Anthony Lane

The work of both Babluani brothers is weirdly stilled and mature, already devoid of the need to show off--serves only to thicken the horror.

The result is a lively bout between bio-pic and fairy tale.

In the end, Lower City is never quite as energetic as it wants to be, touched by the strange, milky lethargy that steeps every waterfront film.

The gist of the critical response has been that The Tender Bar follows a well-worn path. Fair enough, but is that such a sin? (You should try the new Matrix movie. Now, that’s worn.) What counts is the firmness of the tread, and Clooney sets a careful but unloitering pace.

No one who was not laughably self-involved would agree to a project like 20,000 Days on Earth, and yet Cave, to his credit, comes most alive in his hymns to other selves.

The movie is fun, largely because it proposes that fun is the principal legacy of the Beatles.

What distinguishes the latest Cage freak-out is the care with which it’s paced; not until halfway through does he start to lose his hinge, and, even when his face is sprayed with blood, he keeps his glasses on, as if hoping to settle down with a book. Oh, and, if you’ve always wanted to watch him milk an alpaca, your time has come.

Rich in settling and unsettling, Past Lives, for all its coolness, provokes us with difficult questions.

Corbijn has an obsessive eye, and it suits the detail-crazy methods of Powell and Thorgerson.

The whole work drips with a camp savagery (hence the presence of Sacha Baron Cohen as Pirelli, a rival barber and faux-Italianate fop), which in turn relies on the conviction that death itself, like sexual desire, exists to be sniffed at and chuckled over.

Yet Nichols’s movie, though smudged by its dénouement, is not wrecked, and already I am desperate — with a Roy-like yearning — to return to it, and to revel anew in its group portrait of those who are haunted by the will to believe.

Prepare to be surprised by joy, at the outset, and to wind up baffled and sad. Not that the saga is complete; many of the relevant files, at Yale, will not be unsealed until 2066. Less than fifty years to go. I can’t wait.

In all, the movie is a cunning and peppy surprise, dulled only by the news that no less than four sequels await. Will the spell not wear off before then?

Turing will survive this film with his enigma intact, but the movie itself is the opposite of enigmatic, and Cumberbatch merits more.

Barnard's film, as if nervous of being felled by the straightforward, sinewy thump of Dunbar's writing, ducks and weaves in a series of sly approaches. [2 May 2011, p. 89]

Although The Big Sick breaks new ground as it delves into cultural conflicts, there are patches of the drama that give you pause.

The director is Debra Granik, who made “Winter’s Bone” (2010), in which Ron had a minor role; the melodramatic strain in that film was less convincing than its observational acuities, which return to the fore here. With no narrator, it is up to the camera to shepherd us through Ron’s days.

You could argue that the film is too wrenching a departure for an actress as earthy as Farmiga, but that, I suspect, is why she took the risk - daring herself, in the person of Corinne, to slip the surly bonds of beauty and desire.

The movie, which Miranda July wrote and directed, is pretty sharp, not to say acidic, on the silliness of good intentions, but she also takes care to slant the best lines toward the subject of time, and its terrible crawl.

Pegg co-wrote the screenplay with the director, Edgar Wright, and together they have fashioned a smart, cultish, semi-disgusting homage to the fine British art of not bothering.

If the story of Jean Seberg is one of the more wretched footnotes in the chronicle of fame, that’s all the more reason to treasure those occasions, onscreen, when she was not a victim — when she bore herself, and whatever pains she harbored, with mastery and grace.

Heldenbergh owns the role, holding the camera's gaze with ease. The look and the sound of him hark back to Kris Kristofferson, but there is a hint of Nick Nolte, too, around the eyes--unfazed by the world, yet easily bewildered by its wiles. [11 Nov. 2013, p.91]

Gray is hampered, to an extent, by treading in the tracks of Werner Herzog, who went to South America with Klaus Kinski, his leading man (or, as Herzog calls him, “my best fiend”), and returned with the extraordinary “Aguirre, Wrath of God” (1972) and “Fitzcarraldo” (1982).

What will divide viewers is the plot; either the ending makes no sense or it forces you to rethink everything that went before.

Its kitschy grabs at the surreal--the scene in a lunatic asylum, where German troops are billeted, manages to be at once implausible and offensive--that blocks any close engagement with the drama. That said, you must see this film for one unstoppable reason, and that is Lee Marvin.

