Richard Corliss

This daring, perhaps confusing declaration of irrelevance suggests that the epic is a form a director like Scorsese must subvert even as he invokes it. But it doesn't erase the sordid splendor of Scorsese's congested, conflicted, entrancing achievement.

A movie this implausible shouldn't be this dull.

[Murray] has the natural actor's charm of making manners matter. He carries Groundhog Day with his uniquely frittery nonchalance and makes the movie a comic time warp anyone should be happy to get stuck in. [15 Feb 1993, p.63]

In a movie era remarkable for its reluctance to dramatize erotic intimacy, Shame merits praise for the dark energy of its sexual encounters.

Nettelbeck is a sharp observer of life's surprises, and Gedeck has an appraising, intelligent beauty. Her Martha is like the film: tart on the outside, sweet on the inside, with a delectable aftertaste.

But this Evita is not just a long, complex music video; it works and breathes like a real movie, with characters worthy of our affection and deepest suspicions.

When they get to canoodling and conniving, you won't ask for your money back.

Not just a ripping yarn but a powerful, poignant coming-of-age story.

Sideways is by far the year's best American movie.

On its bright face, The Imitation Game, written by Graham Moore and directed by Morten Tyldum, fits into that cozy genre of tortured-genius biopics that sprout like kudzu just in time for the Oscars. But that’s not fair to the film, which outthinks and outplays other examples of the genre.

This British film has the regal, clubby aura of Masterpiece Theatre. [21 July 1997, p. 70]

[Pfeiffer & Demme] and a gang of co-stars have created a coherent farce symphony.

Beetlejuice means something good: that imaginative artists can bring a fading genre back from the dead. [11 Apr 1988]

Green shoots his groping lovers in the art-film style -- long takes, static frame -- but his tone isn't at all minimalist; it's achingly, breathtakingly romantic, like the old Hollywood love stories his kids have never seen.

Without question or competition, the most influential movie by a black filmmaker.

t's a movie for adults -- if they can keep up with its careering pace -- and, yes, you can take the kids. It juggles a '90s impudence with the old Disney swank and heart.

The film mostly simmers.

Even when the movie sags and strains a bit in Act III, Clooney keeps it flying with old-fashioned movie-star allure. He's got it all: Cary Grant's looks and, inside, Bob Hope's snake-oil-salesman soul.

Those opening trailers are hilarious and devastatingly acute, but the rest of Stiller's film could be more a deconstruction of comedy than a display of it. The brain gets the joke; the ribs are untickled.

The movie is a little gimpy. But Murray's molto impressive. He drops his voice half an octave; he walks like a golem tailored by Armani; he puts his silky style in the service of menace. It's a whole nother dimension to him. [8 March 1993]

This is your basic, and very enjoyable, Disney princess musical, an empowerment tale to teach bright, dreamy girls how to grow to maturity - and outgrow the adults in charge.

A furiously time-looping joy ride and the smartest action film of the early summer season.

Designed and destined to win no awards, Machete is expert, cartoon-violent, lighthearted fun. Just the thing to send Junior back to school in a good mood.

There's evocative atmosphere in the period detail and perky faux-'60s tunes. A pity these are wasted in a movie that, like many a pop tune, has a cute idea but a simpleminded lyric.

The best comic turns are by the Afro-Asian twins Keith and Kenny Lucas, whose timing is eerie and superb.

By turns amusing and annoying, Young Adult could be the flip side, plus the sequel, of "Juno."

The movie, which drops the postcards but keeps the edge, is a show-biz mother-daughter film par excellence -- Terms of Endearment out of Gypsy. [17 Sept 1990, p.70]

In this arid landscape, the edifice of Ghost World, with all its acute insolence, stands out like the Taj Mahal.

Seeing Fincher's version is like getting a Christmas gift of a book you already have. This edition has a nicer binding and prettier illustrations than your beloved old paperback, but it's essentially a reproduction of the same old dragon. Dragon Tat-two.

Despite some rough edges and language, this is at heart a beguiling fantasy of comradeship.

You may leave the movie with Seussian anapests dancing in your happy head. Here's mine: A treat for the eye, an epic event/ This film is delightful, one hundred percent.

Sleepwalk is oddly soothing, like a cup of camomile tea before bedtime.

An epic-size, largely entertaining parable of repression and awakening.

This Ed Wood is dead wood.

