If Millennium Mambo is the only chance to see Hou Hsaio-hsien's work at a movie theater, you'd better take it.

Dancing on the edge of dullness, ''Girl'' is continually saved by the look of things: the hush of an atelier in midafternoon, dust-motes swirling in a sunbeam, pigment blooming under mortar and pestle. Impatience is forestalled, time and again, by rapture.

It's riveting moviemaking and a boost for what's left of America's ailing collective life. [20 Dec 1991]

Fennell is a fearsome sensibility and a talent to watch out for, and the arguments you may have after the lights come up will be well worth having. But it’s the sadness behind Cassie’s practiced smile, the wildfire fury behind that sadness, and the reasons for that fury, that may haunt you when the arguments are over.

Shut Up is intentionally slapdash, with jumbly hand-held cameras and random bursts of feedback. But there's a beguiling sense of quiet to it, too.

Consider it the PG-rated, Hassidic version of “Bridesmaids” (2011), and like that movie the comedy is rooted in pain, eroding hope, and triumphant faith.

It’s not exactly like the novel, but it captures the best parts of it.

The dialogue also reflects the material’s stage origins in ways that don’t always translate well.

Dogtooth is slightly less self-congratulatory than the average Dogme movie, a few of which belong to Lars von Trier. This feels, instead, more like an extreme summer at a Dadaist acting camp.

After all the mesmerizingly illicit buildup, the film’s willful lack of a payoff is almost as strange as one of those essays.

Hal is a soft-edged memorial that should direct you, or re-direct you, to some terrific and tough-edged films.

Until Exotica gets away from Egoyan at the end, it's his strongest bid yet to integrate strong feelings and sleek visuals. [03 Mar 1995, p.33]

It is a film about Los Angeles, culture and coexistence, the American dream. It is the opposite of narrowcasting.

Despite the seeming inevitability of tragedy and despair, In Bloom remains true to its title. Though political and personal upheaval threatens to overwhelm them, Eka and Natia’s clarity and courage resist the ignorance, injustice, and rage all around.

The filmmakers clearly intended this to be a goofy rollercoaster ride, so M3GAN is a success.

Belushi was at his best when he was allowed to build, moving from soft-spoken sanity to a maelstrom of fury over the course of a two-minute sketch. We get the infamous Joe Cocker impression, flailing away next to the real thing; we’re reminded of his truly remarkable skills as a physical comedian; and we get most of my favorite skit, the “Little Chocolate Donuts” ad. But a full measure of the man’s art (and it was art) is missing.

Seesawing between despair and soul-affirming inspiration, God Grew Tired of Us is a documentary to make you proud of what America offers to the rest of the world and worried that it can't keep its promises.

Small, sharply written, incisive comedy examines, with smarts and style and sexiness, the very nature of modern romance - gay, straight, and in between.

In the end, Seabiscuit gets right the things that matter.

A structural mess that turns contrived just when it should be hitting home.

While the visuals are often stunning, and the first hour has a loose, raunchy charm, “Mickey 17″ wears out its welcome long before its overlong, nearly t2½-hour runtime ends.

Dreamlike and the slightest bit precious, the film is a beautiful, over-cultivated hothouse flower.

The movie’s pretty great — not quite “Fargo” with lobsters but close enough, and about as good as regional filmmaking gets. Filmed in Harpswell, Maine and environs — the cobwork of Bailey Island Bridge curves through one scene — Blow the Man Down delves cleverly and suspensefully beneath the surface of a small, well-appointed fishing town in winter. There are bodies and there is blood. There are also a lot of quietly furious women.

Beautifully photographed, well composed, but disappointingly superficial.

This Earth doesn't really have anything new to say, but it does present some newly entertaining ways of saying it.

One of the director’s more superficial efforts; it’s watchable but glib.

Debuting at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and updated in light of recent events, it’s a failed film whose failure makes it interesting; it’s less a portrait of Assange than an account of how the scales fell from one admirer’s eyes as she looked at him.

If you haven’t left your house since March, this movie counts as a legitimate vacation.

Several talking heads appear, including George Shultz, James Baker, and Lech Walesa. Tellingly, none of the interviewees is Russian. A running theme is that many Russians consider Gorbachev a traitor. “A tragic figure” Herzog calls him.

Maybe not entirely depersonalized, however. Hogg has a point of view and a point to make, cryptic though they may be.

Belkin’s smart, dynamic documentary shares its subject’s slam-bang style. That’s good. Watching it is exhilarating. It also shares Wallace’s aversion to nuance. That’s less good. Belkin has a weakness for split screens and rapid-fire editing. In fairness, that’s one way to cram in more material, and Belkin has lots (and lots) of material to cram in.

