The impersonation of Welles by Christian McKay in Me and Orson Welles is the centerpiece of the film, and from it, all else flows. We can almost accept that this is the Great Man.

Jeff Bridges is a virtual certainty to win his first Oscar, after four nominations.

The film is visually masterful. It's in black and white, of course.

Arnold deserves comparison with a British master director like Ken Loach.

It is astonishingly original.

Red Riding Trilogy is an immersive experience like "The Best of Youth," "Brideshead Revisited" or "Nicholas Nickleby."

This movie is the work of a man who knows how to direct a thriller. Smooth, calm, confident, it builds suspense instead of depending on shock and action.

The best performance in the film is by Arestrup as Cesar. You may remember him from Audiard's "The Beat That My Heart Skipped" (2005), where he played a seedy but confident father who psychically overshadows his son.

A compelling thriller to begin with, but it adds the rare quality of having a heroine more fascinating than the story.

Some kind of sweet, wacky masterpiece.

Juan Jose Campanella is the writer-director, and here is a man who creates a complete, engrossing, lovingly crafted film. He is filled with his stories. The Secret in Their Eyes is a rebuke to formula screenplays. We grow to know the characters, and the story pays due respect to their complexities and needs.

The movie heroes who affect me most are not extroverted. They don't strut, speechify and lead armies. They have no superpowers. They are ordinary people who are faced with a need and rise to the occasion. Ree Dolly is such a hero.

An amazing film. It is deep, rich, human. It is not about rich and poor, but about old and new. It is about the ancient war between tradition and feeling.

The first shot tells us 45365 is the zip code of the town." In this achingly beautiful film, that zip code belongs to Sidney, Ohio, a handsome town of about 20,000 residents.

We laugh, that we may not cry. But none of this philosophy comes close to the insane logic of "M*A*S*H," which is achieved through a peculiar marriage of cinematography, acting, directing, and writing.

It's gloriously absurd. This movie has holes in it big enough to drive the whole movie through. The laws of physics seem to be suspended here the same way as in a Road Runner cartoon.

Inception does a difficult thing. It is wholly original, cut from new cloth, and yet structured with action movie basics so it feels like it makes more sense than (quite possibly) it does.

There is the sense they're fighting for each other more than for ideology.

Here is a gripping film with the focus of a Japanese drama, an impenetrable character to equal Alain Delon's in "Le Samourai," by Jean-Pierre Melville.

This is a good movie, from a masterful novel.

David Fincher's film has the rare quality of being not only as smart as its brilliant hero, but in the same way. It is cocksure, impatient, cold, exciting and instinctively perceptive.

It is a great film about greatness, the story of the horse and the no less brave woman who had faith in him.

It's one of those extraordinary films, like "Hoop Dreams," that tells a story the makers could not possibly have anticipated in advance. It works like stunning, grieving fiction.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Inside Job involves the chatty on-camera insights of Kristin Davis, a Wall Street madam, who says the Street operated in a climate of abundant sex and cocaine for valued clients and the traders themselves.

This is a film for intelligent people who are naturally curious about what happens when the shutters close.

Is the film watchable? Yes, compulsively.

What we have here is a superior historical drama and a powerful personal one.

Coppola is a fascinating director. She sees, and we see exactly what she sees. There is little attempt here to observe a plot. All the attention is on the handful of characters, on Johnny.

Leigh's Another Year is like a long, purifying soak in empathy.

However much it conceals the real-life events that inspired it, it lives and breathes on its own, and as an extension of the mysterious whimsy of Tati.

It is told from and by an adult sensibility that understands loneliness, gratitude and the intense curiosity we feel for other lives, man and beast.

Haggis writes with such directness and such a good ear for everyday speech that the characters seem real and plausible after only a few words. His cast is uniformly strong; the actors sidestep cliches and make their characters particular.

Rango is some kind of a miracle: An animated comedy for smart moviegoers, wonderfully made, great to look at, wickedly satirical, and (gasp!) filmed in glorious 2-D.

David Schwimmer has made one of the year's best films: Powerfully emotional, yes, but also very perceptive.

Putty Hill makes no statement. It looks. It looks with as much perception and sympathy as it is possible for a film to look. It is surprisingly effective.

Here is a good and joyous man who leads a life that is perfect for him, and how many people do we meet like that? This movie made me happy every moment I was watching it.