The film gives Jones (Oxford) a chance to take control of its emotional center, and she seizes it with spectacular subtlety. She proves that behind this Great Man movie is a woman – an actress – who’s every bit her man’s equal.

In 2007, Jamie Foxx won Best Actor for his subtle performance as Ray Charles. Boseman exceeds that solid standard. Incarnating James Brown in all his ornery uniqueness, he deserves a Pulitzer, a Nobel and instant election to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Alas, The Outsiders is not quite a good one. Because it falls in with the undulating rhythm of the life of its heroes, for whom a fatal fight and a quiet night have almost equal importance, the picture never manages to reach the peaks of satisfying Hollywood melodrama.

This is the rough cut of a good movie, and a splendid opportunity wasted.

You could get drunk, or ill, on the high dose of whimsy in Amelie.

A devious mind game, Trance is also the most entertaining smart movie so far this year.

Under the suave direction of Jonathan Frakes, who also plays the Enterprise's second-in-command, the movie glides along with purpose and style.

The picture is worth catching for the delicate and toxic nuances of Rudd's performance. And one of its funniest corollaries is that it shows how hilarious and instructive a star this perennial supporting player can be.

Arcand has a gift for witty dialogue but a weakness for force-feeding his story with sentiment. References to ancient holocausts and to 9/11 simply expose the intent of a director who will do anything to touch his audience -- with a sweet gesture or a cattle prod. And in a comedy of manners, that behavior is very impolite.

Samantha Morton, as Emmet's "mute orphan half-wit" of a girlfriend, is the sweet revelation. Rarely has a performer mined such complex and potent emotion from such simple materials: a smile, a shrug, an attentive winsomeness.

In this space epic, no one will hear you laugh.

It's just fine. Not great; just fine.

It lacks overall focus, and at the end you may have a question for Michael Mann: Why'dyou bother? [July 6, 2009, p.59]

This film's manifold pleasures come in a series of small packages, with treats inside as tasty as they are unexpected.

Gives its fine actors room to breathe and behave--and in Michelle Rodriguez's case, glow.

Diane Keaton, directing her first fictional feature, gets us safely through a movie that could have turned to mush at any moment.

A serious film about the gnawing of conscience and the thirst for redemption, but the tone is so dispassionately vile it may leave viewers shaken or sick. [16 Nov 1992, p.95]

Steve and the movie still fly high through plot twists and cool stunts.

Gremlins has enough style and savvy to stand on its own as the summer's most original Hollywood picture.

Nichols and his once and current partner, screenwriter Elaine May, can make a funny, knowing, ultimately judicious film from the deliciously satyric satire.

Doesn't aim too high or strain too hard; it is at ease inhabiting its pretty, miniature realm.

The plot, though, is only the lid of this Pandora's toy chest. Inside, the alert viewer will find humor, imagination and a little Oriental mysticism.

Like the virtual game he plays on us, the film is weird, it's addictive, and Lord, it's alive!

There's no reason Banderas, after two Hollywood decades, couldn't do Robert justice; yet for a man whose mourning has turned to madness, he is strangely remote, lifeless, displaying neither rage nor poignancy. If Anaya is the heart at the center of the film, Banderas is the hole.

This is high, and high-wire, melodrama. It's less soap opera than grand opera, where matters of love and death are played at a perfect fever pitch. And grand this Golden Flower is.

[A] sexy, spiky love story.

It could be a distillation of some unaired black soap opera, so predictable are the plot contrivances--adultery, pregnancy, illness, missing money--and so cartoonishly are the characters drawn.

Chris Paine's documentary makes an unapologetic case for the car and an unofficial indictment of the forces allied against it.

That first movie raised the craft of torture to a low art. Expect no less in LW2, directed by Richard Donner and written by Jeffrey Boam. This installment features a surfboard decapitation, death by carpenter's nail gun, a bomb wired to a very sensitive seat ( and reduction of the Afrikaaner diaspora by about one-half. (24July 1989, p.53)

Harrelson rewards watching; he's no less potent at rest than when he explodes in calculated rage.

Jason Patric is the chief sleaze; Ben Stiller adds to his gallery of wormy guys; and Aaron Eckhart is the doleful husband who, when asked who his best lay was, unabashedly answers, "Me." [24 August 1998, p. 85]

For a good hour, a very good first hour, the film efficiently accumulates small, terrifying incidents and images.

This documentary, a gallivanting time trip through a bolder film era, is Herzog's final collaboration with Kinski: an act of love and exorcism.

