Anthony Lane

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

The virtues of Jackson's trilogy, thus far, have been pace and astonishment, which is almost the same thing. [6 January 2003, p. 90]

Woman Is the Future of Man is doomed to infuriate, and its scrutiny of disconnected beings, filmed in long, hold-your-breath takes, might feel like old hat to anyone reared on Antonioni, yet Hong has a grace and stealth of his own, and his scenes tend to tilt in directions that few of us would dare to predict.

Having dreaded the prospect of Sylvia, I admired it precisely because it refuses to play along with the mythologizing that has sprung up, and vulgarized, the lives of two poets. [20 October 2003, p. 206]

A frantic and funny diversion, but it pales and tires before its time is up. It doesn't know the meaning of enough.

This awkward and half-digested movie gives off a melancholy reek.

I am casting no aspersions on the director when I say that The Saddest Music in the World is a work of manic depression. The mania is there in the frenzied editing, the inability to concentrate on a detail for more than a few seconds; and the depression is there in the forcible lowering of spirits. [10 May 2004, p. 107]

What lends the film its grip and its haste is also what makes it unsatisfactory.

The movie is haunted by death and loss, focussing on men who live in stifled grief and reconcile themselves to solitude—a personal desolation that is doubled by Japan’s collective mourning for those who were lost to the country’s catastrophic war.

A scruffy, thick-grained piece of work, shot in thirty days and scrawled not with luscious coloring but with the tense and inky markings of a society that is fighting to keep its reputation for togetherness, and wondering what that reputation is still worth. [18 & 25 Feb 2002. p. 199]

This slow and stoic movie, hailed as a gay Western, feels neither gay nor especially Western: it is a study of love under siege.

As a director, he seems incapable of trusting his actors to carry the mood, preferring always to lend them a backup -- jokes, fripperies, kooky camera angles -- that they don't require. [5 Nov 2001, p. 105]

So smartly has del Toro thought his fable through, and so graceful is his grasp of visual rhyme, that to pick holes in it seems mean; yet Pan's Labyrinth is perhaps more dazzling than involving--I was too busy reading its runes and clues, as it were, to be swept away. It is, I suspect, a film to return to, like a country waiting to be explored: a maze of dead ends and new life.

It is equipped, like an F-15 Eagle, to engage multiple targets at once.

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.

By the end of the film, you just want to get away from these people.

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 movie may be a grim warning against the perils of technology and its ability to spew alternative realities, but Cronenberg himself can hardly claim to have his feet firmly planted on the ground.

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.

There has long been a strain of sorry lassitude in Kaufman's work, and here it sickens into the morbid.

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.

Made me laugh precisely once, as a magazine editor let fly with a Diane Arbus gag. It is no coincidence that she is played by Candice Bergen, who gets just the one scene, but who is nonetheless the only bona-fide movie star on show.

The result is sweet and moody, and richly photographed by Sven Nykvist, but you can't help feeling shortchanged; Hanks and Ryan have quick wits, and funny faces to match—they should be striking sparks off each other, not mooching around waiting for something to happen.

How, then, does The Good German--adapted by Paul Attanasio from Joseph Kanon's novel--wind up so insubstantial, its impact lasting no longer than a cigarette?

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.

The result is clever, and the narrative twistings keep you on your toes, but there's just one hitch: it ain't funny.

The hero's restlessness infects the rest of the movie; the story feels febrile and unhappy, and Allen seems to take his dissatisfaction out on his helpless characters--especially the women.

This film's got EVERYTHING, although purists might quibble that it lacks any sliver of plausibility or dramatic interest.

"Deep Throat" bore an X certificate. Inside Deep Throat is an NC-17. Neither is suitable for grownups.

There is a fine film to be made about the retreat from worldly obligation into erotic rite, and Brando and Bertolucci made it in 1972. But what “Last Tango in Paris” proved was that our skin-grazing view of a body makes us more, not less, enthusiastic to grasp the shape of the soul that it enshrines.

Screenwriter Richard LaGravenese and director Clint Eastwood have turned out something sombre and restrained -- almost, in fact, good (though it's too long).

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.

M:i:III, like many blockbusters, would be nothing without its star.

What fun there is derives from the smart editing (Rodriguez did his own cutting, and he's quicker on the draw than most of the pistol-packers) and from Antonio Banderas, who, stepping neatly into the Mariachi's boots, lends irony and calm, and even a trace of sweetness, to a nothing role.