Shawn Levy

The Trip doesn't really go anywhere you didn't see it heading, but it's worth the journey.

At once spare and dense, chilly and thrilling, literate and visceral, it feeds in gray areas, teasing ambiguities and conundrums out of shadows and making strengths of inconclusiveness and uncertainty.

Credit the great Bruno Ganz with creating a vivid Hitler: furious, unsteady, crushed and frankly cracking up.

It may, finally, be the best and last word on the man, his music and his myth that we ever get on film -- an estimable achievement in itself.

The notions of sacrifice, patriotism, race and self-identity are compellingly questioned, and the battle sequences are realized with stirring intensity.

The film is built as a series of (possibly tall) tales that don't add up to a plot, a theme or a purpose.

It's not a happy film, but it feels true.

With its wide-open setting and taciturn, macho characters, it's a film that earns the right to use the "Once Upon a Time" title that Sergio Leone made so perversely famous.

The film is somewhat sketch-like in its episodes and in placing Raquel within a larger world. But it’s very surefooted when it stays close in on her and her universe of chores, rituals and fears.

Very good Leigh -- maybe even, given Manville's heroic work, great Leigh.

The tension is so plausibly high that you're eager to see how it winds up. Eager enough, in fact, to forgive Jack Ryan for reversing the aging process and winding up as Ben Affleck.

Quick and charming and irresistible.

It’s a fascinating story about ambition and vanity and pride, and in Sheen’s performance and the atmosphere capture by Hooper it contains truly fine and rare things.

It's a wonderfully crafted work, handsome, lively, stirring and utterly convincing in its depiction of the perils and thrills of sea life. But I'm not sure that my personal enthusiasm for it will translate entirely for viewers whose favorite movie about the high seas is, for perfectly good reasons, "Pirates of the Caribbean."

Like a picture postcard vision of his life and work: absolutely accurate as far as it goes but not too keen on looking too close for fear of uncovering anything untoward.

It's a dark, brooding, moody film that follows a grim narrative to a logical inevitability and is nonetheless fully infused with a spirit of humanity.

Watching this tender little movie with its teasing humor, its deeply felt performances and its focus on slight moments rather than gigantic sea changes is like hearing a tasteful sonata instead of the usual vulgar symphony that the cinema offers up.

The acting is so persuasive as to be transparent.

The result is as much a revelation of the artist's craft as it is of the man's heart and mind.

There are nice bits throughout, and your heart can’t help but go out to these impassioned young lovers whom you know are doomed. But Bright Star is too often tarnished by the ordinary.

Acted with earnest commitment and scored and edited with jazzy, laconic grace, "Lights" tells us absolutely nothing we haven't heard before -- and often -- in sports films

Sorrentino is a spectacularly inventive talent and has harnessed an astounding performance from Servillo.

Like "Red Road" it's slow-moving and sometimes grueling, but it's more of a chronicle than narrative, a series of slices-of-life rather than an unfolding and increasingly engrossing enigma.

It's smashing fun, nonetheless, made with razor wit and continual invention and far, far fresher than not only Hollywood buddy-cop movies but also Hollywood's own spoofs of them.

For all the inactivity and resistance that mark the plot, there's beauty in the filmmaking and a kind of dazzling inevitability to the unwinding of the tale.

An exquisitely mounted and achieved film (shot, as it so happens, on Paris sound stages), it tells a story so protracted and uneventful that you wonder if writer-director Tran Anh Hung isn't pulling your leg. [08 Apr 1994, p.AE15]

A mature, tense, frightening and altogether masterful film.

So good at what it does that it can exhaust you: In the later going, one big number follows on the heels of another so quickly that it feels more like an opera than a regular musical.

Kong is brilliant in many, many places. But it overwhelms its own best qualities with its sheer, punishing size. It is, literally, too much of a good thing.

Allen's filmmaking technique isn't what it once was, true. But at age 75 he still manages to keep a spry pace going even if something less than impeccable craft hobbles the photography and editing.