Christopher Nolan, for all his visionary flair, wants to suck the comic out of comic books; Anne Hathaway wants to put it back in. Take your pick.

Mesrine was no more a movie star than John Dillinger was, but both men could dream, and Cassel catches the folly of such dreaming, with its blasts of thuggery and its rare flashes of style, as neatly as anyone since Warren Oates took the title role of "Dillinger," in 1973.

There is no denying the boldness of Persepolis, both in design and in moral complaint, but there must surely be moments, in Marjane’s life as in ours, that cry out for cross-hatching and the grown-up grayness of doubt.

There is plenty to inflame in this picture and nothing to corrupt. [18 Mar 2002. p.152]

To find a comic-book hero who doesn’t agonize over his supergifts, and would defend his constitutional right to get a kick out of them, is frankly a relief.

The result is at once a work of efficient charm and, to those of us who treasured Frears in his more acerbic phase, a mild disappointment.

De Wilde’s film is a more clueful affair, and Flynn (soon to star in a bio-pic of David Bowie) makes an arresting Knightley — more bruiser than smoothie, with a hinterland of unhappiness.

I gradually grew more interested in Curtis, who has his own solitude to cope with. This represents the first non-comic leading role for Robinson (moviegoers will know him from “Pineapple Express” and “Hot Tub Time Machine,” among other films), and he commands it with a gruff and amiable ease.

The irony is that what makes the movie challenging is not the scientific theory—which is delivered with a diplomatically light touch—but a glut of political paranoia.

The Valet does not show Veber at his best. His palate for misunderstandings of every vintage is as refined as ever; what he has lost is his taste for human failing.

No one is denying the energy and the dread that stalked the best B movies of the past, but, when the best director of the present revives such monsters, how can he hope to do better than a B-plus?

This Must Be the Place is dazzling to behold, not least when our hero leaves Ireland. [29 Oct. & 5 Nov. 2012, p.128]

In short, The Last of the Unjust is every bit as quarrelsome as it should be. Murmelstein, recounting the circumstances in which he took mortally serious decisions, dares to ask us if we could have done any better.

The surprising thing about this film, given its potential for devastation, is how funny it can be.

Even if you grow impatient with White Noise—an intimate black comedy that dreams of becoming an epic—stick with it, for the sake of the end credits.

So what kind of movie is this? A conservative one, I would say, not in politics (a topic that never arises at the table) but in its devotion to long-ripened skills and to the sheer hard work that goes into the giving of pleasure.

Shyamalan often tries too hard, but nobody else can conjure such a sudden flood of worry, or summon so unmistakable a stink of evil, and you come out of Signs, as you did from "The Sixth Sense," in severe need of loud music, bad jokes, and drinks with cherries and umbrellas in them -- anything to waft away the fug of unease. [12 August 2002, p. 82]

Everything ends badly, or sadly, and one can imagine the film being screened for M.B.A. students as a cautionary tale—frequently very funny, but often disheartening, too.

It is the most oppressive of the great tragedies, and "Macbeth" aside, the leanest, and the task that Fiennes has set himself is to liberate it from the theatrical while preserving the dramatic bite. In that, he succeeds with brio. [23 Jan. 2012, p.86]

Yet the film, directed by Laurent Tirard, has something. To be exact, it has Fabrice Luchini and Laura Morante, as M. and Mme. Jourdain.

Although Not Quite Hollywood was clearly put together with fanatical love, the suspicion remains, as often with genre cinema, that these trash-rich movies are a lot more fun to hear about, and to watch in snatches, than to sit through.

Why see this film? Partly because of the leading men, but mainly because of a girl. An Australian actress named Angourie Rice plays March’s daughter, Holly, who is thirteen.

The film depends, in other words, on its stars. Both, you can tell, have studied their respective masters with scrupulous care, and the results of their pupillage are plain to see.

The hitch with tales of endurance, onscreen, is their unfortunate habit of becoming endurance tests for the viewer, and, after a while, The Revenant turns into a slog. Make no mistake, it’s a very beautiful slog. Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography summons a wealth of wonders.

One problem with Lawless, though, is that it feels chock-full of entrances that never quite lead anywhere. [3 Sept. 2012, p.78]

The deep drawback of Taking Sides is that it forgets to be interested in music. [8 September 2003, p. 100]

Stately rather than stealthy, is no match for it, but you are borne along, nonetheless, by the clash of characters, and by the ironies of historical momentum.

