Todd McCarthy

In his bigscreen feature debut, director and co-writer Jonathan Mostow displays real flair for visceral cinema while adroitly sidestepping many of the usual tripwires of this sort of film, particularly silly coincidences, stupid decisions on the part of characters with whom you're supposed to identify, and superheroics performed by ordinary people.

Ambitiously tackling his biggest canvas to date, Clint Eastwood continues to defy and triumph over the customary expectations for a film career in Flags of Our Fathers.

Darius Khondji's cinematography evokes to the hilt the gorgeously inviting Paris of so many people's imaginations (while conveniently ignoring the rest), and the film has the concision and snappy pace of Allen's best work.

With its strong premise, a couple of fine performances and highly polished tooling, The Jackal scores as an involving high-tech thriller that occasionally hits peaks of pulsating excitement.

Crucially for such an elaborately dressed production, the characters all come thoroughly alive with their ready wits and pulsing emotions, overcoming the two-century gap with seeming effortlessness.

The script is faithful, the actors are just right, the sets, costumes, makeup and effects match and sometimes exceed anything one could imagine.

Uses first-person on-camera accounts of the adventure by Simpson and fellow climber Simon Yates to backdrop newly shot you-are-there footage that brings home the awesome and harrowing aspects of their feat.

Even if the film is mostly hitting familiar notes in terms of story and theme, it expresses a concise, focused and expertly managed vision with which there’s little to quibble, and the extraordinary style represents the fruition of a long-imagined dream on the part of many directors and cinematographers. From now on, when the discussion turns to great works of cinematography and camera operating, 1917 will always have to be high on the list.

Considerable intelligence and strategic finesse have been brought to bear on this handsomely mounted adaptation of Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, which was hardly a natural for the bigscreen.

As vivid and suspenseful as Roman Polanski has made this claustrophobic tale of a torture victim turning the tables on her putative tormentor, one is still left with a film in which each character represents a mouthpiece for an ideology.

Gubbins’ script is tart, verbally lively and neatly constructed, while director Josephine Decker, in her first outing since her well-received 2018 Sundance entry Madeline’s Madeline, keeps a very tight rein on things, adroitly mixing in tension, innuendo and dark humor to keep the drama at a satisfying low boil most of the way.

Lonergan layers and then layers some more, allows his characters to stew, not always disclose themselves and then come to decisions and changes naturally, or after due deliberation. And they can relapse and not always be ready for the breakthrough moment toward which the story seems to be pointing. The result is something that feels more akin to a full meal than the usual cinematic popcorn.

This is not "E.T.," nor is it a kid's film nor even necessarily a major mass-audience film, although Spielberg's name, high public anticipation and the child-oriented campaign will make it perform like one.

The best blue collar action movie in who knows how long, this tense, narrowly focused thriller about a runaway freight train has a lean and pure simplicity to it that is satisfying in and of itself.

Lee takes a conventional, talking-heads-and-archival-clips approach to the material, but rewardingly establishes an intimate connection with his subjects by devoting considerable time to the personalities and families of the four victims.

As carefully constructed, handsomely crafted and flavorsomely acted as a top-of-the-line production from Hollywood's classical studio era, Francis Ford Coppola's screen version of John Grisham's The Rainmaker would seem to represent just about all a filmmaker could do with the best-selling author's patented dramatic formulas without subverting them altogether.

An astonishing work of studio artifice, A Little Princess is that rarest of creations, a children's film that plays equally well to kids and adults.

Immaculately crafted in beautiful black-and-white and entirely absorbing through its longish running time, Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon nonetheless proves a difficult film to entirely embrace.

A markedly better picture than Roberto Benigni's far more sentimental Oscar collector.

Wang has made a dramatically confident move into the mainstream on his own terms with highly congenial material.

Reitman keeps a strong grip on all the aspects of the story to prevent it from becoming corny, unduly melodramatic or obvious.

This handsomely produced period piece is easily the most emotionally effective bigscreen melodrama since "The Joy Luck Club," as well as the most intelligent.

This full-bodied adaptation of Dennis Lehane's involved and involving 2001 bestselling crime novel about old friends in Boston's working-class Irish neighborhood finds Clint Eastwood near the top of his directorial game with a cast of first-rate actors.

Lightning strikes twice, but not as brilliantly as before, in Shrek 2. The welcome sequel to the monster 2001 Oscar winner about an ogre's unlikely romance with a beautiful princess successfully recycles many of the qualities that made the first one an instant animated classic and worldwide smash.

There are some unsatisfactory elements–slow spots occur during the middle stretch, the mild anti-establishment stance is getting to be a bit cliche and one never knows whether E.T.’s mortal illness is physical or psychological in nature, or both. But, as with “Close Encounters,” the truly lovely and moving ending more than makes up for everything. Chalk up another smash for Spielberg.

The first two Max features ran barely 90 minutes and it takes guts and real confidence to dare push a straight chase film with very little dialogue to two hours. But Miller has pulled it off by coming up with innumerable new elements to keep the action compelling.

It's not really either an animal or a kids' film but rather a young adult drama that rings emotionally true.

It may be a specialist’s rarified sort of work now, but Gordon and Abel really know what they’re doing. It’s gentle and admittedly closer to a divertissement than a full-course comic meal. But no one else is doing anything like this at the moment.