Shawn Levy

It's a film of sneaky power, peculiar delights and, finally, the ability to dazzle.

Privy to virtually all phases of the debacle, the filmmakers have created the behind-the-camera equivalent of a slo-mo crash test.

Slight but terrific. The intertwining of the sharply tuned actors and the guileless (and often hilarious) townspeople is seamless, the tale is sometimes despairing but never heavy, and the blend of drama, comedy and music is brisk and fresh.

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.

Working toward its refreshingly light but utterly apt ending, the film teems with insights into the human condition revealed by an unusually smart script and a wonderfully committed cast. It's a truly fine work.

A worthy and compelling look at a unique and essentially American figure.

It's quite possible that Titanic is one of the greatest romantic epics ever filmed.

The result is a rare and precious work. The Motorcycle Diaries is an epic road movie with everything you'd want from such a film: laughs, kicks, adventures, pathos, poetry, natural beauty, strange encounters and friendship tested and strengthened.

Like "In the Bedroom," the film is studded with brilliant acting, and it's all rendered with gorgeously fluent technique. The result is a film that skirts cruelty and easy satire for deep, troubling realities -- a nearly thorough triumph, in short.

Packs the power to make you see at least a few corners of the world in a new and bracing light.

Cronenberg has, as Guillermo del Toro did in "Pan's Labyrinth," crafted both a drama and a fairy tale -- and he's done it in an entertainment as cracking as you could wish for.

A nearly perfect piffle in an age when hardly any movie seems to know how to play the light notes well.

It's a film that triumphs in small ways and satisfyingly demonstrates how our human nature is based on both the eccentricity of our hearts and the quirky workings of our heads.

It's the most charming and buoyant film Spielberg's ever made.

As it stands, it entertains quite a bit, frustrates too much, and leaves you feeling slightly undernourished, like a meal of tasty but not filling hors d'oeuvres.

A deep and extraordinary film that isn't afraid to look evil in the face -- or, for that matter, to acknowledge that evil can be more complicated and even attractive than we'd want to admit. It's very, very difficult to watch, but you shouldn't miss it.

The timing and cutting of the film are terrific, the build-up to an absurdly hilarious climax is just right, and the performances are near perfect.

A revealing, compelling, scabrous and funny look into a system characterized by through-the-looking-glass logic and Kremlin-style secrecy.

Directed, written by and starring Allen Baron, it's a totally absorbing picture: dark, curt, rancid and lean in the best noir style. [28 Apr 1998, p.C01]

The actors make the trauma in Another Happy Day feel real. But it's too often undercut by directorial fussiness that feels more academic than personal.

Inventive, droll and sharp, the film is rich in comic darkness but quite humane and genuine as well.

Moore's movies may not always be fully accurate in their details, but they almost always spur vital national conversation.

This is harsh and acid stuff, but it's exhilarating on a number of counts. For one thing, Jenkins moves with real authority between scenes of low life, tender intimacy and gripping violence; made on the cheap, her film has the iron certainty of the best art.

Lots of people have crazy stuff happen to them once or twice. Some people are magnets for crazy stuff. And then there's Joyce McKinney, who is like a factory where magnets for crazy stuff are made and warehoused.

There's a wonderful chemistry between them -- though the film wisely allows Duplass and Delmore an equally intimate connection. Choices like that enable the modest Humpday to capture the lives of its protagonists more credibly than any Hollywood-manufactured comedy of recent vintage.

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.

Polisse won a jury prize at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, but it's only a patchwork success.

If the movie is largely familiar, its passion and craft are noteworthy.

This is the first full-length movie about his painting and his being that gets anywhere near close to comprehending both.

It's not life-changing stuff, but it's brisk and clever and funny and avoids some of the predictable pitfalls that hobble so many films of its ilk.

Warm, winning and clever.

This is a deeply felt work of art in the form of a big, brassy movie-movie.

If you think the "Star Wars" prequels are a disease, then Serenity is the cure.

For Whitaker's performance alone, Last King is a substantial piece of work. Otherwise, the film is estimable but not quite great.

With its weary introductory and concluding passages, it announces itself as the most typical of fare, a real letdown after that stirringly fresh central part.

If you feel, like me, kinship with this essential building block of music, you owe it to yourself -- and to the Ramones -- to see this film.

Finely etched and acted but too often limpid and punchless in its impact.

It's not deep for a second -- indeed, it repels depth deliberately as if allergic to it -- but it's as swell a swell time as grown-ups could want at the movies.

One of the most joyous, diverting and original mainstream American movies in years.

Invigorating, blistering and chilling.

Some movies uses make-believe to make you squirm or cry or rise to righteous anger. Bully does all of that with reality.

With its protracted storytelling, its fuzzy philosophizing and its less-than-compelling leading man, it's far less gripping than the subject matter deserves.

It's a film with a silly story, and it's been dubbed laughably into English. Yet it's a transporting bit of fluff, full of zest, miraculous physicality and cheeky humor.

It isn't, finally, satisfying: It's too uneven, indulgent, fey.

The film, built around McKellen's magnificent performance, is a sleek and deceptively artful work, a bio-pic that manages to encompass the whole of a man's rich life by concentrating solely on the final months of it.

One of the great achievements of In Darkness, is in creating a sense of life in the sewers.

How pleasant to report, then, that a new romantic comedy -- small, smart, funny, tender and dear -- should emerge from a pair of filmmaking brothers still in their 30s and with a distinct indie film pedigree that informs, while not dominating, their work.

Bounces along magnetically even when the storytelling goes a bit flat.

This is some of the finest acting you will see on-screen, maybe ever. Single-handedly, Washington turns The Hurricane from so-so to must-see.

