Dazzling, scary and sentimental.

Strip away the French and Arabic subtitles, the French-prison setting and the Muslim-messianic title, and A Prophet, opening Friday at The Enzian, would still be the grittiest prison thriller in years.

This unblinking look at America's Red State Crystal Meth Belt is an instant Southern Gothic classic.

Engrossing and moving story of a alternately warm and combative relationship.

The finale to the Harry Potter saga is, like most of the films in the series, a bit of a slog. But it's a generally satisfying slog.

Moneyball is a thinking person's baseball movie, and a baseball fan's thinking movie.

13 Assassins is entirely too long and too talky. But the cat-and-mouse game of strategy, figuring out when and where to ambush the evil overlord's entourage, is fascinating.

That humor is a the delicious underpinning to whatever melodrama happens as these five connect and clash. And that humor is what reassures us, even at its darkest moments, that no matter how things work out for the adults, these kids are going to be all right.

If you're looking for a filmmaker to document, for all of humanity, "one of the greatest discoveries in the history of human culture," the great Werner Herzog is your guy.

A quietly compelling if not particularly emotional and sober-minded treatment of an infamous incident.

This brilliant contraption of a film could become the hit of the summer. It's a cinematic Rube Goldberg machine whose parts connect in audacious, witty ways. [04 July 1985, p.E.1]

There's a soap opera going on inside that tin can with a cannon.

Glibly put, this challenging time-skipping rumination is the big screen equivalent of watching that "Tree" grow.

The Descendants lets Payne show us the Other America and the Other Americans - little lives caught up in small but epic problems far away from the La La Land of Hollywood hype, sex and violence.

This performance reminds us that Bridges is that rare actor who has never had to make that apology. Crazy Heart lets him be every bit as grand as we’d hope him to be.

Here's a documentary so slick, novel, touching and outrageous that your first thought might be "This has to be fake."

It's rooting against grandma that drives this violent, hardhearted film, and waiting for the pride of lions she's created to devour her that gives Animal Kingdom its animal energy.

A stunning exercise in 3D and a delightful celebration of Scorsese's lifelong love of the movies, something he, like Hugo, developed on childhood.

Like Tati himself, The Illusionist feels like a relic of a different time.

Incendies is occasionally compelling, but also overlong and vexing in the ways it draws out a "shocking" conclusion that we unravel long before the characters do.

The riffing, the one-upsmanship, the off-the-cuff zingers and the singing (ABBA, a great favorite of Coogan's most famous creation, the dizzy talk show host Alan Partridge) make The Trip an easy-going trek down a road well-traveled by these two.

Haneke tells this tale a bit too patiently for my taste. But the metaphors are unmistakable, as is the power of the film’s message.

There are people, powerful people, who don't want old cases dug up. It's a tribute to the story's construction that the mystery only deepens, the more Benjamin digs.

It's a gritty, almost ugly to look at film, and Cianfrance isn't shy about including a random blast of unwarranted shaky footage.

One serious omission in the film - identifying what these seemingly prosperous alumni of the band do for a living and did with their lives.

This is a story about people, not politics. And perhaps because we can see the actors in closeup on the screen, that is even truer of the movie than the play. When you leave this film, you're not thinking, "My, what an important story!" When Driving Miss Daisy is over, you think, "I sure will miss those folks." [12 Jan. 1990, p.12]

Souffle-light and long on charm.

Hogancamp seems a pleasant, offbeat and intuitive fellow who probably takes all this less seriously than those who "discovered" him.