Michael Wilmington

Honest, poignant and very funny, full of memorable, moving moments.

This magnificent pair are the heart of Techine's film, and the sense of frayed, aging beauty and handsomeness they now carry helps project the picture's main theme: the imperishability of true love.

One of the most remarkable English-language feature debuts of recent years.

A film made by a master, with a simplicity that is really revolutionary. It's a work capable of changing the ways you look at the movies - and at life.

A contemporary Russian movie that you could honestly call revolutionary, more for its style than its politics.

The splendid new documentary Crumb, a sympathetic yet woundingly candid portrait, catches the artist with much the same skill. [26 May 1995]

A movie with surprises, some of which you should discover for yourself. But its main surprises may be the power of Collette's performance and the beautifully controlled mood and atmosphere Brooks creates.

Love in the Afternoon is a 1957 romantic comedy by writer-director Billy Wilder that fondly re-created the atmosphere--the brio, wit, star personality and sardonic joie de vivre--of the great Hollywood-continental comic romances of the 1930s. And there's an obvious reason: It's a tribute from one movie comic master to the man who taught him how to do it. [15 Oct 1997, p.1]

The beauties of Shower lie in its human observation, in its funny interplay, candor, lusty acting and hearty simplicity - and also in its warm imagery and the fascinating symbolic use it makes of water.

It's hard to watch and listen to Together without, in some sense, having your heart lifted by its music.

The movie can still make temperatures rise -- though for musical rather than political reasons.

In The Weather Man, Nicolas Cage, a great oddball movie star who sometimes takes enormous risks, has a good, risky part again.

Movies about moviemaking usually fall into one of two categories: ones that satirize or debunk the film industry or ones that celebrate it. Irma Vep, a sometimes dazzling French film by writer-director Olivier Assayas, does both. [13 June 1997, p.I]

For a film that points out so much wrong with German society and shows such dubious, dangerous behavior, it leaves the audience with high spirits and a sense of crazy exhilaration.

A film that art-house audiences in 1959 loved madly. And who can blame them? A buoyant, searingly colorful retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth set in Rio de Janiero, writer-director's Marcel Camus' movie is a romance heightened by its backdrop.

It's a candy-flavored blast of a movie. But though children may love it, they shouldn't monopolize it. Adults will want to eat this peach, or ride it to Manhattan, just as much.

The movie looks like far more than a million dollars and it offers the kind of smart, picaresque good time you get from books like "The Reivers" and "Huckleberry Finn" and movies like "Bronco Billy" and "Bonnie and Clyde."

A gargantuan epic, a historical adventure-drama of overwhelming visual grandeur.

This century's Planet of the Apes is a rouser, a screaming-banshee fun house.

These are real characters, fully observed, gutsily written, beautifully acted by the two leads.

Has the kind of super-cinematic qualities and bravura acting that make up for almost anything.

So intense and warm are Leigh's feelings for his characters, that we may remember Hannah and Annie long afterward as old friends -- imperfect yet lovable, pals with whom we've suffered and laughed a lot.

Showing us a world through a child's eyes, A Time for Drunken Horses speaks so truthfully and well that it breaks the heart and scars the conscience.

Hitchcock's most disturbing film. [26 Nov 1999, p.A]

Shot with a Peter Greenaway-like austere impudence and edited brilliantly (by Jed Parker), this is an entertaining movie, and a moving one--even if, like me, you're not especially fond of these paintings or that scene.

A deceptively simple French film about teaching that keeps enlarging as you watch it, becoming beautiful and inspiring in a way most films never touch.

It's a movie that literally makes your mouth water. A smart, sprightly, lip-smacking comedy about a Taipei master chef who's lost his sense of taste and his tangled family problems with three romantically troubled daughters. It crackles with iridescent style and wit.

After "Ninotchka," this is the best Billy Wilder-Charles Brackett script filmed by somebody else: a terrific romantic swindle comedy set in Paris, starring Claudette Colbert, Don Ameche and John Barrymore. [26 Sep 2003, p.C5]