This is a delicious premise, and Blomkamp, who first played with it in a 2005 short called "Alive in Joburg," has magnified and improved it with ferocious energy, wit and style.

You come away with an appreciation of the abstraction, scale and daring of Ai's art and, even more, a sense of the living man in his courage, humor and restlessness. It's an invigorating experience.

Bad Education, in this light, is Almodovar's "8-1/2" or "Day for Night," a lens through which all of his movies appear as a seamless whole. It's not the story of his actual life but, more excitingly, the deft, witty, bittersweet story of the life of his art.

It's Herzog-light, in a way -- more travelogue than dissection. But it's filled with small riches, not least of which is the director's amazing narration. Can't you just imagine him reading "Green Eggs and Ham"?

Gripping, outraging documentary.

The film is exquisitely realized, with a tremendous, naturalistic performance by Michelle Williams at its heart and a pervasive, assuring sense that Reichardt and Raymond have distilled everything nonessential from their story and imparted exactly the impact they wished.

It's a raw and honest film, and it keeps its feet firmly on the ground, even as The Ram flies through the air to deliver -- or receive -- another beating in the squared circle of life.

There are levels of complexity and nuance and intellectual rigor in The Hours -- it's clearly a film into which you could gain continued insight after several viewings.

Wonderful performances and the director's continual inventiveness make Junebug a particularly promising first feature.

Kenner mounts it all with a pleasingly fluent and varied style, which makes it more or less easy to absorb his arguments, even if they're familiar from other books and movies and are presented with unopposed certainty.

Stirring and haunting.

Watching The Queen of Versailles you don't know whether to laugh or cry.

Incendies was likely a crackling thing to read, but it's not quite so vivid as a finished film.

See Casino Royale for a Bond you've never seen before, and then imagine him in a film two-thirds the size. Here's hoping the writers of the next Bond movie employ the same personal trainer that Craig did to keep the script tight and lean.

Ultimately, a heart in the film to go with Rebney's considerable bile.

The snaky cinematography pulls you through even when the writing doesn't, and the best performances keep you hoping that you'll feel the next one or the one after that just as powerfully.

If you might wish the film got deeper under the skin of the characters, you also feel grateful for the fact that you'll never get closer to them than watching it.

A fine, straightforward and engaging film that restores the salt, fire and humor that Hathaway and company drained from their source, Charles Portis' wonderful 1968 novel.

Entertaining and informative.

It breaks so sharply from the practice of contemporary horror film that it requires us to return to the most basic understanding of what it is to be frightened by a movie.

The result is a film that outrages and fills the viewer with poetry that's at once epic and intimate, scandalizing and life-affirming -- a real work of art.

It's easy to imagine that some folks will find the film rapturous, but it's equally clear that there are others whom it will drive crazy.

The most compelling question dangling at its end is, "Didn't Steven Spielberg used to know how to bring a movie to an end?"

It's amusing enough and breezy enough not to disappoint. But it never dazzles or challenges or truly delights. And that leaves me fairly certain that whatever Bart Simpson would say about it probably couldn't be printed in a family newspaper.

A charming little film built of bits of music, romance, cultural conflict and the simple human need to connect.

Coogan makes tremendous sport of himself, taking on a role as an adulterous, vain, anxiety-riddled, alcoholic and truly comic creep. Brydon is exquisitely droll as the straight man to this ugly comedian act.

An unusual and absorbing, if somewhat preachy film.

When it all comes to a head, what seems ordinary blossoms into something deeply complex and emotional.

For its sheer visual gusto alone, Coraline is a wonder.

A painful, funny and fresh comedy.

While Stallone likely hopes to go out with a bang, this small, manipulative movie doesn't have any real punch to it.

The result is a totally absorbing and entertaining film, one of the best historical dramas from Hollywood in many years.

Not a masterpiece, but still fabulous.

