Michael Sragow

A great adventure.

What keeps the picture alive is Ghobadi's surprising, often explosive grasp of visual farce.

Thelma Schoonmaker, a Scorsese collaborator for over a quarter-century, did the bull's-eye editing. The moviemaking throughout is swift, unaffected, masterly.

The film has a steady, hypnotic momentum; the director, Masaki Kobayashi, wrings as much drama out of facial twitches as he does out of sword fights. He’s helped immensely by Nakadai’s molten performance and Toru Takemitsu’s spare, disquieting music.

The movie lives in its small details.

Starts out as a barbed, poignant little movie and turns into an excruciating slow-motion car wreck.

The result is a performance film that conjures a vision of American life as moving, funny and rueful as John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln.

Under its leathery hide is a genuine compulsion to de-romanticize Western gunfighting. Every bullet in this movie matters, and by the end Munny's alcohol-fuelled, satanic purposefulness is shocking: in the climax, even his choice of victims has a crazy excess. [10 Aug 1992, p.70]

A handsome, accomplished piece of work, but it drove me from absorption to excruciation within 20 minutes, and then it went on for two hours more.

The tough beauty of the picture is that it lets each viewer weigh the costs and benefits to Gardner. It's a genuinely transporting inspirational movie because it's also a cautionary tale. It doesn't downplay the hero's occasional clumsiness or pigheadedness.

What makes this movie an up is that even when its characters are crying for help, they're also crying for Help!

Through unexpected and cathartic twists, this movie leaves you with atonement and redemption.

In "Jaws," you didn't know whether to laugh or to scream. In The Host, the yocks rarely mesh with the yucks.

Hathaway carries you on an emotional whirligig that can be horrifying and funny, hopeful and devastating.

A terrific social drama, the work of an artist, not a pleader.

Slumdog Millionaire dives headfirst into something greater than a subculture - the enormous unchronicled culture of India's mega-slums - and achieves even more sweeping impact.

At last, a great contemporary holiday movie that's strictly for grown-ups - a holiday movie that really is a moviegoer's holiday from desultory daily fare.

It's both irrefutably concrete and irresistibly uplifting.

The Man Without a Past has the slenderness of a folk-tale -- also the clarity and charm.

If, like me, you're both desperate to see new public-works systems in our own country and sensitive to the possible human and ecological damage, Up the Yangtze provides a devastating view of top-down, broad-stroke social programs.

Voluptuous dance about love, pain and the whole damn thing.

It's the oddest case yet of the Emperor's New Clothes. After all, the Emperor in the fairy tale was naked. This movie has tons of fabulous clothing. The people disappear within their wardrobes.

No Man's Land is a 98-minute wonder: this story of three men in a trench renews the meaning of the word "trenchant."

One of the most gorgeous and sophisticated portraits of an artist ever put on film.

A spare, trembling lyric poem of a movie that uses stillness and facial blips the way melodramas use showdowns and action films big bangs.

Penelope Cruz is sensational in Volver - she's its lifeblood, its raison d'etre and its meaning.

Plays like a remake - not of "Knights of the Round Table" (1953) but of director Antoine Fuqua's previous "Tears of the Sun" (2003).

British director Mike Leigh has made the first great comedy for our new depression.