Anthony Lane

About Elly both clutches us tight and shuts us out, adding wave upon wave of secrets and lies.

Boys State will leave you alternately cheered and alarmed at the shape of things to come.

What does make this movie stand out is the presence of Cristin Milioti, a paragon of goofiness and grace.

As Rose-Lynn, stomping along in white cowboy boots, she is ballsy and fiery, at once wised up and dangerously immature.

Structurally, the film is all chop and change, with Hare and Fiennes tacking back and forth across Nureyev’s early years. Some viewers will find the result too fussy by half; I liked its restlessness, and the sense of a chafed and driven spirit that refuses to be boxed in.

By a useful coincidence, A Hero arrives in cinemas (for viewers hardy enough to visit them) in the wake of Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth. Watch one after the other and you may decide, as I did, that A Hero is the more Shakespearean of the two. Coen’s film is powerful but hermetic, sealed off within its stylized designs, whereas Farhadi reaches back to The Merchant of Venice and pulls the play’s impassioned arguments into the melee of the here and now.

There aren't many performers who can deliver the fullness of heart that such a plot demands, but Winslet is one of them. [22 March 2004, p. 102]

The beautiful joke of Factotum is that Dillon is nobility itself.

Only after the movie ends do you understand what Debra Granik, with a consummate sleight of hand, has done. Here, among the peaceful trees, without a shot fired in anger, she’s made a war film.

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.

Anderson's great gift is to catch the generations as they intersect. [4 & 11 June 2012, p 132]

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.

Oddly, the effect of that imbalance is not just to heighten the charm of the film but to render it more credible: the course of true memory never did run smooth.

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

No male director would have put so much as a toe inside this trouble zone, although Kent does borrow a helpful domestic hint from “Shaun of the Dead”: rather than vanquish our worst nightmare, why not tame it, lock it away, and hope?

The dichotomy turns out to be a false one: whether you revile him or genuflect before him, you are still implying that the guy demands and deserves our fascination. What Sorkin and Boyle have to offer is not a warts-and-all portrait but the suggestion that there is something heroic about a wart.

Let’s be honest: the mainspring of The Father, onscreen, is the presence of Hopkins—an actor at the frightening summit of his powers, portraying a man brought pitifully low. The irony is too rare to resist.

The result feels, like Shakespeare's play, at once ancient and dangerously new.

What makes Green’s film so persuasive is that other characters—above all, the redoubtable Brandi Williams—are alive to everything that’s absurd and overbearing, as well as noble, in the hero’s cause.

Wright’s best film so far, livelier and more disloyal to its source than “Atonement” or “Pride and Prejudice” — crams without a care. The outcome is that increasing rarity, a proper children’s film; even the tears are well earned.

What we glean from Belvaux's trilogy is the reassurance (rare on film, with its terror of inattention) that people are both important and unimportant, and that heroes and leading ladies, in life as in art, can fade into extras before our eyes. [Note: From a review of the entire trilogy.] [2 February 2004, p.94]

This is Hogg’s most disconcerting work to date. Like her previous movies, such as “Unrelated” (2007), it proceeds in lengthy takes, and the camera, more often than not, prefers to keep its distance, the better to observe her characters — the human animals — at play.

What’s unusual about Kajillionaire, and what makes it July’s most absorbing film to date, is that you can feel her testing and challenging her own aptitude for whimsy.

I certainly came out of Nobody Knows feeling numb; only later, reflecting on the fact that the movie was inspired by a true story, did it occur to me that the numbness could have been deliberate, and that what suffused this picture was a mist of anger.

Best of all -- and the only thing that has really made me laugh at the movies this year -- is a lengthy scene in which Coogan, inspired by the landscape, confesses his desire to star in a traditional costume drama. [13 & 20 June 2011, p. 128]

To some degree, “Hidden” is a cat-and-mouse thriller, the only problem being that mouse and cat insist on swapping roles.

It's a film that you need to see, not a film that you especially want to.

The part of Lydia is scored for hero, villain, mother, dictator, and f*ckup, and Blanchett responds with perfect pitch.