Walter Addiego

An unbroken flow of sad or nasty incidents.

A simple, serene and occasionally humorous film about a subject that is complex, emotional and usually treated with solemnity.

The chief virtue of Iris is its amiability — it’s a delight to spend time in Apfel’s company, and thanks to Albert Maysles, we can.

This was probably Warren Oates' finest hour, and certainly one of director Sam Peckinpah's greatest achievements. [06 Mar 2005]

The real joy here is the gorgeous nature cinematography.

A couple of other odd moments to savor: Lucky, seeking a crossword answer, reads a dictionary definition of “realism” that’s perfectly to the point. And listen as he plays “Red River Valley” on the harmonica. Either one is a great way to remember Harry Dean Stanton.

This is history of a personalized and meditative sort, and you ought to give it a chance.

Spinney owns the character, down to the last feather.

Goodbye First Love doesn't badger the viewer into drawing conclusions. It's interested in showing, with great compassion, how Camille comes to a fuller understanding of the world and herself, without the sort of prefab lessons more often found in films than in real life.

Le Quattro Volte may sound like art-house tedium, but in fact it's a movie of grave beauty, serene pace and surprising humor.

A long documentary that's very hard to watch - at times, it's harrowing.

It would be wrong to say Close’s performance in The Wife is wasted, but it certainly deserves a better movie.

The movie deals with themes of secular and religious love, of how they may intersect and diverge, that are suggestive of Bergman or Carl Theodor Dreyer.

De Felitta has taken potentially overripe material and given it real heart.

You can take it straight as an example of a bygone day of outsize filmmaking or enjoy it as kitsch, but it's exhilarating either way.

Costner’s performance is mostly monotone, but Harrelson has some nice moments portraying Gault as surprisingly reflective.

Well-made and modestly enjoyable.

This is a nearly miraculous conjunction of director, material and actor.

Bala, by the way, means "bullet." Laura Zúñiga, the real-life beauty queen on whom the film is loosely based, was called "Miss Narco" in the Mexican press.

The director’s skill pushes what could have been the same old song into a likable testament to the saving powers of young love and rock ’n’ roll.

This Belgian crime thriller makes compelling viewing out of a "you can't be serious" plotline.

Hand it to directors Michael Beach Nichols and Christopher K. Walker, who could have made the story into a black-hat/white-hat affair. Without soft-pedaling Cobb’s noxious ideology, they implicitly raise questions about how Leith responded to the perceived danger.

The silence captured in this documentary -- a meditative look at life in the Carthusian monastery of the Grande Chartreuse in the French Alps -- may be the most eloquent you'll ever hear.

The film's sense of intimacy, its closeness to real people and painful events, allows it to reach a deeper place than more conventional pieces of political rhetoric.

This is filmmaking of high energy and wit. What it adds up to is debatable. You can view it as a bright twist on the being-a-cop-is-lonely sort of police picture, or as a mini-anthology of quirky not-quite-love stories. If it's hard to say where Chungking Express arrives, the trip is still exhilarating.

The filmmaker works with economy and has a knack for creating a sense of foreboding, which is good because the plot is simply a working out of the old saw that violence begets violence.

This nightmarish revenge drama from Korea is grueling, intense, cruel -- the very definition of extreme cinema.

A loose, amiable documentary tracking several decades in the life of this most unusual farmer.