Steven Rea

Mommy is too long for its own good, its sense of hysteria too relentless. But the headlong energy is intoxicating more than exhausting, and Freud would have a field day with Die and Steve. A mother and child, so sweet, so tender, so terrifying.

Rivette's slow-moving but seamless study of the rituals of courtship has a disarming grace, even as its downcast hero, Depardieu's Gen. Armand de Montriveau, limps around stiffly.

Starlet sneaks up on you. Set in the same sun-dried, strip-malled precincts of the San Fernando Valley where "Boogie Nights" took place - and set, in part, in that same porn industry milieu - Sean Baker's low-key, low-budget indie traces the relationship that develops between a young actress and an isolated, elderly woman.

Features entertainingly brainy musings from New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman, and comments from child psychologists, friends and Marla collectors.

A throwback in style, pace, and storytelling to the 1970s and the downbeat mood pieces of directors like Bob Rafelson.

This world feels studied in its "authenticity": the rusted GMC pickup, the tumbledown shack, the boozy brothel, and angry Joe Ransom guttin' deer and tending to his own gunshot wounds with a grimace and a bottle of alcohol.

Tully is at turns heartbreaking and heart-stirring. And it's from the heartland, so I guess that makes perfect sense.

Plays with cultural stereotypes, and upends them as well. The picture starts as one thing and turns, dramatically, movingly, into something else.

It's “The Wizard of Oz” with a viral infection.

This is magnificent filmmaking, and a magnificent film.

A compelling existential tableau: sweating bodies, creaking mills turned by numbed oxen, people facing the daily and seasonal cycles of life with little hope of breaking free. Behind the Sun is forceful stuff.

The narrative at the heart of Rust and Bone is a vehicle for sentiment and over-the-top histrionics if ever there was one, but Audiard and his two stars deliver the exact opposite: a film thrillingly raw and essential, life-affirming, sublime.

The Lobster is what would happen if Wes Anderson set about doing Franz Kafka, with a hefty dash of George Orwell thrown into the mix: surreal, comic, sad, strange, beautiful, sublime.

The filmmakers' narrative device of framing Quinn's tale as a feature-length flashback doesn't pay off - we get a goody-two-shoes moral lesson at the end, and a look at movie studio aging makeup gone wild.

Yea or nay, love or hate, the portrait that Streep delivers in Phyllida Lloyd's impressionistic biopic is astonishing.

A loopy, surreal, beguiling collage of a film, the writer-director's meta-biopic embraces its subject.

This slight and amusing 'toon is mostly a trip designed for the kiddie crowd to take in.

The Proposition, a beautiful, bloody meditation on justice, family, and the trap of retribution, is in every respect an artful addition to the canon of six-shooter morality tales.

It's human drama, high and mighty.

You can feel the world closing in, which, I would venture, is exactly how Fassbinder wanted you to feel.

We feel it, in our hearts. And therein lies the great power of this small, wise film.

To be sure, there are goofy flourishes here, the in-jokey, left-field rummies that are the Brothers Coen's stock-in-trade. But this is altogether a quieter, more philosophical sort of endeavor.

A wicked deconstruction of a dysfunctional clan: brothers at each other's throats; a father whose legacy is anger and betrayal; an unfaithful wife; a history of deceit. It's a horror show of hatred and festering psychic wounds.

A Most Wanted Man's cast - a mix of Germans speaking English, Americans speaking English with German accents, Russians, and men and women from the Middle East - is uniformly stellar.

In the end, Arbitrage disappoints a bit. The writing isn't as sharp, or sophisticated, as it needs be. And the cynicism exhibited by Miller and the circle of traders and tycoons he moves in seeps into the fabric of the story itself.

An edgy, disturbing drama.

Like "Hope and Glory," Boorman's Queen and Country finds exhilarating comedy in places usually reserved for drama, violence, loss.

With its mix of Lewis Carroll and William Gibson; Japanese anime and Chinese chopsocky; mythological allusions, and machine-made illusion, offers a couple of hours of escapist fun.

Watts is extraordinary - she manages both the physical and emotional demands of the role, with soul-deep conviction.

A tale of childhood innocence and adult corruption - and the point where the two intersect - I'm Not Scared is a lyrical thriller inspired by the run of kidnappings that befell Italy in the 1970s.

