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.