David Sterritt

Most moviegoers will leave buzzing about the climactic Battle of Helm's Deep. But in my eyes, this is Gollum's show more than anyone else's, even the special-effects wizards behind the scenes.

Well worth seeing on the wide screen before its video release next year. It's guaranteed to take your breath away.

The story gains most of its dramatic impact from superbly understated acting and Christopher Doyle's atmospheric camera work.

It will frustrate viewers who like stories to make instant sense, but fans of provocative puzzles will have mind-teasing fun.

Comically grotesque, strikingly filmed.

Brilliant, poetic, and utterly unique.

It's as powerful as it is bruising, with more surprises than "Jurassic Park" and more sheer energy than any action movie this season.

Timely, pointed messages about oppression and opportunity come poignantly through in strongly dramatic terms.

This romantic farce has a talented cast and energy to spare, but somehow the ingredients don't burn as brightly as one would expect from such promising ingredients.

The filmmaking is meticulous and the ideas are endlessly thought-provoking.

Harrowing, extremely disturbing at times, but brought to the screen in dazzling pop-art images that make the movie's grim content very much worth watching.

This is a lively, life-affirming documentary no viewer is likely to forget.

Some will find the movie's sexual antics too explicit and unconventional for comfort.

Anderson fulfills the promise of his inventive "Bottle Rocket" with this quirky, often hilarious comedy, and Murray gives his most uproarious performance since the groundbreaking "Groundhog Day."

A full-fledged masterpiece.

Iran's greatest filmmaker is fond of stripping personalities bare through conversations they have while riding in cars. Here he pushes his favorite dramatic device to its limit.

Kicks off the Oedipus theme that gallops through the story.

The first half is full of verbal and visual surprises, but the later scenes are talky and dull, as if filmmaker Steven Soderbergh had lost interest in his subject and his characters. Which would be understandable, since the story often seems more calculated than heartfelt. [4 Aug 1989, Arts, p.10]

The acting is excellent, and the movie has a good-natured spirit to match its ultimate faith in the hero's deep-down goodness.

It never exploits its characters or demands their way of living. For all the hidden misery it uncovers, it remains compassionate and humane from first scene to last.

Unexpectedly subtle cinematic style.

It's an ideal match, and Eastwood deserves accolades as both director and star of this powerfully made picture.

The latest installment is packed with surprises and emotion for people who've seen earlier stages of the project, but even newcomers will be fascinated by the vivid glimpses it provides of everything from love and family to political action and the pervasiveness of class distinctions in British life.

Is this misogyny, as some insist, or a critique of misogyny, as others say? Many moviegoers, grossed out by the film's gothic approach to medical matters, won't watch long enough to find out which is the answer. [30 Sept 1988]

Heavily influenced by Quentin Tarantino's brand of quirky sensationalism, this high-energy saga by Paul Thomas Anderson goes a long way toward exposing the greed and stupidity of the pornography trade, then loses its moral compass and steers toward a sadly superficial ending.

As slow-moving as the voyage it portrays,...a surprisingly complex view of contemporary life beneath its good-natured surface.

Directed by newcomer Todd Field, who has a sensitive eye and a knack for storytelling.

Avoiding the clichés and condescension that characterize many films on religious figures, the movie is at once a compelling drama and a thoughtful look at faith-related issues on personal, social, and cultural levels.

A conventional dark comedy with moments of unexpectedly biting wit.

Nobody's Fool centers on a hard-luck guy named Sullivan, played by Newman with a wisdom and panache that recall the best work of his career.

The picture's thoughtfulness and ambition make it unusually suspenseful, gripping, and disturbing.

It's a picture marked by competence, not the boiling-over intensity that Frears and Thompson fans have anticipated. [30 Nov 1990]

One of Almodóvar's most challenging pictures, jumping around in time and sending a large gallery of characters through a wide variety of situations -- will find him again at the peak of his powers.

Swank gives one of the year's most complex and hard-hitting performances in the demanding central role.

It's the best animated fun of the year, and you don't need a lamp or a genie to enjoy it.