The only other film I've seen with this boldness of vision is Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," and it lacked Malick's fierce evocation of human feeling.

It is a spellbinding enigma, and one of the damnedest films Morris has ever made.

Movies about high school misfits are common; this is an uncommon one. Terri, so convincingly played by Jacob Wysocki, is smart, gentle and instinctively wise.

The Interrupters is based on a much-acclaimed article in the New York Times Magazine by Alex Kotlowitz, who followed a period of intense violence in Chicago. He joined with James to co-produce the film. It is difficult to imagine the effort, day after day for a year, of following this laborious, heroic and so often fruitless volunteer work.

The film's ending is improbably upbeat: Magic realism, in a sense. It works as a deliverance. Dennis Foon's screenplay is based on the novel "Chanda's Secrets" by Canadian writer Allan Stratton. It is a parable with Biblical undertones, recalling "Cry, the Beloved Country."

A smart, intense and moving film that isn't so much about sports as about the war between intuition and statistics. I walked in knowing what the movie was about, but unprepared for its intelligence and depth.

The film concludes not with a "surprise ending" but with a series of shots that brilliantly summarize all that has gone before. This is masterful filmmaking.

Here is a film of great beauty and attention, and watching it is a form of meditation. Sometimes films take a great stride outside the narrow space of narrative tradition and present us with things to think about. Here mostly what I thought was, why must man sometimes be so cruel?

This movie is as lovable as a silent comedy, which it could have been.

Into the Abyss may be the saddest film Werner Herzog has ever made. It regards a group of miserable lives, and in finding a few faint glimmers of hope only underlines the sadness.

What happens is that we get vested in the lives of these characters. That's rare in a lot of movies.

The way Hugo deals with Melies is enchanting in itself, but the film's first half is devoted to the escapades of its young hero. In the way the film uses CGI and other techniques to create the train station and the city, the movie is breathtaking.

This is a great act of filmmaking and acting. I don't believe I would be able to see it twice.

This profound and immensely touching film in only 75 perfect minutes achieves the profundity of an epic.

Here is one of the most entertaining films in many a moon, a film that charms because of its story, its performances and because of the sly way it plays with being silent and black and white.

The actors, as sometimes happens, create those miracles that can endow a film with conviction. Moadi and Hatami, as husband and wife, succeed in convincing us their characters are acting from genuine motives.

As a portrait of a deteriorating state of mind, We Need to Talk About Kevin is a masterful film.

After seeing Kinyarwanda, I have a different kind of feeling about the genocide that took place in Rwanda in 1994. The film approaches it not as a story line but as a series of intense personal moments.

Harrelson is an ideal actor for the role. Especially in tensely wound-up movies like this, he implies that he's looking at everything and then watching himself looking.

It's one of the smartest and most merciless comedies to come along in a while. It centers on an area of fairly narrow interest, but in its study of human nature, it is deep and takes no prisoners.

What a courageous first feature this is, a film that sidesteps shopworn stereotypes and tells a quiet, firm, deeply humanist story about doing the right thing. It is a film that avoids any message or statement and simply shows us, with infinite sympathy, how the life of a completely original character can help us lead our own.

A magnificent science-fiction film, all the more intriguing because it raises questions about the origin of human life and doesn't have the answers.

This film is joyous, but more than that: It's lovely in its construction. The director, Prashant Bhargava, born and raised on Chicago's South Side, knows what his basic story line is, but reveals it subtly.

The film is astonishing in its visual beauty; cinematographer Greig Fraser ("Snow White and the Huntsman") finds nobility in this arduous journey.

Sometime miraculous films come into being, made by people you've never heard of, starring unknown faces, blindsiding you with creative genius. Beasts of the Southern Wild is one of the year's best films.

The information they eventually dislodge about Rodriguez suggests a secular saint, a deeply good man, whose music is the expression of a blessed inner being. I hope you're able to see this film. You deserve to. And yes, it exists because we need for it to.

The movie has an emotional payoff I failed to anticipate. It expresses hope in human nature. It is one of the year's best films.

A grand, romantic life story about love, loss, regret and the sadness that can be evoked by a violin - not only through music, but through the instrument itself. It is all melancholy and loss, and delightfully comedic, with enough but not too much magic realism. The story as it stands could be the scenario for an opera.

Oslo, August 31st is quietly, profoundly, one of the most observant and sympathetic films I've seen.