A movie every American should see, although parts of it are close to unwatchable - notably an operating room sequence in which a pair of surgeons performs a gastric bypass, or "obesity surgery," as they like to call it, on a dangerously overweight patient.

Boasts another formidable and fine-tuned performance from the great Charlotte Rampling.

Shot like a Disney period piece (prettily, with spiffy props, shiny vintage vehicles, and costumes just back from the cleaners), Flyboys introduces its squadron the old-fashioned way: with character-establishing setups.

DiCaprio provides one of those tailor-made Oscar turns - cocking his head at odd angles, twitching and gesticulating with childlike awkwardness, his face a mask of sweet innocence and uncontrollable tics. [4 Mar 1994, p.03]

Cold Mountain is the equivalent of comfort food: old-fashioned, earthy (lots of root vegetables), satisfying.

Linklater's film adaptation succeeds in bringing the flamboyant Welles to life.

A mischievously inventive, surreal entertainment, one that celebrates not only Whipple Scrumptious Fudgemallow Delight and Nutty Crunch Surprise but Busby Berkeley, Stanley Kubrick, the Beatles, and the outer-space acting choices of one Johnny Depp - not to mention those bushy-tailed rodents in all their bustling splendor.

Blitz captures the melancholy, the rage, the wackiness and drama of adolescence, and he gets winning performances out of his young stars.

Beefed up and twanging like a true cowboy, Cooper nonetheless carries the full weight of his character's achievements - and the questions that come with them - as he tries to find his footing back on Texas soil. If American Sniper fails at being a truly great film, it is no fault of its star.

A disaster of a disaster movie that veers from the parodic to the preposterous. [6 Dec 1996, p.03]

It also boasts one of the funniest, loopiest Woody Harrelson turns in years.

While The Forgiveness of Blood lacks the narrative momentum of director Joshua Marston's previous film, "Maria Full of Grace" - it is nonetheless fascinating.

Valérie Donzelli's Declaration of War deals with issues that may scare audiences away. Don't let it.

A disturbing and provocative study of adolescence and isolation.

One of the film's cleverest devices is a "Personality Diagnostic Checklist" that equates corporate "serial behaviors" - exploitation, deception, greed, lack of empathy and guilt - with the antisocial makeup of a certifiable psychopath.

Has a slow-burning emotional power.

An amiable mix of "Grumpy Old Men" comedy and "Apollo 13" can-we-fix-this-jalopy-before-we-die? Drama.

Violence ignites her passion, dividing her Belfast family.

Beauty in Trouble offers a meditation on the legacies of communism and the lure of capitalism, but also on the human need for love, connection and family.

And did I mention that it's long? It's long.

Coolly crafted crime thriller.

The Hangover pushes the boundaries of good taste, good sense, and good will toward man. And you'll feel good about it all.

A kind of deadpan soap opera - but one that, despite its high melodrama and wicked humor, delivers a real emotional wallop.

Has a certain cartoonish vibe. That's OK, because Brad Bird's brand of toonage (The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, Ratatouille) owes much to the rigors and traditions of live action, not only in the way he references other films, but also in his visual approach - sweeping, swooping camera pans, wide vistas, jolting perspective.

Things get a little tricky by the end, but it's the sort of trickery that's immensely satisfying.

The good thing about The Company is that nothing much happens. The bad thing about The Company is that nothing much happens.

Although the pervading mood of Twin Falls Idaho - a beautifully shot, noirish thing - is one of sadness and loss, the Polishes' film is playful, too.

It's a shame about Ray, because Foxx is trapped in a movie that takes the music icon's unique story and turns it into cheesy, sentimental American Dream cliches.

Johnny Depp, who portrayed Thompson's alter-ego in Gilliam's film, provides the narration. If there's hagiography here, it's counterbalanced by biographical truth.

Steeped in attitude - a smart-alecky, insider sarcasm that can be pretty clever at times, but also pretty insufferable.

Historical drama of the highest order - teeming with big ideas, and anchored by the nicely nuanced performances of Vikander and Mikkelsen.

Fails on a couple of levels. It never really gives you a sense of the psychology, the root causes behind Glass' elaborate frauds... And since we don't know the why, the how becomes considerably less interesting.

What it lacks, though, is any sense that these people - are real.

Filmmaker Dabis based Amreeka on her own family's experiences in the rural Midwest during the first Gulf War. Although the drama heads on a predictable course, Faour brings intelligence and humor to her performance and Muallem, as the smart adolescent turned surly and scared, is likewise sharp.

