Amy Taubin

Time has tamed some of the terror and eroticism of Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, but it’s still a haunting thriller about guilt and the supernatural. What’s notable (more notable even than the much celebrated bedroom scene between Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, in which sex is displaced into memory even as it’s taking place) is that Roeg’s use of the death of a child as the focus of a horror film never feels exploitative.

Crouching Tiger's dramatic line is so blurry that the central character is only a bystander to the climactic fight between forces of good and evil.

Along with Raoul Coutard's radiant cinematography, what makes the film extraordinary is Karina, the pure curves of her face a contradiction to the marionette angularity of her body.

Probably more terse than it needs to be, but the dramatic line has an elegance and drive that reinforces the unexpected turns of the story.

What's most stunning about Raging Bull is the tension between 19th-century melodrama and 20th-century psychodrama, the narrative form brought into being by the conjunction of Freudian theory and the mechanics of the movie camera.

It soon becomes evident just how inane a film this is.

Pretty much a mess, but it also has a couple of long stretches that are extremely daring in that they reveal black family dynamics we've never seen on screen before.

Rampling has never been as beautiful, not to mention as emotionally naked, nuanced, and affecting as she is here.

The 7Up series is thus one of the rare documentaries to have had a positive practical effect on the life of at least one of its subjects.

Eccentric and thoroughly winning.

Seems like a TV movie. A well-written, sympathetically acted TV movie, to be sure, but so timid and clumsy in its deployment of picture, sound, and editing that you have to wonder if executive producer Martin Scorsese bothered to give notes.

A pop culture document for a mass audience.

What gives the film extra weight is the sense that these are not just actors trying to enhance their careers but real people seizing a chance for immortality.

It's this strategy (however unconscious), and not simply a lack of directing talent, that makes Hedwig so relentlessly assaultive, heavy-handed, and emotionally monochromatic.

Josh Aronson's thoroughly engrossing documentary Sound and Fury is as much about children's rights as it is about the impact of cochlear-implant technology on a family in which deafness runs through three generations.

Although I don't begrudge Borchardt his year of fame, what he doesn't seem to understand about his exploitation creeps me out.

It could be described as the most gripping political thriller to hit the big screen in many years, although given the events it depicts through interviews, photographs, and news footage, the words "gripping" and "thriller" have inappropriately frivolous and commercial associations.

A spare, formally ingenious, journalistically acute piece of filmmaking.

The General is a refined, traditional movie about a character who is never more traditional than when he imagines himself outside the law. It’s a great paradox, but it barely comes alive on the screen.

Restrained, tough, and subtle enough to be as engrossing on the second viewing as it was on the first.

Hal Hartley fans, Flirt may be too slight and schematic. [13 Aug 1996]

A film of rare tenderness and mystery.

It may seem perverse to fault a movie for being too accurate, but when surface accuracy is coupled with tunnel vision about self and society the result is a wee bit irritating.

It seems like a more witty, wise, and succinct "Magnolia."

Unabashedly personal and uncool...but between you and me, dear reader, I love it to death.

There are long stretches in Sexy Beast that are so exhilarating it feels churlish to dwell on its flaws.

It remains one of the most wrenching films about adolescent angst, thanks largely to the performance of Phil Daniels.

There are big crowd scenes, intimate close-ups, and lots of bug’s-eye point-of-view shots. Call me gullible: I believed every second of it.