In the end, this is a movie that doesn't respect its own power. Less of a stacked deck would have left Vera Drake to play a far more effective hand.

Helped immensely by a lush and poignant musical score by Joe Hisaishi, Fireworks makes a quietly powerful impact. [22 May 1998]

The picture has immediacy, force and humanity. It's a muckraking work of art.

What emerges is a fallen warrior's tale: the inside story of a man bloodied and bowed.

Eastern Promises is intensely anti-dramatic.

Enraging and inspiring. It boasts the miraculous quality of finding a letter in a bottle and discovering that its authors are alive.

The impact is hypnotic.

Winchester '73 has a little bit of everything, including a central conflict straight out of the Old Testament, and Mann's highly visual direction -- dialogue is sparse, and the movie looks gorgeous, filmed largely on location in Arizona -- shows that John Ford and Howard Hawks weren't the only directors able to translate their love of the Old West and its mythical figures to film. [05 Jun 2003]

The dramatic content in Memento is as blank as Leonard's post-traumatic mental state.

Director Joe Wright's new movie version of Pride and Prejudice is more Gene Kelly than Fred Astaire: more earthy and athletic than balletic.

Venus is a magnificent tribute to actors by filmmakers who know they are the essential human material of theater and the screen.

In its own quiet, voluptuous way, Rivers and Tides, an unpretentiously brilliant documentary, uses the work of Scottish sculptor Andy Goldsworthy to open up the hidden drama of the natural universe.

The title Tell No One recalls the days when ads proclaimed, "No one will be seated after the first 15 minutes" and "Be considerate of your neighbors: Don't give away the ending of this picture." Both rules apply to this canny, refreshingly emotional and intuitive thriller.

The movie grows richer as it goes along and contrasting pieces click together.

A thriller from the inside out, a romance from the outside in: that's the double-edged brilliance of The Constant Gardener.

A History of Violence is a hollow story from an empty graphic novel.

Sugar is a near-great movie with qualities more unusual than some all-time classics. It resists cliche at every turn and puts something solid in its place: raw yet controlled observation that gives the film the form of a flexing muscle.

Takes a chaotic moment in the long history of "the Troubles" and turns it into a keening, air-clearing epic.

Macabre and astonishing, Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas is a brilliant piece of technology, perhaps undercut a bit by the insincerity of its story and the blood-and-thunder music of Danny Elfman (every single piece he writes sounds like every other single piece he writes). But nasty kids and bored parents should love it.

Watching this movie, you can dream with open eyes.

Bitterly funny about divorce, it's even sharper and more original about intellectuals and their discontent.

Like the particular brand of music Dewey espouses, this is a movie more concerned with exploiting rock than understanding it.

What makes this movie ultra-contemporary is the way Abrams has re-imagined Spock and Kirk as a team of rivals.

Making you feel the presence of absences - of the distant and the departed, of dreams that never quite come true - is the key thing that this uneven film gets exactly right.

Howl's Moving Castle is one animated epic that has it all: poetic intensity, potent storytelling, vivid and surprising characters, and intoxicating powers of visual imagination.

There's a subtlety to Crimson Gold that deserves applause.

There is not one word, one scene in the whole thing that doesn't ring the bell of truth, and anyone seeing it should emerge from the theater with a sense of satisfation rare in the movie-going experience. To put it simply, Marty is great. [18 Jun 1955, p.4]

The Prisoner of Azkaban is to Harry Potter what that other No. 3, "Goldfinger," was to James Bond: the movie that takes the invention and gamesmanship of the series to a whole new giddy peak.