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

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.

Casey's big brother has made a tough, taut mystery.

An odd and entertaining mix of backstage melodrama, indie verite, and "Showgirls" kitsch, the usual gender stereotypes are upturned.

Is it dumb to say, "Wow?"...I don't care. Wow.

I'm not sure what kids are going to make of Matilda and its perception of an adult world crawling with menacing, malevolent despots. They'll probably love it - and the film's resourceful, resilient star. Parents, on the other hand, might be squirming in their seats from DeVito's unrelenting send-up of the crass and the cruel. [02 Aug 1996, p.05]

Still Mine resonates in all the right ways.

Deftly filmed and directed by Jean-François Richet.

Most disappointing, Eastwood's decades-spanning portrait reveals little about the man himself.

The film only occasionally comes to life - it's too literal (and literary), too studied, too still.

Girl With a Pearl Earring is really about watching paint dry. S l o w l y.

Funny and not-funny, slapstick and slapdash, Welcome to Collinwood is a seriously uneven caper comedy in which a bunch of really fine character actors get to act really, really silly.

Brings home the complexities and contradictions of the man.

It's not as good, nor as complex, as "The Lost Boys," but that doesn't make the story of mass annihilation, sprawling refugee camps, the generosity of Americans, and the resilience of a handful of Sudanese survivors any less worthy of telling - again.

It's a charmer.

A wide-screen wildlife documentary in which the cycles of birth and death, migrations and seasons, are captured in stunning - absolutely stunning - ways.

Michael Hoffman, whose credits include the far more lively Soapdish, directs this predictable business in a predictable fashion. [20 Dec 1996, p.03]

A spectacularly satisfying reworking of the legend of Kal-El.

Although its tone is generally genial and jovial, Good Hair touches on some tricky issues, at times complicitly.

It's too gauzy, and - with its Ron Bass script - too goopy by half.

Gorgeous, and full of bittersweet whimsy.

Hackman's in it a lot, and he is, as almost always, great fun.

The film - despite being a half-hour too long - is a rocking, rolling supernatural spectacle.

A goofy conflation of Coenian elements: the numbskull huggermugger of "The Big Lebowski", the La La Land surrealness of "Barton Fink", the Old Testament overlay of "A Serious Man."

Smart and novelistic and spiked with more than a bit of The Catcher in the Rye, Steers' movie is a prickly coming-of-age tale in which everybody -- but especially Culkin -- shines.

The Signal is a road movie turned upside down and inside out.

It's about time: Aubrey Plaza gets her own movie!

The action is exhilarating, the visual effects spectacular - and spectacularly realized.

Spielberg and his team - composer John Williams, as always, cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, screenwriter Richard Curtis - never forget their mission: to pull at heart strings, jerk some tears.

Manages to pull off a couple of startling surprises.

Hobbled by a laughably bad script and a uniformly uncharismatic cast.

An elaborately worked-over opus that's as tarted-up and artificial as Scorsese's '70s classic Mean Streets was gritty and real, Gangs of New York feels like a movie musical without the songs.

It's hard not to get caught up in this improbable but true follow-your-dream tale.

What began as a bold and thrilling story descends into Hollywood cliché. But Crowe and Connelly's work rises above the mush. They make A Beautiful Mind go.

Symphonic and cinematic, full of melancholy and hushed magic.

Bacon's portrait chills to the bone.

Alas, Brick, from writer-director Rian Johnson, isn't as clever as its conceit.

Feels downright ancient.

A heart-grabbing, awe-inspiring work that needs no embellishment.

A darkly comic, piercing, and occasionally painful study of a young woman's quest for identity.

Add Mostly Martha to the list of great mouth-watering food flicks - "Eat Drink Man Woman," "Big Night," "Babette's Feast" -- but don't stop there. Add it to another list: movies that get at the heart of what family, and love, is all about.

It's a celebration of the good times and bad times shared by a man and woman who found each other in the middle of some historic craziness, and it rocks.

Whether it's simply the change of locale, or a change in Allen's psyche, something is up in Match Point. With a dark view of humankind, and of the vagaries of chance - bad luck, good luck, dumb luck - the filmmaker has crafted a wicked, winning gem.

