Noel Murray

Nothing Can Hurt Me is frustratingly unfocused, petering out considerably after its first hour.

ShowBusiness is a smart, highly entertaining piece of cinema-reportage, but it never quite rises to the level of penetrating insight or emotional catharsis.

Some of Knuckleball!'s best scenes show Dickey and Wakefield hanging out with Hough and Phil Niekro (the latter the rare knuckleballer who threw the pitch his whole career rather than turning to it out of desperation), talking about the mechanics and the mojo of the knuckler.

While far from perfect, I Believe In Unicorns is unusually attuned to how it feels for a teenager to have her first intense, quasi-mature relationship, and how it feels for her to use that love affair as an escape from some serious problems at home.

Given that gasp-inducing fireworks and light shows are the main reason why this film got made in the first place—and why people will want to watch it—it’s hard to fault Macdonald too much for opting more for uplift than provocation. After all, many artists begin with grand intentions, then settle for razzle-dazzle.

The movie as a whole tends to circle the same points, becoming less bracing the longer it runs. Still, for the most part, Coded Bias takes something huge and scary and breaks it down into small, easily understood morality tales, featuring everyday heroes fighting to save our future.

This is a different kind of monster movie, no doubt. It’s beautiful and magical, and as aware of the real world as it is of classic Hollywood. Good Manners is a haunting tale of love — and the burdens that come with it.

Illustrates how the rhetoric of civil rights changed after the breakthroughs of Martin Luther King. With the world's media finally paying attention, critical thinkers like Carmichael, Davis, and Malcolm X were able to push back against the fretful questions about violence, and redefine the story of blacks in America over the centuries as one defined by violence.

Amreeka lacks the sense of humor that set "Aliens In America" apart--and frankly, it’s rarely as insightful about the biases and strengths either of Arab émigrés or of sheltered Midwesterners.

The climactic emotional beats are telegraphed almost from the beginning, but they still hit hard, effectively leaving viewers who can suspend their disbelief feeling uplifted and dewy-eyed.

For those who can embrace Hagazussa more as an experience than as a spook show, this film is utterly absorbing and hard to shake.

What makes The Devil’s Candy a standout is how well-developed these characters are.... More importantly, Byrne is as skilled as ever at constructing sequences at once bizarre, suspenseful and oddly beautiful.

The movie has no story per se, and there are times when it does seem like Park is hovering, vulture-like, over his subjects' shoulders, waiting for a disaster. But Iron Crows isn't devoid of natural human exuberance, nor is it immune to the awesome spectacle of a dangerous job.

If the movie is about any one idea in particular, it’s about how parents do their best to stay on top of how their children grow, by taking pictures and documenting the memorable occasions, only to learn too late that most of life happens between the posing.

There’s just not enough of that good De Palma stuff here. The lush Pino Donaggio score and some well-choreographed chase sequences only hint at the movie Domino could’ve been, if a great artist had been granted access to his full palette.

Loving Mandy means appreciating what’s special about it from start to finish: from the psychedelic opening to the speed-metal finale. This film is a fusion of kitsch and pulp, underscored with a genuine spiritual yearning. It shouldn’t even be shown in theaters; it should be projected onto the side of an old hippie’s van.

The first half hour shows a dynamic politician who gets things done; the last hour shows him ground to dust by diplomats.

The cold irony that Foster provocatively presents is that if the idiocy surrounding pain clinics hadn’t become too gross and widespread for the authorities to ignore, people like the Georges might still be getting rich off of addiction today.

Even the breeziest Miami Blues scene can suddenly turn chilling.

So is JFK a good movie? Actually, it’s a great movie that looks better with each passing year. Even aside from what it’s saying, and even with the many, many forced moments, JFK has a mad genius about it.

All the way up to the stunning final shot, Ozon urgently asks whether, for storytellers, it’s better to be on the outside looking in, or the inside looking out.

It's like an early version of Network, and it's just as overwrought, but Kazan enlivens the material with a mise en scène so vigorous that it could make anyone buy into the auteur theory. Kazan varies his shooting style, alternating between portraiture, expressionism, and docu-realism for a look and rhythm that's about 15 years ahead of its time.

As Gabbert alternates [Gold's] monologues with long, gliding shots of funky supermarkets and old cinemas, she makes the point these aren’t disconnected aberrations in L.A. This is the city.

As an expression of the filmmaker’s own sense of guilt over buying into the Apple myth, this picture intends to be a bummer.

The smartest move that McGlynn makes in Rejoice And Shout is to let those old performances run on at length.

If nothing else, Julian Schnabel's concert film Lou Reed's Berlin presents the album's 10 songs with a force they've rarely shown before.

All That Jazz is one of the most self-indulgent movies ever made—but blessedly so.

Amanda Crew and Adam Brody give bracingly realistic performances as a grief-stricken couple in “Isabelle,” a supernatural thriller ultimately too sensationalistic to make proper use of the stars’ excellent work.

A Secret is suitably tense, sad, and deeply poignant as it moves toward an epilogue exploring the idea that everything rots and decays, no mater how well-maintained.

Photographic Memory is less wry and more melancholy than McElwee's earlier documentaries; it's a lot like his superb 2003 film "Bright Leaves," which was also concerned with family history and the shifting meaning of images.

7 Boxes is way too simple, but it mostly works, because every twist of the plot and turn of the street leads back to this one kid, who’ll do anything to make enough money to become someone other than himself.

More often than not, it’s better when filmmakers have a point-of-view, a sense of style, and something to say—all of which is undeniably true of Oda. But Nine Days resonates at such a distinct frequency that some may find it hauntingly beautiful (and have found it so, ever since the film debuted at Sundance back in 2020) while others may find it much too blaring.

