19. Let It Ride

"It really is the kind of movie they don't make anymore, on several counts. First of all, it's a Runyonesque race-track comedy, a genre one might well have thought past reviving. Second, its humor is gentle and unpretentious: There's no going for hard, slam-bang yocks or elaborate set-piece catastrophes requiring a legion of stunt people. Believe it or not, the abundant humor in the sterling screenplay Ernest Morton adapted from Jay Cronley's 'Good Vibes' actually derives from the foibles of human nature and not from special effects."

--excerpt from a full review in the L.A. Times


 

18. Only Lovers Left Alive

"What all these vampires share is a tendency to swoon. When slaked, they fall back, crimson mouths agape, and the camera hungers after them. In the opening shots, it even spins and descends simultaneously, as if beckoned into a vortex. Swooning, prompted as it is by fear and desire alike, has a distinguished place in the history of horror. (For further details, consult the opening of Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum.”) The master swooners, though, were the Romantic poets, and the pining or sickened souls of whom they wrote, and, in that light, I’m not sure that Jarmusch has really made a vampire film at all, still less a horror flick. “Only Lovers Left Alive” is, at heart, a Byronic riff. It may start with red Gothic lettering in the credits, as if in homage to old Hammer pictures, but Adam and Eve are more like junkies than like predators, and their eternal addiction—to each other, not just to hemoglobin—allows them to float above the fads of common folk." 

--excerpt from a full review in The New Yorker

17. Slow West

"Slow West could easily turn punishing, like many a post-modern Western. One of Smit-McPhee’s earliest screen roles was as The Boy in John Hillcoat’s adaptation of The Road, which took the grit and misery of the westward trek to its logical extreme by setting it in a dystopian future. Slow West is salted with necessary cynicism—early on it’s clear to Silas, and the viewer, that Jay’s interest in Rose is very one-sided—and features Ben Mendelsohn as Payne, a brooding, cold-blooded bounty hunter also on Rose’s trail. But the film never loses sight of the bizarre humor of Jay’s situation (trekking through the wilderness looking for a girl who barely remembers him) and the real charm of his friendship with Silas, even though Fassbender’s dialogue consists mostly of growls." --excerpt from a full review in The Atlantic

16. Mountain Patrol

"What is remarkable is that this film is based on a true story, and filmed on the actual locations. These are hard, violent men, risking their lives to save an animal species. In appearance and behavior, they could be commandos, insurgents, terrorists. The poachers are no less desperate, and the film opens with the murder of a patrolman. In a strange way, the patrol and the poachers feel a bond; they are the only humans on this high plateau, both drawn there by a fascination for the antelope, and they share an existence no one else knows."  --excerpt from a full review by Roger Ebert on RogerEbert.com

15. Star Wars: Episode VII-The Force Awakens

"...an exhilarating ride, filled with archetypal characters with plausible psychologies, melodramatic confrontations fueled by soaring emotions, and performances that can be described as good, period, rather than 'good, for 'Star Wars.'

And it’s a treat to see beloved older characters placed beside new ones in situations that respect Lucas' myth-making but correct his flaws as a storyteller, including the default whiteness of his casts. Not only have Abrams and his co-writers, Lawrence Kasdan and Michael Arndt, centered the story on a young woman and a man of color (played respectively by Daisy Ridley and John Boyega), they've made them so compelling and quirky that the film never seems to be putting an up-to-date wrapping on moldy clichés." --excerpt from a full review on RogerEbert.com

 

13. Hero

"Zhang Yimou's 'Hero' is beautiful and beguiling, a martial arts extravaganza defining the styles and lives of its fighters within Chinese tradition. It is also, like 'Rashomon,' a mystery told from more than one point of view; we hear several stories which all could be true, or false. The movie opens, like many folk legends, with a storyteller before the throne of an imperious ruler, counting on his wits to protect his life." --excerpt from a full review on RogerEbert.com

 

14. Guardians of the Galaxy

"Blessed with a loose, anarchic B-picture soul that encourages you to enjoy yourself even when you're not quite sure what's going on, the scruffy "Guardians" is irreverent in a way that can bring the first "Star Wars" to mind, in part because it has some of the most unconventional heroes — would you believe a raccoon and a tree? — this side of the Mos Eisley cantina." --excerpt from a full review in The Los Angeles Times.

12. Brick

"'You have preserved in your own lifetime, sir, a way of life that was dead before you were born." --Harold the butler in Elaine May's 'A New Leaf' (1971) 

You will forgive me for reaching back 35 years for a quotation to open this review of 'Brick,' since the movie itself is inspired by hard-boiled crime novels written by Dashiell Hammett between 1929 and 1934. What is unexpected, and daring, is that 'Brick' transposes the attitudes and dialogue of classic detective fiction to a modern Southern California high school. These are contemporary characters who say things like, 'I got all five senses and I slept last night. That puts me six up on the lot of you.' Or, 'Act smarter than you look, and drop it.'" --excerpt from a full review on RoberEbert.com

 

11. McCabe and Mrs. Miller

"It is not often given to a director to make a perfect film. Some spend their lives trying, but always fall short. Robert Altman has made a dozen films that can be called great in one way or another, but one of them is perfect, and that one is 'McCabe & Mrs. Miller' (1971). This is one of the saddest films I have ever seen, filled with a yearning for love and home that will not ever come -- not for McCabe, not with Mrs. Miller, not in the town of Presbyterian Church, which cowers under a gray sky always heavy with rain or snow. The film is a poem--an elegy for the dead." --excerpt from a full review by Roger Ebert on RoberEbert.com

 

10. Hanna

"Hanna is a first-rate thriller about the drawbacks of home schooling. As it opens, a teenage girl is in the act of killing a deer with her bow and arrow, and then as she's gutting the carcass, a man sneaks up behind and says, 'You're dead!' She engages in a fierce hand-to-hand battle with this man, who turns out to be her father. He has raised her as they lived alone deep in the forest in a house that looks like it was inspired by lots of gingerbread."  --Excerpt from a full review by Roger Ebert on RogerEbart.com

9. The Navigator

"The Navigator is remarkable because of its absorbing story that links medieval fears and fortunes to our times, while confirming director Vincent Ward as an original talent.