Moore is nominated this year, and whether she wins or not, her performance deserves attention. It is one of this very fine actress' defining roles. And it resonates with humanity and heartbreak.

Pray has a great story here, but it's much more than just "The Brady Bunch's Endless Summer."

Kiss of Death can't keep its tangled web of a plot together. The film loses momentum, it falls back on surprisingly hackneyed generic devices, and the editing gets jumpy, abrupt. In the end, the film is a lot less satisfying than its early scenes promised. [21 Apr 1995, p.10]

A beautiful, head-spinning mystery that requires keen attention - and rewards it with a tricky and poetic payoff - The Double Hour is a topflight Euro thriller right up there with "Tell No One."

Undefeated is undeniably inspirational stuff.

It's a good story, a sad story, a story of triumph and prejudice and terrible hypocrisy. And Cumberbatch aces it all - another smartly realized but deeply soulful performance from an actor who seemingly can do no wrong.

Simple, sweet family fare, and a picture that extols the virtues of comradeship and community in a spunky, spirited fashion.

Emily Watson, looking at home in her '40s frocks, plays Angus' mother - coping not only with her son's obsession with what she believes to be an imaginary friend, but also with her own worry and grief about her husband at war.

A crushingly sad, beautiful film.

Smartly acted, achingly simple love story.

Chappie has a nothing-to-lose Roger Cormanesque quality about it, low on budget (except for the CGI robots) and low on meaning, but full of high-velocity chases, helicopter pursuits, and weapons blasting around empty warehouses marred by graffiti and trash.

In a sense, Everyone Else traces, over a stretch of days on the sunny Mediterranean, the whole trajectory of a relationship. It's a marriage in miniature: courtship, consummation, conflict; love and hate; the longing for freedom vs. the need for companionship.

An intriguing study of identity, marriage and, perhaps, madness.

A taut, German-made thriller, Jerichow adds a bit of European xenophobia to the pulp traditions of passion and betrayal.

How do you say "tearjerker" in Spanish?

Funny stuff.

Without doubt one of the scariest, creepiest, gut-churningly unsettling pictures to come along in ages.

There's humor in it, and sadness, and an acid-tinged humor that is miles away from the branded levity of "Friends." More power to Aniston for feeling the need to try something different, and then doing it -- well.

There are laughs here aplenty, and sexy, goofy, off-the-cuff charm.

Light and droll, but with an undercurrent of moody suspense.

The relationship between the young American and the old Frenchman is as rich as one of Perrier's sauces: the pupil and the teacher, the son and the father, the keen protégé and the stubborn classicist.

The music, of course, resonates. And so does this exquisite heartbreaker of a story.

Murphy, in the boogeyman role, toggles between seductive and sinister with enough conviction to make you forget that his character makes no sense at all.

Fulfills the promise of its title: It's transporting, it's magical.

At its best, Edge of Tomorrow plays like a tripwire time-travel thriller. As it progresses, though, the built-in repetition can, and does, grow tedious.

It's a character study, nicely realized.

22 Jump Street's scattershot approach to comedy is rooted in the belief that for every anatomical, scatalogical, sexual, or pop-cultural reference and pun gone awry, another will stick to the wall like, um, bodily fluid.

A pitch-black comedy steeped in bitterness and regret.

Deadpan and a bit dopey, Brooklyn Brothers Beat the Best has a shaggy charm, and the chemistry between the tuneful twosome's would-be Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty makes up for the inevitable rock-and-roll road movie cliches.

There's a loneliness at the heart of this world, and Ghost World, that's really touching -- and a bit scary, too.

At once a deeply personal film and an important historical document, The Man Nobody Knew leaves us with an incomplete portrait of a man. Did Colby have a moral core? Did he know what was truth, and what was a lie? Did he sanction assassination plots? Did he love his family? Was he even capable of love?

A crowd-pleaser of immense proportions.

This beautifully taut and terrifying thriller is faithful to its source in just about every way that matters.

If Macbeth comes off at times like a Classics Illustrated comic-book adaptation (there is one, from 1955), it can also be quite moving, quite troubling, haunting, even.

The two leads, Edgerton and Hardy, pull off their respective roles - rising above the cliches and the melodrama - with ferocity and focus.

So gin-and-tonic dry, so deceptive in its deadpan-ness, that it's not always clear that Julian Fellowes is having fun. But he is.

A satisfyingly moody, melancholy, madcap live-action romp.