Noomi Rapace throws herself into the title role, but something about the conception of her character, and about the far-reaching urgency of the sociopathic shocks behind the killing, smacks of a filmmaker pushing too hard. That is why the movie finds it impossible to wind things up.

Yet the movie is not to be skipped. You should sample its mixture of bacchanal and gall, and revel in Farhadi’s dependable deftness, as he sketches and frames his collection of characters.

The strange thing is that, as the film unfolds, the beauty of the place grows ever more unforgiving. It resembles another planet, fresh from the act of creation, but it feels like a prison.

Viewers reared on The Lego Movie will find plenty to nourish them anew. The songs are still peppy. The principal voices are still supplied by Chris Pratt, Elizabeth Banks, and Will Arnett. And real, non-animated kids are still shown, now and then, sporting with their Lego creations.

Maps to the Stars is at its most potent and beautiful by far when it becomes a ghost story — when the departed, not just Havana’s mother, return to quiz the living.

You find yourself gradually engulfed, as if by rising waters, and it seems only fair to report that The Wild Pear Tree lasts for more than three hours.

In short, those of us who pursue Mariolatry — the worship of all things Poppins — are free to delight in this film. Indeed, it shifts a little nearer than its predecessor did to the spiky, peppery briskness of Travers’s tales, and the whole enterprise exhales, as it should, an air of the politely mad.

The director is John Lee Hancock, who does what he did with “The Blind Side,” where he commandeered a true and jagged tale, tidied up the trauma, and made sure that everyone lived sappily ever after. Sandra Bullock carried the day then, and now Emma Thompson repeats the process.

The movie is a daunting blend of head trip, cinéma vérité, music video, and auto-therapy.

In truth, every performance in Everything Went Fine is nicely judged—too much so, I suspect, for many filmgoers, who will be praying for someone to explode. Yet the movie is anything but bland.

Oppenheim doesn’t waste much space on the upside. He aims straight for the undergrowth, and treats the Villages as one big Carl Hiaasen novel waiting to happen.

The air of mystery here is appealing, because the secrets behind it seem to matter both a great deal and not at all--rather like love, which has been Lelouch’s subject ever since he made "A Man and a Woman."

Levy, holding his nerve, does cut through the chaos, delivering a fable that, if not exactly coherent, is nonetheless tinged with the very last virtue that you’d expect in a movie of this ilk. It has charm.

How could Frears and his cast rise above the sins of the miniseries? One answer is the force of that cast...The other thing that rescues and refines The Queen is one of the basic bonuses of moviegoing, more familiar of late from documentaries like "Touching the Void" and "Capturing the Friedmans": you come out arguing.

Nothing here is so well defined, and the tone of the film begins to suffer. I cannot imagine returning to it as one does to "Shaun of the Dead" and "Hot Fuzz," hungry for fresh minutiae. [2 Sept. 2013, p.80]

The great Bebe Neuwirth should apply for a patent on her slow and dirty smile. The scene in which she introduces her new conquest to her girlfriends over tea, and pretty well pimps him to any takers, is worth the price of a ticket. [29 July 2002, p. 92]

Above all, the movie relies and thrives on Harboe, who is scrutinized, in closeup, with a vigilance that even Bergman might applaud, and who has the blessed knack of seeming like a perfectly capable adult in one sequence and then, in the next, like a vulnerable child.

What Kore-eda doles out are not revelatory surprises so much as gradual enlightenments, and our attitude toward the characters is forbidden to settle or to stick.

The fact that characters are provided with statutory secrets, to be disclosed at nicely timed intervals—as happens with Hunham, Angus, and Mary—does not guarantee any intensity in the revelation. The leading players here, however, bring force and grace to the task.

You emerge from the film with a divided heart: thrilled to hear of a woman who, ignoring the dictates of the age, filled her days to overflowing, yet ashamed to measure your own days and to find them, by comparison, hollow and bare. Is it too late to follow Gertrude Bell’s example? First, hire your camel

Cronenberg made a movie called “The Dead Zone,” and I sometimes wonder whether, for all his formal brilliance, he has ever torn himself away from that locked-in, airless state of mind. You walk out of Eastern Promises feeling spooked and sullied, as if waking from a noisome dream.