Rick Groen

More arduously, Riva is obliged to act out the physical decline while still registering a full spectrum of emotions. Remarkably, she does it all, even when reduced to communicating with her eyes alone. Hers is, in every sense of the phrase, a nakedly honest performance.

Pulp Fiction is at least three movies rolled into one, and they're all scintillating.

Much like Robert Altman during his forays into the genre, writer/director Asghar Farhadi isn't really interested in the answers. Instead, he keeps expanding the questions, until that singular title comes to seem a misnomer.

Restoration is a middling thing, indifferent good, albeit much enlivened by Robert Downey Jr., who did act Merivel with the full vigour of his profession. [31 Jan 1996]

A powerful and affecting piece of work.

It plays like documented fact, a kind of "7 Up" primer on life’s romantic vicissitudes.

Jefferson in Paris isn't merely wooden; it's concrete. Nor is it simply bad; the thing is astonishingly bad. Sure looks pretty though. [08 Apr 1995]

There's fun to be had in watching these losers drift without a compass.

If this is meant to look fresh while still being sensitive, it doesn't and it isn't.

Lee has forged a work of art in the classic sense -- art that delights and instructs.

The Class is simultaneously old school and new, familiar in its themes but unique in design and, at its best, riveting in execution.

The Coen brothers adaptation is impeccable, a perfect mirror of McCarthy's prose – sparse, suspenseful, probing and profoundly disturbing.

More than merely stale and dated, Hollywood Ending seems lazy and careless -- the structure is loose to the point of crumbling.

The British crew here, headed by writer Barry Hines and producer/director Mick Jackson, accomplish what would seem to be an impossible task: depicting the carnage without distancing the viewer, without once letting him retreat behind the safe wall of fictitious play. Formidable and foreboding, Threads leaves nothing to our imagination, and Nothingness to our conscience. [02 Mar 1985]

One of those rare films that manages to be both terrifically entertaining and consistently thoughtful, it turns an apparently tame deception into a very rich metaphor.

Turns out a movie about an infatuated bunch of Star Wars nerds can really set your teeth on edge.

Bizarre, indeed.

Profound, and profoundly affecting.

As a political testament, the result is revealing and important. Yet as a documentary, it wanders here, there and everywhere – long on intensity but short on focus.

This is a sequel just as intriguing as the original.

Simultaneously a tough, haunting, lyrical, hopeful film, and the tears it wants us to shed are an alloy of sorrow and joy - cleansing tears, the kind that alter the rules and dignify the game.

This is a world out of time and, despite the trappings of flinty realism, the film too unfolds like an elemental myth from the stormy past – a Greek tragedy driven by dark fates and struggling toward a catharsis.

Succeeding where most docudramas fail, it turns a slice of recent history into a revealingly intelligent entertainment, without being didactic at one extreme or sentimental at the other.

The last thing I want is this: Yet another instance of black culture diluting itself by imitating a white model. Hell, Honey is hip-hop by way of Andy Hardy.

The result is a rarity on any screen: intelligent fun.

Most movies have music, some movies are musicals, but very few movies combine the two with the grace and pure eloquence of Once.

Greengrass's reluctance to unduly demonize the villains or overly sentimentalize the victims is commendable on the surface, but it tends to blur the two sides and to mask the gulf that separates them.

Persepolis is as modern as tomorrow's headlines and as classic as an ancient myth.

It comes eerily close to duplicating the experience of reading while, at the same time, remaining very much a motion picture. That's a rare, perhaps even unprecedented, achievement.

You'll be rewarded with a terrific finale. The twists here are the rare sort that seem both narratively surprising and emotionally engaging.

If you've got six hours to invest watching superior television in a movie theatre, then spend the time wisely with The Best of Youth.

A movie that combines the Cold War intrigue of John Le Carré with the wired buzz of Francis Ford Coppola's "The Conversation" -- one of those rare two-hour-plus pictures that runs long but plays bracingly, excitingly short.

This is a movie about children that isn't just a children's movie - thoughtful adult accompaniment is strongly advised. [13 Aug 1993]

Borat at its best is pure satiric genius, the Swiftian kind that has you busting a gut with laughter even while checking your conscience for implicating flaws.

An hallucinatory mix of the imagined and the real, all revolving around the mystery at the cold heart of the tale.

Great art is both immediately accessible and eternally elusive, having at its centre a powerful simplicity that speaks to anyone who cares to listen, that rewards every interpretation while embracing none. The Piano is great art.

It's refreshing to have a movie assume that its viewers are also readers, yet this one takes that assumption to testing lengths. To those fearful of flunking the test, my advice is simple: Bring along the book as your cheat-sheet.

For all the undeniable merits, it somehow feels manufactured, and thus, to a degree, calculated - the product not of a collective imagination taking esthetic chances, but of an imaginative collective putting the rivets into a well-wrought plan that can't go awry.

A seriously black comedy. Black, because affliction and angst abound. Comic, because this rampant bleakness is presented as nothing more than an amusing bauble.