A bit of a one-joke wonder.

Foxx makes what he does look effortless. He's the reason to see Collateral, as he walks into the frame and walks off with the picture.

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.

Spinney comes across as a man whose warm spirit is literally at the core of the loving, if loopy Big Bird.

This Santa Claus story is for a midnight movie crowd, not the kiddie matinees.

A super-taut and superbly acted three-character piece.

Black Book doesn't let the grim facts of the Holocaust get in the way of some ripping pulp.

An examination of loneliness and the need to connect in an increasingly disconnected world, What Happened Was . . . is disturbing, funny and unpredictable in the way people themselves are disturbing, funny and unpredictable. [07 Oct 1994, p.05]

Francofonia is a brilliant meditation on art, on war - and what happens to art when nations go to war.

A tale of disaffection, devastation and epiphanies of the catastrophic kind.

Redmayne should be getting a lot of notice for his performance; it's palpable, it's poignant. Jones, too, is terrific. And Marsh, who won the documentary Academy Award for his Philippe Petit Twin Towers caper Man on Wire, brings a keen artistry to The Theory of Everything.

A powerful film.

Rain is a quiet, disquieting triumph.

The real-life career criminal Jacques Mesrine is seen in all his wild, scary, violent glory.

Loose, eminently likable stuff.

A feel-good movie, in the absolute best sense.

Beautiful to behold but lacking in any kind of palpable dread or suspense.

If a movie with suicide as a central theme can be deemed funny, then writer/director Craig Johnson has pulled it off, mixing heartache and humor and giving Wiig, especially, the opportunity to shine.

Does what the best movies can do: take viewers to what might be unfamiliar places, into a culture with unique customs and traditions, and show, through drama and comedy, how the fundamental truths of the human experience need no translation.

As a celebration of agility, ability, and outlandish human behavior, The Walk is a winning thing. It may not get inside the head of its pole-balancing protagonist - it doesn't really even try - but Zemeckis' movie takes you skyward.

Tcheng finds Simons in moments of haughty self-confidence and tremulous self-doubt.

A smart, sharp, stirring adaptation of the H.G. Bissinger best-seller.

But the ending, at once ambiguous and obvious, is a letdown -- a frustratingly literal-minded, or literary-minded, conceit.

Patric and Liotta get the chance to do some heavy riffing on themes of honor, sacrifice, selling out and self-destructing, and the bleak, smeared world of drugs and violence is brought to the fore with feverish style.

It's quite a lot of fun.

Rare, too, is the way The Broken Circle Breakdown incorporates music into its narrative. The songs - traditional bluegrass and country, and a clutch of new ones rooted in same - are as integral to the characters and their relationships as the dialogue.

Smoking, shouting, practically shooting off sparks, Cruz spreads a wildfire sexuality across Allen's sunny tableau of Catalan country picnics and scenic Barcelona ramblings.

Ultimately, the movie's a bust.

Like Shane Black's directing debut, "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" with Robert Downey, Jr., his The Nice Guys borrows from noir traditions and pulp fiction, throwing a fresh coat of smart-alecky comedy over the whole thing.

The Bronze, for all its crudeness and lewdness (Melissa Raunch, anyone?) and wonky comedy, is actually a good old-fashioned tale of redemption.

Question: Is life still like a box of chocolates if you're going in reverse? The answer, in the case of the curiously Gumpian The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, is a gooey yes.

An unflashy but fascinating meditation on addiction and greed. The junkie was clearly Mahowny, but the greed, in a way, was everybody else's: the bankers', their flush clientele's, and the casinos', all busy feeding his habit.

Rodriguez is riveting, with a drop-dead cynical charm.

The real reason to see Blank City is to catch snatches of the now-decades-old films - priceless DIY numbers that capture all the wild energy, humor, and rage of, if not a more innocent time, then certainly a cooler one.

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.

Siegel, in his debut as director, shot the low-budget Big Fan on a digital camera and achieves an appropriately grimy, gritty look. He has an eye for the telling detail and for the comedy in tragedy.

Sensual, dreamlike, both intimate and epic, The House of Sand is a cinematic tour de force.

Moretti knows how to orchestrate a good laugh when it's needed, but he can plumb more soulful, sorrowful depths, too. In Mia Madre, with its self-doubting director and wild-card American interloper, Moretti works a palette of shifting moods. Triumphantly.

