Peter Rainer

Morgan Neville’s movie is more than just a chronicle of Rogers’s career. In some not-quite-definable way, the film itself is all of a piece with Rogers’s principled gentleness. It’s a love letter, but the sentiment and affection that pour through the film is honestly arrived at, even when, near the end, the film threatens to turn into the cinematic equivalent of a group hug.

Turn the River becomes a standard fatalistic misfits-on-the-run movie with more than its share of improbabilities. It's as if Eigeman didn't realize how good the best parts of his film were, and so went ahead and trashed them.

For a movie about hard-driving pioneers, there is nevertheless much existential ennui in the air.

Nothing that Davies does is ordinary or artless but his craftsmanship has its suffocating side too.

The only character in the film who seems to have the requisite gravity is Oscar’s mother, Wanda (the marvelous Octavia Spencer), whose scene with her son in San Quentin is as hard-bitten as the rest of the film isn’t.

I’m Still Here is a movie about remembrance – of a family and a nation. The necessity to acknowledge injustice is its timeless clarion call.

With a minimum of actorly fuss, Winger shows us the rage and hurt inside this overcontrolled woman. It's a great piece of acting – high drama at the service of the highest talent.

Edet Belzberg’s documentary Watchers of the Sky, which was a decade in the making, reclaims the reputation of Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Holocaust refugee who not only coined the term “genocide” but also invented the concept of categorizing mass murder as an international crime.

In The Circle, which is banned in Iran, the enforced society of women is, in effect, a community of adults treated as children.

The entire film has the glibness of a music video. Boyle has managed to make dire poverty seem glossy.

I'd be more inclined to call this French dysfunctional family epic gabby and preeningly self-indulgent – in a word, annoying.

After seeing this film, try reading Norman Mailer's "Of A Fire on the Moon," its perfect companion piece.

It takes a while to get into the ruminative rhythm of this film. But it’s worth it.

A first-rate crime thriller from 1960.

No other concert film has ever expressed so fervently the erotic root of rock. Seeing it is the opposite of taking a trip down memory lane; it's more like a plunge into the belly of the beast.

What I ultimately took away from the documentary is the deep love that can exist between owners and their dogs. In The Truffle Hunters, both are shown to be the custodians of each other’s happiness.

At times the film is so supercharged that it glosses over the story's thematic richness and turns into a very high-grade action picture. But if that's the worst thing you can say about a movie, you're doing all right. The best thing to be said about Children of Men is that it's a fully imagined vision of dystopia.

The paradox of Tarantino’s oeuvre is that it is highly derivative of other movies, mostly genre pulp, and yet the films seem distinctly his. He is the most influential director of his generation because he ranges promiscuously through pop culture and brings to his borrowings an incendiary force.

There are times in this lovely, complacent movie about uncomplacent circumstance when I wanted to be shaken up, and wasn’t.

It makes you nostalgic for the pangs of young love.

A crowd-pleaser in the best sense, it overflows with empathy for its beleaguered people.

Perhaps most heartening about Writing With Fire is how the film doesn’t discount the personal toll on these women. Crusaders though they may be, they voice throughout the film their deep doubts and fears.

The scene is so emotionally ravishing that it breaks you apart. The peacefulness that finally descends on Séraphine in the film's final moments is more than a balm. It's a benediction.

The passage of time has rarely been more forcefully conveyed in a movie, as we see clips of the interviewees not only from today but also at seven-year intervals from the past.

It elevates female sacrifice into an aesthetic. The movie isn't about suffering, really. It's about how you look when you suffer, how you dress up for it. Style is all.

If you've never experienced a Bollywood musical before, seeing Lagaan will be like watching "Gone With the Wind" without ever having seen a Hollywood movie.

Anderson works in animation and home movies (Lolabelle “playing” the piano is a wonder), and Anderson’s voice-over narration is closer in quality to song than to spoken word. It’s a confounding, transfixing mélange.

War Witch is most effective not when we are looking in on Komona but when we are inside her head. When she says that, in order to survive in the rebel camp, she “had to learn to make the tears go inside my eyes,” our identification with her is total.