Following its theatrical run, Mea Maxima Culpa debuts tonight on HBO at 9 p.m. Eastern. This review previously ran in The A.V. Club’s film section.

Every year provides plenty of films worth cherishing, but there are isolated scenes and moments, too, that are equally unforgettable. Sometimes they epitomize a film’s greatness, and other times they stand out as a flash of brilliance in a sea of mediocrity. Take last year, for example: Mission: Impossible—Ghost…

So far, The A.V. Club has looked at the best films of 2012 and put a spotlight on the films we consider to be the year’s most essential. Here are our picks for the worst the year had to offer.

From the gut-wrenching, step-by-step chronology of the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad to seafaring cultists practicing Scientology-like rituals in the wake of World War II to the 16th president twisting arms over the passing of the 13th Amendment, the best films of 2012 brought history to life with…

1. Alien (1979): “In space, no one can hear you scream.”
There’s some consensus that Alien has the single greatest tagline in movie history, and for good reason: It’s punchy, memorable, and perfectly evocative of Ridley Scott’s seminal horror film. The series would add Marines to take on the alien threat in the sequel,…

Loving the work artists produce doesn’t guarantee feeling the same way about their choices or personalities. It’s one of the more difficult aspects of fandom, grappling with the fact that someone whose output you admire may in other parts of life be less than admirable. For actor-comedian-writer-director Stephen Fry,…

Blending old-school kung-fu elements with a touch of noir and a plot that recalls A History Of Violence, Peter Chan’s Dragon is a drama about redemption masquerading as a martial-arts movie. This is mildly disappointing, since the film stars Donnie Yen (who also choreographed), and he can feel wasted onscreen whenever…

It feels unfair to call King Kelly a found-footage movie—its title character, who frequently turns the camera on herself and preens in its gaze like it’s a mirror, has every intention of making everything she shoots publicly available online. A webcam girl fixated on the upcoming launch of her own site, Kelly (Louisa…

Whether or not audiences are already familiar with the Catholic Church’s mishandling of sexual-abuse cases, Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence In The House Of God is primed to deliver a heady dose of outrage via a broad overview of systemic cover-ups tracing to the Vatican, as well as a specific and heartbreaking case in…

The brisk, earnest Chasing Ice documents nature photographer James Balog as he creates the Extreme Ice Survey, an ambitious study of glaciers using time-lapse cameras set up to take photos every half-hour of daylight in locations throughout Alaska, Greenland, Iceland, and Montana. But it’s also a film about a didactic…

Adolf Hitler didn’t have any officially recognized direct descendants, but the subjects of Hitler’s Children, a documentary by Israeli filmmaker Chanoch Zeevi, bear the surnames of many of his senior officials. They are the relatives of Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, Rudolf Höss, Hans Frank, and Amon Goeth, men who…

Pornographers and young-adult novelists alike would slap their foreheads in exasperation over Jack & Diane, the dreamy, abstract art movie writer-director Bradley Rust Gray made from the ripely commercial premise of a teenage lesbian werewolf romance. Starring Juno Temple as the English Diane and Riley Keough as the…

Josh Schwartz is the man behind the primetime teen soap-operatics of The O.C. and Gossip Girl, but his big-screen directorial debut takes place in the milder territory of the Nickelodeon Movies empire. Led by Victoria Justice, who hasn’t yet escaped from the kiddie network’s stable of wholesome, photogenic stars, Fun…

Last week, The A.V. Club took a look at the best films of the 1990s (a look that proved unexpectedly controversial). As a lark, we started talking about a companion list covering the best films of the 1890s. But the more we talked about it, the more it seemed like a good idea to turn back the clock to the very…

There’s an irresistible cinematic appeal to watching kids dedicate themselves to fundamentally non-kid-like practices like competitive ballroom dancing or studying etymology to ease their way in spelling bees. Following in the footsteps of earlier documentaries that chronicle such earnestly precocious behavior is …

Ponderous and heavy with its own importance, Simon And The Oaks is the kind of film that’s made for awards—it nabbed 13 nominations in Sweden’s equivalent of the Oscars last year. Adapted from a 1985 novel by Marianne Fredriksson and directed by Lisa Ohlin, the film spans the years during and after World War II, as…

Christophe Barratier, director of the sentimental hit The Chorus, returns with another tale of loveable Gallic ruffians and the stern-but-fond instructor guiding them in War Of The Buttons. For added shameless heartstring-tugging, the action takes place in occupied France, as a dimpled Jewish girl (Ilona Bachelier)…

Everyone plays against type in 3, 2, 1… Frankie Go Boom, none more so than Ron Perlman, who has a small role as a post-op transsexual hacker. The image of the burly, lantern-jawed actor in makeup and a wig, painting his toenails, is a terribly easy joke, but it’s the best one this otherwise abrasive comedy can manage.…

Getting eight critics with disparate tastes to come together for our Best Films Of The ’90s list wasn’t easy, and it naturally resulted in some painful omissions—some great films that didn’t quite make the Top 50, others that didn’t survive the second ballot, and still more that are personal favorites but didn’t have…

On Monday, we started counting down our top 50 films of the 1990s, which we tabulated by blind votes among the film-writing staff. Following parts one and two, here’s the last of the batch: our most acclaimed films of the decade.