Beyond the eerily evocative impersonation, Hoffman's brilliance lies in not only playing the shrewd puppet master but also revealing that he too comes with strings attached, the most dominant being his consuming need for acclaim.

Yes, The King's Speech is a lively burst of populist rhetoric, superbly performed and guaranteed to please even discriminating crowds.

Life is Sweet is sweet indeed - and comic and quirky and, on those occasions when the tone deftly shifts, just a little sad... Leigh's work, and the quotidian life it depicts, is sometimes slim but never insubstantial, occasionally sweet but never a sugary confection. And always worth celebrating. [24 Jan. 1992]

Of course, given the abundance of voice-over, Nic Cage is unburdened from any great need to act. But he narrates splendidly, delivering the stuff with an unrepentant glee laced with liberal doses of irony.

Lincoln is directed by Steven Spielberg but, to his great credit, few will mistake this for a Steven Spielberg film. Rather, it's a Tony Kushner film, the playwright who conjured up the wordy but intricately layered script; and it's a Daniel Day-Lewis film, the actor who so richly embodies the iconic title role.

The whole ensemble has a hoot with this material, and their joy is contagious.

At first startling, even disengaging, that strange style eventually dovetails with the awful substance.

Ledger proves what we've suspected all along -- this is his picture, and he steals it brilliantly.

It may well be the ultimate family picture of this or any year. [22 Nov 1996, p.D2]

Haneke is best known for "The Piano Teacher." His latest, Caché (or Hidden) is a quieter but equally provocative attack. It's less in your face, more in your head and under your skin.

Turning the stately game into something few can resist – a smart and lively comedy of manners.

Heavenly Creatures is a devilishly clever and damnably accurate reflection of that duality - twinning the mystique of adolescence with the mystery of murder, it's a wonderfully natural recording of an awfully unnatural act. [20 Jan 1995]

Cholodenko casts much better than she writes. Yet, alas, even a talented veteran like Moore can't sell a hoary line like, "Sometimes you hurt the ones you love the most." Maybe if she'd set it to music – nope, sorry, that's already been done.

Soderbergh has bathed the Depression in lovely, golden-brown hues - so lovely, so golden, that the flick seems to be unfolding from inside the delicious core of a burnished bran muffin. [20 August 1993]

Society would do well to remember that, in large part, the most effective redress to the tragedy of AIDS came directly from the people with AIDS. Lest we forget, director David France is intent on reminding us.

Barbara is intriguing because the script subtly plays off that expectation, not denying it so much as expanding it, showing us that the grey world can contain, and even embrace, contradictory colours.

A too-perfect mirror of its creator, The Apostle's greatest strength doubles as a singular weakness -- in the end, it feels like an immaculate forgery.

Be prepared to exercise the same patience and forbearing as the Trappists, because the pacing here is all Grecian urn – so much "silence and slow time."

No doubt about it, Nobody's Fool is endowed with a lot of cinematic smarts - from the star's poise to the director's wiles to a lambent cameo from the late Jessica Tandy. And those smarts, part trickster's magic and part craftsman's guile, work their transforming art to perfection - seldom has a shallow pool looked so refreshingly deep. [13 Jan 1995]

The problem is not that the director is working but that his latest film is working too hard. Way too hard – this thing is melodrama running a marathon.

Bad summer films, full of furious hype and signifying nothing, are hardly exceptional these days, nor is the sound they typically make: the dull scrape of a culture hitting rock bottom. Yet this one seems uniquely bad; this one is a threshold-breaker with a different sound, the crack of rock-bottom giving way to a whole deeper layer of magma.

With his breathy, antic delivery, pouring out his heart in staccato bursts, Cusack puts a nice loop on the sensitive teen theme. For his is an upbeat, mature brand of sensitivity, the healthy kind that makes fine discriminations, not nasty judgments.

Indeed, as the film unreels to its extraordinary climax - a scene that will make your skin crawl - Frears has the larger target right in his sights and, bang, pulls the thematic trigger, taking no prisoners.

This is the master at the top of his form, his erratic genius harnessed and everything clicking, everything flowing, a fresh creation from a mature artist.

Legs flashing and eyes smouldering and brain scintillating, Fiorentino serves up each facet with venomous glee - it's a performance that mixes a main course of Bette Davis with a side order of La Femme Nikita, and it's mesmerizing.

In the midst of his many other achievements here -- his documentary realism, his wry humanism, his allegorical subtlety -- Panahi even manages to redeem the good name of toilet humour.

Not everything here is that vivid or uncluttered. Sometimes, the film betrays the circumstances of its making, shot hastily on location in Iraq after the fall of Saddam just as the extended conflict was beginning.

Rarely has a star's look-at-me turn so completely torpedoed a project. Whenever the picture threatens to gain some momentum, up pops Jack to stop it dead in its tracks. The loyal few may be laughing with him, but the rest of us are definitely laughing at him.

This superb remake has the inevitable look of a period piece, a smoke-filled rendering of things past. However, thanks to Tomas Alfredson's direction, a taut screenplay, and a uniformly brilliant cast, the film also retains its contemporary relevance.

