Shawn Levy

Shot on location in New York by director Ted Tetzlaff, it's tense and fresh and, at 73 minutes, remarkably taut. [14 Sep 2012]

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.

It's sometimes uneven, but it's glorious, too, with constantly churning invention and the guarantee that you have never seen anything like it before -- unless it came from Winnipeg and Guy Maddin.

The film is a lively and absorbing document, filled with jaw-dropping materials, such as an actual audio recording of Kesey's first LSD trip in a Stanford University lab.

Funky, scrappy, dishy, screwy story of that star-studded, gilded squad.

Something in the simplicity of its vision gives The Man Without a Past a dimension of heroic grandeur -- and that effect, too, seems to tickle Kaurismaki's funny bone.

Watching skinny-armed little Will pretend to be the spawn of Sly Stallone in a series of botched feats of derring-do is a treat, as is much of this film.

A fine and sturdy picture, capable of standing alongside the many such films made when Westerns were one of our chief entertainments.

The excellent news is that Yates and company took their time adding visual depth to the film -- they shot it as 3-D -- and the result feels immediate and real and not at all slathered-on.

It's a refreshing sensation, even if it makes you feel a touch seasick at first, and the fittingly eerie conclusion to a lavish and unsettling movie.

But this is pretty honest and true filmmaking, nonetheless; try as you might, you can't detect the leer of the satirist.

The sense of inescapability, the mood of capitulation and resignation, becomes the story. What is being made clear is the thoroughgoing rot of a civilization; there is literally no place to find peace, solace or consolation.

Like the bits of home life its pioneers have brought with them to an alien landscape, the careful craft grounds the film in a reality that is as much felt as it is observed.

One of the most exciting American movies about recent political history since, ironically, Oliver Stone's "JFK."

Both deeply weird and charmingly dear.

A diverting, playful and puzzling documentary.

A gripping movie about espionage, loyalty and betrayal.

The overall effect is awe and affection -- and a strange urge to get on a board and, uh, shred, dude.

It's a lovely film that suffers from an overdetermined structure and a reliance on a sensationalized plot line that, quixotically, is ignored for long periods of time.

Within this simple structure, Panahi manages at once to celebrate and critique his nation's passions, sexual politics, sporting heritage, laws, morality and class system. It's a fictional feature but, like many Iranian films, it feels uncannily real, particularly in its final rousing minutes.

This much is guaranteed: You won't leave thinking you've seen the like before.

Somewhat marred by Bruno Coulais' treacly New Age score -- as well as by Perrin's somewhat daft and repetitive narration. But the key word is "somewhat." In the main, Winged Migration is an unforgettable piece of moviemaking.

Hogan whips up a high-energy family entertainment that fairly erases memory of the other filmed versions of Barrie's tale.

A feel-good movie that doesn't think it needs to rub people's noses in the happy stuff to get its points across or eliminate all the disturbing shades to make a uniformly glowing whole.

Beautiful, thoughtful and engrossing.

Gosling, who was amazing in "The Believer" but hasn't yet connected substantially with a big audience, continues to impress.

No other sporting figure has ever been afforded so much screen time for self-revelation: just another instance of Iron Mike's one-of-a-kind status.

Cage is superb as a hollowed-out, ferocious man of action chasing his demons recklessly with machine gun firing away.