Drenner’s overall approach here is too limiting for a character sketch—which may be why That Guy Dick Miller frequently veers off-topic.

This is what ultimately makes the movie’s climate-change backdrop more poignant than perplexing. By the end of Weathering With You, this has become a story about two people with their whole lives ahead of them, navigating their way through a future where they pine for things we all take for granted. Like, say, the simple pleasure of a sunny day.

The result is one beautiful movie-and no less so for making a strong case that beauty is a lie.

Piggy is a masterful mix of dark comedy, social commentary and raw suspense.

Being Evel’s story is too plain in the telling, but it’s still incredible, and relevant in the way it shows how a person can achieve wealth and fame if he’s willing to leap way high—and to endure the inevitable wipeout.

The footage in Paul Williams Still Alive - old and new - is highly entertaining, even moving. But it's as though Kessler recorded the DVD commentary track first, then made the movie.

Tell Them Who You Are is indulgent by design, and the elder Wexler may be right about his son's aesthetic failings.

Some may find all this tedious or confusing, but there’s an admirable integrity to Banfitch’s approach. The Outwaters genuinely feels like a first-person perspective on the end of the world.

In spite of a handful of striking images--4 never resolves into anything special.

Is Christine voyeuristic, or even exploitative? Very possibly. But it’s also vivid, intense, and artful.

Cronenberg has a lot of high-minded ideas, but he grounds them in human behavior and has found the right humans to tell his story.

Miike retains his twisted sense of humor, with mangling and disemboweling deployed for comic effect. And after 99 movies, he certainly knows how to make action memorable. When 300 brightly clad actors with sharp props come storming in for the story's climax, all a martial arts fan can do is sit back and salivate.

At its best and its sharpest, this film is less about supernatural monsters than about the common fear of drifting apart from the people you love.

Full Battle Rattle works just fine as a two-fisted combat story, with unexpected bursts of violence peppering that old universal message that war is hell.

There’s scarcely a minute of the amped-up action movie Line of Duty that isn’t absolutely ridiculous … and scarcely a minute that isn’t mindlessly entertaining.

Metal Lords traffics way too much in teen movie clichés; but whenever it sticks to the music and the relationships between its core trio of weirdoes, it’s genuinely affecting.

Unlike Salvadori's previous comedy, 2003's "Après Vous," Priceless is less preposterous, and more grounded in character.

Oskar Roehler's serio-comedy Agnes And His Brothers tries to make some incisive points about the damage wrought by society's sexual hang-ups, but though Roehler throws three different characters at the subject, only one halfway sticks.

Ultimately, If God Is Willing And Da Creek Don’t Rise is a documentary about the myriad ways that the poor stay poor, and the way our society marginalizes them by reducing them to numbers on a balance sheet instead of people with their own unique stories to tell and their own network of friends and family who love and rely on them.

Only a filmmaker as talented as Alex Ross Perry could make a movie as misbegotten as Golden Exits.

As Refn counts down the days and ratchets up the tension, Pusher shifts from a subdued lowlife sketch, with lots of raunchy conversation between Buric and his horndog ex-con buddy Mads Mikkelsen, to a nail-biting look at a man running out of options.

Spellbinding.

The Meaning Of Life is unsparing and elaborate in its vision of humanity at its foulest.

There’s something widely relatable about the way Barry tries to find somewhere to fit in, and preferably in a place where he can be himself and not somebody else’s symbol.

This absorbing, thoughtful film doesn’t take sides; that’s not James’ way.

Larrain crafts Post Mortem as a slow, quiet character study, narrowing in on Castro in his home and office while the world outside descends into madness.

Three Stars works best as straight-up food-porn.

He Never Died isn't as fleshed out as it could be, but what the film lacks in vivid supporting characters and rich plotting it gets back from Rollins, whose innate charisma carries the film.

Whenever the cars are running, Grand Prix is one of the best studio efforts of the '60s. The film only stalls when it's off the track, which is where more than half of this three-hour epic takes place.

Reggio has a flair for iconography, and whatever external baggage Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi may carry, they should be admired for their vivid, astonishing illustrations of humanity consuming itself in clouds of its own smoke and debris.

Williams has been making taut, gritty genre films and TV programs in the U.K. for two decades now, which is evident in the confidence of Bull.

Anyone could make a film about a theater full of naked women; only Wiseman would take equal interest in the person who handles the ticket-ordering, and the one who makes sure there's a bottle of champagne on every table.

Weaver's overacting and Dorfman's bold-faced dialogue oversell the scenario. Only Kingsley's sly turn gives Death And The Maiden any real feeling of disquiet.

When the long-promised global barrage of tornadoes, lightning strikes, tidal waves and extreme temperatures hits in the final half-hour, the special effects are stunning. But the razzle-dazzle arrives too late, and is strangely unmoving.

Though the plot contrives to throw Gervais and Leoni together and then pull them apart, the two leads stay consistently in sync through it all, laughing at each other's jokes and generally sharing the kind of normal adult communication that's often missing from movies about people falling in love.

Tiny Furniture offers a 21st-century, East Coast spin on "The Graduate," but with comedy-writer-ish dialogue and a mannered style that never fully gels.

Ends up being another one of those life-of-an-entertainer films that reduces an artist to his most embarrassing moments.

The gut-churningly nasty Pusher III practically justifies the whole series, as it digs deep into the angst of a drug kingpin—a junkie himself—nagged by a thousand little business details and taunted by all the young, carefree libertines he sees enjoying themselves at his drug dens.

deWitt's script is much better than anything Jacobs has worked on before, with a story that gets richer as it goes.