This is a grown-up film that puts liberalism under the microscope and finds it tired -- not a dirty word, as neo-cons believe, and not a panacea, as sentimentalists wish, but just tired and longing for rejuvenation.

You may be of the opinion that taking in an art film, especially the haute brand that disdains conventional narrative, is like watching paint dry. If so, happy surprise, Holy Motors is definitely the art film for you – it's like watching paint blister.

There are some laughs here and the cast is accomplished, but this patchwork comedy is a tad threadbare. The bottom-line school of filmmaking. [18 Aug 1990]

It's an imperfect movie that serves as a perfect reminder of what the movies do best.

The result actually plays like a divine pronouncement, cosmic in scope and oracular in tone, a cinematic sermon on the mount that shows its creator in exquisite form.

It's appalling, it's wicked, it's bleak, and it's very funny. In fact, the movie's ability to disturb us is directly linked to its ability to amuse us. We're made to feel guilty precisely because we're made to laugh - seeing something so sordid shouldn't be so engaging. [28 Jan. 1994]

En route, what emerges is the kind of film, rich in paradox, that's common to Reichardt but so rare anywhere else – a film ponderously slow in pace yet kinetically charged with insight; starkly realistic yet allegorical too; psychologically astute yet politically resonant.

The Long Day Closes is a twice-remarkable film. Once, because director Terence Davies opens his personal bottle of memories and makes them interesting to us. Twice, because, in doing so, he triggers our own memories. [11 June 1993]

Intriguing, disturbing, uplifting evocation. In fact, to watch this film is to engage in participatory art -- for better and for worse, through sickness and in health, we're drawn deeply in.

Dragnet is twice blessed and once cursed. It boasts a nifty comic premise and a terrific lead performance, two virtues that might well have combined to make a great sketch on a good television show - SCTV comes quickly to mind. Yet, as a feature-length movie, the thing slowly degenerates into a one-note joke. A neatly produced and nicely sustained note, to be sure, but monotonous nonetheless. [27 June 1987]

It sure ain't the Christmas of Dickens's imaginings. Dysfunctional overachievers all, the Vuillards are a family bizarre enough to make the Royal Tenenbaums look like candidates for a Hallmark card.

Undoubtedly, [the lead actors] both benefit hugely from the sharpness of Leonard's stock-in-trade dialogue: Put smart words in any actor's yap, and their performance will rise accordingly.

As manipulative as a charmer with a snake, and twice as much fun... Shameless, yes, but open your eyes, close your mind, sit back and enjoy - 'cause it feels so good.

Children of Men is a nativity story for the ages, this or any other.

Kaurismaki is a master at infusing his movies with apparently contradictory qualities. The best of them -- and The Man Without a Past is surely that -- are hard to describe precisely because they seem to exist, to balance precariously, in the tension between opposites.

Even by his stylistic standards, Anderson has cranked up the artifice.

Before that marvel of human engineering - China's Three Gorges Dam - completes its legacy of human upheaval, there are vanishing sights to be seen.

Employing a bizarre love triangle as its base, and blessed with occasional flashes of brilliance, this melodramatic film leapfrogs among the defining moments in China's turbulent past. [29 Oct 1993]

Sonnenfeld moves things along with alacrity and panache, serving up the exotic visuals quietly, blending in the sprightly humour efficiently, and keeping the mix at a rolling boil.

Mock-heroic yet still lyrical, faux-mythic but honest too, uniquely and absurdly and often hilariously Canadian, My Winnipeg is like no documentary you've ever seen.

Smarting like hell, the artist and his art are at it again. Consequently, like most of Michael Haneke's films, The White Ribbon is profoundly disturbing, impeccably shot, superbly cast, allegorically ambitious and, yet, slightly disappointing – just enough to make you wonder if that salt-in-the-wounds theory is as dogmatic as the dogma he likes to condemn.

Looper ups the ante like a poker player on speed. What a potpourri of genres we have here – noir again, but sci-fi too, and action and horror and psycho-drama with existential trimmings, the latter designed to invite the thinking viewer into the fray.

As a captivating bauble, a tribute to a romantic legend, Don Juan DeMarco shines. But as an exercise in performing artistry, a gift from a living legend and an heir apparent, it positively glitters.

He gets much of what he wants, but not all of it, and not all of the time - the film is just too eclectic on occasion, a bit jumpy in its tone and its pacing.

Plot isn't what drives the picture; instead, this is a cinematic tone poem, where the dominant mood is a Faulknerian mix of sorrow and endurance.

As down-to-earth as a ghost story gets.

There, in its midst, stands a freeze-dried Arthur -- stripped of his legend, shivering in the cold and wondering, like the rest of us, where in hell the magic went.

The result is a rarity on the modern screen -- a film with more brains than heart.

Apparently, somebody thought it was time for a remake. Clearly, somebody was dead wrong.

A 75-minute tour de force that's often fascinating, sometimes frustrating, but ultimately rewarding. So be patient -- the payoff will come.