There's a misery in Fassbender that's spellbinding. I rolled my eyes for most of Shame. But never at him. That face tells the story of addiction: the joylessness of sex.

All the gears, in fact, are shamelessly visible, yet they lock smoothly and resonantly into place. If Akeelah and the Bee is a generic, well-oiled commercial contraption, it is the first to credibly dramatize the plight of a truly gifted, poor black child.

His abiding interest is in the ways that human beings work together, his famous fly-on-the-wall shooting style revealing the constant struggle to connect and create. Wiseman's are the movies to show to the aliens when they arrive.

Brick is Bogart goes to high school, in other words, but that thumbnail description doesn't begin to convey the lasting pleasures of Rian Johnson's directorial debut.

The upshot: The movie develops a distinctively trippy identity.

The addition of Gunn, like the addition of a definite article to the title, means more of the same: a baroquely nasty, flauntingly mean two-plus hours of superhero action that is also (a much greater sin) noisily tedious.

Someone once said about W.C. Fields that he had the rare ability to despise amusingly. I can imagine no greater compliment than to say that Ricky Gervais seems, at his best, like a young Fields.

The movie's sense of inspiration is realistic. It never implies a future of glamour, only hard-won success.

Dunham has been justly praised for her determination in getting Tiny Furniture made, but the movie itself has been overpraised as a result.

While heartfelt and beautifully crafted, Bringing Out the Dead is too freighted with its protagonist's failed savior complex and is surprisingly lacking in primal impact.

A semiserious documentary about a cult of performance art that until recently was never meant to be taken seriously.

Perhaps not the most uproarious of Veber's farces, but entertaining and emotionally satisfying all the same.

If there's nothing here for romantics, there's even less for gourmands. Nettelbeck fails to produce a good food metaphor, let alone an impressive, palate-aching preparation montage

The film sends you home moved and in a tuneful mood.

It's got sharp wit and a wise heart, and as good as it was onstage, it's even better as a movie. [22 Dec 1993, p.33]

Though the narrative of “Marnie” bogs down toward the end, this does not diminish its spell.

Takes your angriest thoughts about urban public transportation and magnifies them into a grubby and rousingly antisocial fantasia on post-communist breakdown and bureaucracy.

The movie struggles to find its shape throughout. Jacobs favors observational moments rather than linear narrative, and that's fine, but you still sense he's drifting toward a point that never quite coheres.

Vanessa Gould’s charming and soulful documentary Obit should convince the doubters and cheer those who already know. As someone who takes great pleasure in both reading and writing valedictions to the recently deceased, I can personally attest that the movie’s dead on.

The question that should be asked is whether Woody Allen has made a good movie this time out, and the honest answer is "almost."

At its best, Still Alice is a moving inquisition into the emotions and memories and connections that make us us and how we might cope when they’re taken away with slow, impersonal cruelty.

Though at times Siddharth can resemble a well-photographed report on India’s social and economic ills, Mehta subtly employs different styles to sustain the poetry, poignancy, and drama.

With this entertaining, funny, and informative movie, McKenzie can add documentary filmmaker to his CV. I doubt it will convince anyone who has bought into the legends of cryptocurrency to change their outlook, but skeptics will definitely get a kick out of this three year journey, which started during the pandemic in 2020.

There's enchanting delicacy and irresistible quirkiness in Anthony Minghella's allegory of grief. And humane comedy, too, in this fable about a woman flattened by inconsolable loss, then rejoining the world. [24 May 1991]

According to the closing credits, My Entire High School was six years in the making and is clearly something that Shaw felt he had to get out of his system with his feature film-directing debut. Mission accomplished, and very stylishly, too.

The movie feels exhaustive in its loaded 90-something minutes, showing and telling us much while leaving the meaning of the tangles and twists in this family open to interpretation. For once, the tip of the iceberg is enough.

Serves up enough action and passion to stay afloat, but at the end of the day it's just not the perfect ride those earlier films were.

Despicable Me has enough visual novelty and high spirits to keep the kiddies diverted and just enough wit to placate the parents.

The Silence is a victim of over-plotting, clunky narrative, gratuitous stylization, and too many points of view. When any character quirk or story turn shows promise, depend on some ill-considered directorial decision to put a stop to it.

