Shawn Levy

One of the most vital and strangely gripping films in recent years, a thriller more opaque, involving and realistic than just about anything that Hollywood is capable of.

Brimming with bittersweet wit and emotion and built with deceptively fluent craft.

It's a sports story, yes, because without baseball there's no Beane. But it's far more a tale of a man's triumph over himself and his doubters. And you don't need math to make sense of that.

Made with brisk energy, shot with Powell's limitless ingenuity, written with fairy-tale echoes and steeped in a love for northern Scottish folkways, it's apt to become a favorite film the first time you see it. [02 Mar 2001]

fFat, dull drag.

Amir Bar-Lev shows in the absorbing, eye-opening and sometimes enraging film The Tillman Story, if there was one thing that you could count on Pat Tillman to do it was speak his mind: loudly, intelligently, and often in salty, pointed language.

A truly powerful, masterful work.

An empathetic portrait of humanity on a house-by-house, heart-by-heart basis.

It's possible to be dazzled by a movie and still not like it very much.

It is, in a way, the first glimpse of the cinema, right there at the dawn of humankind. And it is utterly remarkable to see.

Demanding, harrowing and very, very real. You won't shake its impact easily.

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.

It more or less plays like a five-episode arc of the series, which is a strength and a weakness.

Despite the film's inevitably downbeat tone and occasional repetitiveness, there is that heavenly music to remember -- or to encounter for the first time. You will leave the theater singing, if with a touch of melancholy.

A stunning film.

Anderson, god love him, seems determined to make the "Great American Film." The Master isn't it, but you come away from it with the sense that may be on the right path.

A kick to the heart, and Swank is a marvel. Any problems in the storytelling are more than balanced by her wholly committed work.

Gives us a fresh way to think not only about movies but about the town in which so many of them are made, and in that regard it's kind of amazing.

It's a remarkably sure-handed film, taking us with Shaun on a journey through alienation, anger, trepidation, ebullience and fear.

An entertaining and fascinating film.

A staggering movie about a reality so dark and painful and real that it almost crushes the mind to think about it.

Brings you into a world you didn't know existed with a closeness that the movies almost never achieve. If that constitutes exploitation, then it's a crime which all works of art should aspire to commit.

Not only does this film make you think, it makes you want to think. Few films -- few works of art of any stripe -- can claim that.

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 movie about having a sibling and all of the pain, joy, love and anxiety that that entails: a movie, in other words, for almost everyone.

It's no wonder that Polanski, himself an artist who has survived a series of nightmares, should tell it so naturally and powerfully.

The film has a dreary, worn quality; much of it is set in winter in Buffalo, N.Y., after all. You know before long that the best you can hope for is that these folks won't kill each other or themselves.

Movies don't get any more real than this.