Anthony Lane

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.

Knightley and West leap without a qualm into these excesses, not least the Feydeau-like saga of a flame-haired Louisiana heiress (Eleanor Tomlinson), who sleeps with both Willy and his wife, unbeknownst to her, though he beknew everything.

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 Duke is as funny and as implausible as Michell’s “Notting Hill” (1999), the slight difference being that the ludicrous events in the new film happen to be true.

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.

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

However moody, though, Two Lovers didn't strike me as a downer, for the simple reason that it wells with sights and sounds that are guaranteed to lift, not sink, the spirits.

What binds and clads the new movie most thoroughly, however, is not storytelling but the high pressure of atmosphere.

Beast is at its best when Buckley is at her most undaunted, showing us Moll at her most extreme — when she lies down by moonlight, for instance, in the shallow hole where a murder victim was found, beside a potato field.

Yet Joe, directed by David Gordon Green, succeeds. Although Green's resume has been as up and down as that of his leading man, his eye for decay has rarely blurred; and now, you sense, he has come to the right place. [14 April 2014, p.87]

The movie is one of those pointed and prickly farces, like “8 Women” (2002) and “Potiche” (2011), that Ozon tends to scatter among his more solemn projects, as if to keep his comic hand in. The dramatis personae are boldly drawn and, let us say, broadly performed.

There are two drawbacks here. One is a shortage of superior zombies, although where one goes to rent extra zombies I have no idea...Second, we have a serious shortage of fright. [30 June 2003, p. 102]

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.

Less fruitful is the casting of Michelle Pfeiffer as May's older cousin, the mysterious Countess Olenska, with whom Archer falls hopelessly in love. With her silly blond curls, Pfeiffer looks more plaintive than the dark exotic of Wharton's imagination.

No one could claim that the film is a distinguished contribution to cinema, but it would be churlish to resist its geniality and speed.

Rust and Bone might as well be called "Water and Light"; it glitters and flares with the urge to renew those things - limbs, knuckles, lovemaking, and parental bonds - which are easily fractured and lost.

The Lobster is more than a satire on the dating game. It digs deeper, needling at the status of our most tender emotions.

As Adrien, Pierre Niney is extraordinary to behold: pale, tapered, and flickering, like a candle made flesh.

There are passages of gravity and grace here that few other directors could unfurl. [27 Jan. 2014, p. 78]

It makes “Yellow Submarine” look like a miracle of sober narrative.

It is one of those movies--Antonioni's "Red Desert" being the most flagrant example--that spend so much time brimming with moral and political suggestion that they almost forget to tell us what's actually going on.

You leave the film like one of Giovanni's patients rising from the couch -- far from healed, but amused and pacified by the sympathy that has washed over you. [4 Feb 2002, p. 82]

If “The Lobster” remains Lanthimos’s most vital work, that’s because it tempers the gloom with a mischievous play of wit. The Killing of a Sacred Deer, by contrast, is stubbornly hard to enjoy; there are jokes, but they make few dents in the programmatic rigor of the plot.

This movie, in short, kneels at the altar of high capitalism.

The movie, with spiderlike timidity, scuttles into a corner and freezes. [13 May 2002, p. 96]

Credit is due to Dick Pope, the cinematographer, who toughens the film and somehow prevents the fabled grandeur of the locations from softening into the pretty.

The monologue that Goldblum delivers there, grand with illusion and larded with mouthfuls of canapes, is entirely delicious -- roguish and absurd, but lending the film a zest that it was in danger of losing. [17 March 2014, p.79]

The problem is, there’s only just enough story to go round. You can hear the creak as both characters and subplots get jacked up out of proportion.