Along with other cast members, Penn takes ages registering his stares and scowls, until the movie is finally not about gangs but about actors' attitudes. Dressed up in '80s street slang, this is a '60s exercise in Method excess. [18 Apr 1988]

It's just possible that Tarantino, having played a trick on history, is also fooling his fans. They think they're in for a Hollywood-style war movie starring Brad Pitt. What they're really getting is the cagiest, craziest, grandest European film of the year.

Poignant, troubling and altogether splendid new film.

Visually the most ravishing and complex Pixar movie, Brave evokes memories of Walt Disney's early experiments with the multiplane camera, but with the more persuasive intricacies available to CGI artists.

At 78, Polanski has earned the right to pursue his career-long demons of confinement and anarchy even in a minor film like this. But Carnage is not the word for what he's perpetrated here. Minor irritation is more like it.

This is a declaration of love: The Opposite of Sex is the smartest, edgiest, most human and handsomely acted romantic comedy in elephant years.

His point here seems to be that voyeurism can induce a trancelike emotional paralysis—a message feminists could appreciate if Body Double took less pleasure in the mechanics of mutilation, and that ordinary moviegoers could ponder if the characters' motivations were not so numbingly nitwit. Upscale sleaze—so what else is new?

A savory cocktail with a bitter twist.

His films will never be mainstream fare; audiences who wander into the theater may well find them derisive, needlessly shocking, perhaps unforgivable. But I'd call them, and especially Life During Wartime, unforgettable.

For all the carnage, Lee's tone is contemplative.

The cast is uniformly superb, and Marc Forster's attentive direction gives proper weight to each perplexing emotion. Strip away the strident melodrama, and you have this season's moodiest, most adult love story.

The most beguiling romantic comedy this side of "Broadcast News." [11 Jan 1988]

The Avengers doesn't aim for transcendence, only for the juggler's skill of keeping the balls smoothly airborne, and in 3-D too (converted after production). At that it succeeds.

At first and final glance, Poltergeist is simply a riveting demonstration of the movies' power to scare the sophistication out of any viewer. It creates honest thrills within the confines of a P.G. rating and reaches for standard shock effects and the forced suspension of disbelief only at the climax, when we realize that the characters are behaving with such obtuseness precisely because they are trapped inside a horror movie.

For those who park their sense and sensibility at the 'plex door, there's plenty to enjoy in the performances, the rowdy innocence of the whole thing, the closing sing-along of Build Me Up Buttercup--and the vision of Cameron Diaz in giggly, gangly bloom.

Bad 25 is an intimate view of a performer at his peak in the intense splendor of creativity.

Simultaneously diverting and annoying.

Toss in enough gorgeous bluegrass music to make the movie's CD a must-have, and you have prime, picaresque entertainment.

It parades a screen chemistry rarely seen since the original Butch and Sundance.

Inside Llewyn Davis is more deserving of a Grammy than an Oscar. Problematic movie, great album.

To their old fascination with Sunbelt pathology, to their side-winding Steadicam and pristine command of screen space, the Coens have added a robust humor, a plot that keeps outwitting expectations and a surprising dollop of sympathy for their forlorn kidnapers. [23 March 1987]

Obsession has seldom looked as gaudy or thrilling as here.

Pretty lethargic stuff. Monty, a convicted drug dealer on his last day before he is to report to prison, does more moping than moving.

Hazel and Augustus will live in film lore because of the young actors who play them.

The project loses traction toward the end, as the picture strains to become a full-blooded action film - the very thing it spends the rest of its time mocking. And yet 21 Jump Street earns my genial nod because of its limber, 120-IQ take on the whole notion of movie revivals.

John Wells's The Company Men is a juicy, judicious drama, and one of the few current movies to address an issue that affects many of the people who will see it - or, because reality is too depressing, avoid it.

By next semester, some grad student will be writing a thesis on the B-movie influences on this A+ film.

The perfect summation of Hollywood at this moment - an apotheosis of American male infantilism - and, on its own, a most likable mess.

Through the actress's effort and her director's generosity, this book about an irresistible man becomes a movie about a remarkable woman. Madison County is Eastwood's gift to women.

Pummeling, exhilarating.

If this riveting, repelling film is to be seen, it must be not at home but in a theater, where you are confined in a room, like Sandra and Becky, deciding whether to watch, and how you would react.