Michael Sragow

Mirren brings intellect, humor and romance to the role of Elizabeth II.

The result is a treat for Sandler fans and a revelation for those of us who've spent the last decade wondering what on earth his appeal is.

In Kurosawa’s dynamic yet intimate wide-screen filmmaking, practicality and empathy merge with psychoanalysis and even bits of magic; the young doctor’s near-fatal close encounter with a female serial killer, and a virtuous man’s deathbed confession of a horrifying marital tragedy, are among the sequences building to a genuinely inspirational conclusion.

Greengrass and his tremendously smart and emotionally agile lead actor, James Nesbitt, paint their portrait of a good politician without illusion or sentimentality.

One genuine small triumph of American Splendor is that the title isn't ironic. The movie is a splendid, inventive piece of urban Americana about that hardboiled original, Harvey Pekar.

What a relief to see a movie in which an audience responds with peals of laughter to subtle facial shifts as well as punch lines.

The movie's generosity of spirit and artistry swamps its flaws.

No one could seethe better than Mifune, but what gives the movie equal shares of exhilaration and heartbreak is the feeling that pours out of him when his son finds happiness in his own marriage.

There's no cheap uplift to their victory, no pop catharsis. What's great about United 93 is that you never feel it's just a movie - even though, as a movie, it's terrific.

A spellbinder of the rarest kind and quality. It opens audiences up to an infinite variety of emotional and intellectual nuances.

Wants to be a bittersweet comedy about erotic loss and memory loss. But it doesn't have the heart or brain.

The unique, serious fun of this movie - and forbidding reputation aside, it is exhilarating - lies in the way that Wiesler, Dreyman and Sieland end up collaborating unknowingly on their own Design for Living (for a while, it's like Noel Coward for moral cowards).

By turns breathtaking and heartbreaking.

One of the favorite sayings of journalists and politicians is "You don't want to see how the sausage is made." Marsh's movie says you do want to see how a miracle is made, even if the details can be just as unsavory.

A great, lusty movie in the tradition of Bertrand Blier's "Going Places."

Borat is a terrific, risky comic creation: a village idiot for the global village.

If any movie can rid Americans of "Iraq war fatigue," it's Charles Ferguson's muscular documentary No End in Sight.

It's intelligent and emotional, not studied or sappy.

A gorgeous flirt of a murder movie.

Even with the great Ken Watanabe lending command and compassion to the role of General Kuribayashi, it's a formless slog across a treacherous field.

Funny Girl is old-fashioned; it is also exhilarating.

Thanks to Walter Murch’s keen, intuitive sound montage and Hackman’s clammy, subtle performance, the movie captures a more elusive and universal fear—that of losing the power to respond, emotionally and morally, to the evidence of one’s own senses.

Will be hailed for its macabre imagination and inventive farce. But it also elegantly renders an archetypal teenage tale.

All the Coens come up with is a movie about bad things happening to limited people.

Just when you might give up on young American film directors making art the way Bergman and Kurosawa did, along comes Bennett Miller's quiet, tumultuous Capote.

If the movie has a flaw, it's that the working out of Vincent's psychology is too perfect.

A masterpiece of psychological suspense.

Thanks to Kerr's eloquent tremor of a performance, when the heroine witnesses apparitions, they're immediately credible to the audience. [29 May 2009, p.1C]