Like last year's Inuit sensation ''The Fast Runner,'' the Maori drama Whale Rider is based on a folk myth, and it's told with an elemental timelessness that feels like a swan dive into prehistory.

The Mill and the Cross captures the wish that some of us have had while standing in front of a great painting. What hangs before us is so striking, beautiful, strange, vast, horrifying, ethereal, lifelike - so alive - that we're desperate to enter the other side of the canvas, to be inside the painting.

It is hard and empathetic and bleak and often beautiful — not far off from a prairie “400 Blows.”

Among the virtues of Bergman Island is how uncluttered it is generally, as well as its consistent quietude and Hansen-Løve’s keenness of observation.

Barbie knows it can be construed as a giant Mattel commercial. Look at how it highlights Barbie’s outfits by having them stop in midair for product identification, or how even the discontinued Barbies have houses in Barbie Land. That self-awareness is part of the charm, along with the clever way the plot unfolds and the genuine love Gerwig has for her characters.

Cruise will never be a master thespian, but there's no one better at putting across the charisma of control, and the opening sequence of ''Report'' is an astonishingly fluid demonstration of his gifts.

It would be a stretch to call The Simpsons Movie more than a crisper, livelier-looking episode of the series. The change in mediums changes nothing.

Giants has SO many insistent high points, in fact, that its breathlessness threatens to turn monotonous.

The film veers from farce to tragedy and relates a twisted variation on the American Dream.

Watching Room 237 is like being stuck on an airplane next to a stranger hellbent on convincing you of his very detailed, very paranoid theory of the universe. Actually, it’s like being stuck on a plane full of those guys, each with a different yet compellingly insane take on reality. And the in-flight entertainment features only one movie: “The Shining.”

The Beast is an unusual film: challenging, ambitious, and inward. Even when inscrutable, as it often is, it holds the attention, though less so the longer it lasts, and it lasts nearly 2½ hours.

Pascale Ferran's Lady Chatterley is sensual in escalating degrees of heat, but the film's eroticism, which is substantial, is laid on with a caress. The movie's a slow-motion swoon back into Eden -- a nature documentary about humans -- and it's hypnotic.

A look at Morgan Neville’s 2018 documentary “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” is enough to remind a viewer how engaged Fred Rogers could be and was. By contrast, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood comes a little too close to turning him into a magical sprite. That’s a fairy tale that grown-ups may need, but something tells me the children know better.

All in all, quite impressive for a debut. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait another 40 years for the next one.

The movie has an unhurried rhythm, not slow, but unpressured. It’s a visual equivalent of the clacking of the railroad tracks.

The film is valuable for gently insisting on both the indignities and the dignity of old age, and it’s invaluable as a keepsake of a most individual screen presence. It is, simply, a lovely time at the movies.

Olivier Assayas's Irma Vep is a spicy, propulsive, invigorating paradox - a French film of great gusto about the exhaustion of French film culture. Written in 10 days and shot in four weeks with a very busy Super 16mm camera, it looks and plays as breathlessly as its on-the-fly circumstances. [27 July 1997, p.C8]

It's a small, profoundly satisfying movie that keeps echoing long after it's over.

Ham on Rye will frustrate literal-minded audiences, but it’s a work of gentle, genuine American surrealism — a lo-fi love song to those left behind by character and chance.

Intimidated by the words "avant-garde film"? Then hand yourself over, without reservation, to the skills of documentarian Martina Kudlacek and her astonishingly accessible primer, In the Mirror of Maya Deren.

Though “Berberian” bogs down a bit in its infernal spiral, Strickland proves himself to be a rising talent — a master of sound and fury both.

Nick Nolte electrifies the football-cum-drugs saga with a remarkable performance as Phil Elliott, a pot smokin', beer swillin', cocaine sniffin' tight end for the North Dallas Bulls. But the erratic direction of Ted Kotcheff and the wayward script are strictly second-string. [10 Jun 2014, p.G15]

Tokyo Sonata, in so many senses, is about an allergic reaction to the very idea of what it means to be Japanese. The characters misplace their belief in etiquette, politesse, dignity, and propriety - or they struggle to maintain it.

In short, the film removes any possible shred of gloss or glamorization of the situation. It's gritty, honest and admirable. Sarandon is perfect as the combative mother. You can't take your eyes off her. And Nolte eventually is touching as the dogged father determined to find a cure in the Library of Congress. [15 Jan 1993, p.45]

The movie's still a wickedly droll put-on. Better yet, beneath the fun lurks a dry and weary sigh at life's refusal to match the tidiness of art.

A puzzle: a hermetically sealed period piece so intensely relevant to our current state of affairs that it takes your breath away.

Terrific French film about that most universal of subjects - work.