It is the kind of experience you simply sink into.

Hitchcock called his most familiar subject "The Innocent Man Wrongly Accused." Jarecki pumps up the pressure here by giving us a Guilty Man Accurately Accused, and that's what makes the film so ingeniously involving.

One of the best police movies in recent years, a virtuoso fusion of performances and often startling action.

Argo the real movie about the fake movie, is both spellbinding and surprisingly funny.

It fascinates in the moment. It's getting from one moment to the next that is tricky. Surely this is one of the most ambitious films ever made.

It is nearly flawless.

Rarely has a film attended more carefully to the details of politics.

Skyfall triumphantly reinvents 007 in one of the best Bonds ever. This is a full-blooded, joyous, intelligent celebration of a beloved cultural icon, with Daniel Craig taking full possession of a role he previously played unconvincingly. I don't know what I expected in Bond No. 23, but certainly not an experience this invigorating.

Is it real? Is this whole story real? I refuse to ask that question. Life of Pi is all real, second by second and minute by minute, and what it finally amounts to is left for every viewer to decide. I have decided it is one of the best films of the year.

Here is a searing film of human tragedy.

What Tarantino has is an appreciation for gut-level exploitation film appeal, combined with an artist's desire to transform that gut element with something higher, better, more daring. His films challenge taboos in our society in the most direct possible way, and at the same time add an element of parody or satire.

An unexpected kind of masterpiece by Haneke, whose films have included the enigmatic "Caché" and the earlier Golden Palm winner "The White Ribbon." We don't expect such unflinching seriousness, such profundity from Haneke.

Do we need a fourth film? Yes, I think we do. If you only see one of them, this is the one to choose, because it has the benefit of hindsight.

It is a mystery, this business of life. I can't think of any under cinematic undertaking that allows us to realize that more deeply.

King of the Hill could have been a family picture, or a heartwarming TV docudrama, or a comedy. Soderbergh must have seen more deeply into the Hotchner memoir, however, because his movie is not simply about what happens to the kid. It's about how the kid learns and grows through his experiences.

Each character in this movie is given the dramatic opportunity to look inside himself, to question his own motives as well as the motives of others, and to try to improve his own ways of dealing with a troubled situation. Two of the characters do learn how to adjust; the third doesn't. It's not often we get characters who face those kinds of challenges on the screen, nor directors who seek them out. Ordinary People is an intelligent, perceptive, and deeply moving film.

Lore belongs in the inspiration-and-control camp. It makes dizzying flourishes out of moments that would pass as filler in other films.

Beresford is able to move us, one small step at a time, into the hearts of his characters. He never steps wrong on his way to a luminous final scene in which we are invited to regard one of the most privileged mysteries of life, the moment when two people allow each other to see inside.

Carl Franklin's film is true to the tone and spirit of the book. It is patient and in no hurry. It allows a balanced eye for the people in its hero's family who tug him one way and another.

The Gatekeepers has a cold air to it: washed-out colors, tan ominous soundtrack, eerily floating satellite footage… The most chilling aspect, however, is the blunt commentary about the work itself.

A few great directors have the ability to draw us into their dream world, into their personalities and obsessions and fascinate us with them for a short time. This is the highest level of escapism the movies can provide for us.

The movie makes no attempt to psychoanalyze its Kit Carruthers, and there are no symbols to note or lessons to learn. What comes through more than anything is the enormous loneliness of the lives these two characters lived, together and apart.

Starting with Le Petit Soldat, Godard was forging his own individualistic art and becoming the most relevant director of our time.

The film becomes a sort of boxing match, getting more intense with each round, building to an exciting finish.

The music, the cinematography, the acting choices, the daring plot leaps — not a single element is timid or safe...The Place Beyond the Pines earns every second of its 140-minute running time.

Even when Disconnect follows the path we expect it to follow, it does so in a way that keeps us intensely engaged. There wasn't a moment during this movie when I thought about anything other than this movie.

This is a brave, layered film that challenges the wisdom of victory at any price. Both of its central characters would slip easily into conventional plot formulas, but Bahrani looks deeply into their souls and finds so much more.

It is a full-bodied silent film of the sort that might have been made by the greatest directors of the 1920s, if such details as the kinky sadomasochism of this film's evil stepmother could have been slipped past the censors.

A splendid comic thriller, exciting and graceful, endlessly inventive.

