We are in the presence of a new classic.

See this film immediately.

To fall in love with it, viewers only have to be receptive to a movie that examines the ties that bind with grace, wit and depth.

Filmmakers from Jacques Rivette to Hou Hsiao-hsien have treated the City of Light like Alice’s rabbit hole; writer-director Hong Sang-soo similarly embraces the fantasy, but goes one step further in this extraordinary character study by fully erasing the line that separates the actual from the fictional.

Sokurov, who also acted as director of photography, films the character and his surroundings with the eye of a newly arrived visitor to another world.

It’s likely that only Herzog would dare to, and succeed at, resolving this singular cinematic object by contemplating the fate of an abandoned basketball.

Strangely enough, our knowledge of what’s to come makes Word Is Out that much more affecting, because it shows that there were—and are—pockets of peace amid the brutality of an ongoing civil-rights struggle.

Jersey Shore may be the hyped example of trashy onscreen “reality,” but this portrait of an upstate working-poor family forsakes guilty-pleasure exploitation and simply wows you in every other way.

Stunning, eerily atmospheric.

Sly and suggestive, Lourdes is a cosmic black comedy that bumps up against the metaphysical.

Why do we care? Because never before have the steps to thugdom, as depressing as that destination may be, been so rigorously detailed, neither romanticized nor negated. Don’t miss.

This is Young in his playroom, grabbing his toys at random while indulging his every antimelodic whim, and Demme’s off-the-cuff approach makes for the perfect aesthetic complement.

The most impressive aspect of Breillat’s feature is that it agitates like the best fairy tales, seducing us with otherworldliness before sticking the knife in and permanently inscribing the moral.

The meanings of Close-Up shift, subtly and profoundly, with every viewing; the only certainty is that its rewards are boundless.

That rarest of art documentaries, one that actually leaves viewers with a better sense of the gifted versus the phony.

World on a Wire is the discovery of the season, rarely screened in America but very much a key chapter in Fassbinder's story--a step toward bigger budgets and slicker production values, yet clarifying of his core artistic legacy.

Again, Granik has foregrounded a bold woman, expertly balanced between fearlessness and Ree's own private nervousness.

How perfectly perverse: In a summer crammed with sequels, remakes, '80s nostalgia and the frustrated sense of "What else y'got?" comes the most original nightmare in years.

Alain Resnais's mind-bending new feature.

The attention to visuals is above and beyond what most vérité is capable of; doing double duty as the film's cinematographer, Fan demonstrates a pitch-perfect photojournalistic eye.

Is Joaquin Phoenix putting us on? After watching the terrifying, near-brilliant exposé I'm Still Here, in which the Oscar nominee's public and private unraveling becomes a sick joke, the question doesn't matter.

It's a grandly entertaining reminder of everything we used to go to the movies for (and still can't get online): sparkling dialogue, thorny situations, soulful performances, and an unusually open-ended and relevant engagement with a major social issue of the day: how we (dis)connect.

Though it runs an epic five-and-a-half hours (it was made for French TV), Carlos books like no film since "Goodfellas." You will not be bored, ever.

Indeed, you leave the film feeling like Wiseman has given you a glimpse of one of those ephemeral ports in a storm to which all of us retreat at times.

Amer could exist only as a movie, not as a novel or a pop song. If you give it a whirl, you won't simply get drunk on its immediacy; you may throw out plot and character altogether.

Paradoxically, this is not a tale about summoning inner strength, but about shedding pride. Sometimes, there's no choice.

Shoah's ultimate legacy, however, is being the final word on the Final Solution-one that renders every well-intentioned dramatic re-creation of such horrors into repulsive Ausch-kitsch by comparison.

Blue Valentine has a quiet, resigned wisdom to it.

These characters are more than what we see on the surface, and it's thanks to Leigh's rigorous yet generous eye that we never just gawk at the drama.

Its stunningly composed images showing how Isaac is himself something of a ghost-given to staring off into the distance, being condescended to by those around him, a man perpetually outside the times. What he needs is to take that one extra step toward his spectral siren; the scene in which he does so might be one of the most exhilarating visions of death's sweet embrace ever filmed.

What you see and hear always seems perfectly natural, even if you can't exactly say why. Who needs words when you have cinema?

Thus comes My Perestroika's most sophisticated idea: Day-to-day family struggles have a way of trumping even the most profound political change. Don't miss this.

The movie's true brilliance comes from its portrayal of how the world curls around you in the grip of heartache-every song on the radio, every face you see, every story you're told reflecting only what you've lost.

A staggering political drama that could put you in mind of the intimate sweep of Bernardo Bertolucci, Incendies feels like a mighty movie in our midst.