Dormant Beauty always comes back to the difficult decisions that family members have to make for each other, contrasted with the huffiness of outsiders who try to project their own beliefs onto someone else’s business.

Just when the seemingly endless scenes of Johansson's nagging threaten to sink Match Point for good, the movie becomes the thriller that early reports promised.

What binds the entertaining crime movie to its YouTube-ready musical interludes is the unspoken yearning of its two leads: he for the world of silence in which he'd rather live, and she for all the sounds that slip by every second, uncontrolled and unappreciated.

Rosefeldt’s visual panache and Blanchett’s astonishing versatility bring cinematic verve to something that could’ve easily come off as too dryly conceptual.

Luhrmann works aggressively for laughs early in the picture, playing up the gaudiness and piggishness of the old-guard dancers in camera angles as extreme and unflattering as a mid-'80s David Lee Roth video.

How can a freethinking father mandate his ideals without violating them? Pray covers it all, and movingly so.

If modern art-lovers want to understand what the Jack Smith experience was like, Jordan's documentary may be their best chance.

This is a fascinating, underreported piece of recent world history, but Patty Kim and Chris Sheridan's documentary Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story doesn't do it full justice.

If nothing else, the shaggy romantic comedy Celeste And Jesse Forever establishes that Parks And Recreation's Rashida Jones is a movie star.

The result is a movie that jumps all over the place, but with the ultimate intention of showing how the public's attitudes and assumptions about drugs have changed over the past half-century, guided by politicians and businessmen with a stake in misinformation.

For a film so slight, Doomsdays makes a strong impression.

While the message is pat, the way it’s presented is poignant, thanks to an arresting lead performance from Gong, who manages a tricky balance of chilliness and charm.

Great World Of Sound is painfully specific about the music-scouting grind.

Dagg (who previously made the very good chase picture “River”) tries too hard to give the material a highbrow frame. The movie is dimly lighted and hushed to a fault. But the China brothers’ script is strong, and Dagg elicits terrific performances from Abbott, Bernthal and Poots.

Pretty to look at, making good use of the scenery in and around Turin; if nothing else, the runaway plot keeps the movie unpredictable.

Rarely has the voyeuristic appeal of sitting on a jury been so cleverly expressed.

Goodman doesn't allow even a hint of postmodernism or self-consciousness to creep into What Doesn't Kill You, and though the movie's various heists and shootouts are gripping, they aren't especially kinetic or stylish.

The lack of a splashy style puts the tales of the rescued and their rescuers properly at the center, but whether viewers connect will depend in part on how saturated they are with Holocaust lore.

If von Carolsfeld had worked more surprises into her style and presentation, Marion Bridge wouldn't live down to its genre stereotype so readily.

The movie isn’t trying to understand Chicago in the Capone era. It just uses those names and stories as a backdrop for a lot of shooting, swearing and bad accents.

Most of what makes Brooklyn 45 so entertaining doesn’t cost a lot of money. It just takes talent, and diligence.

The moral to Clash's story? It's surprisingly easy being red.

Burdge holds the picture together, playing a character who walks a fine line between being sympathetically damaged and terrifyingly loony.

To The Limit is full of a lot of talk about "risk" and "dreams" and "making the impossible possible," and Danquart's stabs at making this an inspirational tale can be a little exhausting.

Almost as fascinating as the depiction of modern Cameroon law is the snapshot of how the 21st century has found its way into rural Africa. Cameroon has always been one of the more developed African nations, but the place where Sisters In Law takes place still consists mainly of tumbledown shacks strung together chaotically.

The tedium of The Raid 2’s setup is offset by some of the most jaw-dropping, bone-crunching, flesh-ripping setpieces ever filmed.

Prey works because the filmmakers don’t overcomplicate it. A “Predator” story should have well-crafted and excitingly staged scenes of humans fighting an alien. This picture has plenty.

La Moustache recalls the "everyday suspense" films of Roman Polanski and the existential woe of Michelangelo Antonioni, but it isn't as strange or penetrating as the former, or as artfully shot as the latter.

The movie ends abruptly, setting up an epilogue that viewers will have to provide for themselves. Jerichow's sparseness, tiny cast, and minimal plot can make the film seem a little elusive, but there’s a certain elegance to Petzold's concision, too. He shows all he wants us to see.

While the plot is skimpy, the performances are rich, which turns Prevenge into a series of satirical sketches, dissecting the social dynamics between a mother-to-be and the various men and women who think they have an advantage over her.

What makes this documentary a vital piece of Hollywood history is that it’s not as much about Hudson’s carefully managed public image as it is about the real joy and pleasure he experienced outside the spotlight — living not as some tortured romantic figure, but as someone who savored whatever the shadows could provide.

Neil Barsky's Koch doesn't try to do anything radical as a piece of filmmaking, but Barsky - a former newspaper reporter - covers Koch's story magnificently as a journalist.

Most viewers should find the documentary Battle For Brooklyn gripping and provocative, no matter their opinions about eminent domain, historic preservation, or public dollars going to support private development.

What's missing from Mozart's Sister, though, is the kind of fervor that made "Amadeus" so memorable.

When Two Worlds Collide employs a variety of styles and approaches to construct a single gripping narrative.

Like the real-life events that inspired it, Broadcast Signal Intrusion is most thrilling when it’s at its vaguest — like a juicy rumor that’s impossible to confirm.

Even during the gunfight, this always remains a character piece: a thoughtful, imaginative movie about stubbornly authoritarian professionals, protecting their territories.

Allen and Anderson are outstanding in roles that require a lot of levels and moods, as the central relationship goes from loving to shaky to … well, something else.

