Where Wiseman excelled in respecting the broad rhythms and pure storytelling of the ring, Chang's new documentary focuses on the stories of three boxers and weaves them into a compelling narrative that rivals anything Hollywood could script.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a foodie's delight, obviously, and best seen either on a full stomach or with restaurant reservations immediately following.

Once the film started throwing in Satan worship, spooky dolls, and nuns with agendas the Pope would not endorse, it became more silly than disturbing. Still, I have to admire a filmmaker who, once realizing he’s painted himself into a corner, opts to bust through the wall rather than accept being trapped.

Dark Horse falls into the formula of underprivileged kids challenging the elites at their own game. But the outcome is never certain.

In addition to directing outstanding performances, Edgerton also suggests psychological processes by means of space, architecture, and décor, exploiting the walls, doorways, windows, and mirrors of the new house to indicate the status of a relationship or self-image.

Julie Cohen’s Every Body is a master class in how a documentary should be done. It packs a lot of information into a briskly paced runtime of 91 minutes, and its use of clips and talking heads doesn’t distract or feel extraneous. The

It’s a showcase for an actress who wins us over by degrees and a reminder that there are no new stories — only fresh ways of telling them.

True, a lot of marmalade gets spread around, and at times the zaniness gets a bit too slap-sticky, but it’s all good clean fun.

Women Talking is full of phenomenal acting by a group of actors at the top of their game. There are a lot of characters here, but even the most minor are given moments to shine.

From start to finish there's a shimmer of discovery about it - our discovery of it, Coppola's discovery of how much she can do.

Not your everyday dilemma, but as depicted in this lushly detailed and passionately performed melodrama, the mores and traditions of this sequestered, seldom depicted group take on a broader relevance.

Nobody does a better job of putting animals and people in the same movie than Carroll Ballard, and he does it again, humanely as ever, in Fly Away Home. [13 Sep 1996, p.D8]

Like its subject, Pollock is a messy creation, but one whose depth of commitment and high attack keeps it on track.

In short, A Christmas Story isn't just about Christmas; it's about childhood and it recaptures a time and place with love and wonder. It seems an instant classic, a film that will give pleasure to people not only this Christmas, but for many Christmases to come. [19 Nov 1983, p.1]

A luminous love letter to the Banco Chinchorro, the largest coral reef off Mexico's coast, and to the tender bonds between a father and son.

This is a person you'd enjoy spending time with and learning from. That's certainly the case with Dorman's film.

As a piece of nostalgia, "Mrs. Miniver" will carry you into a world gone by when war movies promoted community and not fragmentation. [16 Oct 1992, p.38]

Wild Tales rockets along with sleek, amoral charm and a masterful sense of cinematic storytelling; it’s worth noting that one of the producers is Spain’s Pedro Almodóvar.

Even when events get intense, even violent, and they do, there’s nothing abrupt. Corpus Christi never erupts. It unfolds.

Watching “Story,” one realizes that so much of what most of us most love about the movies isn’t the medium, per se, but its appurtenances: stardom and glamour and the pull of narrative. What Cousins loves is the medium. We love the effects. He loves the cause.

Potrykus seems to be going for a critique of disengaged youth stuck in a corporate dystopia of dead-end jobs and fear of life itself. But as a “Clerks” for the Millennial generation, the social commentary of Buzzard tastes about as half baked as the Hot Pocket in Marty’s toaster oven.

"No God and no religion can survive ridicule," wrote Mark Twain, but for once the sage of Hannibal was wrong.

You’ll be in the mood for it or you won’t. 24 Frames is slow cinema at its slowest, and as meaningful as you want to make it. Above all, it breathes with the sensibility of an artist who saw beauty in people and places where most of us never thought to look.

A feast of a film that goes on feeding you long after you've left the theater. [25 Dec 1995, p.83]

Personal Shopper is as coolly, beautifully ambiguous as we’ve come to expect from France’s Olivier Assayas, and it contains the kind of mysteries that can leave adventurous audiences tingling pleasurably while others spit out their gummi worms in frustration.

Open Hearts, like all good melodramas, is ruthless in its insistence that people are dragged, uncomprehending, in the wake of events.

A hip-hop cousin of Prince's ''Purple Rain,'' which had braver fashion sense and better original songs.

There are many indicators of star power. Not the least of them is unforgettability. On screen, no less than in the laboratory, Eric Kandel has star power.

Neighboring Sounds unfolds like a casual nightmare in the light of day.

In Polanski’s hands, it’s an unholy pleasure: a diversion that stings.

Under Murphy’s direction, the tone is darkly comic — not what you’d expect given that plot synopsis but to which the actors respond with deftness and creativity, like downhill skiers facing a challenging slalom.

The chief attraction of the film is the ersatz India created by the pixel pushers at special effects houses WETA Digital and the Moving Picture Company.

The Hunting Ground does a fine and fierce job of portraying campus sexual assault as a national disease. It never dares to suggest that it’s a symptom.

Baumbach has something of an evil genius for casting. If Driver — the mercurial Adam of “Girls” — and Seyfried are solid as the incoming kids, Charles Grodin (the original “Heartbreak Kid”) ruthlessly represents the boomers refusing to cede the stage.