The problem with Captain America: The Winter Soldier is that there's too much going on: the Marvel Universe stuff, the WikiLeaks-ish paranoia stuff, the video game-ish CG visual effects stuff, the epic John Woo-ish everybody-pointing-a-weapon-at-everybody-else face-off stuff.

Despite the jumpy, ride-along camera work and the ever-present threat of engagement, a certain tedium sets in during the film.

A dazzling costume epic, a spectacle for the eyes and for the soul.

Impossibly charming and impossibly French.

A sweet but unsticky comedy from Norway that was one of the five foreign- language nominees at this year's Academy Awards.

Extraordinarily sensual and extraordinarily bleak, Claire Denis' Nenette and Boni depicts a world of diffident youth, of estranged families and displaced souls. [02 May 1997, p.15]

The truth is left for the audience to decide. And while the conclusion isn't necessarily clear, it is unsettling.

The Hoax makes the fakery of disgraced writers Jayson Blair, James Frey and Stephen Glass seem puny by comparison. Irving was the grand master, and Gere's portrait and Hallström's movie suggest why: He almost bought his own story, believed his own outrageous pack of lies.

Simple, poignant and leavened with humor, it's a film that affirms the nourishing aspects of love and companionship.

Brazen shocker is never less than compelling -- even when you feel compelled to shut your eyes.

Arnold's Wuthering Heights has its doom-laden moments of urgency and heartache, but vast swaths of the (longish) film just seem to meander across the muddy hills.

This sad, staggering drama should be seen: out of the grimness, and the profound calamity, you can almost taste life in your mouth.

Merchants of Doubt shouldn't be a hard sell. The fact that it is should make you very mad.

Try not to let the film's overbearingly jaunty score get in the way. The Lady in the Van is quite a feat.

Labaki, who studied filmmaking in Lebanon and France, has a deft touch and nice instincts.

While this hugely likable cast is, indeed, hugely likable, no one's sweating things at all. The comedy's relaxed, moony rhythms imbue it with a certain charm, but can result in a certain stop-and-start awkwardness, too.

A love song to the new Europe (Klapisch's original title: Euro Pudding) and a snapshot of a polyglot gang on the cusp of kind-of-reckless youth and responsibility-burdened adulthood.

Splendid, smile-inducing fun.

By the time this globe-hopping, movie-star-crammed disaster saga - directed with petrifying efficiency by Steven Soderbergh - comes full circle, you'll never want to touch a subway pole or elevator button or ATM again.

For a movie about community and forgiveness, family and grace, Pieces of April is refreshingly unsappy.

Aspires to the devilish crudity and unfettered social commentary of South Park. But Zwigoff's direction lacks the exaggerated cartoonishness necessary.

A fascinating, albeit self-congratulatory, account of how Disney's fabled animation department was reenergized and reimagined between 1984 and 1994.

The Warlords, ultimately, tries to speak to the futility of war - but it does so by staging one gargantuan dustup after another.

There's no quick fix for a culture "addicted to debt," as one wag puts it in the film. But watching I.O.U.S.A. is a good place to start.

Bleak and painfully earnest.

An eerily quiet, bracingly bloody, and expertly laid-out adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel.

Béart, too beautiful for words, brings a complex swirl of emotions, elegantly restrained and marked with pain, to this finely wrought work.

By movie's end, it seems like the only one giving a truly genuine performance is Bianca. Mouth-agape, steadfastly mum.

Boy begins with an epigram from E.T.: "You could be happy here . . . . We could grow up together." That's what the film is about - finding happiness, growing up, feeling like a stranger in a strange world.

Quiet, quirky gem.

How much is shaman and how much is showman is hard to tell. Some of Levitch's staccato soliloquies have the ring of truth, and some have the ring of jive. Either way, though, The Cruise is a journey worth taking. [27 Nov 1998, p.03]

Less a Holocaust retribution fantasy than a messy homage to war movies, and to movies, period.

A beautifully mopey adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's much-praised novel.

Scott shoots and edits Unstoppable with roller-coaster momentum and an eye (and ear) on that roaring tonnage of steel.

Satisfying and spirited and laced with humor.

This is a smart, spirited spoof that will leave you with a smile on your face - and an appetite for some serious '70s funk to play on the eight-track in your solid gold Cadillac convertible.

