Shawn Levy

The film is one of the great portraits of the artist as impossibly gifted young snot. [31 Dec 1999]

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 tension between the comely and comforting manner of the film and its undecided and beguiling content is, arguably, Haneke’s signature touch.

The slowness and stillness in the film are, actually, a slow boil, and in Lie's taciturnity there is pain and even horror.

In Volver, the latest marvel to emerge from his sharp and joyful mind, Almodovar blends autobiography, gossip, melodrama, music, the supernatural and the suffocatingly quotidian in a story about a woman -- indeed, a tribe of women -- struggling through a life of pain and disappointment.

There are ample opportunities for the film to soak in pathos, righteousness, farce, or pictorialism, and Payne manages to nod at those pitfalls without falling into them. In a way, it's just like Matt King's world: enviably plush but filled with the real pain of real life.

It's a delicate and ingenious film that skewers modern life without ever baring its nails or turning sour. [17 Dec 2010]

The film reveals itself to be not so much a historical allegory as an Iliad of the heart. It's sad and smart and beautiful and true.

Eastwood has crafted one of the most powerful American dramas in years.

It's an exemplary and incendiary instance of documentary filmmaking as real-world advocacy.

Banderas' direction is a bit of everything and a lot of not much.

Schumacher's depictions of street life are cartoonishly ludicrous and riddled with cliches -- a pair of garish hookers, for instance, can't be excused simply because one is played with engaging vigor by Paula Jai Parker.

Wright and company do a splendid job of distilling it down to a fresh and entertaining joyride of a film.

The darkest, most operatic, and technologically richest "Star Wars" movie to date, "Sith" is grim, stirring entertainment and a nearly complete vindication of everything its creator has been saying for six years about where the series was heading and what its final shape would be.

For all the ostensible immaturity of its form, Fantastic Mr. Fox is the most grown-up thing the director has done in years.

One of those should-I-laugh-or-cry satires.

Gorgeous and saddening, Osama makes the human-scale claim for the overthrow of governments ruled by the iron hand of religious fundamentalism far more persuasively than any of the rhetoric coming out of the White House or No. 10 Downing St.

Plotwise, the film seems actually designed to repel logic, almost a parody of a spy film. But it's played with such verve and dash and confident flair that you'll have a grand time.

This is Mel Brooks' finest hour. [28 Jan 2005, p.11]

It's one of those works that presents the deeds of both humans and animals and leaves you wondering which is the more civilized.

Apparently it’s the second film of a trilogy Demme intends on Young -- and the middles are always the hardest parts to get right, yeah?

Is it a great movie? Maybe not. But it is a great step forward in moviemaking. Shrug it off if that makes you feel better, but starting today you live in a post-Avatar movie world.

Pina, so exquisitely made and filled with such powerful beauty, suggests thrilling new possibilities for the marriage of movies and dance.

Frightening stuff, and made all the more so because of how matter-of-factly by writer-director David Michôd plays it.

The performances are universally good, the 3-D is utterly gorgeous, and the nutshell history of the early days of movies is inspiring.

Ladybird, Ladybird is a scathing indictment of a meddlesome social-service sysBased on a true story, and set in a large English city, it is wrenching viewing, guaranteed to make complacent audiences reconsider their attitudes toward social welfare, single parents and the lot of battered, state-dependent women. [27 Jan 1995, p.12]

Exciting spectacle of a master director reining in his abilities to create a work that is etched in acid, burnished in smoke.

For much of its going, Up in the Air moves with the same refreshing pace and attitude that marked Reitman's "Thank You for Smoking" and "Juno" -- with the added frisson that the subject matter is so torn-from-the-headlines that it feels, in a good way, like reality TV.