Anthony Lane

Never, though, has the evolution of an automaton been depicted with the extensive grace and wit that Dan Stevens, speaking good German with a slight British accent, brings to I’m Your Man.

Here is Cruz at her least showy and yet her most adventurous, allowing a storm of confusion to sweep across her face as she sits at a café table, and guiding us through the stages of one woman’s self-possession: having it, losing it almost completely, and then reclaiming it.

Leviathan is a tale for vertiginous times, with the ruble in free fall. There must be thousands of stories like Kolya’s right now, lives folding and collapsing, upon which Zvyagintsev could cast his unfoolable eye. Despite that, he is not primarily a satirist, or even a social commentator; he is the calm surveyor of a fallen world, and Leviathan, for all its venom, never writhes out of control.

The director is John Maclean, making his début, and, if he demonstrates how hard it is to handle whimsy, he more than atones for it with two tremendous set pieces — one in a store, and the other in an isolated homestead, girded with cornfields where a shooter can nestle and hide.

This is less of a courtroom drama, I reckon, and more of a discordant, highly strung character clash with legal bells and whistles tacked on.

[Farhadi's] gift for pulling us deep into the story, and for conveying the major burdens of these supposedly minor lives, is unimpaired.

We long-term Kiefer nerds may not learn much, but so what? It’s more important that newcomers thrill to—or recoil from—this self-mythicizing figure who forges sculptures out of fighter planes and U-boats.

Damon has never seemed more at home than he does here, millions of miles adrift.

His (Francois Ozon) theme could hardly be less original (think of "Bonjour Tristesse"), but the tautness is that of a horror film. [5 May 2014, p.85]

This is a scary movie and a serious one, because it lures us into the minds, and the earthly domains, of those who are themselves scared, night and day, that they have forfeited the mercies of God. It takes an original movie to remind us of original sin.

It goes without saying that, like most of Abu-Assad’s films, especially Paradise Now(2005) and Omar(2014), Huda’s Salon is rubbed raw by the politics of the occupied territories; but somehow it doesn’t feel like an issue movie. When Huda is onscreen, played with sublime command by Awad, the story becomes unremittingly about her.

Widows, in other words, is a merger — of silliness and perspicacity, of conspiratorial gloom and surprising violence. (Even those who wield it can be taken aback.) So strong is the cast that it carries us over the gaps in the movie’s logic.

Personally, for that reason, I would have lopped off the final scene, which I simply didn’t believe in, and which, if anything, resolves too much. A movie as cryptic as “Burning” deserves to hang fire.

It’s a mixed bunch, often flimsy, with deliberate lurches of tone, and the Coens, as ever, are unable (or unwilling) to decide whether barbarous bloodshed is something to be flinched from or cackled at. Yet I came away haunted by a scattering of sights and sounds.

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.

Sophie Scholl: The Final Days may sound like a history lesson, but don't be fooled. It's a horror film.

That is a beautiful riff, worthy of Chaplin, on the inverted values of a world gone to rot, whereas the gags in Anderson’s film are more about themselves, delighting in the literal and the overparticular.

The over-all effect is as taut with tangible evidence as a detective story.

It may be weaker in the resolution than in the setup, but that is an inbuilt hazard of science fiction, and what lingers, days after you leave the cinema, is neither the wizardry nor the climax but the zephyr of emotional intensity that blows through the film.

The film is a hybrid. Its backdrop is despair, but the foreground action has the silvery zest of a comedy.

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]

Layer by layer, this dumbfounding movie devises its magical recipe, and dares us to resist it: ketchup, mustard, two slices of pickle, and hold the irony. Delicious.

There's another reason for the lure of The Sisters Brothers. If the lives that it portrays are in transit, the world that encircles them is in even faster flux.

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 Meyerowitz Stories comes across as Baumbach’s ripest and wisest film to date, alert to the fact that so little in life, especially a screwy or a super-ambitious life, is open to resolution.

Whole passages of non-event stream by, and you half want to scream, and yet--damn it all--by the end of The New World the spell of the images, plus the enigma of Kilcher's expression (she is as sculpted as an idol, and every bit as amenable to worship), somehow breaks you down.

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.

While Boseman does what he can with the ever-noble hero, Jordan is so relaxed and so unstiff that, if you’re anything like me, you’ll wind up rooting for the baddie when the two of them battle it out. Jordan has swagger to spare, with those rolling shoulders, but there’s a breath of charm, too, all the more seductive in the overblown atmosphere of Marvel. He’s twice as pantherish as the Panther.