Dillane is onscreen for the entire film, and he gives a performance that will stick with you long after the symbolism-laced last scene.

For all its pessimism, the movie prompts a viewer to search his or her own memories for actions rather than reactions, and to mull over the differences between the two. It's a dark little ride, but at the end the lights hesitantly flicker back on.

Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck's film is a fascinating look at the intersection of commerce, celebrity, and controversy.

The strength of Kopple’s film (as opposed to the strength of Sharon Jones, which is mighty) is that it honestly depicts the vulnerabilities of an indomitable woman.

With inconsistency, [Collins Jr.] articulates the murkier and subtler aspects of a thinly written character through his physicality, revealing flashes of brilliance. But this feels undermined by directorial choices that don’t embrace or take full advantage of the potential primal nature of the performance.

By the end of this sincerely calculated, always watchable movie, everything has burned away but the fury, including whatever you may think or have thought about the actor you’re looking at. That’s how good the performance is.

Elegant, insistent movie -- a great gray filmmaker's finest in years.

Beverly Dollarhide, Nicholas's mother, says of the period after her son's disappearance, "My main goal in life at that time was not to think." Apparently, the filmmakers have taken a cue from her. At least her unwillingness to think makes sense.

Güeros is brutal, ironic, madcap, and grim. Shot by Damian Garcia in black-and-white with the pristine spontaneity of Godard’s cinematographer Raoul Coutard, it is “Bande à part” (1964) meets “Los Olvidados” (1950).

Though the last third of the film feels rushed, and Bennebjerg’s performance hews dangerously close to mustache-twirling-villain territory, there is much to admire and enjoy here. Arcel has made the kind of cinematic spectacle Hollywood used to excel at, but doesn’t make anymore.

There’s a lot, in fact, that keeps this film from greatness. One performance alone recommends it. That’s enough.

The scenes between Montgomery and Stone in plainclothes would seem to be tangential to Moverman's movie, but they're very much its point. Only in uniform do these men make sense to themselves.

It's all a treat to behold, and, at least where the turtle and the jellyfish are concerned, it's transcendently beautiful, too. I just wish there was more of it.

Private Fears says that life is a smoldering holding pattern, but Resnais is gracious enough to blanket the embers with eternal snow.

Jeff Feuerzeig's film is as good a portrait of the artist as a beloved basket case as you'll see, but it's kept from greatness by the questions it refuses to ask itself.

It's the tone of the movie's two sides - action and stillness, graphic violence and romantic melodrama - that don't cohere.

Normally I’d recommend a rock ’n’ roll documentary to the band’s fans, but since the cult of the Mekons is infinitesimally small, if fanatically devoted, I have no problem recommending Revenge of the Mekons to everyone who hasn’t heard of the group. All 99.9 percent of you.

The Nightingale strives to be an epic and pulls it off, even if there are one or two false summits before the final scenes. It’s painful to watch because the truth is often painful, especially when so many myths of empire have accreted around it.

Never has a movie so soberingly made the fight to save life and the struggle to hold on to it seem so futile.

Of all the great monster mothers in cinema history, Cornelia Keneres (Luminita Gheorghiu, who sets the standard other performances should be judged by this year) ranks high on the list.

It’s predictable in many places and acerbic in others, sentimental when you expect it and poignant when you don’t. But it stars Lily Tomlin, and that’s all you really need to know.

One of the year’s surprises, a defiant, funny, and multi-layered saga of talent and class resentment, marred only by some technical oddities and a certain smug awareness of everything the moviemakers are daring themselves to do right.

The screenplay tries to say something about female autonomy and male selfishness, yet the film plays like an overlong, 108-minute riff on the old reliable stand-up routine subject “girlfriends be crazy” that never subverts the trope.

Uncompromising and unforgiving, but ultimately more self-destructive than any of its characters.

Tarantino and Rodriguez want you to cover your eyes in disbelief and get the unholy giggles at the same time. You do, but in two very different ways, and that's the movie's strength.

Lawrence Kasdan's Body Heat--an homage to film noir--gets off to a nice start before it becomes entangled in its convoluted and somewhat uninteresting plot machinations.

Like Anderson, many directors claim to value local color, but few have gone as far, or achieved such impressive results, as has Chris Smith in The Pool.

The man we meet is intelligent and good-humored. "They do what they want," he says with a shrug, indicating a set of just-completed canvases. "I planned something different."

The Twentieth Century exists somewhere on the Venn diagram between midnight movie, fever dream, Turner Classics fetish object, and all-Canadian prank. Does that sound interesting? By all means. Does the movie go anywhere? Not really. Will you mind? I didn’t.

Really the film is a deft first-person character study with a war zone for a background.

Imitation and musical enthusiasm are all there is to this performance; in the dramatic scenes that make up the majority of Maestro, Cooper is the weak link that drags everything down.

The film is depressive, slow, darkly funny, unyielding in its formal rigor, and unsettlingly beautiful. It's obviously not for everyone, but only because not everyone can meet its stare.

For all its bells and whistles, “Project Hail Mary” is also a lovely, bittersweet character study, a pas de deux between man and alien that elicits a surprising amount of emotions by the time the credits roll.

