question: With Revanche, Götz Spielmann has crafted a debut as surprising as it is suspenseful.

numbered reviews: 1. Tauntingly slow but hauntingly shot (and edited with crisp abruptness), it was a deserving nominee for Best Foreign Film at last year's Oscars.
2. This riveting study of desire, isolation, guilt and redemption bears the influence of both Robert Bresson and Michael Haneke, and proves surprisingly optimistic in its assessment of human weakness.
3. From pacing and composition to its frank attitude to sex and wonderfully open performances, the film is a largely pretension-free zone. A fine lesson in the art of storytelling.
4. It's a truly refreshing movie that justly received an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film.
5. It's a slow-burning Austrian thriller with no stars, no special effects and, by the looks of it, almost no budget. But sometimes a little goes a long way.
6. Aided by a terrific performance from Krisch and an exceptional ensemble cast, Revanche is a beautifully crafted psychological thriller that should firmly place Götz Spielmann on the world cinema map.
7. The film exerts a steady grip without charging head-first into thriller territory: there's a cool, cosmic irony to the way fate wheels around.
8. As good a thriller as you'll see this year.
9. Unsettling and at the same time genuinely moving, it's a superb psychological thriller...remarkable for its meticulous creation of mood.
10. The performers do terrifically understated work. Even in a scene of angry, anguished coupling, silence and stillness persist.


question: Despite Uma Thurman's comic skills, Motherhood's contrived set-ups and cliched jokes keep this comedy from delivering laughs -- or insights into modern parenting.

numbered reviews: 1. A pleasing, lighthearted look at the mommy wars.
2. [A] sharp comedy.
3. You can see the movie wants to comment on all the frustrations of urban motherhood, but it does so only shallowly. How did having children kill Eliza's "fiercely lyrical'' fiction career? The movie isn't that political or reflective.
4. Many films have been made about the perils of parenthood, but none with a more attractive and entertaining mom on the verge of a nervous breakdown than Uma Thurman in Motherhood.
5. So focuses on Eliza's need to look out for number one that [the film] obscures the reasons people become parents, winding up with a movie light on love and heavy on narcissism.
6. gets stuck in the starting gate, unsure of what kind of film it wants to be.
7. The lesson, I guess, is that it really sucks being a mom, but it's also incredibly unrewarding.
8. Misguided, cluttered, annoying mess of a dramedy, a film only moderately redeemed by the still-luminous Thurman, but even she is dragged down by a truly awful screenplay. Mothers still get no respect.
9. ...inept...ill-conceived, and amateurish...an insult to full time Mothers and motherhood.
10. Motherhood gives upper-middle-class whining a bad name.


question: Not all of its many intriguing ideas are developed, but The City of Lost Children is an engrossing, disturbing, profoundly memorable experience.

numbered reviews: 1. The City of Lost Children is a stunningly surreal fantasy, a fable of longing and danger, of heroic deeds and bravery, set in a brilliantly realized world of its own. It is one of the most audacious, original films of the year.
2. Lyrical, strange, gorgeous, and pretty darn hypnotic.
3. Falters under flabby direction and a weak script suffering from too many ingredients and not enough cooking.
4. Anyone looking to lose themselves in an engrossing fairy-tale world will be richly rewarded.
5. A visually stunning and intensely bizarre fairy tale.
6. A freakish visual delight
7. Watching the film is like leafing through a giant sketchbook crammed with intriguing ideas that can't all be comfortably fitted into the same master plan.
8. By turns funny, horrific and oddly sweet, there's really nothing out there that's quite like City of Lost Children.
9. The City of Lost Children is as visually striking and daringly offbeat as its predecessor.
10. Many people will probably not find themselves sympathetic to this movie's overachieving technological pretensions, while others will find it the best film in months or years.


question: Part biopic, part love story, The Theory of Everything rises on James Marsh's polished direction and the strength of its two leads.

numbered reviews:
1. Eddie Redmayne's captivating performance will be compared to Daniel Day Lewis's in "My Left Foot," but it is important to note how much life, joy and humor he brings to the role with little more than a cocked eyebrow, a few facial muscles and his eyes...
2. A strongly acted, handsomely crafted film that nonetheless feels bland and unsatisfying.
3. Redmayne and Jones are beautifully compatible as Hawking and his then-wife Jane as they navigate the ebb and flow of 25 years of their relationship.
4. This is sheer poppycock, of course, but it makes for fine drama, and that's all Cupid and Oscar care about.
5. The Theory Of Everything surpasses the standard biopic to become an unexpected and moving love story between Stephen and Jane Hawking. The acting is superb in this winning film.
6. On one side is Mr. Redmayne's remarkable presence. On the other is Ms. Jones, whose lovely freshness and calm intelligence complement everything her co-star does.
7. Stephen Hawking, a genius challenged by a progressive neurological disease, is a role that demands miracles of an actor. And Eddie Redmayne, in a landmark performance, delivers them.
8. The Theory Of Everything is a modest film, a simple film, but an honest and impressively-restrained one, and it should serve to launch Redmayne into rarefied air as an actor, deservedly so.
9. Marsh takes a complicated persona and reveals a range of dimensions. The result is an engaging biopic that is often quite moving.
10. It's disappointing to see Hawking's life slotted into the conventions of the biopic genre, from a meet-cute at a Cambridge party to a centerstage ovation for our genius hero.