John Powers

Filmmaker Lixin Fan's Last Train Home documents the journey 130 million migrant workers make back to their rural villages every Chinese New Year. But the movie is not only about families traveling home -- it's about China's modernization. Critic John Powers says the images in the "epic and intimate" movie are absolutely ravishing."

The French outlaw Jacques Mesrine, who terrorized France and killed 39 people, is the subject of the thrilling Mesrine: Killer Instinct, which stars Vincent Cassell as Mesrine and Gerard Depardieu as a Parisian crime boss. Critic John Powers applauds Cassell's acting, saying it "ranks with the best of DeNiro or Pacino or, more recently, Daniel Day-Lewis."

In 1963, French filmmaker Henri-Georges Clouzot decided to make a movie that would reinvent the movies. It was called Inferno, and the unfinished film was an enormous failure. But a new documentary about the disastrous project is anything but -- critic John Powers says Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno is "cinematically thrilling."