Order may be restored to the Circus, the "bad" elements weeded out, but in the jaundiced world the film has spent the last two hours so effectively delineating, the barriers between good and evil have been shown to be essentially meaningless.

A boldly conceived assemblage of diverse and seemingly random fictional materials, Athina Rachel Tsangari's Attenberg is concerned with nothing less than those hardy perennials: sex, death, and modernity. And coming of age a little too late.

Although the film remains continually fanciful, it always reminds us of the stakes in which precocious childhood rubs up against the possibility of a childhood denied altogether.

A sense of anachronism is what provides the film with its melancholy heart.

In Joshua Oppenheimer's extraordinary The Act of Killing, film becomes the medium for a bold historical reckoning--and in more ways than one.

Proves how invigorating genre filmmaking can be in the hands of a savvy, perpetually inventive director.

Shat makes Our Idiot Brother work is the endless appeal of watching Rudd's lovable idiot run roughshod over the sophisticated New York mini-universe while winning the confidence and admiration of everyone around him.

A slick, entertaining offering, playing at times like a tarted up "E! True Hollywood Story."

The film proves that neither gross-out gags nor pseudo-sophisticated Woody Allenisms are necessary to make a smart, funny comedy.

It not only makes for riveting cinematic drama (all the more impressive given that it relies so heavily on recounted words rather than illustrated actions), but for first-rate muckraking.

Not only sets up the writer's life as representative of the transitions of early modern Jewish life, but posits his oeuvre as an ongoing chronicle of the shift from a vibrant, unified Yiddish culture to a fractured world-in-exile.

Rachid Bouchareb casts his account of the horrifying aftermath of tragedy on an intimate scale, allowing the halting words and frightened faces of his two leads to tell us as much as we need to know about the uncertainties of those faced with tracking down their lost loved ones.

The film successfully positions its point of view with the developing countries that suffer the most immediate consequences of global warming rather than the developed countries most responsible for climate change and from whose citizenry Jon Shenk's prospective audience is likely to be drawn.

A study of the this former mining region in both its de-industralized present and its past state as an active coalfield, The Miners' Hymns arranges its two parts as a set of binary oppositions.

Thanks to Melanie Lynskey's performance, the movie feels like a believably worked-out, sympathetically presented study in thirtysomething uncertainty.

The director's clear-minded approach allows her subject's more challenging aesthetic-political mix to shine through, even if it's at the inevitable expense of her own filmmaking proclivities.

Tsui Hark's film is the veteran director's chance to let his imagination run riot in the context of a high-budget, 3D IMAX production.

There's no coddling the audience in Vibeke Løkkeberg's verité heave of disgust as the full consequences on the Palestinian people of Operation Cast Lead are made sickeningly clear.

The mixture of different techniques and varied views results in a rich, multi-faceted look at one of America's most misguided policy initiatives.

Jason Tippet and Elizabeth Mims refuse to use their subjects as test cases for any sort of larger thesis.

Alejandro Landes's Porfirio is an ugly movie to watch, but it's not without purpose.

One Day conveys a real sense of the poignancy of individual lives unfolding over time, but the film's ultimate embrace of conventionality ultimately undercuts the not inconsiderable accomplishments the project had worked so hard to achieve.

Even as an "18 months later" epilogue ensures us that everything's hunky dory, this is one surprisingly grim celebration of a group Rapaport obviously loves.

The astonishing footage of apes in their natural environment is made perfectly accessible and then nearly undone by a narration track that plays to the audience's basest desires for gag-inducing cuteness.

Haney's movie is not great cinema, nor was meant to be, but as an introduction to one of the myriad dangers threatening our earth, it serves its cause well enough. And that, after all, is the whole point.

Chockfull of ideas in a way that's both scattershot and more than a little exciting.

Expressionistic rather than analytical, Passione, John Turturro's cinematic ode to the music of Naples, Italy, unfolds as a compendium of tuneful performances bracketed with the barest of contextualization.

What Puiu seems to be suggesting is that the complexities of human behavior and relationships are beyond the power of the law to comprehend, but are they also beyond the power of the cinema?