Some aspects of Siddhartha seem terribly dated: the '60s-ish nude sequences, the wispy music, the big-eyed earnest acting. But it is a lushly beautiful film. Shooting largely in natural light, Nykvist creates a poetry more beautiful than Hesse's prose and as profound as the author's message.

A murky, turgid work that is no doubt exactly the film Malkovich wished to make but is so indirect and affected as to border on incoherent.

In some ways, Senna is as pure and clean as the man's sport: as actor/racer Paul Newman liked to say, the winners of auto races are determined, unlike movies, by objective criteria. And although it's a subjective judgment, it's hard to see how anyone wouldn't be absorbed by this fascinating film about a formidable driver and man.

It's a good movie, mind you, with great bits in it, but it still falls short of rapture.

The film that results from Jacquet's application is gorgeous and even inspiring, a tale of loyalty hard-tested and hard-earned, a sumptuous travelogue, and a reminder that some of the critters with whom we share the planet are, in ways, as complex in their feelings as any human being.

You can find movies with better scripts, direction, acting, songs, and jokes than The Muppets -- but you won't find one that's nearly so much fun.

A riveting and impeccably researched documentary.

A tender and affirmative movie, if never a transporting one.

An exhilarating slap in the face, bracing and sexy, smart and visceral, stylish and raw -- the advent of a fabulously exciting new moviemaking talent.

It's a tiny story, told on an intimate scale, and it is rich in emotion, specificity and care.

It's so spry and lively and warm that you want to dance to it.

It's a fascinating patchwork.

Here the homages/critiques of old craft and form are often laughably mangled, and nothing sexy, profound or illuminating results. For all its prettiness, it's the sort of picture that gives the arthouse a bad name.

An engaging chronicle not only of a memorable game but also of an era that seems at once more innocent and combustible than our own.

An engaging exercise in mature poignancy, existential consciousness and deadpan drollery, Broken Flowers is a return by Jarmusch to the road movie structure of such films as "Stranger Than Paradise," "Night on Earth" and "Dead Man."

It's no insult to the rest to say that this is one of those films that sells itself on the strength of a single performance.

Like "Private Ryan" and "Band of Brothers," it fills in our sketchy impression of that famously reticent generation of ordinary young men who were asked by a frightened world to accomplish an extraordinary feat. In this case, the homage takes the form not of a photograph or a statue but of a deeper, more sympathetic understanding of their experience. A finer tribute is hard to imagine.

A fascinating and frustrating film in turns, created out of scorching passions and built around a fascinating performance but rambling and choppy in the telling. It can overwhelm you and puzzle and repel you, sometimes within moments.

As the film accrues intensity and awakes the demon lurking inside its protagonist, you can see it as something more than a retro-cool crime story. Rather, it's a parable of good and evil and the nature of man.

It's a film possessed of its own force, wit and style, and it builds to a rousing climax that absolutely pays off in crowd-pleasing fashion. It knows what it is, doesn't try to be what it's not, and hits you with drop-dead force. In short, it's terrific.

Lacks the poetic and romantic resonance of "Crouching Tiger," but it's got kicks aplenty -- of both the physical and the sensational kind -- and it lands them again and again.

The combined effect is, as I say, small but sincere. McCarthy may prove to have something bigger in him, or he may be a miniaturist content to build little stories and fill them with all the humanity they can bear. If that's the case, there are far less worthy ways to spend a career.

There are more compelling stories to be found in the comic book world, and there are more expressive directors than Jon Favreau. But on the bases of wit, verve, spirit and whiz-bangery, it's pretty tough to find fault with.

It's a moderately compelling historical record, but of far more interest as an artifact than a film.

The film moves with strange, creepy energy and is populated by characters who delicately walk a line between charm and grotesquerie. It's a treat.

To follow up his superb "The Host," director Joon-ho Bong has crafted a remarkable film about love, faith, determination, guilt, and honor, a full-blooded, constantly inventive movie that enthralls, entertains, horrifies and never lets go its grip.

That rarest of movie biographies: a warts-and-all exploration of the life and times of its subject.