The stars can’t save it.

The movie’s “and then this happened” structure can feel a little scattered, as Rice bounces among different people’s personal stories without developing any narrative momentum. But those stories are still moving, especially given that nearly everyone watching Broadway Rising will have been through something similar.

It’s all lovely and sweet, and while this story might’ve been just as engaging in live action, Miyazaki’s animation does clear away the extraneous detail, re-creating the world of 50 years ago and instilling it with the poignancy of a family snapshot.

Black Death bears some similarities to a zombie movie in the way the plague inevitably overtakes the populace, and it also has one foot in the "creepy community" genre, alongside films like "The Wicker Man" and "Two Thousand Maniacs!"

Taken in the right spirit, The Pervert’s Guide To Ideology is a lot of fun, like watching a movie with a friend, then going out for drinks and talking late into the night. Just don’t expect to get a word in edgewise.

As is so often the case with Crowe, what mostly stands out about Singles is how sensitively and honestly it tries to capture the way people with deep convictions are inevitably headed for heartbreak.

The ordinariness of this film—and the flatness of its video-shot images, relative to Blank’s beautiful-looking ’70s films — isn’t a significant drawback, given how eloquent Leacock can be.

The best reason to see Don’t Knock Twice is the volatile chemistry between genre favorites Katee Sackhoff and Lucy Boynton.

“A Portrait” may not make Frisell’s biography fascinating, but it does give the proper due to a guitarist whose music flows like water into any handy vessel.

Unlike Medem’s best films, The Tree of Blood feels way too haphazard. It hops freely between timelines and characters, such that it becomes more of a compilation of sensual, stimulating scenes than a movie with anything in particular to say.

Darkness is a harrowing and affecting story about young women trying to hold onto hope across the grim, unchanging days.

There are two Bronsons on display here: the impossible thug that we don’t dare release into polite society, and the guy we enjoy watching do his terrible thing. The man and the movie are both living, punching contradictions.

These moments, enjoyable and arcane, may not add up to a masterpiece. But they're uniquely Weerasethakul's.

Divan overcomes its stylistic clichés only because Gluck's story is rich, and because it comes to a knockout finish.

The emotional reserve of 66 Days can make the film feel a little dry at times, given that it’s about something as visceral as a man starving himself to death. But Byrne does a fine job of juggling a lot of information.

The filmmaker self-consciously borrows from dozens of sources, including radio dramas, Our Gang shorts, hygiene films, school plays, stag pictures, Universal horror, ethnographic documentaries, and the indie weirdness of John Waters and David Lynch.

The movie comes to life whenever Hamed Behdad appears.

Nearly a quarter of the way through Earth Days, the movie seems on-track to being just another tongue-clucking “Isn’t it a pity” doc, painted in broad strokes.

This movie is uncompromisingly discomfiting, meant to remind people of all those drunken nights where they overreacted to every well-intentioned joke, and woke up choking on the stench of burned bridges.

Gleize establishes her multiple plotlines fairly cleanly, though once disentangled, the individual stories don't offer enough incident to be meaningful. They don't mean that much all put together, either, but Carnage is still highly watchable, thanks to Gleize's keen eye.

Billie isn’t just about the stories we tell about great artists. It’s also about why we tell them — and whether we can ever really get them right.

Though the result is too slow and curious, with a weak lead performance by the writer-director, The Tenant's tone of abstracted anxiety is distinctive, and its central message, that the obnoxious define the world for everyone else, provides another tile in Polanski's career mosaic of paranoia and power brokerage.

Slight but fun.

Neither pro- nor anti-war; it’s a somber study of perpetually unsettled lives.

In the end, Black Book may be one of the most fun movies ever made about how people basically suck.

Hoge, who scripted and directed The United States Of Leland, caters to his cast too much. He gives almost every character a way-too-involved subplot, which distracts from the heart of his story.

Mavis! is maybe too short and too plain, but it covers a lot of ground and contains a lot of great music. It's a fitting tribute to a true American original, belatedly getting her due.

Manda Bala is exciting and stylish, and Kohn knows exactly what he wants the movie to say. But he makes most of his points in the first 10 minutes, with disgusting slow-motion frog footage and sound bites from social scientists pointing out how "corruption is what links all other crimes." The rest is just so much show.

On a narrative level, Mazzei and Goldhaber don’t come up with enough ideas for how to capitalize on their hooky premise. But on a character level? The filmmakers and Brewer capture the mounting existential anxiety of a woman who’s constructed an entire identity on-line and is horrified to see that it can keep on living without her.

Ewing and Grady practically squander the African material, and The Boys Of Baraka doesn't really come to life until the boys return to Baltimore for what turns out to be a permanent summer vacation, due to political unrest overseas.

Given how well Micheli captures the personality and aspirations of two complicated professionals, it's too bad she never answers the key question: What makes one person a stuntwoman, and another a star?

Vesper is on the arty side of science-fiction, more focused on character and setting than in plot-driven thrills.

What makes Prisoners more potent than its oft-implausible mystery should allow is the way Villeneuve lingers over the textures of a terrible event.

Somehow, all of these scattered pieces of film and video fit together, as do the ideas they represent.

The emotions evoked by Bird People should be familiar to anyone who ever stared out the window of a classroom, imagining what it would be like to leave school, hop on a bike, and go for a ride around the mostly empty neighborhood.

While Our Last Tango is a little schematic overall, from moment to moment, it's beautifully choreographed.