Windblown, with a sage and playful Zen vibe, Wong Kar Wai's Ashes of Time Redux is a color-saturated, slo-mo martial arts piece about time, memory, love, regret, betrayal.

Directed in workmanlike style by Underworld: Evolution's Len Wiseman, has its share of wild stunts and spectacular carnage, but it feels pokey and predictable, too.

Think "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," but then think fun.

Engaging, though certainly not groundbreaking, I Went Down manages to quote from Plato and deploy a cheap joke about masturbation (twice). As gangster movies go, it's a charmer. [3 July 1998, p.3]

The Cooler is small-scale moviemaking about small-scale lives. But it's big in all the right ways.

No one is getting at anything in The Strangers, except the cheapest, ugliest kind of sadistic titillation.

Sure, it's a skewed view through adolescent eyes, but it's one that still speaks to the aspirations, agendas, image-making and spin control behind a real, grown-up political election.

As a piece of filmmaking, What the Bleep isn't exactly transcendent stuff. But as an entryway into new ways of thinking about the self, the universe, and the vast infinite whatnot of whatever (you know what we mean, oh wise one), this little movie is big.

Duplicity zips from one elaborate piece of hugger-mugger to the next. But at a certain point (for me, it was Rome), boredom sets in.

The Painted Veil is rich with history and heartbreak. It's stirring stuff.

Digging for Fire, like last year's "Happy Christmas" (also with Kendrick) and 2013's "Drinking Buddies" (with Johnson and Kendrick), is not a film for fans of taut, crafted dialogue and definitive endings. Conversations drift and weave, as do the people having them. Narcissistic melancholy dukes it out with beer-and-pot-stoked merriment. There is longing. There is foolhardiness.

Cold Souls entertains on its own terms, delivering irony and suspense as Giamatti discovers that his soulless self is a terrible, terrible actor.

Thanks to the evocative cinematography of Ed Lachman, it is bathed in a celestial light that cannot penetrate the existential darkness of its characters.

Her life, and her work, transcended what we think of as "fashion."

What Our Fathers Did is a movie about historical and filial responsibility, about repudiation, about acceptance, about the pain we inherit, and the pain that continues to be doled out.

The chaos and carnage here is just a pumped-up take on a tradition that harks back to Godzilla, and harks back, of course, to the Marvel comics from which all these heros originally sprang.

Wickedly smart and wickedly playful, Roman Polanski's adaptation of David Ives' Tony-nominated Venus in Fur works on so many levels, it's almost dizzying.

Fails to bring Giger to life in any kind of illuminating way.

Feels more like a postscript than a probing, provocative documentary.

A terrific mystery, equal parts haunting love story and nimble thriller.

A fine, inventive '70s period piece about friendship, first love, and growing up to face the hard lessons of life.

Chronicle is full of smart writing that isn't too smart.

Johnny Depp, in bushy eyebrows, sinister mustache, and a suit and hat of fur, may be too cartoonishly lascivious for his own good as the wolf who pursues the girl in the scarlet cape to Grandmother's house. But then he gets to croon the couplet, "There's no way to describe what you feel / When you're talking to your meal." Delicious.

Succeeds royally at building a sense of apocalyptic dread. It isn't quite so successful at sustaining that mood, and Fessenden resorts to blurry images of totemic spirit forces and stampeding moose specters to get where he's going. And where exactly is that? To a place designed to scare the bejesus out of us planet-pillaging consumers.

It's a tale of survival and kitsch that will win you over.

Rings true for the most part, and explores human nature - leashed and unleashed - in ways that resonate.

Devilishly delightful.

A deadpan, dead-on comedy.

Even the Rain strikes a deep and resonant chord.

It's a period piece full of colorful characters, natty costumes, jaunty music.

Skarsgard's performance is bold and raw (and reminiscent of vintage Jack Lemmon in its earnestness).

Inside Llewyn Davis plays like some beautiful, foreboding, darkly funny dream.

It could have been more taut, could have been harder, but 25th Hour still resonates with power and poetry.

Maybe it's generational: In a movie about teens, it's the teens who should rule. And they do. With certainty. With laughter. And with tears - buckets and buckets.

One of the problems with the way Mamet resolves Mike's predicament is that it's ridiculously implausible - even in the context of a far-fetched fight story.

