Anthony Lane

To be fair, A Quiet Passion is wittier, in its early stretches, than anyone might have foreseen, but it’s when the door closes, and the Dickinsons are alone with their trepidations, that the movie draws near to its rightful severity.

Werner Herzog may lack heroes, nowadays, who seem adequate to his fierce capacity for wonder. When occasion demands, however, he can still turn the world upside down.

If you are pressed for time this week, and can spare only fifteen minutes at the cinema, spend them at the opening of Custody. There’s a scene near the start that is like a mini-movie in itself, tense with foreboding — a tension that the rest of Xavier Legrand’s film does nothing to dispel.

The casting of Minority Report may be the smartest in the history of Spielberg. [1 July 2002, p. 96]

Seldom has our modern taste for the confessional mode been so smartly explored. [20 May 2013, p. 123]

There is something horribly apt in the way Fincher closes the drama in joyless exhaustion, leaving you certain that there will be a sequel to these events, not onscreen but in someone's home, tonight. [8 April 2002, p. 95]

It’s a hell of a performance by Robyn Nevin, who’s had a long and commanding career on the Australian stage.

Honeyland swarms with difficult, ancient truths about parents, children, greed, respect, and the need for husbandry.

The Look of Silence is a simpler work than “The Act of Killing,” and a better one.

Too long, but it feels sturdy and stirring – there's an old fashioned decency in the way that it exerts, and increases, its claim upon our feelings. [26 Sept 1994, p.108]

Even if you love the film, as I do, all the lurching, stop-and-go exchanges of these unquiet souls may leave you with a craving for “The Philadelphia Story,” or something equally streamlined.

The eye must travel not merely through the earth's crust but backward in time, as well. Indeed, you could argue that Herzog has succeeded in making the world's first movie in 4-D. [2 May 2011, p. 88]

The most consuming and most exhausting of its kind since “The Dreamlife of Angels,” fifteen years ago. From the moment when Adèle first catches sight of Emma, on a busy crosswalk, the movie restores your faith in the power of the coup de foudre and yet redoubles your fear of its effect; love, like lightning, can both illuminate and scorch. The problems of two little people, it turns out, do indeed amount to a hill of beans. Some hill. Some beans.

The architecture of Pulp Fiction may look skewed and strained, but the decoration is a lot of fun. [10 Oct 1994, p.95]

The writer and director, Asghar Farhadi, has thus created the perfect antithesis of a crunching disaster flick, such as "2012," which was all boom and no ripple.

It's a pleasure to find a thriller fulfilling its duties with such gusto: the emotions ring solid, the script finds time to relax into backchat, and for once the stunts look like acts of desperation rather than shows of prowess.

Every gag is girded with fear. The humor is so black that it might have been pumped out of the ground.

If I had to define The Irishman, I would say that it’s basically “Wild Strawberries” with handguns. Like Bergman’s film, from 1957, this one is structured around a road trip.

The good news about the new film from Yorgos Lanthimos, The Favourite, is that you are likely to emerge from it in good humor — bemused, or amused, or a mixture of the two.

It is the first film to be directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev, and what it shares with other coruscating débuts, from “The Four Hundred Blows” to “Badlands,” is a sense that it HAD to be made. There is a controlled wildness at the heart of such movies, whose narratives ask to be handled as delicately as explosives. [15 March 2004, p. 154]

The Best of Youth takes its chance--almost unheard of, these days--to bloom and unfurl like a novel.

The remarkable thing is that Son of Saul is a début: Nemes has never directed a full-length film before. As for Röhrig, he is a poet as well as an actor, born in Budapest and now living in the Bronx. If neither of them made another movie, this one would suffice.

Catch the film on the largest screen you can find, with a sound system to match, even if that means journeying all day. Have a drink beforehand. And, whatever you do, don’t wait for a DVD or a download.

Victor Hugo would watch this film and weep.

Birdman, right now, is on the money. In Riggan and the rest of the cast, writhing with the dread of being a nobody but appalled by what it takes to be a somebody, we see not just the acting bug but also the New York bug, the love bug, and, if we’re honest, the life bug, diagnosed as what they are: a seventy-year itch.

By the time of the closing shot -- twists of fog rising like spectres from a leaden sea -- even the most stubborn viewer will be lying back in a state of happy hypnosis. [16 December 2002, p. 106]

The movie, at two and a half hours, retains much of the unhurried suspense -- the careful cultivating of our patience, of our narrative loyalty -- that is bred by the best TV.

So expert are the performers that you wind up rooting for Burry, Baum, and the others despite yourself, knowing full well that they are fuelled by cynicism -- by an ardent faith that the system will and must fail.