Directors Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe (best-known for their Terry Gilliam behind-the-scenes docs Lost In La Mancha and The Hamster Factor) have made The Bad Kids in the “fly on the wall” mold of Frederick Wiseman, crossed with the “year-in-the-life” storytelling of Hoop Dreams. The structure of Black Rock itself is one of their biggest narrative assets.

Castro’s Spies becomes genuinely challenging once Aslin and Lennon get to the trials of these men, who argued they were acting within the bounds of U.S. law to push back against the actions of a country that had interfered in Cuban affairs for more than a century.

This is a beguiling film about two people so charming and disarming that no one suspected them of anything shady when they were alive — although now that they’re gone, the Alters’ many mysteries have the allure of great art.

The Barbarian Invasions' flaws are mainly glaring because the movie is occasionally so winning.

I Care A Lot isn’t some brilliantly subversive social satire. It’s a tightly constructed, masterfully acted, lightly stylish little caper picture, which revels in just how mean it can be. It’s not essential, and it’s not for everybody. But for those who prefer their pulp to carry the faint aroma of moral rot, this movie is a real treat.

The story is almost too small for Bertolucci's sprawling approach, and the ungainliness of his international cast stifles both the dialogue and the performances.

While Bitton engages in some penetrating conversations, and shoots some artful video footage, Wall never really tops its first scene.

Walker has something important to say with Countdown To Zero, but if this movie were standing on a doorstep with a petition, most reasonable people would sign it quickly and send it on its way, rather than inviting it in to chat.

Primal ends up being more exhausting than awesome.

The superhero stuff is often unintentionally silly, but again, Sayles shapes a catchy premise into a subtler piece, using Morton's "alien" status as a way of asking who deserves to be called an outsider in a country born of outsiders.

For all the smart visual design, though, She's One Of Us is frustratingly clinical.

In the end, Blank City becomes not just a salute to the artistic adventurousness of a bygone New York, but a reminder that new strains of creativity keep emerging, just when the scene looks stalest.

Get Low is meant to be funny, heartwarming, and wise, and it is, for the most part--but in an overly familiar way.

While writer-director Megan Freels Johnston makes some unusual choices that set her film apart from run-of-the-mill low-budget horror, too much of her movie feels warmed-over.

By preserving the exoticism and making sure the audience left the theater humming, Jewison made a grubby, European-flavored movie that Yanks could embrace.

Because the audience isn’t privy to the hero’s thoughts, the final 15 minutes or so of Big Fan are white-knuckle.

Grease is a pure pop construct, fueled by movie-star poses, hit songs, and persistent audience fantasies of being an acceptable kind of "bad." Barry Gibb-penned disco theme aside, Grease doesn't really belong to any one era. It's like it's always existed.

This is a crime story with little to no interest in the who or the why, but only the what and the how. It's a reverse-procedural, tracking not the solution of a crime, but all of its awful particulars.

Waging A Living's biggest failing is that Weisberg gives his subjects too much of a pass when it comes to their bad past romantic and career choices.

The film’s icy style pays surprising emotional dividends by the end, with the heroine’s silent meditations on who she is and whether she owes anything to her family culminating in moments of real tenderness.

Banzai is an occasionally incomprehensible rush of subplots, sight gags, mythology, and bizarre fashion choices, truer to the spirit of classic adventure stories than to the letter. Which may be why people who love the film feel the way they do. Buckaroo Banzai assumes an attitude of poise and purpose in an otherwise awkward universe.

This is a powerful movie about human nature and how no matter where we end up — and who we end up with — we wake up each day and adjust.

Had Almodóvar embraced the genre more, and changed his style to suit a story in which human beings get hacked up and transformed, he might've naturally found his way into a more potent, satisfying narrative, rather than one that dawdles and dead-ends.

The very definition of "breezy." It's a featherweight romantic comedy.

The Last Unicorn is notable because author Peter S. Beagle adapted his own popular 1968 novel, and made sure that his philosophical ruminations on myth, truth, and illusion remained integral to the plot.

Love Songs is definitely daring, but too much of it seems calculated to lead up to a final line about how to guard against grief.

The 12th Man is a polished crowd-pleaser, with a timeless message: Nazis suck.

What makes Informant so effective is that while its focus is on Darby, the story has a larger scope.

This is pure, thick hokum. It’s also utterly absorbing, from start to finish.

When El Bola isn't drawing cheap sentiment from the sight of a bruised and scarred little boy, Mañas raises vexing questions about how and why parents leave lasting impressions on their children, and whether good intentions really matter.

There's nothing surprising about the arc of Kold's story, but Matthiesen and his cast have created a believable space, and that ultimately helps give Teddy Bear the tension of a fine suspense film once Kold sits down across the kitchen table from Steentoft to speak his mind at last.

Big Game tries a little of everything, but ultimately settles into being a scrappy, lower-budget spin on the Big Dopey Action Movie genre. And as with nearly every stab at the BDAM, the audience’s satisfaction will depend largely on just how dopey they expect it to be.

When the trouble does hit in this film, it hits hard, at which point all the investment in character pays off.

The first full flowering of the De Palma style, the film cleverly uses split-screens and cross-cutting to string the audience along while heightening the emotions of any given scene nearly to the point of parody. The movie is playful and provocative -- at once one of the scariest and funniest horror movies of the '70s. [21 Oct 2018, p.E7]

In the wake of Lethal Weapon, producers across Hollywood had started running the buddy-cop concept into the ground, which made 1989’s Lethal Weapon 2 a reminder of how to do this schtick right, with just as much emphasis on loose character interaction as on violent action.

Song Of The Sea is a triumph of design and animation, populating lavishly detailed, patterned backdrops with characters so simplified that they could’ve been cut-and-pasted from a newspaper comic strip.