By detailing the allegiance between Tutsi Muslims and Christian Hutus, and the fatwa issued by a Muslim leader forbidding his followers to participate in the massacres, the film is hopeful rather than horrific, even as it describes events of impossible savagery and hate.

Watts gives a deep and Oscar-worthy performance here, displaying the steely composure that made Plame a valued NOC (non-official cover operative).

For a comedy about autoerotic asphyxiation, epic deception, and shameless exploitation, World's Greatest Dad is a surprisingly sweet and tender affair.

It's the dynamic between the three leads, Rawlins, Sives and Henderson - and the young McKinlay, who's like a miniature Shirley Henderson - that is this oddball and bittersweet story's pulsing heart.

Fear(s) of the Dark, a French production, interweaves the shorts, linking the segments together thematically, and narratively.

McAvoy is charismatic, funny, and on the mark. Hall and Eve are both just right in their roles - bringing depth and detail to what could have been caricature parts. And if Starter for 10 takes a turn into foolhardy tragedy, it doesn't linger too long there.

It's a study in human behavior, describing how a self-confessed "emotional wreck," through accident and ambition, talent and temperament, became a star.

A disconcerting experience.

Tender but never sappy, Monsieur Ibrahim brings two people of vastly different age and background together in ways that are touching, and telling. It's a small, glowing gem.

There is plenty in Star Trek Beyond for diehard Trekkers to enjoy, and director Justin Lin (Fast & Furious) guns the action sequences.

Richly informative and fascinating.

It also smells very much like a movie with money on its mind - not altogether successfully balancing its loftier ideas with a sense of superficial whimsy and Vegas-meets-Wizard of Oz production design.

Possession, humiliation, jealousy, revelation . . . they're all painted in light, swift strokes by the veteran director and his two stars.

A light and extremely likable comedy -- just what the doctor ordered right now.

Informative, funny, sad and intriguing.

As entertaining as it is exasperating.

As he's done in such otherwise diverse pictures as Lone Star, City of Hope, and The Secret of Roan Inish, in Limbo writer-director Sayles circles down into a community of friends, colleagues, strangers - and shows what happens when paths cross, and sometimes double-cross. [04 Jun 1999, p.03]

David Ayer, the writer of "Training Day," director of "Street Kings," writer/director of "Harsh Times," does not make movies about princesses with witchy curses, about yuppie commitment-phobes, about talking plush toys. His territory is narrow, but he owns it: cops, in Los Angeles.

The heart of the matter - and the viscera - is the action, and one man's determination to survive. Apocalypto is primal.

Its dabs of dark comedy and stabs of gore, still rings with a sense of the real. It's electric-charged.

And if there's a problem with Tintin, it's that it's too big and booming.

With Sarandon in the title role, Scafaria has a winner: The actress tackles Marnie headlong, with heart and soul, trolling the fancy outdoor shopping mall for products to buy and for people to intercept and hang on to.

It's giving nothing away to say that Munro makes it to Bonneville, and breaks the record - which apparently still stands - on his two-wheel contraption.

A wise, wistful study of hope and dread.

At a certain point, The Homesman will take you by surprise. By the end, a ferry ride across the Missouri River, it will take your heart.

Fragmented, dreamlike, a whir of memories and misery, We Need to Talk About Kevin is unsettling, but also somehow unnecessary.

Easily the best computer-animated feature to come from Hollywood in a long while, Monster House is also one of the weirdest. A creepy-crawly, freak-show Halloween yarn.

Black Mass, a down and dirty crime drama based on the exploits of Boston gangster James "Whitey" Bulger, is thrilling for a number of reasons.

Boasts exciting competitive track cycling footage.

So disturbing, on so many levels.

This is no "Raging Bull."

Kari's film, witty and sad, is a spare, small thing, but Noi has a poetry about it, and a poignancy.

Bittersweet and funny.

It's small. It's real. And it's deeply moving.

An epic work of self-indulgence and smug riffing, stringing together tropes from TV and screen westerns and closed-room whodunits, The Hateful Eight announces itself with all the pomp and circumstance of a mid-century cinema spectacle.

A sort of full-course Father of the Bride, Lee's Eat Drink Man Woman is tender without being mushy, sweet without being syrupy - and surprising in ways that can only make you smile. [17 Aug 1994, p.E01]

The less said about the twists and turns The Illusionist takes, the better. Suffice to say, Eisenheim's masterful deceptions do not stop when he exits the stage.