Smart, funny, stimulating.

The film should captivate anyone with a taste for bold cinematics, unpredictable storytelling, and pitch-black humor aimed at the worthiest of targets: a self-involved and self-congratulatory, industry that often gives lip service to art while worshipping the bottom line. [10 Apr 1992]

It combines a fresh and exciting style with stunning performances and that rarity in current film, a deeply humanistic story.

Loach has made more memorable films, such as "Raining Stones" and "Ladybird Ladybird," but his dramatic sense remains strong and his social conscience is absolutely unstoppable.

The acting is capable and the suspense is effective at times, but the gore is grisly and the climax is surprisingly hokey.

A fascinating nonfiction voyage into rural and urban France, focusing on idiosyncratic individuals who live off things the rest of us throw away, from food to furniture.

Politics and humanism find an engrossing balance in this ambitious drama based on the life of Reinaldo Arenas, a gay Cuban poet who was persecuted by the homophobic Castro regime.

Few American filmmakers put more faith in the ability of words to stimulate mind and heart.

Wittily written and deliciously acted, Lonergan's debut film is a clear cut above the average.

Has a sense of emotional urgency and deep-dwelling grief.

The topic is well-suited to the Maysles brothers, who helped pioneer reality-centered "direct cinema" techniques.

The plot switches gears every time it threatens to run out of energy, which keeps the show as lively as it is preposterous.

It's hugely ambitious, with a sweeping range of character types, frequently shifting moods, stylistic flourishes of many kinds, and some mighty wry satire, aimed largely at the world of psychotherapy.

Bob Hoskins doesn't succeed at making the hero's wild mood swings credible, but Cathy Tyson makes the most stunning screen debut in recent memory. The movie seems genuinely saddened, moreover, by its own nasty view of London lowlife. [13 June 1986, p.25]

Judged by the standards of ordinary filmmaking, it's as strange, suggestive, and surreal as other Lynch pictures have been. Judged by the standards of Lynch's own career, however, it's amazingly stale and second-hand… [and] contains not a single moment of genuinely felt emotion. [1 Sept 1992]

Superb acting and authentic details energize this rare Iran/Iraq coproduction.

Full of bright colors, offbeat people, tuneful sounds.

Kim's movie conjures a sense of spiritual discipline as suspenseful as it is stunning to watch and exhilarating to contemplate.

Excellent acting, a stirring screenplay, and crisply intelligent directing make this fact-based movie a great human drama as well as a riveting and revealing look at crucially important social issues.

The movie is a portrait, not a polemic -- but I can't imagine an attentive viewer leaving Love & Diane without increased understanding and concern with regard to inner-city life.

Nicholson makes the movie so poignant that it's hard to resist, but I wonder if Payne and Taylor are rejecting the skeptical attitudes of their other films to become more popular, hoping a softer emotional tone will help this picture win the Oscars that have eluded their more tough-minded works.

Results are illuminating, harrowing, and riveting.

A walloping entertainment, brimming with the magic-realist action that made Ang Lee's somewhat similar "Couching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" a hit.

Cameron's imaginative directing and screen-shaking performance give this rock musical plenty of oomph.

Plays out its drama with enough old-fashioned sobriety to lend the proceedings a classical air, offering the comfort of familiarity rather than the thrill of discovery. [13 Aug 1992]

Downright awful.

Extravagant and funny it is, and also quite dark at times.

Surely the best fiction film ever made on a jazz subject.

There's some sexually tinged humor and a bit of foul language, but most of the action is lightheaded fun. The picture also has a striking visual style - showing what a strong talent Almod'ovar can be when he focuses his energy on cinematic values, instead of dreaming up provocative stunts that put his work beyond the pale for many moviegoers.

Directed by Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky with the same unearthly visual style, and the same mingled concern with technology and psychology, that he showed in his towering ''Solaris'' a few years ago.

This remarkably clever, often hilarious animation derives much of its humor from its satirical view of the 1950s.

