Michael Sragow

The movie is impressive both as a celebration of the Old West and a tough, ambivalent depiction of a ruthless pioneer. [04 Jun 2004]

The title Tell No One recalls the days when ads proclaimed, "No one will be seated after the first 15 minutes" and "Be considerate of your neighbors: Don't give away the ending of this picture." Both rules apply to this canny, refreshingly emotional and intuitive thriller.

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

It's first-class entertainment for bookish lads and lasses of all ages - and for those who never have or never will crack a paperback's spine. And it might inspire today's nascent artists to open up their sketch-pads as well as their hearts and minds.

The movie lives in its small details.

The gritty heist picture The Bank Job has everything adult action fans could want, starting with a grand, fact-inspired gimmick.

The movie has been compared, with some reason, to the French New Wave. But it's like "Jules and Jim" or "Band of Outsiders" blended with "A Hard Day's Night."

As a filmmaker, Brewer doesn't just yank your chain: He forges a bond with his characters and his audience that produces ecstasy and healing.

Standard Operating Procedure says that human nature abhors moral vacuums - but sometimes humans get sucked into them.

It's a summery idyll: his most entertaining picture since "Bullets Over Broadway" (1994) or maybe "Sweet and Lowdown" (1999).

The movie is an inspired comedy-drama about artistic temperament.

This is a landmark of Hollywood-on-Thames trompe-l’oeil.

Penn, with curled hair and wire-rims, makes a brilliant, slippery high-end shyster; his modulated hysteria is amazing. So is Brian De Palma’s direction. Few films actually made in the disco era can match the kinetic allure of this 1993 production, which has a bluesy undertow all its own.

This movie is as wrenching as it is eruptive. Hitchcock never went further beyond pop than he did with Sabotage.

Hayao Miyazaki’s animated adventure, from 1984, is a magnificent anomaly—a rousing vision of scorched earth.

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.

The union of thought and feeling becomes flesh and blood thanks to four brilliant performers in Iris.

The combination of 3-D photography and puppet-animation - centered on actual figures designed by hand and manipulated frame by frame - creates a world that's dense, active and fluid: a sensory Jacuzzi.

The movie's jabbing originality is what sticks in your memory.

The movie's sweetness, wit and charm go beyond its can't-we-all-just-get-along premise.

Until the final shot, the movie keeps you wondering how it will turn out.

The love that heals and the love that kills are one and the same in the exhilarating Head-On, Fatih Akin's overgrown dead-end-kid romance for live-wire adults.

Humpday mixes hilarity with upset as the irresistible force of male pride meets the immovable object of sexual identity.

To discover why movie fans are screaming for more Will Ferrell, and to savor the work of improv wizards like Carell, go see Anchorman.

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

A sophisticated thrill. And incandescent Thandie Newton is a worthy successor to Audrey Hepburn in 'Charade.'

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

Paul Giamatti - that huddle of broiling instincts, out-of-control impulses and aggravated ardor epitomized in "Sideways" - you feel his soul's absence as dearly as its presence.