Charles Taylor

What holds the movie together is its modest, sweet spirit.

Much of the pleasure of the movie is the way its mood lingers with you afterward.

Though I admire much of what Cuesta does in L.I.E., the film didn't give me much pleasure. I didn't find it unpleasant or repulsive; it's just that I felt he was too much outside the story.

In some ways it's not a very good movie... tries to mix comedy and tragedy...but the movie has an exciting subject -- a true story.

Surely one of the canniest and most accurate films about American working-class life ever.

It's an awfully enjoyable, hip little B-movie.

Robert Altman's surpassingly beautiful ballet movie feels lighter than air -- but in fact it's the great director's most tender and memorable film in years.

It's not badly made, but it's a drag. Leconte's virtues can't overcome the plodding glumness that prevails.

What Ray does right, combined with its generosity of spirit, makes it the most satisfying American movie of the year.

Mike Leigh returns to the council flats of London -- and delivers a richly Dickensian masterpiece about working-class family life.

What's the point of setting up a historical fantasia around an invented character if you're only going to make her part of the scenery?

A bigger problem is that since the movie is a straight remake that reprises many of the original's scenes, we have those scenes playing in our heads, and the Russos' execution just isn't up to Monicelli's. It's painful to see gags that worked so beautifully fall flat, or wither and die because of indifferent timing.

It's a deluxe vacation for adults with all frills included: glamorous settings, glamorous clothes, glamorous sex.

A consistently engrossing piece of work.

It's deluxe and handsome and has no soul.

Winterbottom's film is openly a polemic. Messy and visceral, with an articulate, pointed anger that's recognizably British, Welcome to Sarajevo hits with an impact that's not diminished by the fact that Sarajevo's uneasy peace has held.

There's something offensive about how Mamet continues to win praise as a serious filmmaker with such a joyless picture, a picture that -- intentionally -- gives the audience so little.

It's not just our emotions that are being played on here, it's not just our intelligence being insulted because of Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman's presumption that we won't have any interest in a character whom it's not always possible to like. It's John Nash's life, being turned into an Oscar machine and an easy way to jerk tears.

It's an exceptionally intelligent and controlled piece of direction, and for once Polanski didn't hide his emotions in a death's-head grin. The movie is raw and passionate and unresolved in a way that's unique among his work.

Ricci's Wendy captures the volatile combination of aggressiveness and uncertainty in a young woman trying to come to terms with her sexuality like no performance since Emily Lloyd's in "Wish You Were Here." It's a very different performance, quieter, harder and yet more vulnerable.

The only romantic comedy in quite a while that acknowledges, even celebrates, the fact that love and sex are emotional anarchy.

Southern Gothic lite -- with a bite.

Has a solid farce structure, a bunch of ripe second bananas, and two sinfully attractive stars ready to raise comic hell. So why is a movie with so many genuine laughs and so many good bits only fitfully amusing? The short answer is that the Coen brothers seem to be incapable of trusting their material.

To borrow a phrase from Pauline Kael, Intimate Strangers suggests bits of Alfred Hitchcock and bits of Woody Allen. But the wrong bits.

Just a bad movie, with more bits of good acting and flashes of director's invention than you get in most bad movies.

A weaker actor, one more naked than De Niro is now capable of being, might have revealed some inner compulsion in the character. But De Niro's steadiness becomes part of the movie's rugged stolidity.

The picture is moderately diverting. But it's never much fun.

Like too many young filmmakers, Anderson seems to equate honesty with choppy editing, bad lighting (so harsh in a couple of shots you can see the pancake on Davis' face) and herky-jerky camera movements.