Peter Rainer

This may sound like a dry subject, but, as presented here, it's anything but – especially if you have more than a passing interest in the art and science of what gets projected onto our movie screens these days.

The battle scenes and a few of the human vignettes are powerful, but too often the film falls back on conventional plot mechanics.

There is so much to look at in Isle of Dogs that a second viewing is almost mandatory. You can forgive its fetishism. Mania this dedicated deserves its due.

The Brothers Bloom is much more interested in showing off its own smarts, such as they are, than in challenging the audience's.

The movie often seems glib in the face of tragedy. And when, near the end, Shepard tries to pour on the hearts and flowers by showing us just what made Simon crack up on camera, the bathos is icky. The whole movie is icky.

Devos is especially fine as a woman whose inner solitude carries depth charges.

The hurt and rage flying back and forth have primal power, like Russian-flavored Eugene O'Neill. It's rare for a movie to work as effectively as this one does on such parallel tracks.

It’s questionable whether this film needs narration at all, or at least whether it needs the faux biblical lyricisms served up here. The panoramas are so glorious that I didn’t ache to hear any highfalutin hoo-ha on the soundtrack.

Melissa Leo is startlingly good...You feel like you're watching a life, not a performance.

The living-apart scenario is contrived – there was no way for these men to share a space somewhere? – but the two actors are so good that it doesn’t much matter.

So intimate and sensual and funny and psychologically self-revealing that it makes most of what passes for sex in the movies look like cheap hysterics.

The jamboree is beautifully shot and directed, by Chris Menges and David Leland respectively, and there is a haunting touch: the presence of George’s son, Dhani, on guitar, looking near-identical to his dad in his twenties.

It's a highly enjoyable spree that doesn't add up to a whole lot by the end. But you don't necessarily want it to add up to anything -- that's part of its charm. [24 Sept 1993]

Greengrass is an expert hijacker, too. He hijacks our good sense.

Just when you think you’ve pinned down someone as good or bad, the tables are turned and the complexities thicken. Just like in real life.

As it is, The Maid is a study of a character who rarely emerges from the opaque end of the spectrum.

Its stars, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, are on screen virtually all of the time, and they're always worth watching. But the film puts such a premium on tastefulness that it never threatens to become exciting. [23 Nov 1990]

At just over two hours, Stranded is nonstop harrowing. It has cumulative power.

A quintessential Mike Leigh performance. It deepens as it goes along until, in the end, in its final close-up, it overwhelms.

The fierce, questing intelligence of these students and educators is a perfect match for Wiseman’s own.

There are flashes of visual grandeur in Blade Runner 2049, which was shot by the always-inventive Roger Deakins, but there’s not much reason for this film to exist outside of its fan base.

Movie has been upstaged by the sum of our fears. The staunch heroics, frantic presidential huddles, and hairbreadth rescues all seem tinny and escapist, too Cold Warrior–ish, for what's really going on now.

Achingly funny movie...Guest has cultivated a stock company of players whose work together is so intuitively sharp that it seems to redefine the boundaries of acting.

A comprehensive and compelling film that does justice to the anguished history of Cambodia.

Sheen is startlingly good here, and so is Timothy Spall as Clough's trusted and much abused lieutenant.

Unless there’s something truly momentous going on, I prefer my sci-fi to be a lot more weightless than weighty.

At its best, Juno is about the messy things in life that are not so easily summarized.

The film's time structure is splintered into shards of past and present, which is probably just as well – a strictly narrative chronology would make this wallow seem even sloggier.