Richard Corliss

Watch Murray's eyes in the climactic scene in the hotel lobby: while hardly moving, they express the collapsing of all hopes, the return to a sleepwalking status quo. You won't find a subtler, funnier or more poignant performance this year than this quietly astonishing turn.

The film's both mental and experimental, more melodious than Yentl and at heart as soft and gentle as a Christmas kiss.

This is a survival manual turned into an existential prison-break movie; it cuts deep and, at its ecstatic climax, soars high.

With craft, crackle, a little bombast and plenty of residual rage, he has created a time-capsule movie that explodes like a frag bomb in the consciousness of America, showing how it was back then, over there.

Side Effects virtually demands a three-word review: Just see it.

This is a test, requiring rapt concentration and acute attention, and repaying a hundredfold. For spectators dulled by the midget movies of an arrtstically timid era, the film may be a chore. For those on Malick’s rarified wavelength, it’s a wonder.

Wings of Desire works hard to be both an essay and a love story, a mural and an intimate portrait. To savor this film, the viewer must work hard too. But when the artists behind the screen and the angels in the audience meet, it's like a smoke and coffee: fantastic! (1998 May 9, p. 79)

Sexy, funny, sad and defiantly romantic, Feast of Love is the rare movie to cuddle up to.

Fincher, whose work on "Fight Club" and "Panic Room" displayed his expertise in melding the suspenseful and the lurid, plays it cool here. He lets his stars do their thing.

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.

If the film is just as strange and endearing as its glowing protagonist -- and it is -- that's because the director and co-writer (with Mignola) is Guillermo del Toro, 43, who has the wildest imagination and grandest ambitions of anybody in modern movies.

This is a serious filmgoer's treat: intelligence cloaked in elegance.

A canny director and a top star decided to dig deep to find the core of a compromised hero. And when they reach that center of gravity, Flight soars.

Solondz's most waywardly endearing film - his gentlest triumph.

This is a bold, drastic and utterly persuasive inhabiting of a doomed fighter by a performer who has graduated from the shirtless rom-com Romeo of the last decade to indie-film actor du jour.

The perfect e-ticket for a flight of fancy into a world far more gorgeous than our own. The film doesn't halve itself to appeal to two generations. At its best, it turns all moviegoers into innocent kids, slack-jawed with wonder.

In this judicious, irresistible romantic comedy, all the performers are tops. [14 Dec 1987, p.82]

Viewers will feel as though they've just finished a great meal but aren't sure what they've been served. Behind them, the chef smiles wickedly.

It is vigorous, subtle, thematically daring, visually gorgeous.

Hoffman and the film are terrific. Supported by the eminent Catherine Keener (as author Harper Lee) and Chris Cooper (as detective Alvin Dewey), Hoffman begins with a dead-on impersonation of Capote that soon becomes a kind of channeling as the audience comes to see this American tragedy through his eyes.

Fresh alchemizes the terrifying cliches of urban melodrama into annihilating poetry.

Can a movie have too much good stuff? Not when it's stuffed like this one.

An exhilarating two hours of serious fun.

Kick-Ass moves with such bloody assurance that you'd be forgiven for not seeing how smart it is. But smart it is. Smart, important and deadly.

The Trip may have familiar elements - it's pretty much "My Dinner With Andre" pinned to the plot of Alexander Payne's "Sideways" - but the badinage provides an immediate and lasting kick, as well as the spectacle of two champion combatants at the top of their game.

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

Both horrifying and hopeful.

A banquet of creepy, gory or grotesque incidents is on display in Hannibal. but this superior sequel has romance in its dark heart.