There is no mechanical plot that has to grind to a Hollywood conclusion, and no contrived test for the heroes to pass; this is a movie about two particular young men, and how they pass their lives.

One of the pleasures of Get Shorty is watching the way the plot moves effortlessly from crime to the movies - not a long distance, since both industries are based on fear, greed, creativity and intimidation.

It looks and listens to its characters, curious about the unfolding mysteries of the personality. It is a treasure.

Penn and Nicholson take risks with the material and elevate the movie to another, unanticipated, haunting level.

If Scott Fitzgerald were to return to life, he would feel at home in a Whit Stillman movie. Stillman listens to how people talk, and knows what it reveals about them.

Sharp-edged, perfectly timed, funny and thoughtful.

"Black Hawk Down" was criticized because the characters seemed hard to tell apart. We Were Soldiers doesn't have that problem; in the Hollywood tradition it identifies a few key players, casts them with stars, and follows their stories.

Pure slam-bam space opera.

It's always about more than boxing.

Sayles' film moves among a large population of characters with grace, humor and a forgiving irony.

It placed second for the People's Choice Award at the 2000 Toronto Film Festival--after "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon." That's about right.

Parsimonious with its plot, which is revealed on a need-to-know basis. At first, we're not even sure who is who; dialogue is half-heard, references are unclear, the townspeople know things we discover only gradually.

Made against all odds into a funny and charming movie that understands the charm of the original, and preserves it.

It will not appeal to the impatient, but those who like long books and movies will admire the way it accumulates power and depth. It is about youthful idealism, headstrong love and fierce ambition, and is pessimistic about all of them.

Tells one of those rare and entrancing stories where one thing seems to happen while another thing is really happening.

If the film is less than perfect, it is because Smith is too much in love with his dialogue. Smith is a gifted comic writer who loves paradox, rhetoric and unexpected zingers from the blind side.

You will either be in sympathy with it, or not. Much depends on what you bring into the theater. It is possible that those who know most about Nijinsky will be most baffled, because this is not a film about knowing, but about feeling.

I saw it a third time. By then I had moved beyond the immediate shock of the material and was able to focus on what a well-made film it was; how concisely Solondz gets the effects he's after.

This description no doubt makes the film seem like some kind of gimmicky puzzle. What's surprising is how easy it is to follow the plot, and how the coincidences don't get in the way.

This is the movie to seek out.

It's intense and involving, and it doesn't let us go.

Portrait of men and a few women who stubbornly try to maintain some dignity in the face of personal disaster.

You leave Felicia's Journey appreciating it. A week later, you're astounded by it.

This is one of Denzel Washington's great performances, on a par with his work in "Malcolm X."

Likely to appeal to the fans of "The Sixth Sense," "Ghost" and other movies where the characters find a loophole in reality. What it also has in common with those two movies is warmth and emotion.

A touching and effective film.

One of those comedies where everything works.

Not a great movie, but as a classic heist movie, it's solid professionalism.

It handles a sports movie the way Billie Holiday handled a trashy song, by finding the love and pain beneath the story.

Finds a tone that remains more entertaining than depressing, more absorbing than alarming.

Jesus' Son surprises me with moments of wry humor, poignancy, sorrow and wildness. It has a sequence as funny as any I've seen this year.

Civil Action is like John Grisham for grownups.

A family film that shames the facile commercialism of a product like "Pokemon" and its value system based on power and greed.It is made with delicacy and beauty.

This human level is always there beneath the thriller elements. The screenplay takes care to bring the crime story and the personal histories together, so that even the crossed lines of romance work as plot points, not just sentiment.

One of the truest films I've seen about the ebb and flow of a real relationship.

It is not about memories but memory. Yours, mine, Proust's. Memory makes us human.

The film has an odd subterranean power. It doesn't strive for our sympathy or make any effort to portray Rosetta as colorful, winning or sympathetic.

Because the stories are so skillfully threaded together, the movie doesn't feel like an exercise: Each of the stories stands on its own.

Simply amazing.

It is about the desiring itself, not about what they desire. That makes it more intriguing than if we knew their secret--and sexier.

There is a little something of the spoiled masochist about Arenas. One would not say he seeks misery, but he wears it like a badge of honor, and we can see his mistakes approaching before he does. This is not a weakness in the film but one of its intriguing strengths

Intriguing in the way it dances in and out of the shadow of Bergman's autobiography.

