Anthony Lane

If Sicario does not collapse under its own grimness, that is because of the pulse: the care with which Villeneuve keeps the story beating, like a drum, as he steadies himself for the next set piece.

Those who worship Joy Division may bridle at Corbijn’s film for its reluctance to mythologize their hero. Speaking as someone so irretrievably square that I not only never listened to the band but didn’t even know anyone who liked it, I can’t imagine a tribute more fitting than this.

Looking back at the film, I don't buy all this, but no matter; Channing is so stormy, so keen to unleash her resentments, that for an hour or so you do believe in Julie. [17 Dec 2001, p.98]

The Artist is not just about black-and-white silent pictures. It is a black-and-white silent picture. And it's French.

Bean, a lovely guy with a touch of Mickey Rooney, is one of the stars of Sington’s rousing show. There was something unearthly, in every sense, about the astronauts in their prime.

Mungiu’s pacing is so sure, however, in its switching from loose to taut, and the concentration of his leading lady so unwavering, that the movie, which won the Palme d’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, feels more like a thriller than a moody wallow.

It’s not just a blast but, at moments, a thing of beauty, alive to the comic awesomeness of being lost in space.

I prefer to think of Akin, however, not as a forger of patterns but as an ironist who understands that bad luck is a crucible, in the heat of which we are tested, burned away, or occasionally transformed. The Edge of Heaven is about something more exasperating than crossed paths; it is about paths that almost cross but don't, and the tragedy of the near-miss.

It runs roughly two and a half hours, and the intensity spikes with every fight; without Russell Crowe and Paul Giamatti, however, it would be flat on the canvas. They make it seem a better and more bristling film than it actually is.

The new film is definitely suaver and busier, glinting with wit and concluding in, of all cities, Singapore.

The symptoms may be far from covid-like, and the mortality rate, as far as we can gather, is blessedly low, but what Nikou evokes, with a haunting prescience, is the air of a stunned world.

The invective energy of Four Lions and its Swiftian vision of a confederacy of dunces are never in doubt. The problem is one of form. [15 Nov. 2010, p.99]

What animates The Banshees of Inisherin and saves it from stiffness is the clout of the performances. Within the oxlike Colm, thanks to Gleeson, we glimpse a ruminative despair, and Farrell adds Pádraic to his gallery of heroes so hapless that they forfeit all claim to the heroic. The movie, however, belongs to Condon.

Anybody hoping that The End of the Tour would mirror the formal dazzle of Wallace’s fiction, doubling back on itself like the frantically probing encounters in his 1999 collection, “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,” will be disappointed. Yet the film, despite its flatness, is worth exploring.

The result, like many of Winterbottom's films, lies an inch short of disarray; we CAN keep pace with the investigation, but only just, and that sense of splintering honors the unpredictability of the setting.

Far more valuable is the urgency with which the movie stares ahead, as it were, at any future legislation that would incite women to take such dire measures once again.

The trouble is that, for all the comedy and the poignancy of this central concept, the movie requires a plot.

The first twenty minutes of Wedding Crashers are rabid with simple pleasure.

Above all, there is Tom Cruise, whose career was in the ascendant, with “Risky Business” (1983) and “Legend” (1985), in the frantic years covered by the second half of American Made. Because he has changed so little in the interim, and mounted so uncanny a resistance to the onslaught of time, we feel, with a jolt, that we are gazing up at a star as he both was and still is. Astronomers may flee the cinema in confusion.

Stranger by the Lake, it must be said, flirts with monotony. There is something both fascinating and numbing in the rituals on display, and in the matching rhythm of the film's approach. [27 Jan.2014, p.79]

Where the eyes of a Disney princess grow wide as her pumpkin becomes a coach, the folk in Tale of Tales accept that miracles happen, being not an irruption into life but part of its natural flow.

Lo and Behold is, by virtue of its scope, one of Herzog’s more scattershot endeavors.

So skilled are both Carell and Tatum that the movie itself falls prey to the characters’ repression. Though never less than careful and clever, it’s also a stunted and fiercely unhappy piece of work, straining hard to deliver home truths about a commonweal that has beaten itself out of shape.

The performance that lingers, once the tale is told, is that of Jay Pharoah as Nate, a fellow-patient on Sawyer’s ward, who has furtively kept hold of his cell phone (she was deprived of hers), and who lends the film an understated calm.

Performs the unlikely trick of being both taut and plotless.

This mixture of poverty and fantasy will not be for everyone. Compare the angry reaction to Buñuel’s “Los Olvidados,” when it came out, in 1950; not content with revealing the plight of destitute children, in Mexico City, Buñuel had the temerity to swerve into nightmare.

This movie has almost no bite but plenty of moseying charm, and what it does get right is the idea of poets as perpetual magpies.

You don't feel bamboozled, fooled, or patronized by District 9, as you did by most of the summer blockbusters. You feel winded, and shaken, and shamed. [September 14, 2009, pg.115]