While Crosby is painfully frank throughout this documentary about his knack for destroying friendships and driving people away (we learn in one brief aside that there’s a daughter who hasn’t spoken to him in years), one senses that it’s easier for him to say these things now than to have done the hard, human work of repair. David Crosby: Remember My Name is a testament of achievement and a portrait of ego, but it never quite gets past its subject’s illusions to properly consider his art.

As often happens in Guzmán’s films, The Pearl Button keeps returning to the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship of 1973-90, during which thousands of Chileans were “disappeared,” taken away and never seen again alive.

Deep Water, which had seemed like a sort of Conrad novel, takes on the aspect of Dickens at his darkest.

The Dardennes resist the expected cliches: The climactic scenes gather force and purpose and the movie seems headed for a breakthrough of some sort, but then it glides softly and unexpectedly to a halt.

Most of all, California Typewriter is an elegy. “The truth is, no good typewriters are going to be made again,” Hanks laments. There’s a reason that the title of the first tune on the fine musical soundtrack is “Stolen Moments.”

A meditation on fame, acting, aging, and acceptance, “Clouds” is a multilayered rapture on the subject of woman, performing. Not only does the film demand repeat viewings, it rewards them.

"The Corpse Bride" with teeth, Bruno Bettelheim retooled for the multiplex, a nightmare of daft and creative consequence. I really liked it.

It's poetic, resonant, wistful, convulsive, regretful, exultant. There also are times when it's demanding to sit through, when time passes slowly, urged on only by flickers of uncertainty on the face of its protagonist, or by his insistent peering after meanings that may not even exist. But it's also a film that offers the kinds of rewards possible only to the contemplative mindset. [25 Jun 1999, p.D5]

This is an easy movie to spoil. It's rather plotless. But things happen in precisely the way that life happens.

It looks at the all-American obsession with winning and chortles darkly. You still come out of the movie wanting to give your family a hug.

It’s unnerving in ways that elude easy explanation and that slip under your skin and stay there.

A meditative and intensely beautiful documentary.

Director David Lowery (“Ain’t them Bodies Saints,” “A Ghost Story”) did the adaptation of David Grann’s New Yorker magazine article. His direction is winningly relaxed, and his script has real flavor.

There's humor in "Le Quattro Volte," and then a deep, abiding sadness, and beyond that a larger, more graceful comedy that extends to the horizons.

This entertaining and informative documentary just might make you a fan as well.

While the “Paradise Lost” films captured events as they unfolded in the heat of battle, West of Memphis has the luxury of at least partial closure.

Despite a moving, canny incarnation of the man by Frank Langella, despite a slickly entertaining coffee-table production as only Ron Howard knows how, the movie feels cooked up.

Apologies to Conrad Rooks, but the only reason his 1972 film, Siddhartha, is getting a 30th-anniversary rerelease is the appeal of seeing Sven Nykvist's amazing cinematography restored to its full splendor.

Lee's light hand with his timeless subjects deftly, affectingly, ruefully and hilariously covers all the bases. [19 Aug 1994, p.49]

The movie's assemblage of audio interviews poured mostly over astounding race footage is fit for a shrine.

Really, The Lost Leonardo is a detective story. Like any good detective story, it’s also a morality tale. Or maybe immorality tale better describes these goings on.

By any other standard, the creatures in Monsters, Inc. would be impressive. But by the high standard Pixar not only set itself, but invented, they're only ordinary.

It’s a deceptively impersonal style, because Beyond the Hills seethes with astonishment and rage at a broken society marooned between the 21st century and the 16th.

Without stooping to the uselessness of style, Working Woman makes its points simply by staying with Orna as she proceeds through stages of shock, humiliation, self-loathing, self-censorship, all emotions her husband finds difficult to understand and which the Bennys of the world rely on.

The achievement of this simply told, exceptionally fine film is the clarity with which it portrays the drama of a good soul in an inert body.

Mank is one of the year’s best movies if you’re the kind of person who genuinely loves movies and damn close if you’re not.

Touching and brisk.

Harrowing and inexorable, the film recaptures the progressive insanity of Jim Jones and the hundreds of worshipers in his thrall, and it certainly gives you willies to last for days.

Worth staying with for the respect it pays to its characters' emotions.

Oasis is that rare miraculous whirlwind romance that moves from attempted rape to reverence without kicking up a lot of dust.

As a portfolio of visionary images of surreal landscapes and hallucinatory flora and fauna, the movie sometimes dazzles. But as a metaphorical narrative, it often fizzles.

Full of action, but no soul.

This is a movie that feels in all its vividness, specificity, and honesty - and in its amateurish screenwriting, too - like something found from the early- to mid-1990s, when American independent moviemaking encouraged far more conversations about the sexuality of young, brown girls in movies like "Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.'' and "I Like It Like That.''

Red Rock West is one of the ongoing reasons noir is a genre that just won't say die. It's one of the most deviously entertaining detours since, well, Detour. [20 May 1994, p.53]

Immersive, enlightening documentary.

An elegy for a vanishing emblem of what once characterized this country's vitality.