Shindô concocts a stylistic mix of odd experimental flourishes, female nudity, Soviet-style close-ups and baldly sentimental melodrama to emphasize the toll this disaster took; its cup may runneth over, yet the stark vibe is impossible to shake.

A classically structured rampage that bears serious comparison to the definitive greats of Akira Kurosawa, 13 Assassins will floor connoisseurs of action, mood and the dignity of a pissed-off scowl.

The Tree of Life enthralls right from the start.

Quietly, though, this amuse-bouche of a setup (culled from six episodes of BBC television) blooms into a meal of majestic agony. Coogan and Brydon's competitive bursts of celebrity impressions - Michael Caine comes in for special attention - take on a tone of clingy desperation, as does their jockeying for status in taunts of love, marriage and career.

It may be time to stop calling Nicolas Roeg's sexed-up sci-fi film that vaguely demeaning term - a cult classic - and start addressing it as what it is: the most intellectually provocative genre film of the 1970s.

The final Harry Potter movie, above all others, supplies Radcliffe with the gravitas of not just an epic story come to completion, but some real dramatic heft. Not so bad for a Hogwarts dropout.

Starring a tough-minded band of scrappy teens who actually do some solving, it's the movie "Super 8" wanted to be - or should have been.

Phenomenally sad yet exhilarating.

Funny and heartbreaking, this is a movie that would have made the '80s-era Jonathan Demme, attuned to American anxieties, blush with pride.

An epic indictment of media manipulation, this avant-doc delivers its coup de grâce once the camera finally demands accountability - leaving the disgraced despot staring into the lens, and the abyss of history staring back into him.

Drive feels like some kind of masterpiece - it's as pure a version of the essentials as you're likely to see.

And though not all of Lonergan's conceits work on a scene-by-scene basis (an upper-crust womanizer played by Jean Reno skews a bit too close to caricature), the film has a cumulative power-solidified by a devastating opera-house finale-that's staggering. This is frayed-edges filmmaking at its finest.

Nichols has said that the idea for the film emerged from a free-floating anxiety that he sensed in the world at large, the feeling that everything we treasure in life could be lost in an instant. That sensation permeates this strikingly original movie - especially its enigmatic mind-fuck of a finale, which will haunt you for several lifetimes.

In lesser hands, this could have easily been some seriously detestable John Wayne jingoism. But via Fiennes, the film is a spiky and complex counterweight to Hollywood sentiment and indie cynicism alike.

The Cold War is over, but director Tomas Alfredson (Let the Right One In) and his collaborators have brought those suspicion-fueled days to vivid life in this masterful adaptation of John le Carré's beloved 1974 spy novel.

The movie toggles between two periods-before and after a catastrophe-and, were it not for Swinton's magnetism, it would be unbearable. Instead, you'll want to stay for the wallop.

The drama it might remind you most of, oddly enough, is "Six Degrees of Separation," also about the snowballing connections between unlikely people. And as in that urban clash, the bedrock of it all is social responsibility, ever crumbling and rebuilding. A total triumph.

It's hardly the first movie to deal with thimble-size protagonists, but it's one of few animated fairy tales to genuinely transport the audience into their world and, in the process, let us see our own with fresh awe and respect.

Sure it is - and a great one at that.

A dream, indeed. Sure to delight foodies and cinephiles alike.

Those Dardenne brothers…still making great movies with second-nature ease.

There are moments when The Raid: Redemption doesn't feel like an action movie so much as pure action itself, delivered in strong, undiluted doses and with the sort of creative one-upmanship capable of rejuvenating a stale, seen-it-all genre.

The tunes, flooding every frame, remain perfect.

Brava, Mia! The exceedingly talented Ms. Hansen-Løve (the writer-director of Father of My Children) is sure to win many more fans with her latest feature, an incisive, exhilaratingly frank examination of l'amour lost.

Matthew McConaughey finally locates his perfect métier as the town's Fordian skeptic, a district attorney who smells a rat.

Rare is the profile that captures so much oddness with so little judgment. You owe yourself a chance to be challenged.

This time around, the director documents a 2011 Young solo show in Toronto (the musician's birthplace), but in an intentionally fractured way.

It's McConaughey who is the real revelation: All Grim Reaper strut and cutthroat stare, he savors each of Letts's vividly ghoulish lines.

It is the richly evocative performances of Marion (aggressive yet enticing) and Merhar (wearing world-weariness like an aged suit) that cut deepest.

This is a drama about finding one's self-worth; you simply have to see it.

The true value of the film is universal: These kids study the knotty viral science, pressure doctors into taking daring, inventive steps and make their cause a global emblem.

A paranoid police procedural, a perverse parable about the corrupting elements of power, and a candidate for the greatest predated Patriot Act movie ever, Elio Petri's stunning thriller makes no attempt to hide the culprit behind the film's grisly murder.