A generally thrilling entertainment that's not quite the grand slam you want it to be.

The movie is about hope and courage and fortitude. It's about beating the odds and defying expectations. But Lucy Walker's movie is also about whether the trip was a good idea in the first place. The answer is compellingly complicated.

There’s a lot of Michael Moore’s ambulatory spirit in this film, which the comedian Jeff Stinson directed. There’s also a lot of the damning comedic commentary that made Rock’s old HBO series so urgent.

Presumed Innocent is interesting to the extent that it goes beyond the usual whodunit and courtroom drama formulas and shows how nobody really has clean hands. [27 July 1990, p.29P]

It's pure plastic product from plot line to the pro forma 3-D to the tidy moral lessons - ersatz family entertainment as disposable as it is diverting. It made me want to go read a book.

Jolie does not dwell on the atrocities, though a horrifyingly ironic battle scene near the end contains some gruesome imagery.

ParaNorman is supposedly for kids, but it's really aimed at their snarky older brothers, and it illustrates the limits of the new family creepshows.

Watts’s insistence on pursuing in secret the truth about her son, as opposed to asking him simple questions outright, doesn’t quite track. The questions echo long after the credits roll — which is either brilliant or maddening, depending on who you ask.

Knappenberger can’t paint his subject as an imperfect human being because Swartz simply means too much to too many people right now. He’s a focal point for social and political change, with communal grief as its engine.

The film concerns itself more with beauty shots of the region’s rugged, intimidating vastness than with “Backdraft”-rivaling imagery of combustion as art.

It has been said before but it’s worth saying again: Gore Vidal was born to the toga, even if he never actually wore one.

It’s noted that General Tso himself was a guardian of Chinese tradition and would himself shudder at what the dish named for him has become. On the other hand, what does “authenticity” even mean when it comes to cuisine that has assimilated into another culture along with the people who make it? The best food — the kind we want again and again — always tastes like home. Wherever that is.

Reed follows the proceedings as they happen and builds the suspense of a top-notch courtroom drama.

In more ways than one, Mark Wexler gets the release he's seeking.

So forget about taking anyone under 12. But if you want to see what a benign demon looks like when he's eating nachos and unwinding to Al Green, this is the movie for you.

Violette demonstrates how suffering produces great art, and that the artist isn’t the only one who suffers for it.

There are the serious Coen brothers movies, like “No Country for Old Men” and, um, “A Serious Man,” and there are the not-so-serious ones. Hail, Caesar! is the opposite of their serious ones, and it is delightful.

Immense, mystical, and deranged beyond immediate comprehension, Ilya Khrzhanovsky's 4 is an apocalyptic allegory of Mother Russia and its current state of squalid exhaustion.

A fresh perspective on one of the world’s longest conflicts.

The Color Purple ultimately works far better in pieces than as a whole. Considering those pieces contain some of the best moments I’ve seen in 2023, I’m able to put my concerns aside as a mildly nagging uncertainty.

There is no continuity in narrative or character and it’s all shot in an elliptical, heavily stylized, gaudily lit (much of it looks like it’s shot through an algae-filmed aquarium) collage.

Across the board, the performances testify, often hilariously, to the pain these characters feel and inflict but are incapable of expressing.

At its heart, this is a film about sisterhood.

The final scenes deliver a payoff worthy of the film's scrappy optimism, but that may not be the reason you walk out of the theater on a cloud. It's the sight of a character coming rapturously into her own at the same time as the actress playing her.

Campos really doesn’t need to tack on such heavy-handed irony as the scene near the end of a disconsolate woman eating ice cream and singing along with the theme song of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”

Heymann's film was originally a six-part series for Israeli TV. The feature he and his crew have made smoothly truncates those three hours into a rich, discretely damning 85-minute portrait of intolerance.

All Abrams wants to do is give us a great ride while holding firm to our longstanding emotional investment in these characters.

Full of energy and attitude, it’s the sort of movie that likes to startle, if not necessarily shock. No wonder Dope was an audience favorite at Sundance last winter.

New rule: All Disneynature films must be narrated by Tina Fey.

Working from a script by Will Tracy, Lanthimos creates a realistic ridiculousness, and trusts his leads to walk the tightrope with him.

As Altman misfires go, Brewster McCloud is one of the better ones. [25 Jul 2010, p.12]

Has a pleasantly freewheeling, European art film feel to it, a welcome reminder of the New Hollywood of the '70s. [04 Sep 2005]

These are some of the questions raised and left on the table in the fascinating but frustratingly murky Author: The JT Leroy Story, a documentary by Jeff Feuerzeig that’s worth seeing if only to argue with the movie and with yourself.