This first-person account of suffering and survival among Hungarian victims of the Holocaust contains much stirring and revealing material, although the conventionality of its style diminishes the freshness and urgency of its content to a degree. [05 Feb 1999, p.14]

Victimization of homosexuals during the Holocaust era has often been overlooked. Epstein and Friedman lucidly recount this woeful history, with help from Everett's articulate narration.

Rarely does a movie combine so much genuine human drama with such vivid exemplifications of "identity politics" and other sociocultural issues.

Weir had a truly magical touch in early films like this 1977 masterpiece, which offers a transfixing excursion into the "dream time" of Australian myth.

Suspenseful and ingeniously directed.

Everything about this subtly directed drama enhances its pathos and humor, especially an astonishing performance by Gorintin, a 90-something woman only a few years into her acting career.

Riveting documentary about the early California cable outlet and its ingenious programmer, Jerry Harvey, whose unsettled life and tragic death provide a dramatic framework for the account.

Masina gives one of her most expressive performances.

Much of the action seems more like warmed-over Quentin Tarantino than first-rate Steven Soderbergh.

Gene Hackman is solid as the hero, and Dennis Hopper does his best screen work ever. [6 Mar 1987, Arts & Leisure, p.23]

It's never been topped.

Kaurismaki is Finland's greatest filmmaker, and never has he more artfully balanced his patented blend of deadpan humor, low-key melodrama, and toe-tapping music.

The meandering story doesn't gather much momentum and Vittorio Storaro's camera work is less awesome than usual.

A reasonably effective comedy-drama that squarely fits the usual Allen mold. [18 Sept 1992, p.12]

This riveting drama takes courageous stands against the senselessness of war and the brutality of capital punishment, leading to one of the most ironic climaxes in British cinema. [17 Apr 1997, p.12]

Like O'Connor's other novel, The Violent Bear It Away, and some of her best short stories, Wise blood has a fierce momentum and a savage wit that stand alone in contemporary literature. The movie makes a good try at capturing these elusive elements. But ultimately it loses its balance, and many viewers may wonder whether its rewards are worth all its perversities. [07 Mar 1980, p.19]

While the movie is well acted and creative, its story and style are too self-consciously clever to build a high degree of emotional power.

Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith give uproarious comic performances as government agents ordered to keep New York's monsters in Manhattan, where they'll blend right in with the rest of the confusion.

A ruthless dissection of suburban malaise.

As before, the movie is more impressive for its finely detailed vision of Los Angeles as a futuristic slum than for its story, acting, or message. It's all downhill after the first few eye-dazzling minutes. [2 Oct 1992]

Cinema's greatest surrealist is at the peak of his powers in the last movie of his unparalleled career.

Easily the best American film so far this year, Far From Heaven is close to perfect.

Some of the film's points are made a bit too heavily, but the subject is as timely as it is timeless, and many of the performances strike a pitch-perfect balance between parody and passion.

If you can handle its horror-comic grotesquerie, you'll find an enormous amount of cinematic imagination at work.

The picture has more charm than credibility, and its conquistador-like attitude toward women is mighty questionable; but the story becomes resonant if you see it as a fable about Brando vicariously regaining his youth by teaming with Depp in this all-stops-out movie fantasy.

The movie gives us a Round Table and a flashing Excalibur but no magic, no mystery, no mythic resonance. Mostly there's a lot of slashing swordplay that should appeal to the picture's target audience of young males.

Jane Austen's deeply ironic novel loses some of its bite but little of its beauty in Emma Thompson's screen adaptation, which is fetchingly photographed and capably acted by Kate Winslet and Hugh Grant, among others.

Mood, atmosphere, and character are more important than story twists in this unassuming, acutely observant drama.

The visuals are amazingly realistic, filling the screen with authentic effects.

Charged with humanity and compassion.

Noyce's movie pares away the novel's meditations on the futility of war and the importance of religion. It retains the book's thoughtful blending of psychological and moral issues.

This kind of quiet ambiguity, avoiding easy answers to complex human conflicts, is all too rare in American movies.