Shawn Levy

The film is filled with fascinating, static set-ups, beautiful but never fussy or artificial.

Brilliantly colored and passionately acted, Moolaade teems with incidents, personalities and drama and is never less than vivid.

A gorgeous, engrossing, utterly alien and fresh movie that has the human truth and impact of classic Greek myth and the overwhelming beauty and mastery of the greatest epic films.

It's a bento box of shifts, feints, hints and small, sharp insights, built around a surprisingly deep core of feeling. And it confirms Coppola as an artist to watch and relish.

After Life is a thoroughly original, wholly realized work that leaves a profound and nagging bug in your brain for days after you've seen it: What in your life is worth holding on to? What one thing would you wish never to forget? It's a question as relevant to the lives we live each day as it is to our final moments. [24 Sept 1999, p.26]

It is a pure, streamlined delight, the advent of a talent with no exact equal in modern film.

The film ends on an absolutely sick-making note, with live-action footage of the massacre and its aftermath.

One of the best films ever made in this country, filled with our proudest national virtues, cognizant of our deeply rooted human weaknesses and frighteningly able to evoke emotions.

The Queen is all-together remarkable not only for what it is but for what it isn't.

Anderson delivers a satisfyingly quirky, cinematically masterful valentine that contains more seeds of truth about the human heart than a hundred big fat Greek comedies.

It's raw, visceral stuff that precious few movies are capable of equaling.

Thoroughly unique work of art.

A masterful treasure trove of hilarious gags and inventive moments. It's so good that a single viewing it might awaken you to the charm of snails, frogs legs and -- heaven help us -- Jerry Lewis. [14 Jul 1995, p.E01]

It's as full a movie as you can imagine -- exhausting and exhilarating and continually fascinating.

Long and sometimes grueling, but it never feels indulgent or excessive. In order to be subtle about the horrifying transformation he records, Audiard needs to let it unfold slowly, so that only when we reach the end can we see Malik as a new man who has come unimaginably -- and terribly -- far.

One lucky guy, on a roll with rock.

Music aside, what finally puts Once over and makes it a film you can watch more than once is its slight but thoroughly credible realism.

Franju conjures images -- sometimes gory, sometimes poetic, sometimes fantastical -- that genuinely haunt: the essence of the cinema distilled.

I am here to tell you that Greengrass has fashioned one of the most powerful films I have ever seen, and that watching it makes you value your loved ones and your privileges more, perhaps, than you ever have. He has made a film that makes you feel, makes you think and makes you want to connect. And that, finally, might be the greatest thing that art can do.

More than just a good crime story about the guilt or innocence of Arnold and Jesse Friedman. It's also a fascinating portrait of a seemingly normal middle-class family crumbling before our eyes.

It's refreshing that something once considered terribly new and modern can still feel contemporary three decades later.

You can learn about the grand shifts of history from Persepolis, but you learn about a handful of lives as well.

Adventuresome, melancholy and exhilarating.

In exchange for a small piece of your life, you receive an infinity.

It's so full-blooded, smart, sexy, tense and absorbing, so cleverly written and shot and cut, so filled with superb acting and music, so perfect in its closing moment, that it surely ranks with the most impressive debuts in world cinema.

The second action melodrama released in the United States this year by director Zhang Yimou, and if I prefer the previous one, "Hero," it's partly a matter of degrees.

Teems with pot smoke, body parts and profane outbursts -- you ride a giggly wave throughout, jokes and turn-ons and shocking sights alternating in buoyant fashion.

As slapstick, as satire, as sheer gut-busting comedy, Borat is top notch.