Makes effective drama, but ultimately it's just an outrage machine, designed to get the viewer fired up by the sight of warring ideologues preaching to their own.

Queen To Play has a winning heroine, who fantasizes about being special and then works hard to make it happen. Too bad the rest of the movie is so common.

Has a free-ranging mood, mixing tragedy and comedy irregularly, but Jeong's film is equally free with genre, and entertains its audience openly before pouring on the astringent.

Harrelson thrives amid the restlessness, and gives perhaps the peak performance of his increasingly distinguished career.

For those able to overlook the obviousness, The Painting is both beautiful and affecting.

There's ample overacting by the likes of Stella Stevens, Ernest Borgnine, and Shelley Winters, but the movie's one-obstacle-atop-another plot—and active meditation on faith—remain sharp and surprising.

Though the movie rockets Judge’s doltish heroes into the future, it feels like a charming artifact from the past.

Yankovic diehards will likely enjoy this movie since — like his parody songs — it takes self-serious pieces of pop culture and changes the words to something silly. Those songs though are usually under four minutes. This picture runs 108.

In spite of the material's thinness, and even though Carradine and Keitel look ridiculous sporting fancy duds while speaking bodice-ripper dialogue in flat American accents, The Duellists endures as a diverting action potboiler.

If After the Bite ultimately has more questions than answers, it’s only because the film is reflecting the people it’s about, who see existential dangers everywhere and no easy way back to safety.

It's more clever than funny, but it's very clever.

Indie filmmaker Pete Ohs and a small cast of committed actors ventured out into a barren New Mexico nowhere for “Jethica,” a horror-comedy that doesn’t offer much in the way of scares or laughs but is strangely fascinating regardless.

The movie is most successful when it ditches the particulars of the text and just grooves on how it feels to be displaced and disgruntled, stranded in a surreal mindscape that in some ways makes just as much sense as any other day on a dreary alpaca ranch.

The Warlords relies too much on combat movie clichés and corny sentiment, weighted down by speeches about heroism and hypocrisy.

There’s a hagiographic aspect to Truth Or Dare that’s disquieting even now, especially given that an honest movie about this genuinely groundbreaking tour—which became the model for ambitious pop-star concerts—and the high-school-play-like camaraderie of its personnel would’ve had more lasting value.

Shortland and Grant build to a climactic final act that’s almost unbearably intense.

Dilts and Grashaw build out What Josiah Saw thoughtfully, letting the dread from one story bleed into the next, until everything is covered in a dark, dark stain.

What becomes clear in this film—if it wasn’t obvious already—is that sometimes the ways in which the rich and powerful thrive have nothing to do with merit. Sometimes they just buy access to people like Singer, who are good at selling their customers a story they can tell.

It’s possible Swab made this film just to tell a story about the more compassionate side of prostitution. If so, the movie’s guilty-pleasure thrills are just a bonus.

Comes closer than most to seeing the whole picture.

Mohawk is a gripping and despairing action picture, about how we can't seem to stop trying to destroy those we distrust — including ourselves.

The movie is never going to have broad appeal. Though Sasanatieng makes a few swings at real poignancy--which don't really connect--mostly this is the kind of relentlessly postmodern "fun" best served in small portions, and preferably on dessert plates.

More than a few times, the film feels choppy, sloppy or paltry. But Wall gives a sympathetic performance as a man facing his final stand. And even at its pulpiest, Happy Hunting has a point to make — about how in modern society we often use the pretense of morality to justify base savagery.

Best approached with little to no advance information or expectations, which is the same way the film's characters experience their lives.

Why Don’t You Just Die! is too cartoonish and glib to have much to say about Russia or about genre films in general. But it is stylish and snazzy — a confident throwback to the knowing exploitation pictures of yesteryear.

When the best part of the movie is when no one's talking and the anguish relents, it says something. It says that Iñárritu is a great director in need of a screenwriter who has more than one card to play.

Co-directors Anna Rose Holmer and Saela Davis (who previously collaborated on the excellent mood-piece “The Fits”) create a strong sense of rhythm and texture, capturing the feel of this town and how it holds its inhabitants tightly.

Garbus knows how to catch people at their most open, as they define their own types and simultaneously transcend them.

Listening to Berg's characters talk so naturally, honestly, and colorfully about the small, surmountable problems of their daily life is so engaging that whenever Kempner cuts away to another dry historian or fervent fan, it's doubly aggravating.

The characters Lehmann and company use as generational mouthpieces bear no relation to any people who have ever existed, and they barely work as parody.

What makes the movie fascinating is the particulars of the campaigns.

Even if The Little Hours never becomes a knee-slapper, it’s consistently entertaining…kind of like a laid-back, stretched-out Monty Python sketch.

When “Chasing Trane” serves up mesmerizing footage of Coltrane lost in the middle of a long solo, the film communicates something beyond words.

What emerges won’t be revelatory for anyone who has spent time studying the Kubrick filmography. But it’s still such a rare treat to hear the man himself say anything at all — let alone to hear him talk about why the ideas in his work and the challenges of bringing them to the screen excited him as much as they did his fans.

Peepli Live has a lot in common with Billy Wilder's black comedy Ace In The Hole, in that it explores the cynicism of modern life with wit and honesty.

There's been a proliferation of "globalization sucks" documentaries over the past couple of years, but few have been as blunt as Black Gold.

It's clear what Breillat is trying to do here in the abstract - and The Sleeping Beauty is never less than gorgeous to look at - but the movie doesn't hang together as a story, and "stories" are what these fairy tales are meant to deliver.

Enjoyably moody in the early going, and it develops into a decent Hitchcockian thriller at times.

