Steven Rea

Tavernier pulls all this off with elegance and style; his battle scenes are tough and bloody, his châteaus grand.

Anderson, 29, does so much in Magnolia, with such nerve, with wily humor and out-of-the-blue bravado, that the film's flaws and lapses don't really matter. It ain't perfect, but it's awe-inspiring.

The Island could be read as a metaphor for societal ills (commercialization, conformity, pharmaceutical overkill) if it weren't so shamelessly dumb. And dumb it is.

It's not a very good title, Waste Land - this isn't a bleak film, at all - but just about everything else in Lucy Walker's documentary works, and illuminates.

Mr. Holmes is about how the past defines us. It is also very much about regret and trying to put things right.

Thanks to a witty script and the recognizably goofy but absolutely earnest delivery of Black, Kung Fu Panda has a human soul, too.

Shines with weird, whimsical invention.

Nat King Cole croons a Christmas chestnut, an opera wafts into the ether, Latin jazz sways. It's all terribly atmospheric, and if you're in the mood for atmosphere, 2046 delivers.

Affleck is more interested in the people in the midst of the action than he is in the action itself, and that gives this accomplished genre piece considerable and compelling depth.

A beautiful eyeful of puckish whimsy and dark-humored mystery, Hukkle (it means hiccup in Hungarian) is a little gem in which nature and humankind commingle, where coincidence and causality collide in a chain of odd, even murderous, events.

Winner of a prize at the Cannes Film Festival in May, the quiet, solemn Climates is a bit like those towering ancient columns that Isa photographs to show his class. The fragmented architecture is beautiful and striking, but also extremely dated.

Stevie is compelling, real-life drama: bleak and disturbing, but illuminating all the same.

Much of Finding Dory is funny, and fun. But there's something kind of haunting about our heroine's memory thing. If you forget where you are, and who you are, and why you are - isn't that called Losing Dory?

Bale is extraordinary, grinning like a kid, displaying wily intelligence, sinewy resolve and spirit - and a bit of craziness, too.

Offers dazzling cinematic family fun, and a mad medley of tunes.

David Gelb's thoughtful and wonderful documentary, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, explores the dedication of this humble, bespectacled man, and the Zen-like focus he has for his work - or, as many would claim, for his art.

Profoundly knuckleheaded.

There's a melancholy sweetness here, a gentle humor that speaks to the angst and awkwardness of girls turning into women, and the awe of boys watching the transformation from afar.

Fly Away Home falls a little short of classic status, but it is easily one of the more appealing family films to come flying this way in quite some time. [13 Sep 1996, p.03]

Madly entertaining and just plain mad.

Best of Enemies offers a bracing view of a pivotal time in our recent history, as Vietnam and race riots scarred a nation's soul, and as the Establishment and the Counter Culture exchanged epithets and blows.

Bier knows what she's doing, and the performances are expert and affecting. But this meditation on love -- and love's bad timing -- is also improbably accommodating to its characters' respective longings.

The real drama -- and poetry -- in 8 Mile are in those fiery face-offs, the hip-hop battles, as Jimmy rat-tat-tats his rap in deft flashes of spontaneous combustion.

Their apartments are chic, the architecture is impressive, the restaurants richly appointed. And yet, while the atmosphere and cinematography of director Leon Ichaso's grandly conceived movie evoke The Godfather series (as does its theme of brother vs. brother in a criminal underworld), Barry Michael Cooper's screenplay falls short of any such epic design. [25 Feb 1994, p.03]

Loaded with Hitchcockian hugger-mugger, this is a genre Polanski clearly revels in.

Baumbach, whose films include the searingly funny, autobiographical "The Squid and the Whale" and the brilliantly uncomfortable "Margot at the Wedding," writes wry, sharp, poignant stuff.

McConaughey's performance isn't just about the weight loss. It's about gaining compassion, even wisdom, and it's awesome.

A Single Man is like a big coffee table book on grief, loneliness, and loss - and mid-20th-century home design.

