Rene Rodriguez

A rich, marvelous movie -- the kind that enchants on so many different levels, it leaves you feeling giddy.

I can't imagine anyone seeing Once and not instantly falling in love with it.

The movie is quiet and serene, but it stirs and inspires and amuses. In the small details of an ordinary life, Jarmusch finds wells of beauty and empathy. The movie is an exploration of the deep pleasures of creativity.

There's nothing about United 93 that qualifies as entertainment in the traditional sense: It is an unpleasant, wrenching experience, which is just as it should be.

This remarkable, continually surprising documentary turns out to be something far richer and more complex, closer in spirit to "Crumb," another devastating film about a family's gradual self-destruction.

Like his con artists are prone to saying, American Hustle works from the feet up, and the fun is intoxicating.

A thoughtful, audacious meditation on love and relationships that finds a group of wildly disparate talents clicking together in perfect unison.

The film’s true subject, though, is innate talent — for music, writing, painting, sculpture, plumbing — and the superhuman lengths we sometimes have to go to in order to wring it out of ourselves.

Beautifully textured and layered movie.

The result is one of the most visually astonishing martial-arts fantasies ever made.

Despite its all-around good performances (Pomeranc in particular is a marvel), Searching for Bobby Fischer can't quite shake its overly familiar feel. We've seen this all before, many times. It's a diverting, undemanding piece of work though, and you don't have to know a single thing about chess to enjoy it. [11 Aug 1993, p.E3]

Cotillard, who earned a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her performance, plays the character as a woman hanging on by the barest of threads.

As suspenseful as a full-blown thriller.

It's almost startling to see a film that believes in itself and its characters so deeply.

Unabashedly frank in its depiction of sex -- too frank, probably, for more discreet viewers -- but it's never exploitive or seedy.

It takes some exceptionally intelligent and witty people to make a dumb comedy this funny and perceptive: Borat may be offensive (to some), infantile, low-brow or even just a stunt, but you won't hate yourself in the morning for loving it.

The movie isn’t a thriller, but it still generates a strange sort of emotional suspense - an incredibly intense drama that makes you hold your breath, and it builds toward a total knockout of a final scene in which the story is resolved with hardly a word.

A brazen stunt that pays off. Writer-director Michel Hazanavicius, simultaneously channeling "Singin' in the Rain" and "A Star is Born," tells a story about 1920s Hollywood made in the style of that era.

Turns out to be something entirely different than it initially seemed, and while the conclusion brings everything to a logical close, it also renders the movie less interesting -- a stunt that didn't merit Bale's startling, and dangerous, transformation.

Letters From Iwo Jima, much like any war movie, honors the courage of men who took part in a war not necessarily of their making. But by placing us on the opposite side of the battlefield, the movie forces us to approach it from a fresh perspective.

The film’s visual artistry works as an ideal counterbalance for Kaufman’s heady brand of middle-aged despair.

The Lion King is everything you'd expect it to be: utterly charming, dazzling, rapturous entertainment. It's one for the ages. [24 June 1994, p.G4]

Populated by all kinds of grinning skeletons and decomposing zombies, but in Burton's universe, they aren't the slightest bit threatening. It's the drab, flesh-and-blood living you have to worry about.

That song (Jefferson Airplane's Somebody to Love), which becomes a sort of mantra to the movie, is the key to understanding what the Coens are after: When the truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies, you better find somebody to love.

The movie implies that despite its thunderous success, the book also destroyed Capote, who crossed a line in his quest for personal glory for which he could never forgive himself -- no matter how many accolades it brought him.

Using a buzzy, unnerving score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, Citizenfour makes you share the same sense of shock and paranoia as Snowden spews damning information that implicates the White House in transgressions that extend beyond our borders into other countries.

The movie isn't a thriller, but it has the tension of a thriller, and its cool, icy tone, deliberate pacing and clean, antiseptic lines are reminiscent of Kubrick and Antonioni.

As this intimate, beautifully observed film unfolds, you realize that the story's themes -- the nature of love, the role of sex in relationships and the ways in which we learn to make peace with our guilty consciences -- are relevant no matter what age you happen to be.