Rick Groen

Don't go down this Rabbit Hole unless you wish to see a superb film that treats a sad topic with unflinching honesty. Don't go down this Rabbit Hole unless you believe that tragedy's grief, when transmuted through art's protective lens, can feel liberating, even joyful in its painful truths.

The score (a nifty collection of vintage but never clichéd period tunes) complements the mood perfectly, and the ensemble cast members hit their own notes to perfection.

A masterly piece of documentary chicanery that kills George W. Bush without once pandering to his legions of ill-wishers.

What saves it, however, is Gerwig. The love story ain’t credible, but her performance is, perfectly capturing a young woman who doesn’t lack confidence so much as a sense of self.

The picture goes exactly where the prose does, enticing all of us, kids and adults and atheists and believers alike, down below the brittle surface of our cold logic and into a richer world of imaginative wonder.

Love & Other Drugs is quite the little cocktail of mood-brighteners, a movie narcotic easy to take and, since the effects wear off quickly, even easier to forget.

From its title on down, An Officer and a Gentleman (at the Plaza) is both a thoroughly rousing crowd-pleaser and a shamelessly manipulative banner-waver, a homage to the never-practiced ethics of a non-existent era. [28 Jul 1982]

Those who lived through the Vietnam War era, and paid attention, will find this documentary short on revelation but long on poignant reminders.

Is Funny Games an unqualified success? No, and for this reason: In order to analyze the devolution of violence into entertainment, the premise obliges the film to superimpose a complicated game atop the genre's simple one – in other words, it makes a game out of the game it condemns.

Win Win is a paragon of truth at a slow jog, but that upbeat sprint to the finish feels like a big cheat.

It's not so much a movie in three acts as three movies stuffed into a single casing, and often showing the strain.

Gilliam himself is a joy to behold. His wit stays sharp even as his fortunes dull, and the conditions that conspire against him only prove the mettle in our man of La Mancha.

The impact should be visceral and gut-wrenching; instead, it's cool and cerebral – after all, we're being lectured in a lecture hall.

The Muppet charm, always more at home within the intimate frame of a TV set, is gone here.

For all his daring, the brazen creator maintains control - there's aesthetic order in the disorder, and calculated reason in the madness. Seldom has it felt so good to seem so lost.

Both the Chicks and this doc are left to deal with the aftermath as best they can. The film chooses to pad with an occasional over-reliance on cutesy filler -- a pregnant Emily having an ultra-sound, giving birth, recuperating at her beloved ranch away from it all.

Gimmickry is death to this sort of artsy endeavour -- it turns a movie with a small budget into a small movie.

The Shrek franchise is alive and well -- Model 2 is zippier, sleeker, with ever-improving graphics, vast commercial potential and the same sly ability to reach out and hook the whole family.

A searing tale effectively told. And superbly acted. [18 Aug 1989]

To his credit, Beatty has designed Bulworth along the classic lines of Shakespeare's Fool -- the antic truth-speaker who has the ear of the court.

Titanic is awesome even when it's awful -- you can't take your eyes off the extraordinary thing.

To these disappointed eyes, Little Children seems a frustrating mess.

A great movie... A pop epiphany, marking that commercially creative point where the power of Hollywood meets the purity of myth.

Like the stationary figures it portrays, Kicking And Screaming is alive at the edges; it comes with a vibrant border of trenchant asides, tossed-off remarks that blend the solace of protective irony with the sterner stuff of hard truth.

What it doesn't have is the resonance of Cronenberg's "A History of Violence," a film that exploited the same genre even while transcending its limitations. Eastern Promises delivers, but not on that scale.

Sometimes, the quiet lyricism of DuVernay’s direction seems at odds with the grittiness of the subject matter, like poetry force-fed into prose.

A laugh and a half, a genial crowd-pleaser.

The movie could have used a further dose of the resonance Walken gives it, and a more intellectually adventurous director might have brought the theme close to home.