston's straightforward, sardonic direction reinforces a compact, unusually literate screenplay. [07 May 1980, p.C1]

There is no narration. There are no interviews. Just rote, monotonous activity — a recipe for repetitive stress injury — and the occasional fly-on-the -wall conversation on which we are allowed to briefly eavesdrop between several representatives of what Ascension suggests is as a nation of strivers, with hearts set on achieving what might be called the new Chinese Dream: wealth and success, in the world’s second largest economy.

Perceptive, powerfully acted psychodrama.

Reality isn’t just stranger than fiction: It’s subtler, sadder and exponentially more haunting.

The line between madness and genius is thin. Not to mention more than amply explored in any number of films about tortured artists. But to look at the almost religious ecstasy on Moreau's face is to feel the artist's passion and be inspired by it.

The more you watch, the more you are committing yourself to watching "56 Up" and beyond.

Candid, pitiless and deeply humanistic, Fleifel’s portrait feels simultaneously timeless and urgently new.

Campillo’s style is usually naturalistic, and the superb ensemble cast’s performances are entirely unaffected.

Gives refreshing -- and bittersweet -- dimension to the age-old clash between generations.

At times heavy-handed in its symbolism, “Seed” is still a gripping, provocative knockout — a domestic political thriller — that hints at the limits of oppression and the long, long bending of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “moral arc.”

Hilarious, painful and brutally frank.

Grand enough in scale to carry its many Biblical and mythological references, Blade Runner never feels heavy or pretentious -- only more and more engrossing with each viewing. It helps, too, that it works as pure entertainment.

If Kagemusha falls short dramatically, and many admirers may not share that impression, the sag occurs at an awesome level of filmmaking prowess. Ironically, this tale of a shadow warrior is diminished only by the length and intensity of the artistic shadow thrown by Kurosawa in his prime. [21 Nov 1980, p.F1]

The movie has the sense of being embalmed, or pickled. With its stilted dialogue not quite kitschy enough to be funny and not quite authentic enough to be realistic, the whole movie feels as if it's taking place in formaldehyde.

A well-mounted, macabre seriocomedy with passing punchlines. And for about half the movie, it's compelling stuff.

Weaving together stories of death with observations on the post-9/11 culture of surveillance, Heart of a Dog hints that the very language on which Anderson has built her career as a performance artist is finally inadequate in the face of mortality.

Mournful, enigmatic and compulsively engrossing, Fireworks Wednesday gives viewers a chance to watch a master at work — before he was acknowledged as a master.

Within the stylistic limits and shortened time span the filmmakers have decided to use, All the President's Men is an exceptionally well-made film. It's simply impossible to suppress the feeling that a more involving and satisfying movie would have emerged from a less restrictive framework.

It's a showcase for Nicholson in an astounding performance as the dim but lovable hit man, Charley Partanna. [14 June 1985, p.27]

Much of the humor derives from how despicable these characters can be, and Jude doesn’t so much push the envelope as turn it into a paper airplane and let it fly.

A crackpot Looney Tune, pretentious, abysmally slow, amateurishly acted and, above all, wrong.

A diverting, visually dazzling concoction of wily schemes and daring adventures, Toy Story 4 achieves that something that eludes most sequels, especially this far into a series: a near-perfect balance between familiarity and novelty, action and emotion, and joyful hellos and more bittersweet goodbyes.

What gradually comes into focus is a terrifying, appalling, infuriating cycle of exploitation and corruption.

Maddin has called his new film a "docu-fantasia," and it's an apt label for an entirely idiosyncratic mix of local myth and history, dubious science, salacious gossip, personal rumination and endless camp humor.

Their individual voices may not be literally captured in On the Record. But in this anguishing and essential film, they are heard — and the implications of being silenced for so long come through loud and shamefully clear.

Mishima tries to make sense of both its subject's life and his work, and ends up illuminating neither.

To quote In the Heights itself, the streets are made of music in the first genuinely cheerful, splashy, exuberantly life-affirming movie of the summer.

The archival footage is exciting enough, but editors Erin Casper and Jocelyne Chaput, who co-wrote the script with producer Shane Boris, make judicious use of split-screen, circular stencils and other visual effects, varying the rhythm just enough to make this world seem even more magical.

I love the unsettling details.

Oslo, August 31st builds to an unforgettable climax, a bravura sequence that starts at a party, crawls through a variety of nightclubs and raves, and ends on a note of utterly surprising lyricism.