Marjorie Baumgarten

A masterful synthesis of generic conventions and creative imagination, a sublime amalgam of some of the best tendencies and talent our times have to offer.

A smart and delightful romantic comedy, yet in the course of creating his new charmer Alexander Payne has sheared off some of the rambunctious edges that made his previous films, About Schmidt, Election, and Citizen Ruth, such marvelous studies in social parody.

Billy Wilder’s cynical edge is finely honed in this darkly amusing satire, which won three Academy Awards. It’s a film that is perennially ready for its close-up.

This essential Billy Wilder film smoothly combines trenchant social observation with hilarious comedy.

The film is an intensely personal record, yet also a universal contemplation. Faces Places leaves the viewer with a sense of the glories of images and communication – sometimes random, sometimes specific, always continual and cumulative.

Divorce severs this marriage like the dull blade of a knife cutting through the tiers of a wedding cake.

In her first solo writing and directing effort, the hard-working indie film actress Greta Gerwig proves that she is her own muse. She takes the well-worn coming-of-age-dramedy format and fashions something fresh, funny, and artful from its familiar tropes. Also delivering the goods is a knockout cast of accomplished veterans and relative newcomers.

As masterful as the character it portrays, TÁR is a textured, finely calibrated, stunningly composed, and thoroughly contemporary study. Its chords reverberate long after the music fades.

More than a story about Iraq war veterans, The Lucky Ones is a movie about carefully considering one's options.

There Will Be Blood is not a movie that disappears quietly.

Hands down, this is the best Astaire-Rogers musical ever. Nothing more needs to be said.

So fascinating is Brother's Keeper that you almost don't quarrel with things like the biased portraits of the prosecuting team and the Deliverance-like banjo-shuffling soundtrack. Brother's Keeper intrigue factor is enormously high and, it could almost be said, that this movie is good enough to be fiction.

Though Crumb is packed with information and telling details, the movie's objective is hardly art history or a survey of Crumb's place in the world of comics. The movie aims for broader subject matter, to discover something about the role art plays in the life of the artist, and about how the release of art may, indeed, allow the artist to function as a stable human being.

Spotlight is a great newspaper movie, ranking up there with "All the President’s Men" and "Citizen Kane", and it’s certainly the best of its kind since "The Paper" in 1994, which also happened to star Michael Keaton.

The keen observations of The Class ultimately become a remedial education in themselves.

The adaptation by Joel and Ethan Coen (both co-credited as writer and director) of McCarthy's as-if-written-for-the-screen No Country for Old Men becomes a marvelous meld of narrative faithfulness and pre-established sensibilities.

Secrets & Lies, despite my dwelling on its problems, is a really solid and enjoyable movie. It's just not what I would call "best of the fest."

Depending on your perspective, Moonee is either youth incarnate making the most of her circumstances, or Dennis the Menace determined to drive the oldsters stark-raving mad. Her escapades eventually take a turn from boisterously fun-loving to downright dangerous, which kicks the movie’s low simmer into full boil.

The film is a magnificent document of secular humanism.

Frenzy is one of the great latter-day Hitchcocks; great technique, great suspense, and very black humor drive this tale of an innocent man hunted by Scotland Yard for a series of sex murders.

One of the sharpest prison dramas ever, although it's graced with some very humorous portions as well.

It comes as little surprise that Errol Morris and Werner Herzog, both masters of sly documentaries in which the subjects nail themselves with their own words, are the executive producers of Oppenheimer’s film.

The film's ideas are provocative, yet vague and unfully formed. It's much like Pulse itself, which is a bit too long, despite several great sequences.

The perfect antidote to the summer heat in Austin, more refreshing even than a dip in our chilly holy waters of Barton Springs.

At heart, White is a black comedy with intriguing characters and a plot that plays its cards close to the deck.

Contemplative, though riddled with humor, After Life reveals itself gradually.

The story is bizarre, unique, and thoroughly unpredictable, while its images resemble some kind of bastard offspring of the linear realism of George Grosz and the fantastic foreboding of Edward Gorey.

Repulsion's depiction of a young woman's dissolution into madness is one of the most harrowing mental descents ever depicted onscreen. (Reviewed 11/24/97)