Hardly a consistent piece of work, but even when it falls apart toward the end in a mess of bad acting and amazingly youthful pretentiousness, you may find it hard to look away. Handmade and helpless, it's nevertheless the real deal, an artful blurt of sensitivity and rage.

Kendrick gives a truly bad performance here - she's a self-conscious actress playing a self-conscious person and getting her signals all mixed up - and it's unclear whether she has been hung out to dry by her director or if it's just that the character makes no sense whatsoever.

There's a thin line, though, between honoring what came before you and replicating it, and Super 8 occasionally wobbles over that line into predictability.

War Horse is the best film of the year. The year, unfortunately, is 1942.

The Aristocrats -- the movie, not the joke -- is a working demonstration of the pleasures of the profane.

In the end, the sparse dialogue and lengthy scenes make the film feel as leaden and listless as Juan's sputtering engine.

Until it spins manically out of control in the last act, Easy A is a charmer: a high school satire with a lethally sharp script and a big, smart, adorable star performance from Emma Stone.

An opportunity to capture on film a unique cultural enclave is reduced to a Hollywood pastiche.

El Camino is enjoyable as a kind of epilogue to “Breaking Bad.” It’s unnecessary, but it’s good enough to offer two solid hours of pleasure to anyone who loved the mother ship.

A subtly comic, ultimately moving film about modern adult relationships.

In reality, it's messy in the way that life is, and with a rare and welcome obstreperousness.

The hidden message of The Oath is so inescapable as to be Shakespearean: Character will out.

Priceless is a bauble - an art-house diamond made of paste that somehow still gives you good glimmer for the money.

Unfortunately, there's never a moment where you can't see Anderson and his co-writer, Will Conroy, yanking on the strings.

Metz is another artist more interested in war's side effects than combat itself, although he and his crew are embedded for battle.

An amiable if not especially urgent celebration of the life and work of Wayne White.

Acute and skillfully made, Candyman is also pointedly political.

Because its subjects are so driven and so talented, First Position, which is about ballet, is more gripping than the norm.

The screenplay, by directors Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley and co-writer Michael Gilio, tries to evoke the feeling that “D&D: HAT” is being written on the fly as the movie unfolds. While their attempt is valiant, it takes away from the task of creating a world that we’ll want to revisit or see again (you know there will be sequels).

Refn's direction in Pusher exhibits an uncanny prescience for techniques that would peak a decade later as reality TV -- low-budget, digital video; the use of a tipsy, peripatetic camera; and a wide-angle lens to engulf all the action.

Visually, this translates into thrilling action sequences of lone knife-wielders hewing down ranks of adversaries with balletic precision. If preserving this means sacrificing a scruple or two, it’s worth the trade.

If Gimme Danger never quite solves the secret of Iggy’s onstage atavism — how he pushed the myth of sheer, unhinged rock ’n’ roll abandon until he embodied it better (or worse) than anyone else, ever — it reminds us of when he was, verily, the velociraptor of popular music.

This is a time travel fable that feeds the heart as much as the brain, tipping its hat to sci-fi favorites as well as masters of animation from Walt Disney to Hayao Miyazaki. It’s an imaginative treat.

This charming, bittersweet 90-minute monologue consists of the actor telling tales of his childhood and early years, when he was an ugly duckling from an uglier family. The anecdotes are bruisingly funny and delivered with clarity and light mockery.

A charming, damning portrait that has been stinging audiences in the Czech Republic since its 2006 release. In any language, what the movie says about surviving fascism by rolling with it speaks loud and clear.

Scorsese and his team of Grade A talents are working on an operatic scale here, and like many operas, this is long, overwrought, sprawling, and more than frequently brilliant. It also hits just enough discordant notes to keep it from greatness.

Has more ambition than the usual serial killer film, but curiously less urgency.

It's not afraid to play cornball when it isn't playing baseball, but The Rookie gets away with it.

The movie's strength is its refusal to offer easy answers.

Made of a serene dynamite that's all but unknown to American film audiences.

The film makes more apparent than ever that Howard is quite underrated as a filmmaker, possibly because he's been hidden in full view in the mainstream for so long.

Slow West doesn’t really go anywhere we haven’t been, but because Maclean is discovering the genre for the first time, we see through his fresh yet jaundiced eyes.

It’s a long, jangling, melodious soak, rich with backstage incident and wall-to-wall hits.

Much of the horror in Midsommar unfolds in bright sunlight; it’s the star who really takes us into the dark.