Anthony Lane

Beauty and the Beast is delectably done; when it’s over, though, and when the spell is snapped, it melts away, like cotton candy on the tongue.

The practiced calmness of Kore-eda’s approach is such that you barely notice the speed at which he tugs the plot along and flips from one setting to the next.

What Branagh has made is a kind of home movie writ large. It is a private stash of memories and imaginings, which touches only glancingly on the wide and troubled world beyond, and which feels most alive when it turns to face the consolations of home and the thrills that lie in wait on the big screen.

Much of the film glides past with a slightly purposeless elegance. Astounding landscapes rise and fall away; enticing women glance and dance and disappear.

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.

Comes in well under the ninety-minute mark, leaving no room for bombast or overkill.

There is more to ponder, in this uncommon movie, than there is to plumb. Broad rather than deep, and layering the vintage with the modern, it’s a collage of shifting surfaces — an appropriate form for a pilgrim soul like Martin, whose gifts, though plentiful, do not include a talent for staying still.

As the feigning wears off, and Captain America: Civil War crawls to a close, you sense that the possibilities of nature have been not just exceeded but exhausted. Even the dialogue seems like a special effect: “You’re being uncharacteristically non-hyperverbal,” Black Widow remarks to Iron Man. Translation: “Say something.”

Even as this fine documentary unveils the "mystery woman," as she once described herself, it remains intent on the molding of her myth. [31 March 2014, p.80]

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.

There are times when the movie's entertainment value verges on the scandalous. [4 November 2002, p. 110]

Again and again, its stark and suspenseful compositions strike the eye — figures in dark clothing, prone on a pale beach, with lines of wire, black warning flags, and the chill gray waves beyond.

Is it robust and plain-speaking, proud of its comic swagger, or is there something tight-mouthed in its imperative, with a hint of “or else” hanging off the end? Either way, the life of Amy is dished up for our inspection.

British director Michael Winterbottom has made his best and most driven picture to date. [22 September 2003, p. 202]

As the movie shows, the whole furtive business of ratings is indeed ridiculous and should be overhauled.

Okja is a fairy tale of sorts, though too foulmouthed for children; it nips from pastoral bliss to a terrorist pig-napping by the Animal Liberation Front; and it takes the eco-menace from Bong’s sublime “The Host” (2006) and replays the fright as farce, with a spirited turn from Tilda Swinton, as the company boss, and, I’m afraid, a barely watchable one from Jake Gyllenhaal, as a drunk TV presenter.

Of the many heists and grabs that litter the movie, none is as blatant as the deft, irrepressible manner in which Ferguson, displaying a light smile and a brisk way with a knife, steals the show. Poor Tom Cruise. He can’t even steal a kiss.

Extravagant care is taken with minutiae, and the directors, Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee, whistle through the first twenty minutes of the plot with a controlled giddiness that would leave many live-action adventures staggering in their tracks. Yet what a curious plot it is.

Owen has made immense progress, to which Life, Animated is a stirring tribute, yet it leaves a trail of questions unanswered or unasked.

The line between the dispassionate and the dull can be ominously faint, and when Rohmer kicks off his film with ten or fifteen minutes of solid anecdotal chat, you fear for the stamina of the audience. [13 May 2002, p. 96]

A Bigger Splash is fiercely unrelaxing, and impossible to ignore. You emerge from it restive and itchy, as though a movie screen could give you sunburn, and the story defies resolution.

At its best and quietest, Divine Intervention suggests -- that levity and threat are eternally clasped together, like the lovers' twining hands. [20 January 2003, p. 94]

The movie is, literally, a tough act to follow, thanks to the brusque, undemonstrative way in which Haneke chops from one subplot to the next. [3 Dec 2001, p.105]

You exit the cinema in a fever of melancholia, wondering how long it will take you to shed the sensation of alarm. The film is less of a shocker than an adventure in anxiety, testing and twisting some of the classic studies in infantile curiosity.

The horror is genuinely visceral, yet the story, aided by impassioned work from Chalamet and Russell, pushes onward with a rough and desperate grace. Bones and All proves difficult to watch, but looking away is harder still.

One’s eye is at first dazzled, then sated, and eventually tired by this pitiless inflation of scale.

Still, it is a writer's privilege to trim and tailor at will, and everybody loves a duel. It would take the dullest of curmudgeons not to enjoy the surge of this saga, accurate or not, and the excesses of what already feels like a distant age. [30 Sept. 2013, p.84]

This is typical Suleiman, as anyone who saw his no less wondrous work "Divine Intervention" (2002), can testify.