The material about the modern-day Peggy and Joe is incredibly sweet... But A Life In Dirty Movies is also fascinating just as a document of changing cultural mores.

Still, there’s something instructive in how little progress Thunberg seems to make even with sympathetic politicians—which means that she has to keep raising her pitch. And there’s definitely something infuriating about all the clips of world leaders and snarky TV pundits mocking Greta, calling her stridently angry, dangerously naive, and even “mentally ill.”

What’s most notable is how Eastwood holds fast to the rebel spirit of the spaghetti Westerns and revisionist New Hollywood Westerns of the previous decade, but packages it in a film that’s slicker and more mainstream-friendly. 

There’s a rigidity of purpose here that keeps A Nazi Legacy from ever becoming startling or revelatory.

Garcia and Prinze are so likable that it’s satisfying to see them spend an hour or so of screen time figuring out what the audience knows right away.

Thanks to a focus on the setting and emotions of the story, by the time the life-or-death action kicks in, Harcourt and McKenzie have clearly delineated these characters and what they’re facing — bringing Mahy’s words to life.

Polanski’s direction of Venus In Fur is masterful—a pleasure in and of itself—but Seigner is the star attraction here, giving one of the best performances of her distinguished career.

A raucous, relevant documentary, capturing the mood of the times and the participants' best anecdotes.

The filmmakers get more tension and even emotion out of this premise than most movies of this type do, mainly by treating the characters as multidimensional people who deserve a shot at redemption, and not like voodoo dolls ripe for the poking.

The story starts at a low boil and quickly heats up, but the problem with Tell No One--a common problem with contemporary pulp literature--is that at some point, all the narrative's intriguing questions resolve with prosaic answers, delivered in long, convoluted speeches by people wielding guns.

So much about The Friends Of Eddie Coyle feels locked into 1973—from Dave Grusin’s jazz-fusion score to the shaggy hair and wide collars—but the dialogue is almost David Mamet-like in its specificity and rhythm, and it remains bracing even now.

For all Crowley's reliance on quiet naturalism, Boy A ultimately steals a page from film noir, showing how guilt and constant hounding can turn any ex-con into the desperate animal everyone presumes him to be.

Even at its most scattered though, Finding Yingying is haunting, largely because it’s so personal. In a way, this feels like Shi reflecting on her own life by honoring someone who had hers cut short.

Where before, Porterfield seemed to be recording life as it’s lived, here, he’s mostly recording plot. The difference is glaring.

La Petite Lili isn't conventional or crowd-pleasing enough to appeal to audiences who like their foreign films safely sentimental, but it's also not daring enough for those who expect art to hurt a little.

The Princess is absorbing and surprisingly intimate, given the sources Perkins used. But it’s also a cautionary tale, which lets no one off the hook.

The Last Winter's heart is in the right place, but it isn't pumping any blood.

Just as the plot combines fantastical and biographical elements-some of it is reportedly based on Satrapi's own family legends-so the filmmaking veers from straightforward to more outsized. The tonal shifts don't always work.

What's so remarkable about the movie is how matter-of-fact it is.

The fun of watching The Towering Inferno is in figuring out which old star Allen is going to indiscriminately kill off, as well as watching ultramodern décor go up in flames while a bunch of stubborn egotists refuse to listen to reasonable men.

As offbeat and personal as the director’s best.

The second movie nestled within Solitary Man--the one that doesn’t show up often enough--is about a man of rare eloquence and honesty, sharing his views on salesmanship and sex with anyone who’ll listen.

This movie is more like a gallery exhibition of moving portraits — each more astonishing than the last.

The movie can be affecting at times, and might’ve been even more so if Potter hadn’t made its theme so explicit, via heavy “this is the point” speeches delivered during what’s otherwise a powerful climax.

Mona Lisa’s story is at first bizarre, and then tense, and then genuinely moving as the escapee figures out what she actually wants from the outside world.

The main reason to see The Armor Of Light is to spend more time with Schenck, and to get a sense of how deeply he’s thought about all of this.

The brilliance of Knightriders—and it is a brilliant film, even though no one paid it much attention when it was released in 1981—is that Romero clearly identifies with King William, yet doesn’t lionize him.

Beyond treating this story like a potboiler, Deraspe does her best to make A Gay Girl In Damascus cinematic. She alternates nicely framed and photographed interviews with some fairly expressive dramatic reenactments. Some of these are pretty powerful.

Segan doesn’t force anything. He takes each situation and imagines what might realistically happen — and then what might happen next. He builds a world that feels real, and anchors it with a relationship so wholesome that its easy to see why a lonely vampire would upend his whole existence to preserve it.

Jeffers and Hay have a strong chemistry, and they make Peter and Winona’s vivacity and pain feel equally real, even when the movie around them is shading toward the phony.

What results is an illuminating new way of seeing this old building — not just as an historic landmark where amazing things happened long ago, but as a place where people have actually lived full lives, finding shelter and inspiration in its haunted halls.

Despite the morbid preoccupation with diving’s dangers, The Deepest Breath is an intense and often beautiful movie, likely to appeal to fans of extreme sports documentaries like “Free Solo” and “Riding Giants.”

The cast doesn't treat The Company Men like a slideshow. They take something overly schematic and imbue it with real anxiety, shame, and humility.

Intended to be shamelessly heart-tugging and even uplifting in an odd way, but it's recommended mainly as an acting showcase.

There isn’t much to The Exploding Girl, but it’s blessedly compact, and owns its no-big-deal-ness.