What's best about the movie is its playfulness.

Only rarely is a film this observant and tender about the ups and downs of daily existence.

If a movie like this had a neat ending, the ending would be a lie. We do not want answers, but questions and observations.

A feeling movie, a mood movie, an evocation of the kind of interaction we sometimes hunger for.

You can sense the difference between a movie that's a technical exercise ("Resident Evil") and one steamed in the dread cauldrons of the filmmaker's imagination.

It is a bold, reckless gesture.

The latest in a flowering of good films from Iran, and gives voice to the moderates there. It shows people existing and growing in the cracks of their society's inflexible walls.

There is a jolting surprise in discovering that this film has free will, and can end as it wants, and that its director can make her point, however brutally.

Emerges as an accurate memory of that time when the American melting pot, splendid as a theory, became a reality.

The movie will seem slow to some viewers, unless they are alert to the raging emotions, the cruel unfairness and the desperation that are masked by the measured and polite words of the characters.

A breathtaking exercise in the macabre, a gruesome thriller with quirky cops and a killer of Lecterian complexity, and even when the movie is perfect nonsense, it's so voluptuous that you're grateful to be watching it anyway.

A real movie, rich and atmospheric, savoring its disreputable characters and their human weaknesses.

Not all movies can be stark, difficult and obscure. Sometimes in a quite ordinary way a director can reach out and touch us.

A well-crafted example of a film of pure sensation. I do not mind admitting I was enthralled.

One of the strengths of this film is that it never pauses to explain.

To see this film's footage from the '70s is to see the beginning of much of pop and fashion iconography for the next two decades.

If you understand who the characters are and what they're supposed to represent, the performances are right on the money.

"Willem Dafoe is Max Schreck." I put quotes around that because it's not just a line for a movie ad but the truth: He embodies the Schreck of "Nosferatu" so uncannily that when real scenes from the silent classic are slipped into the frame, we don't notice a difference.

Lumbers a little on its way to a preordained conclusion, but is intriguing for its glimpses of backstage life in shabby German postwar vaudeville, and for Dietrich's performance, which seems to float above the action as if she's stepping fastidiously across gutters.

The film's title is appropriate. A desperate Catholicism flavors the doomed city.

It may be that a relationship like the one here between Rosalba and Fernando is impossible in real life. All the more reason for this movie.

So rich in atmosphere it makes Western films look pale and underpopulated.

The movie is not tidy. Like its heroine, it doesn't follow the rules.

There is anguish here that makes "American Beauty" pale by comparison.

Not an easy film and is for those few moviegoers who approach a serious movie almost in the attitude of prayer.

Routinely called Tarkovsky's reply to Kubrick's "2001" -- But Kubrick's film is outward, charting man's next step in the universe, while Tarkovsky's is inward, asking about the nature and reality of the human personality.

Warren Beatty's Bulworth made me laugh -- and wince.

Nunez has a gift for finding the essence, the soul, of his actors.

The texture of the film is enough to recommend it, even apart from the story.

There is a kind of horror movie that plays so convincingly we don't realize it's an exercise in pure style. ''Halloween'' is an example, and John Dahl's Joy Ride is another.

There really is a little something here for everyone: music and culture, politics and passion, crime and intrigue, history and even the backstage intrigue of the auction business.

Not about murder in the literal sense, although that seems a possibility. It is about a man who would like to kill his father, and who may have been killed spiritually by his father.

The Circle is all the more depressing when we consider that Iran is relatively liberal compared to, say, Afghanistan under the Taliban.

Anyone who loves movies is likely to love Cinema Paradiso.

It has more intelligence than heart, and is more clever than enlightening. But it is never boring, and there are moments when it reminds us of how sexy the movies used to be, back in the days when speech was an erogenous zone.

Too many films about the dead involve mourning, and too few involve laughter. Yet at lucky funerals there is a desire to remember the good times.

Director Phil Alden Robinson and his writers, Paul Attanasio and Daniel Pyne, do a spellbinding job of cranking up the tension, they create a portrait of convincing realism, and then they add the other stuff because, well, if anybody ever makes a movie like this without the obligatory Hollywood softeners, audiences might flee the theater in despair.

Whoever cast De Niro and Grodin must have had a sixth sense for the chemistry they would have; they work together so smoothly, and with such an evident sense of fun, that even their silences are intriguing.

