question: Rich in atmosphere and anchored by a powerful performance from Nicolas Cage, Joe is a satisfying return to form for its star -- as well as director David Gordon Green.

numbered reviews: 1. Cage gives us a complex portrait of a formerly bad man trying to do the right thing in all his imperfect and messy glory.
2. Joe is elegiac and wistful, but it also is loose enough to let Cage run a little free.
3. Nicolas Cage is as if the question "Turn down for what?" took human form and then starred in a bunch of direct-to-DVD thrillers. For him, there is no such thing as a 'phoned-in' performance.
4. What lifts Joe above similar stories, besides the acting, is Green's intense attentiveness to setting and atmosphere.
5. Green doesn't take the obvious route, looping in and out of a series of incidents instead of chaining them too tightly in cause and effect, creating real intrigue around Joe and his impulse to destroy.
6. Green's soul-baring Southern noir has much to say about those who speak with their fists and is a masterwork of threatening melancholy.
7. Moody, melancholy and well-intentioned, Joe works better as a character study than the melodramatic parable that it eventually embraces.
8. Here is a seething piece of social-realist Southern gothic, featuring a powerful performance from a big and broodingly bearded Nicolas Cage.
9. Green is as observant as ever, and he not only conjures up a vivid, self-contained universe, but peoples it with fascinating, damaged characters. No matter how lowdown they may appear, Green seems to understand their humanity.
10. a beautifully, painfully wrought drama about violence and redemption


question: A modern classic, Alien blends science fiction, horror and bleak poetry into a seamless whole.

numbered reviews: 1. Better than most of today's big budget sci-fi/horror films.
2. It certainly doesn't look like a 24-year-old movie.
3. It's a chilling, slow-paced, space horror movie using the same formula as the B-films of the 1950s.
4. Alien proved that material derided as B-movie fodder could be handled with finesse and glossy production values, without diminishing the thrills or polishing over the hard-edged horror.
5. Dated but still extremely scary. Not for younger kids.
6. Science fiction horror doesn't get any better than this.
7. Ridley Scott's Alien is nothing short of a masterpiece. Technically brilliant, tense, horrifying and visually breathtaking, there's not a moment in this B-monster movie that doesn't excel well beyond the usual genre trappings.
8. It is depressing to watch an expensive, crafty movie that never soars beyond its cold desire to score the big bucks.
9. The limited strengths of its staple sci-fi horrors always derived from either the offhand organic/ Freudian resonances of its design or the purely (brilliantly) manipulative editing and pacing of its above-average shock quota.
10. An old-fashioned scary movie set in a highly realistic sci-fi future, made all the more believable by expert technical craftmanship.


question: Nouvelle Vague master Claude Chabrol balances subtle stabs of humor and biting class criticism to explore a love story and the seedier side of the haute bourgeois.

numbered reviews: 1. Sex, murder, insanity, perversity -- A Girl Cut in Two has it all, yet it stands as a singularly classy and sophisticated drama.
2. Chabrol has always been more interested in sensibility than sense, in discourse on fashion and form than in the narrative possibilities of function, and on the rich hypocrisies of the wealthy.
3. This is one of Mr. Chabrol's strangest films, but he still makes a ripple in his ocean.
4. It's a very long way to go for a punch line, but Claude Chabrol fearlessly meanders along for the two hours it takes him to get there
5. A pitch-black fusion of dark comedy, icy melodrama and satirical sideswipes at the class system, held together with an absorbing lead performance.
6. One keeps hoping that some of that sinister Chabrolian wit will enliven the film's smooth surface, but alas, it never does.
7. Bordering on the surreal, Chabrol's latest film investigates conflicting desires in a woman in love. The old meets the new and the quandary remains unresolved.
8. Never more than semi-plausible.
9. Most people won't care enough about these people or believe in their relationships to sit out all 115 minutes of this icily mannered film that continually hints at darker, more subversive themes of sado-masochism than it dares to explore.
10. An elegant, darkly amusing effort that relishes taking digs at the middle-classes while leaving its characters' supposedly perverse acts firmly to our imaginations.


question: A comedy that tackles outrageous subjects (pornography, transvestism, bisexuality and drug abuse) with both grace and mischievous glee.

numbered reviews:
1. We should be thankful for the wit and style of Joaquín Oristrell's film.
2. Unconscious is relentlessly wacky but robustly performed...
3. As unpredictable and comic as the best of Oscar Wilde's plays.
4. A well-observed, sideways portrait of the day, Unconscious is a little gem.
5. A distinctive, sharp-witted and good-looking period comedy.
6. The comedy is too broad, lacking the subtlety that the film's high-brow intentions require.
7. The Freudian farce Unconscious is paced so breathlessly that it keeps you panting to keep up with each new plot twist.
8. Everything you always wanted to know about sex, and then some. A bawdy, early Woody Allen-esque slapstick comedy!
9. Film is ultimately unsure of what it wants to say about modernity, psychoanalysis and all it liberates.
10. Oristrell is a modern day Woody Allen, although with a better sense of rhythm and naughty buffoonery. You'll laugh from corners of your subconscious you didn't know you had.