Keeper is nonfiction in name only. Unabashedly subjective and dramaturgically conscious, it squeezes reality until the drama collects. Luckily for filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, this reality was juicy stuff.

One of the most extraordinary films of the year.

No Bears would be thoroughly engaging simply as a wryly funny fish-out-of-water story, with some diverting film-within-a-film metatext thrown in for thoughtful measure. But as Panahi’s stories mirror and merge, his deeper observations come into sobering and ultimately deeply moving focus.

If 8½ seems stuck in the early 1960s, it's only superficially so. Somehow, the movie is more than the dated crisis of a naval-contemplating artist. It's about the inability in all of us to make sense of our lives, put it all together and come up with something meaningful.

For all of its modesty and dedication to process, Spotlight winds up being a startlingly emotional experience, and not just for filmgoers with intimate knowledge of the culture it depicts.

His (Tarkovsky's) pictures, and his sounds -- such as the symphonic drip of raindrops in a wooded pond -- tell more than just the immediate story; they rejuvenate the mind.

Arguably one of the two or three best musical films ever made, and, along with Singin' in the Rain, the wittiest and most sophisticated of the '50s Technicolor musicals. [25 June 1987, p.B7]

Beneath this straightforward (if enigmatic) premise, there is a gradual slippage, as if the plate tectonics of Weerasethakul’s seemingly solid medical/mental mystery were subtly rearranging themselves, like puzzle pieces shifted by an unseen hand. As they lose their narrative mooring, the various parts of the whole have the effect of rearranging your own consciousness, in a way that leaves your perceptions feeling profoundly altered, perhaps permanently.

Thanks to Bauby's courageous and honest writing, and Schnabel's poetic interpretation, what could have been a portrait of impotence and suffering becomes a lively exploration of consciousness and a soaring ode to liberation.

The Class is not just the best film released thus far this year. It may be the most gripping.

Platoon is a triumph for Oliver Stone, a film in which a visceral approach to violence, which has always set him apart, is balanced by classical symmetries and a kind of elegiac distance. This is not the Vietnam of op-ed writers, rabble-rousers or esthetic visionaries, not Vietnam-as-metaphor or Vietnam-the-way-it-should-have-been. It is a movie about Vietnam as it was, alive with authenticity, seen through the eyes of a master filmmaker who lost his innocence there.

I appreciate No Country for Old Men for the skill in the film craft. I understand No Country for Old Men for its penetrating disquisition on narrative conventions and its heroic will in subverting them. I admire No Country for Old Men for the way it tightens its grip as it progresses, taking us deeper and deeper into a hellish world. I just don't like it very much.

The French actor Alex Descas is mesmerizing in 35 Shots of Rum, where he plays a metro conductor.

A magnificent melodrama that draws both tears and laughter from the everyday give-and-take of seemingly ordinary souls.

Dafoe delivers his finest performance in recent memory, bringing to levelheaded, unsanctimonious life a character who offers a glimmer of hope and caring within a world markedly short on both.

In providing audiences a chance to bear witness to unspeakable suffering as well as dazzling defiance and human dignity, Sissako has created a film that’s a privilege to watch.

The acclaimed director’s Depression-era film ranks among the better-known Little Women adaptations.

The Act of Killing is a must-see.

Spielberg has always demonstrated extraordinary aptitude for filmmaking, but "E.T." is far and away his most satisfying work to date. He knows how to transform the raw material of his childhood into an appealing popular fable. There are sequences that touch you to the quick in mysteriously casual ways

The movie offers one of the great lost pleasures, one we so seldom encounter at the bijou anymore. You watch this monster unreeling in its splendid vitality, its absurd ambition, its wobbly tone, its beauty, its stupidity, its immaturity, its tragedy, its grandeur, and before you know it, close to four hours has blasted by. And when you leave, you seize whoever is up close to you -- friend or foe, stranger or lover -- and begin to talk. You have opinions. You must express yourself. You must be heard. [5 Aug 2001, p.G1]

With empathy and outrage that cut equally deeply, Hittman reminds us: This is a girl’s life in a man’s world.

After slapstick farces as exuberant and hilarious as Sleeper and Love and Death, it comes as a soft, fuzzy, mildly diverting letdown.

With its spectacular scenery, stupefying effects and epic scope, is a dream come true.

On the most surface level, “The Zone of Interest,” which Glazer adapted from Martin Amis’s novel, is about denial and Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil. But the mental contortions Rudolf and Hedwig go through to justify their own monstrosity go beyond obliviousness into something far more insidious and timeless.

As taut, sleek and guiltily comfortable as the classic Chrysler automobile we see at the beginning, "Quiz Show" is built for entertaining road performance. The facts (at least, the dramatically inconvenient ones) are left on the side of the road. Redford retains the emotional engine of the Van Doren affair and drives this baby all the way—presumably—to the bank.

Magnificently acted, expertly crafted and unerringly sure of every treacherous step it takes, Leviathan is an indictment, but also an elegy, a film set among the monumental ruins of a culture, whether they’re the skeletal remains of boats, a whale’s bleached bones, a demolished building or a trail of lives that are either ruined or hopelessly resigned.

Preserves and resuscitates the hard-boiled genre.

Lasseter and his team plunge the audience into a collective case of empty- nest syndrome, with a dash of mortal terror thrown in for grins. And again, they make it work.