The story begins in Cumbria in 1348, the year of the Black Death. Young Griffin (Hamish McFarlane) is anxious for the return of his beloved, much-older brother Connor (Bruce Lyons) from the outside world. He is haunted by a dream about a journey, a quest to a great cathedral in a celestial city, and a figure about to fall from a steeple.

When his brother returns to the village with tales of impending doom, the two brothers, with four comrades, set out on the journey fired by Griffin’s prophetic dream. It takes them to a city of the late 1980s and on a mission against time if their village is to be saved."  --excerpt from a full review on Variety.com

[For some reason, the Spanish overdub trailer below seems to be the most readily available trailer on YouTube, so I am linking to it. This is an English language film, in its original version]  

8. Before the Rain

"This is one of the year's best films (1994), a brilliant directorial debut for a young man named Milcho Manchevski, born in Macedonia, educated at Southern Illinois University and now a New Yorker who made award-winning MTV videos before returning home to make this extraordinary film. Work like this is what keeps me going, month after month and film after film: After the junk with Chevy Chase and Adam Sandler, this is a reminder of the nobility that film can attain.

The movie is made in three parts, two in Macedonia, one in London. The story circles back on itself, something like 'Pulp Fiction,' and there is a paradox, a character who seems to be dead at a time he is still alive. Manchevski was not influenced by Quentin Tarantino; they were making their films simultaneously, and in 'Before the Rain' the circular structure has a deeper purpose; it shows that the cycle of hate and bloodshed will go on year after year, generation after generation, unless somehow men find the will to break with it."  --Excerpt from a full Rober Ebert review on RogerEbert.com

7. Die Farbe/ The Color Out of Space

"If you want to see a Lovecraft adaptation done right, you have to look into small, independent films, done by talented enthusiasts, rather than fodder produced by the Hollywood machine. THE WHISPERER IN DARKNESS was one such example, and now there's another, coming a bit surprisingly from Germany. DIE FARBE (The Color) is the first attempt to do something other than a cheap monster-fest out of Lovecraft's story 'The Colour out of Space' (1927). The movies 'inspired' by it so far have been largely nonsensical, conventional cheapies like DIE, MONSTER, DIE! (1965) and THE CURSE (1987). This new COLOR follows faithfully the words of the story, and makes a pretty good attempt at capturing its spirit, too." --excerpt from a full review on Screenanarchy.

6. The Snow Walker

"The Snow Walker lacks Never Cry Wolf's primal poetry, but it's hard to make the tundra look anything other than beautiful, and Smith smartly holds long shots of icy lakes and northern lights. And it helps to have Pepper, with his Martin Sheen/James Dean passionate cool, facing a barren landscape by strapping on his walking boots and heading for the hills." --excerpt from a full review on The A.V. Club

5. Sorcerer

"Friedkin's nightmarish vision of embryonic multinational conglomerates, filtered through the set-piece exigencies of genre filmmaking, stood no chance against audiences' emerging preference for fantasy-based pop spectacle in the summer of 1977, as Star Wars became the emblem for blockbuster, commercial filmmaking." --excerpt from a full review on Slant

4. Mad Max: Fury Road

"From its very first scenes, 'Fury Road' vibrates with the energy of a veteran filmmaker working at the top of his game, pushing us forward without the cheap special effects or paper-thin characters that have so often defined the modern summer blockbuster. Miller hasn’t just returned with a new installment in a money-making franchise. The man who re-wrote the rules of the post-apocalyptic action genre has returned to show a generation of filmmakers how they’ve been stumbling in their attempts to follow in his footsteps." --from a full review on RogerEbert.com

3. Shadow Dancer

"Shadow Dancer, about an IRA partisan recruited as an informant by MI5, creates a powerful mood of unease and sustains it for an hour and forty minutes. There are scattered moments of intense beauty throughout, thanks to Rob Hardy's widescreen photography, which tends to view people from either very far away or very close up, making you think about them as individuals and then as specks in a social panorama." --excerpt from a longer review on RogerEbert.com

2. The Good, the Bad, and the Weird

"Even if you are vaguely aware of Italian Spaghetti Western movies, this movie title still should ring a bell. “The Good, the Bad, the Weird” is inspired by Sergio Leone’s most famous “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” with Clint Eastwood. This movie is a Korean Western set in China’s Wild West lands of Manchuria (that technically are West of Korea). If this set-up sounds odd, well indeed it is. It is fun and unpredictable as it sounds." --excerpt from a full review on The Asian Cinema Blog 

1. Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter

"Inspired, disquietingly enough, by an urban legend, 'Kumiko The Treasure Hunter' does not wear the outlandishness of its premise on its sleeve. Rather, this new film from the Zellner brothers—writer Nathan and co-writer and director David, both of whom also act—plays out as a deliberate, somber character study that semi-eerily morphs into comedy of middle-American manners and then into something else again." --excerpt from Ebert.com review