Bloody Oranges isn’t a heavy-handed polemic. It’s more a genre-hopping experiment: sometimes funny, sometimes terrifying. Meurisse’s pluck is admirable, even though — or perhaps because — he’s made something often incredibly unpleasant.

Even if the narrative feels a little forced, the movie still works.

The story’s many advances and reversals can be hard to follow at times, but this isn’t really a movie where plot is paramount. Everything boils down to the action, and what that action means.

The strength of Eastwood’s Bridges is in its patience, and how it lets the love story develop from start to finish, even though the audience knows from the beginning the broad strokes of what’s going to happen.

About A Son may not let in anybody who doesn't already have one foot in Nirvana's doorway, but those people are invited in fully, to experience the contradictions and preoccupations of a man whose music defined his era.

We Live In Public doesn’t show that Harris was a genius so much as that he was a mentally and emotionally unstable egotist, trying to force a revolution in self-broadcasting and connectivity that later happened more naturally.

The Milk Of Sorrow is lousy with allegory, and is often too heavy for its own good.

The two main points Persepolis makes are that strife is relative, and all politics are personal.

Bryan Fogel’s Netflix documentary Icarus tells such an eye-opening story that it almost doesn’t matter when the storytelling itself gets a little sloppy.

If nothing else, Scheinfeld captures the essence of the Nilsson experience, and how, according to his attorney, "He would turn up at your door at 4 in the morning, and you knew that the next three days were going to be an adventure."

Bullhead is well-plotted, with a powerful ending, but its most brutal scene comes early, explaining why for Schoenaerts, life has been one long wince.

More propaganda than cinema, and at an hour and a half, its exhaustiveness diminishes its impact. But Epstein anchors the film nicely with her own pregnancy, which occurs while the documentary is in production and comes to an unexpected conclusion before shooting ends.

Berri's work never really rises above the gradual or the mild, and it eventually settles gently into one of those elliptical conclusions that mark mainstream French cinema at its most tasteful and staid, but the film's fully realized performances and sharply observed moments make it a pleasure, albeit a minor one.

The movie as a whole has an immediacy that’s appealing even in its weaker second half.

Dark Passage is usually ranked as the least of the four Bogart-Bacall collaborations, but it's a practically perfect little noir exercise, with Bogart as a prison escapee tracking his wife's killer.

From Valentino Garavani's imperious carriage and diva fits to his coterie of tiny dogs, the subject of Tyrnauer's doc comes off like a fictional character, scripted by a writer with a weakness for cliché.

Skarsgård brings some redemptive soul to the role of a man who gradually begins to understand the aptness of his favorite Pretenders album: "Learning To Crawl."

So what happens when people forget about all those people he stalked and snapped? Will his collection still be seen as an invaluable store of late 20th-century art, or the work of a celeb-obsessed hoarder?

Pierrepoint is handsomely crafted and well-acted, but its sense of scale is as constricted as a noose.

There’s a tear-jerking moment roughly every five to 10 minutes in this movie, as Gomez reveals her essential dilemma of being someone who loves making fans happy and loves being creative but lives in fear — as many people do — of disappointing their benefactors and loved ones.

Funny, twisty, and sometimes bittersweet, Potiche is a fluffy good time, but not entirely insubstantial.

Tommy just riffs freely, aping the moody, improvisatory style of classic jazz as he works some rich variations on the all-too-common story of an artist knocked around by a rough romance.

This is a different kind of prison escape picture, focusing on the stifling confines of a life devoid of possibility.

Perhaps the best use of Caldwell and Earl’s limited budget is their cast, which also includes Andre Royo and Anwan Glover as dangerous men. They help keep “Prospect” from becoming a gimmicky mash-up and make it more a study of real people just trying to get by far from civilization.

The outsider road picture Gypsy 83 means well, but writer-director Todd Stephens can't keep his aesthetic out of the way.

Eventually, The Blackcoat’s Daughter connects the pieces and ends strongly, though Perkins smartly spends more creative energy on crafting creepy situations than on pointing toward the payoff.

It’s a taut, intense procedural, with a resonant story that simultaneously follows a journalistic investigation and an attempt to fix a fatally dysfunctional medical bureaucracy—all while criminal organizations, corrupt politicians, and rabble-rousing television hosts work in concert to stymie any real reform.

Downfall is effectively enraging—especially in its middle section, where the picture really packs the most punch.

Even if Eat Drink Man Woman had no plot, it’d be a pleasure to watch.

What Queen And Country has going for it that admirers of the original will appreciate—and that total novices can enjoy just as much—is how skillfully Boorman takes major historical events and filters them through small, personal moments.

Ruth Wilson gives an outstanding performance.

Ultimately, Meet The Fokkens isn't a documentary about elderly hookers; it's about two women forced into a hard life by circumstance, who tried to make the best of their situation, and are trying still.

What makes this film so fascinating is that its subject remains an enigma: a pioneer who did a lot of good and inspired a lot of people, then faded quietly away, leaving questions about who he really was.

Amalric gives another in a recent string of riveting performances, and Klotz gets a lot of play out of the ironic distance between musical expression and corporate rigor.

To Die Like A Man is powerfully controlled, and builds to a moving finale in which the characters are stripped down to their essences: no flowers, just stem.

Opens with a montage of thrilling clips from its predecessor, then hits all the same notes, harder and duller.

The two sides of A Vigilante are ultimately held together by Wilde’s ferocious performance — which swings between steely control and eruptive emotion — and by the way Dagger-Nickson frames nearly every moment from Sadie’s perspective.

Girl Model shows that even though some models make big bucks, the global economy remains the same as it ever was: Those with nothing are seduced by the prospect of something, such that they hesitate to complain, lest they end up with less than nothing.