An exquisite, ecstatic film, crude in its characterizations and plotting, yes, but extraordinary in its capacity for elation and its hard-earned sentimentality.

Grim, sordid and, as it progresses, increasingly dunderheaded.

As you can reliably expect of a work by Alan Bennett, The History Boys is bubbly, witty, sneaky-smart entertainment with the additional virtues of heart and cunning.

The most striking thing about it is what it's not...a richly atmospheric film that races surefootedly through complexities of data and emotion like a spy movie and not at all like a sentimental sob story.

Long and slow, granted, but it's so peppered with moments of realism and nuanced craft that it continually rewards careful viewing.

It’s not a great film, but parts of it are outstanding.

The result is a true conundrum: You can't say for sure if a scam is in play or if a genuine genius is being smeared. And the brilliance of the film is that it doesn't let you feel secure in choosing either side.

Phoenix makes an interesting case of Leonard's twitchiness and mooning, but neither Paltrow nor Shaw is particularly credible as a Brooklynite, and Rossellini and Moshonov seem like they've wandered in from another film altogether.

Some things in Sin City are almost too much to watch: the violence, the cruelty, the irredeemable evil. But it's irresistibly magnetic because it serves as a barely distorted mirror to our world.

Neil Young Journeys is the third documentary/concert film focusing on the great Canadian songwriter that director Jonathan Demme has made since 2006, and it's the weakest of the three, even as it sporadically charms.

This is hair-raising, clever and winning entertainment. Even if his protagonists aren't entirely what they seem to be or think they are, Mr. Jones is, it's increasingly clear, the real thing.

That it's based on a true spying case seems almost incidental. The heart of the picture is the human drama.

Cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, a veteran of low-tech Dogme films, work wonders with a digital camera, pausing to take in the beauty of the countryside or an eerily empty London…It's virtuosic without ever quite being showy.

It's a wonderful debut, despite all the pain you may feel watching it.

Feels like a lost film from the '60s in the very best way: unstructured and intrepid and free. As a result, it's sometimes a little indulgent and overlong. But, like its hero, it's never less than sincere in its search for truth and beauty, even as it stares death in the eye.

Turns out to be more ordinary than the recipe might suggest. Oh, it's dense and funny and assured, but it's also chatty and listless in a fashion that constrains a narrative film, which, however reluctantly, it is.

Woo's hand is sure and his eye, as ever, finds beauty in everything, even death.

A near-perfect movie.

David Lynch's Inland Empire left me grasping for the merest crumbs of comprehension.

In breezy fashion, it introduces us to a handful of crossword savants, the history of crossword puzzles, a number of celebrity crossword addicts...

A modest little caper film that satisfies chiefly because of its relative familiarity and lack of ambition.

Anyone looking for a full-bodied account of the woman, her deeds, and her place in history shouldn't be encouraged to linger too long with The Iron Lady.

This film insists on being taken on its own terms -- the sort of demand, in other words, that defines the best art.

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.

By and large it's formulaic and dull.

There is life to The Proposition, though, and brutal, pitiless life it is. If it breathed more (and if Huston had spoken less), it might have been remarkable. As it is, it's monotonous, grim and uneven.

A charming but only partly satisfying portrait of its subject.

It's an entirely conceived work of art, dark and hopeless and maybe even callous, but glittering and wonderful in its determination and in its craft.

Emotionally brutal, ferociously acted, crafted with unflagging expertise and relentlessly locked in its vision of human darkness, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is as grim and despairing as any tragedy by Sophocles or Shakespeare.

More seriously, Jarecki never quite pierces the skin of this world, capturing its shiny and grimy surfaces but failing to immerse us in its flaws; too often it's like flipping through a magazine story on the lives of the rich and corrupt.

A film in which barbs of wit, anger and grief continually prick at you.

It romps along with infectious good humor but continually imparts a sense that underneath all the surreal frivolity lurks a scathing allegory of modern-day Balkan troubles.

Marnie is merely a marginal work by director Alfred Hitchcock, meaning, naturally, that it's superior to all but the best works of almost every other director ever. [02 Jun 2000]

It's hard to recall the last time a big-ticket summer movie delivered so fully on its promise.

This is the sort of film for which the phrase 'movie-movie' was coined -- and coined as a term of highest praise.

The Matrix slams you back in your chair, pops open your eyes and leaves your jaw hanging slack in amazement.

Heading South is strong in bursts, but the bursts are too diffuse for its best moments to last.

In many respects, it's Kurosawa's most sumptuous film, a feast of color, motion and sound: Considering that its brethren include "Kagemusha," "The Seven Samurai" and "Dersu Uzala," the achievement is extraordinary. [01 Dec 2000, p.26]

A handsome work of impressive sweep dotted with fine performances. It offers a few fine moments of wit, fear and emotional intimacy. But it rarely pulses with vital life.

A thoroughly credible and deeply entertaining biopic about a titanically famous film personality.

It's not orthodox Dahl but it's pure Burton, and, as it's been such a very long time since moviegoers have been afforded that particular treat, it's entirely welcome.

It never exactly lights you on fire, but you always believe it.

You can sense the deep investment Donzelli and Elkaïm have in what they're doing, which isn't something you get at the movies every day.

Frighteningly, grippingly real.

If it touches up against the syrupy at a very few moments, it's nevertheless consistently clear-eyed and convincing.

Gran Torino amounts to one more elegiac movement in Eastwood's astonishing late-career symphony.

It's fine ensemble work, but you nevertheless grow itchy wishing Roos had focused it a little better.

There's so much to impress and delight you that the time flies by.

A lot of what happens is gross, puerile and gratuitous, granted, but Helms and Galifianakis are truly funny in offbeat fashion, and the script allows Phillips room for some brilliant slapstick. You will not be ennobled. But you will be entertained.