Morris' visual style in The Thin Blue Line is unlike any conventional documentary approach. Although his interviews are shot straight on, head and shoulders, there is a way his camera has of framing his subjects so that we look at them very carefully, learning as much by what we see as by what we hear.

The characters are allowed to be smart, to react in unexpected ways, and to be more concerned with doing the right thing than with doing the expedient or even the lustful thing.

So perceptive and mature it makes similar films seem flippant. The performances are on just the right note, scene after scene, for what needs to be done.

It's also interesting to see how little screen time the final disco competition really has, considering how large it looms in our memories.

The sweetest and most openhearted love fable since "The Princess Bride."

What Burton has made is a film which celebrates Wood more than it mocks him, and which celebrates, too, the zany spirit of 1950s exploitation films - in which a great title, a has-been star and a lurid ad campaign were enough to get bookings for some of the oddest films ever made.

While the surface of his film sparkles with sharp, ironic dialogue, deeper issues are forming, and Chasing Amy develops into a film of touching insights.

You can see how this movie could have been jacked up into a one-level action picture, but what makes it special is how Thornton modulates the material.

Surprisingly touching.

What is most wonderful about Man on the Moon, a very good film, is that it remains true to Kaufman's stubborn vision.

One of the most complex and visually interesting science fiction movies in a long time.

Movies like this are not for everyone, but arrive like private messages for their own particular audiences.

Amores Perros will be too much for some filmgoers, just as "Pulp Fiction" was and "Santa Sangre" certainly was, but it contains the spark of inspiration.

A dark, grisly, horrifying and intelligent thriller.

The beauty of the film is in its quietness.

The whole movie is quiet, introspective, thoughtful.

The movie reveals its serious undertones (with commentary by the Greek chorus, which occasionally breaks into song and dance) while at the same time developing a plot that lends itself to slapstick.

A harrowing look at institutional cruelty, perpetrated by the Catholic Church in Ireland, and justified by a perverted hysteria about sex.

Whether the protest movement hastened the end of the Vietnam War is hard to say, but it is likely that Lyndon Johnson's decision not to run for re-election was influenced by the climate it helped to create.

Drew me in from the opening shots. Byler reveals his characters in a way that intrigues and even fascinates us, and he never reduces the situation to simple melodrama, which would release the tension. This is like a psychological thriller, in which the climax has to do with feelings, not actions.

The strength of the thriller genre is that it provides stories with built-in energy and structure. The weakness is that thrillers often seem to follow foreseeable formulas. Frears and his writer, Steve Knight, use the power of the thriller and avoid the weaknesses in giving us, really, two movies for the price of one.

The film is poetic and erotic, creepy and melodramatic, overwrought and sometimes mocking, as if F. W. Murnau's "Nosferatu" (1922) had a long-lost musical version.

Both hilarious and sorrowful.

It is just as well that Last Crusade will indeed be Indy's last film. It would be too sad to see the series grow old and thin, like the James Bond movies.

Exists on a knife edge between comedy and sadness. There are big laughs, and then quiet moments when we're touched.

The movie is a dazzling song and dance extravaganza, with just enough words to support the music and allow everyone to catch their breath between songs.

As for myself, I think he made it all up and never killed anybody. Having been involved in a weekly television show myself, I know for a melancholy fact that there is just not enough time between tapings to fly off to Helsinki and kill for my government.

What made Shackleton's adventure so immediate to later generations was that he took along a photographer, Frank Hurley, who shot motion picture film and stills.

Nick Nolte plays a great shambling wreck of a wounded Hemingway hero in The Good Thief, a film that's like a descent into the funkiest dive on the wrong side of the wrong town.

A new documentary about the life of this producer who put together one of the most remarkable winning streaks in Hollywood history, and followed it with a losing streak that almost destroyed him. It's one of the most honest films ever made about Hollywood.

It's the kind of movie you know you can trust, and you give yourself over to affection for these characters who are so lovingly observed.

Stevie seems destined to end the way it does, and is the more courageous and powerful for it. A satisfying ending would have been a lie.

Who is this movie for? Not for most 13-year-olds, that's for sure. The R rating is richly deserved, no matter how much of a lark the poster promises. Maybe the film is simply for those who admire fine, focused acting and writing.

An imperfect but deeply involving and beautifully made Western.