Carrie Rickey

Bravo to Brooks for conceiving Mother and for giving Reynolds a role that required her to do something more than merely effervesce. Here Reynolds bubbles, she boils, she exhibits a complex geology of human emotions. Her Mrs. Henderson is the mother of all mothers, and Mother is the mother lode of all comedies. [10 Jan 1997, p.05]

This is more than a movie: It's Almodovar's design for living.

A gut-punch of a drama.

Pure, undiluted joy.

Urgent and stunning movie.

So electric are the performances in The Crucible, so breathtaking is director Nicholas Hytner's darting camera, that it was fully halfway into Arthur Miller's screen adaptation of his legendary drama before I noticed something missing. Namely, a subtext. [20 Dec 1996, p.03]

Almereyda's smart, streamlined adaptation is full of such neat little ironies.

Not since Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" and Malick's own "Days of Heaven" has a movie been both so breathtakingly beautiful and so narratively abstract.

An epic docudrama - electric and raw.

An eco-mentary that's as passionate and persuasive an argument for change as "An Inconvenient Truth."

Throw bouquets at Marshall, who instead of dissecting it to death, neatly resurrects the Hollywood musical.

A masterful epic charting love's labyrinths.

Its deceptive simplicity makes A Better Life so emotionally profound.

Funny as it is fierce, breathtaking as it is life-affirming.

It's a coming-of-age story - blunt, mythic, gut-wrenching.

A postfeminist valentine to the Paleolithic days of Woman Power when dinosaurs walked Manhattan in heels with matching handbags.

There's a word for women like Giselle: Supercalifragilistic. Ditto her film, Enchanted.

The film billed as the first Disney animation to boast an African American "princess" is really about a resourceful bootstrapper in New Orleans, a young woman allergic to the fairy-tale pap spoon-fed to young girls.

The $200 million result is an irresistibly entertaining, if grandiose, saga of doomed love and directorial hubris.

Disarming and unexpectedly poignant, An Education contrasts the knowledge learned in school with that learned from life.

It may be the first meditative action movie.

All in all, this phenomenal film illustrates Alexis de Tocqueville's observation that "The people get the government they deserve." In both meanings of the word, Il Divo is sensational.

Almodóvar has made a powerfully moving film about men who think they want to lose themselves in their women, then are startled to realize that they're the ones who have been comatose.

An extraordinary work in three movements about the Sasakis, a seemingly ordinary family. In this unpredictable work, the clan implodes, explodes, and glues itself back together.

The film gracefully telescopes a lot of information in its brief running time.

Floats before your eyes like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The surprise is that, fitted together, these pieces make a completed picture.

Director Manoel de Oliveira's minimalist, incomparably moving I'm Going Home ranks with John Huston's "The Dead" as one of the great works by a director at his twilight.

The mosaic of cases and caseworkers is like a season of "The Wire" distilled into two hours.