The movie is a steady, frightening depiction of a baton of awful knowledge being passed.

Though the outcome is a matter of public record, it still unfolds like a suspenseful tragedy. Suffice it to say that the wheels of justice turn slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine.

In the end Death triumphs, but its allure and obsession remain a mystery.

As quietly confident in its emotional grounding as any American film you'll see this year, and animated by a radiant debut performance from Ashley Judd in the title role, Ruby in Paradise is refreshingly removed from the usual strivings for effect. Part of its allure is that it plays out in what seems like real time. [12 Nov 1993, p.49]

His carnival-esque filmmaking style, which can leave some Spike Lee joints in tatters, helps this one expand in sorrowful heart and indomitable wit. Chi-Raq is a vibrant community mural of a movie, and it stretches to the horizon.

This is one of the year’s best films, and the most fun you’ll have at the theater this summer.

It's a celebration of free expression that treats youth like a fierce and beautiful animal, and never attempts to tame it. In Pump Up the Volume, the "why-bother" generation finds a voice, and begins to bother. [22 Aug 1990, p.47]

I generally love noir, gore, kick-ass women, the 1980s — but “Love Lies Bleeding” ladled out a visual stew I did not enjoy consuming.

Taking its title from the site where Christ was crucified, the controversy-courting film has a lot of Catholic church business (and doctrine) on its mind, and veers from poetically eloquent to jarringly blunt in hashing it all out.

I'm wary of implying that it's your civic duty to see The House I Live In, but - guess what - it is. And see it with someone whose views are different from your own. We're going to need everyone to help get us out of this mess.

As the title implies, though, Keep on Keepin’ On has more on its mind. The film’s as much about the young Kauflin’s struggles — as a 21st-century Asian-American naïf trying to succeed in a 20th-century art form created by African-Americans, as a blind man navigating the often callous New York jazz scene. It’s also about the ongoing health of jazz itself as the music recedes further from the mainstream into the protective world of festivals and small clubs.

The time for poetry is past, the director seems to say, as his camera looks deep into the eyes of the mob in the film’s final image. The chaos may be just be getting started.

For all its smarts, however,the film feels the slightest bit impersonal and risk-free. Coppola has been faulted in various quarters for dropping a female slave from her remake.

These men tend to be laconic, tormented, tattooed, impenetrable, usually bearded, potentially or actively violent, with screwed-up families and traumatic pasts. Nothing that a good horse couldn’t cure, or a talented female director.

Somers Town, is a trifle: A short black-and-white lark with sharp edges and a soft center. It has its raptures, though, and then some. A disarmingly slight tale of adolescent friendship, Somers Town is one of those rare movies that seems to discover itself as you watch it.

An illuminating and entertaining study of an underground culture that has become part of the American mainstream.

There's plenty of invention and exuberant vigor in the chopsocky, and Wilson's cool, ironic drollery provides the perfect foil for Chan's heroics.

That commendable sense of balance, which Dolgin and Franco use to approach this family reunion, ultimately makes the finished product devastating.

More a bleak docu-melodrama than an esoteric morality play.

Just when you were about to give up on the Internet as a swamp full of trolls, bullies, and liars, along comes a documentary like Ido Haar’s Presenting Princess Shaw.

A collection of beautifully acted encounters, conversations, symbols, and vignettes woven into an evocative and unforgettably surreal garment.

Philomena is a tearjerker of rare honesty and craft.

So expect the upending of expectations: visual, emotional, tonal, generic. Especially generic. Is First Love a comedy? A crime thriller? A love story? An advertorial for subscriptions to Guns and Ammo?...Yes.

A charming, spiky period piece that might be called "Boo Radley: The Final Years."

Alonso sustains an atmosphere of otherworldly immanence in a vivid setting, with a style involving long takes with characters posed as if in tableaux vivants.

The characters look as if they’d be more comfortable with intertitles than spoken dialogue. And the faces — Marion Cotillard as Ewa, the beleaguered Polish immigrant of the title, holds a close-up as well as Lillian Gish or Louise Brooks.

Tommy Lee Jones makes his feature directing debut here, and the film is as weathered, subtle, and sympathetic as the actor's own face.

As anyone who saw Pelle the Conqueror remembers, August is great with landscapes, but perhaps because he was telling Bergman's story here instead of his own, he seems on this occasion too reverent. Considering the fierce emotions that are the film's subject, The Best Intentions is too hushed, decorous, solemn. [14 Aug 1992, p.43]

Lines are drawn and connections are made. The intentions are pure. The results are enraging, often in accordance with the filmmakers’ hopes, sometimes against. Personally, I came out of Detroit angrier than I’ve been at a movie in ages, and not entirely the way director Kathryn Bigelow probably wants.

This is less a throwback to cutely misunderstood Molly Ringwald than to “My So-Called Life” — but with our high-school heroine stuck in a spiral like Claire Danes never knew.

The biggest complaint about Brooklyn Castle is that there's not enough of her. A presence as magnetic as Vicary's demands more screen time. How did she come to chess (a notoriously male-dominated game)? How did she come to 318?