The film’s energy is contagious.

I wish Hotel Rwanda felt like something more than a very, very good TV movie.

I must give credit to Reijn’s screenplay for including scenes where Romy and Samuel work out the kinks in satisfying this particular kink.

Quiet, powerful, contemplative, respectful of stillness, Eureka is the first film this year in which there is obvious greatness.

Midnight Traveler unfolds in many kinds of limbo, and the one between living a disaster and recording it for the world to see is the least problematic. Like its makers — all four of them — the movie is flawed, human, hopeful, and desperate for a place to land.

Whose Streets? gives us more than enough stories from people not often enough heard, and their refusal to remain silent is invigorating.

Depardieu and Rappeneau have not so much revived Cyrano as restored it. [25 Dec 1990, p.87p]

One of the smarter, more unexpectedly touching documentaries of the year, and I recommend it to you whether you love Rivers or loathe the very thought of her.

McKellen and Coel give a master class in line readings throughout “The Christophers.” It’s a real pleasure watching two seasoned actors bounce off each other in service to creating their characters. It’s even more delightful to see this in a film made for adults that has plenty to say about human nature, love, and the inspirations that fuel our lives.

Simple, but loaded. It celebrates the humanity and humanism at the heart of Iran's remarkable flow of films, but it's also more of a rebuke to materialistic values than any ideologue could ever hope to be.

It's sweeping yet intimate, stately yet impassioned, stylized yet immediate.

Sad, funny, brilliant.

It rates a resounding yes because it doesn't insult our emotional intelligence. [23 Nov 1983]

Coriolanus leaves an acrid, unfinished taste. Fiennes, making his directorial debut, gets into the meat of the thing, and he takes advantage of the bluntness of the text; even Shakespeare newcomers will be able to follow along.

A Most Violent Year, then, is something of a science experiment, with Abel the good rat trying to make it to the other side of the maze, uneaten and in full possession of the cheese. In its weaker moments, the movie struggles to get out of the lab. At its best, it reminds us that the maze is as big as the world and as timely as today.

If you're not in the mood, the whole thing will probably seem pretty silly. But if you are -- oh, if you are -- I Am Love may be the richest, tastiest truffle you're likely to savor all summer.

Io Capitano doesn’t try to convince viewers whether Seydou, Moussa, and all the other migrants have a right to seek a better life. What it does do, however, is tell their story in a way that makes them far more human and relatable than most of the news stories we see nowadays.

Perhaps Flynn, who did the adaptation, has been a little too faithful to her novel. The faux-punchiness of her dialogue doesn’t help matters. The characters sound like people trying to sound like people in the movies and not quite pulling it off.

If the second hour or so isn't as strong as the first, it's because the filmmaking fails to rise to the injustice that's befallen its subjects since their exoneration. It can't, really.

The movie sprawls, almost entirely in a good sense, and it lets the audience draw its own conclusions. None of them is likely to be rosy.

The film makes its edgier, more uncomfortable arguments with conviction, forcing us to think about who the justice system trusts, and why.

As superbly crafted -- as good -- as this movie is, Condon never really owns up to the cloud of pessimism at its center.

The catch in Gabrielle is that the audience pays as well.

It's a spirited and essentially optimistic film, but it's also simplistic.

Slightly misshapen and unbalanced, with a few loose ends, a few extraneous dream sequences. But there's something going on all the time.

The larger point Harvard Beats Yale makes, perhaps, is about the inevitability of loss. Many of these men, now in their early 60s, look terrific. Others, let us say, do not. Either way, all of them look very different from the helmeted young athletes of 40 years ago. A sense of mortality shadows the documentary. On or off the gridiron, time is the only opponent who always wins. Even at Harvard, even at Yale.

Exhilaratingly slow, which for many will simply mean SLOW... Those who can downshift appropriately, however, stand to be enraptured.

I like this movie a lot, but it may be too intimate, too slow for some moviegoers.

The movie’s being promoted as the third in the director’s unofficial trilogy of faith, after “The Last Temptation of Christ” (1988) and “Kundun” (1997), and it feels like a self-conscious masterpiece, a summing-up from a filmmaker who, at 74, may be thinking of his legacy.

Sarnet elevates his Rabelaisian folktale into a tragedy illustrated by haunting, metaphorical imagery.

A novelist and screenwriter, Claudel's directing for the first time here, and he leans on melodramatic contrivances more than he needs to. Still, he gives us a lean and observant weepie, and the mystery of Thomas's Juliette pulls you in.

It’s largely successful, if by nature all over the map.

Most refreshingly, Science Fair illustrates the many different kinds of STEM students out there.

You come out of the theater impressed by the scope of Eastwood's reach and frustrated by how little remains in his grasp. As gifted as this filmmaker is, this isn't the sort of thing he does best.

Reprise is exceptionally smart about the crushing expectations brought to the table by those who love us.