Glenn Kenny

Murina is a slow burn of a movie, one that doesn’t end in a detonation but with an enigma. Nevertheless, it’s one of the more coherent and satisfying narrative releases of the year.

Proceeds at a very stately pace, hoping the otherworldly mood of its detailed recreation of the old West might seep into the viewer's bones. This viewer did, as it happens, fall under the film's spell.

The wisdom of this meticulously crafted film is in its genuine irony, which amplifies steadily throughout until culminating in a moment of real heartbreak that, ironically enough, only sets the stage for a cycle of deceit to begin again.

The Duke is not his all-time-best picture, but it’s a very strong one, and it showcases his varied strengths as a filmmaker rather nicely.

The Fall is a movie whose every frame pulsates with the desire to be a transportive, transcendent work of cinema. And each one of said frames is full of visual bedazzlement and wonder. So full that one is loathe to sum up with the phrase "Close, but no cigar." But there is something, finally, kind of pushy about the film's desire to be a masterpiece.

von Donnersmarck delivers something extraordinary and rare: a thriller that's entirely adult in both its concerns and perspective which manages to be as thoroughly gripping as any finely tuned albeit adolescent Hollywood nail-biter.

As much as I enjoyed much of it, I hope Grindhouse doesn't start any trends. Exploitation cinema is combustible stuff that only highly trained professionals should be permitted to play with.

So breathtaking is the action.

Limbo is entirely engrossing as it brings its discomfiting points home.

“Copperfield” is a grand, long novel, and in reducing it to 120 minute scale, Iannucci has hewn it to something almost anecdotal.

Beautiful, lyrical, but not in the least bit wimpy. [May 2004, p. 18]

Margot is a fleet, strangely enjoyable film, animated by the acuity of Baumbach's perceptions and -- this helps a lot -- the frequent laugh-out-loud wit of his dialogue.

Yes, The Death of Stalin is a kind of farce, but it’s a mordant one. It never asks us to laugh at cruelty; it does make us laugh at the absurd pettiness and ultimate small-mindedness of the men perpetrating that cruelty. And Iannucci is a superb ringmaster.

With 2008’s “In Bruges,” and now “The Banshees of Inisherin,” the Irish actors, under the writing and directing aegis of frequently pleasantly perverse Martin McDonagh, display a chemistry and virtuosic interplay that recalls nothing so much as the maestros of the early 20th-century Comedy of Exasperation.

An observation that when you’re running away, it doesn’t matter where you’re running to as much as it matters where you’re running from. “Compartment No. 6” has an always energetic sense of place even when it’s keeping to the confined space of its title room. Combined with the committed acting, it makes for a worthwhile journey.

Wang’s non-adherence to narrative lines deliberately prevents the sense of sustained drama. Still, every sequence has some emotional or dramatic hook to make it engaging.

I generally resist calling any actor's work "brave" or "fearless" or any such thing, but Bosco's work here made me reconsider that self-imposed ban. It's incredible, harrowing, precise stuff.

The movie is relentless in how it poses questions about our culture’s way of dealing with the power of female sexuality (and it wouldn’t work without Robinson, whose appearance and performance is impeccable for the job) and acknowledges that there’s not only unease in these questions and their answers but also mordant hilarity.

Kaurismäki makes these bigots look ridiculous, but he also takes very seriously the damage they do, and the movie’s finale takes that into account.

Akin is here working in a tradition established in Italian Neo-realism — and by the end of the film, he shows he can turn on the viewer’s tear ducts as deftly as De Sica did in his prime — but his narrative approach brings a vivid freshness to the proceedings.

The way Philippe organizes the hundreds of clips provides more startling and exhilarating moments per minute than most movies about movies can muster, although I can’t say that aficionados of ostensibly realistic cinema aren't going to be too thrilled. Which is too bad, because among the many things this picture captures is how the fanciful worlds of “Oz” and Lynch illuminate the pain and splendor of the world we have to inhabit once we leave the magic realm of cinema.

As for this film's esteemed director, I don't remember getting such sheer pleasure out of an Altman movie since . . . hmm, lemme look at the filmo . . . hmm—"The Player"? Not so much . . . "O.C. and Stiggs"? I wish . . . Um, "Popeye"? More likely, but . . . Ah-"A Wedding." Yeah, that’s it, "A Wedding." Whoa. That was, like, almost 30 years ago.

By turns harrowing and stirring, it’s a shame-inducing history lesson that never feels like a lecture.

David Strathairn, playing Murrow, follows his writers' lead beautifully, delivering a performance that's all understatement on the surface and searing fire underneath.

As magnificent as the movie looks, sounds, and feels, this cut expands upon and unpeels the movie’s weaknesses both as story and meditation on Vietnam.

When the movie isn't being scary, it's crazily funny, so much so that critical watchers will wonder if Bong might tilt the balance of the picture too far in a comic direction and water down the scares. He doesn't.

One of the more striking and effective horror pictures of recent years.

Exiled brings To back to lighter ground, and it’s one of his most assured, enjoyable pictures, refreshing fun that’s sure to satisfy anyone’s action jones.