For all the film's gritty verisimilitude, The Messenger is not the great Iraq War movie that Kathryn Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker" is.

The footage is spectacular, the colors electric, the life aquatic trippier than anything you'll see in even the most wildly imaginative animated fare.

Forceful, heart-wrenching stuff.

Mountain Patrol is breathtakingly beautiful, breathtakingly brutal and simply breathtaking.

There are some terrifically strong scenes and terrific actors contributing to them.

Must-see stuff.

In-your-face polemic, with nowhere to go once the point has been made. Repeatedly.

Calvary is also just jaw-droppingly beautiful. McDonagh and cinematographer Larry Smith capture the four-seasons-in-one-day miracle that is Ireland, with its jagged stonescapes, roiling surf, fairie towns, and bracing skies.

The Hunt offers a powerful, provocative study of mob mentality and the fabric of trust.

A sad and funny examination of issues of racial subjugation, cultural stereotypes and sexual mores. Although some of its filmmaking techniques seem naive and anachronistic now, there is much that is bold, inventive and poignant about Van Peebles' feature debut. [09 Nov 1994, p.E01]

The Catholic Church does not come off well in Philomena, but then, what else is new? And the film isn't so much an indictment of institutional unkindness as it is a story of resilience, resolution - and human kindness.

The period details - the cars, the clothes, the old storefronts along Main Street - are attentively described. But it's Duvall, spooky, sly, and sad, who makes all the props and the plot twists seem real.

Marion Cotillard has made her share of unremarkable, if not remarkably bad, films. But when the French star, who won the Academy Award for her unearthly reincarnation of Edith Piaf in "La Vie en Rose", gets it right, the result is magic.

Wily, sad, funny, and full of life.

As scripted by Cathy Rabin and directed by Santosh Sivan, Before the Rains is never less than compelling, but never more than adequately realized.

Code Black is sobering stuff. The American health system, McGarry's film argues, is broken. But the film is undeniably inspiring, too: Despite everything that is wrong, there are nurses and doctors and technicians determined to do things right.

Gimmicky artifice.

Career Girls doesn't have the sweep of Secrets & Lies, nor the venom of Naked (which also featured the riveting Cartlidge). But in the small world it keenly describes, the film packs an emotional punch - silly voices and all.

The final third of Audiard's drama falls into crime-drama mode. It is tense and violent. But even if it feels true, given Dheepan's history with the Tamil Tigers, it also feels a little beside the point.

Mixes the intimate, indie vibe of "Daytrippers" with the absurdist screwball streak of "Superbad," to winning effect.

With an attention to the telling detail that one finds in a great short story, Kiarostami guides Takanashi and Okuno - and then Kase - through the mischievous and melancholy tale. It is quiet. It is lovely. And it will stay with you for a long time.

Lee transforms a generic cops-crooks-and-hostages scenario into a smart, sharp heist movie by the sheer force of his love for, and knowledge of, the city where he lives.

The film doesn't hold together in any compelling way.

By the end of their arduous journey, Lore and her siblings are changed. But it's the kind of change that will take years, perhaps generations, to understand, to heal.

Another high school vixen movie, this one with a potty mouth (the vixen) and pretensions of social commentary (the movie), Pretty Persuasion brings to mind a number of other titles, all better.

A bizarre counterculture jukebox musical.

This gory horror romp is a goofball medley of "Dawn of the Dead," "28 Days Later" . . . , and Monty Python-style severed-limbs/blood-spurting sicko comedy.

If Edel's Oscar-nominated film drags in its final 40 minutes, it's a function of the director's fidelity to the facts - and the fact that the founding trio (and the film's stars) have become prisoners of the state, confined and confused.

The talented Hansen-Love, with clarity and economy, manages to avoid the maudlin.

Despite Scorsese's efforts to pump up some drama - the director, with his signature glasses and Groucho brows, gets huffy about not receiving a set list - drama is sorely lacking. This is just a concert film.

A Very Long Engagement is "Cold Mountain" with French people.

Gripping, sobering, inspiring stuff.

Cartel Land offers a chilling glimpse into a world of violence and vigilantism.