Defiantly intellectual, complex and true to the shifting winds of real-world governance, Lincoln is not the movie that this election season has earned-but one that a more perfect union can aspire to.

Wang has made a confidently intimate movie that is devastatingly larger-than-life.

Remains a primo example that cinema actually traffics in truthiness 24 frames per second.

An aggressively unpleasant man somehow lands a perfect series of gigs in this rudely funny documentary: first as a pounding rock drummer who revolutionized the field; then as a fearless, rage-filled polo player; and finally as an impatient interviewee.

The details are gripping, presented with respect for an audience's intelligence.

It isn't until the story reaches its fancifully abstract final passages, where cinema displaces music as Douglas's weapon of choice, that Chase's reverie reveals itself as a particularly exceptional exploration of how art ceases being an idle hobby and becomes an obsessive vocation.

There's influential, and then there's this 1953 microbudgeted beauty, one that's made its way into the DNA of everything from cinema vérité to the French New Wave.

The essential thrust here is both knowing and undeniable: No is pitched at the pivot point when the image makers were brazen enough to push ideology to the side. Considering how high the stakes were, it’s amazing they almost didn’t get the gig.

Even this early in his career, Godard knew how to make audiences viscerally experience and contemplate things they might otherwise not have wanted to.

Voyage to Italy is the kind of movie that makes those unhappily in love feel understood. And even if that’s not you (congratulations), it’s still possible to groove on Rossellini’s stranger-in-a-strange-land psychodrama.

Wheatley, underplaying his stylishness, goes for a subtle national satire about geeks gone wild, and that’s the fun here: On as mild-mannered a vacation as two Brits might devise, a killer comes along—and, after a while, is politely welcomed in, the kettle simmering.

Polley has gone further into the thorny subject of forgiveness than any of her peers. Her movies ache with ethical quandary; Stories We Tell aches the most.

That’s the subtle level this movie operates on, and by the time it arrives at its powerhouse climax, a ruinous argument in a hotel room where all lingering doubts are finally and furiously outed, there’s nowhere left for them to ramble. They’re pinned down and have to improvise, but this glorious movie has infinite space to roam.

There is always an interesting tension in Cameron's work between masculine and feminine qualities. When it finally hits the fan here, we're in for the mother of all battles.

A darkly stylish horror film.

And then, Robert Duvall appears—or, should I say, insinuates himself out of the muck. Cagily, his character wends his way into the story, played by the one American actor who might best understand the limits of bluster. “It’s foolish to ask for luxuries in times like these,” he mutters in the Duvall twang, the weather and indignity beaten into him, and The Road suddenly feels major.

Spelling may not be Quentin Tarantino’s forte, but his grasp of language (both verbal and visual) is peerless.

When violence eventually rears its ugly head again, the effect is as anticlimactic as the movie’s title is misleading. Brief bliss is a red herring; there’s only a lifetime of pain left in such acts’ wakes.

Rousing, devastating, invigorating, painful, joyful, soulful--all those adjectives don’t even begin to describe Passing Strange, but it’s a start.

Anne Fontaine’s biopic transforms the designer’s early life into highbrow guilty-pleasure gold.

What follows is pulp made near-profound through director Jonathan Mostow’s sure-handed guidance.

Marcia Gay Harden is the picture’s treasure; watching her swell with concern at her daughter’s choices, you understand how hard it is to let go.

Unlike "The Wrestler," which Siegel scripted, Big Fan has a way of making a socially marginal figure seem oddly charismatic without stacking the sympathy deck.

Would be fascinating by virtue of its subject alone. But the filmmaker wisely emphasizes how Harris also represents something bigger; this isn’t just the story of one man but also the dawning of the virtual über alles age and the death of privacy.

Perkins asks us to bask silently in the majesty of an artist in his element; in one unforgettable shot, Francis stands atop a newly finished canvas, utterly transfixed. It’s a stirring snapshot of that strange space where the act of creating can be a religious experience.

Clearly, Pixar’s genius for adventurous storytelling continues unabated.

Harmony is a finely tuned comedy, complete with precisely scripted jokes and comic set pieces that swerve toward the playfully perverse.

The results do justice to a complex genius whose impact can scarcely be overstated.

If you can roll with Almereyda’s free-form vibe, you’ll find the docu-essay’s cumulative effect goes a long way toward proving his thesis

Ferrara’s unconventional methods only manage to serve Chelsea on the Rocks, his loving portrait of Manhattan’s boho landmark, the Chelsea Hotel.

Far more deserving of the hoopla Mike Figgis received for his single-take, multicamera drama "Timecode" (2000), Finnish visual artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s experimental narrative truly pushes forward the possibilities of split-screen cinema.

The movie’s b&w images of craggy landscapes and shirtless young men have never looked more vibrant.