There's real joy in O'Day's eyes - and larynx - as she bobs and weaves through an amazing songbook.

Zany screwball farce.

It's complicated. And it's fascinating.

How the film plays out, and what happens to the boy and the adults in his company, may prove a revelation, or a disappointment, or something in between. But getting there is thrilling and wondrously strange.

Brothers is about how people change, how they can rise to an occasion, or sink to one. It's a tale of love and allegiance, of truth and the cruelties that men can bring to bear on one another.

It's hard to feel compassion for these Masters of the Universe. I'm not even sure Chandor wants us to, but if he doesn't, then what's the point?

A slasher spoof of sorts, except that unlike the "Scream" pics, scant effort seems to have gone into the spoofing aspect of the story.

Deschanel does what she does seemingly without effort, managing to convey Summer's mixed-up messed-upness.

Although Me and You and Everyone We Know requires patience on the part of the viewer - to get past the faux naivete of its grown-up characters, to get past its deadpan arty tone - Miranda July's feature debut is worth the time.

Scott and Davis bring heart-rending sadness and telling detail to their roles, and imbue Secret Lives with something real and true.

The Revenant is exhilarating cinema.

A small, beautiful film exploding with big ideas.

Safe, disturbing and edgy and grounded by Moore's riveting performance, resonates with uncertainty.

Buscemi has pulled off a deft feat: He doesn't romanticize his characters, but he doesn't condemn them as losers either. They're just people. [25 Oct 1996, p.12]

The vampires in What We Do in the Shadows are symbolic of something else altogether: epic unkemptness.

Wickedly clever nightmare entertainment.

There's an icy chill, a detachment, to A Dangerous Method, too. Of course, there are no talking cockroaches (Naked Lunch), no naked steambath knife fights (Eastern Promises), and that may have something to do with why this all feels so un-Cronenbergian.

A devastatingly funny portrait of a wildly dysfunctional clan, Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums is a movie about how people never really mature in ways that matter.

Mud is steeped in a sense of place, and the people inhabiting it. Southern. Superstitious. Suspenseful. Sublime.

Catching Fire is bigger, better and broodier than the first film.

Something about the way the film has been assembled doesn't feel altogether organic.

Takes startling - and startlingly unpleasant - turns. This is not a film with anything approximating a conventional ending.

Sure, there are holes in The Manchurian Candidate, and tenuous coincidences and too-convenient plot devices. But Washington, Schreiber, Streep and company - and Demme - have managed to make all the malevolent machinations seem relevant again.

Greenberg, with Stiller's sad and self-mocking portrait at its core, is well worth getting to know.

Rife with nightmarishly violent and horrific behavior. It's intense, graphic, frightening.

The menagerie of mythological beasties in Narnia don't seem quite genuinely, three-dimensionally real.

Kids for Cash is no-nonsense, no-stone-unturned filmmaking.

This is a sad, passionate, beautifully wrought story, and Bardem's portrait of Arenas is at once daring and deeply moving.

Ripe with homoeroticism, but also with what the director — who made the film after recovering from a stroke a few years back — calls "the scent of murder."

Although Mistress America is very much a New York movie, full of references to couture, pop culture, boutique hotels (to Antigone and Faulkner, too), its comic centerpiece is a brazen assault on a country compound.

A delightful, oddball surprise.

An English-language remake is in the works, but why wait for the Hollywood knockoff? Easy Money is the real thing: a great gangster pic.

There's no adroitness, no grace in the handling of the pitching emotions - funny, sad, icky - that such a story presents.

Amelie is utterly charming. And so, too, is the film.

In the end, what the movie is about: time and life, and what we do with them, and what we regret that we didn't do.

Suffers from several goofily tacky animated reenactments and a music score that unnecessarily underlines the significance of key events, but for those who lived through the turmoil of Vietnam, and for the generations that have come since, the film is an important document in its own right.

Moves from its protagonist's dream state to her memories to her waking present in imperceptible shifts - the effect is disorienting, at first, but ingenious.