Holding it all together is his voice-over narration: always intelligent and thoughtful, sometimes wistful, occasionally navel-gazing annoying. Even when annoying, the narration sounds great, thanks to the murmury musicality of Salles’s Portuguese.

Poitras includes screenshots, Zoom sessions, surveillance footage, even voice mails. The overall effect is both hypnotic and deeply unsettling, like watching a real-life William Gibson novel.

Ultimately, I respected the dramatic destination at which the film arrived, but I kept asking myself if the trip was really necessary. Sometimes you admire a movie more than you like it.

With keen-edged direction by Barbet Schroeder and a Richard Price screenplay loaded with venomous savvy, Kiss of Death is the most high-powered and brutal New York gangster movie since "GoodFellas." [21 Apr 1995, p.41]

What appears at first to be a Euro variation on David Lynch's patented mind games, though, ultimately settles for more conventional pleasures. The movie makes sense, more's the pity, although you may need to see it twice to figure out how.

The new film's not only almost double the length of the original, it's four times as ambitious - a sprawling, surrealist, ultimately disturbing portrait of a society lurching uncertainly toward democracy. What's really on trial in this movie? Just the Russian soul.

It’s a sly, twisty little chiller, not ashamed of its B-movie bona fides and better for it.

The Batman doesn’t plod, but it sure lacks a spring in its cinematic step.

The film has an ending that anyone who has watched a movie in the last 15 years will see coming half an hour into the film. But even with that, the weight of the performances from Yu Nan and Bater is enough to make for a satisfying, if uneven, film.

The movie charts its nine-game winning streak and post-season. If there's a problem, it's that there are too few moments like that one with Chavis in the locker room.

Darker, leaner, less expansive , and meaner, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is all business, and it casts a spell utterly unlike the first four films.

Like “An Inconvenient Truth” (2006), the Oscar-winning film about climate change, it is a call to action. As a screed, it builds a credible, engaging argument, presenting evidence, statistics, talking-head testimony, whimsical charts, poignant personal stories, and animated illustrations of digestive processes to make its case.

The most interesting thing about Smashed is the way Kate, the movie's alcoholic schoolteacher, never looks drunk - at least, not the way drunk people do in the movies.

It doesn't take its ideas or its audience far enough. The result is a humanist potboiler.

A rarity among modern movies: a coming-of-age tale without cliche or sentimentality. Bolstered by a luminous lead performance from Lauren Ambrose.

Because Manito is really just an opera without the violins or Viking hats, you probably don't need to have everything spelled out. Its Spanish-English script is secondary to the universal language and timeless drama of family, community, dreams made and dreams dashed.

These children are indeed the faces of war. It's just harder to recognize them because they're the ones someone cared enough to save.

Looks and feels like someone else's better-made schlock.

The Boss of It All finds the common ground between business and acting -- panicky improvisation -- and wonders whether applause or an executive comp package is the greater reward.

The most interesting part of this lively, likable documentary is the journey.

The film that director Morten Tyldum has made from Hodges’s book is a shinier, less trustworthy thing, but it’s ripping old-school Oscar bait, and if it sends moviegoers off to check the facts, all the better.

The movie's masterstroke is to avoid interviewing the usual anti-globalist suspects and let solid, hard-working middle Americans speak.

Married to the Mob is a funny yard sale of a film about regeneration in a junked-up America. [19 Aug 1988]

If you want to take the kids to a cockle-warming tale of humans and computer-generated critters, do yourself a favor: Skip the singing rodents and head for the baby Loch Ness Monster in The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep.

Plá’s comedy is black, but his moral position isn’t black and white.

Despite the lack of an especially defined narrative arc, the people are what make the movie -- as they should in a tale like this.

Tom Volf’s distinctive and affecting documentary makes plain how much the persona also owed to appearance and intelligence and life history.

Written in wisps and watery double-entendres by Heather McGowan and Niels Mueller, and the movie is so benign that its proceedings are beside the point.

Wacky enough and gadget-driven enough to appeal to bored kids looking for fresh energies.

Give it a chance and you'll probably share the cast's collective impulse to dive in and embrace it.

Green unquestionably has a rare, intermittent knack for rapture.

Haneke has become known as a dour modern master of cinematic pain, and in this movie he scrubs civilization down to the root level.

The film was technically astonishing and yet brazenly simple.

Overall the movie has too many dead spots. And they aren’t necessarily the non-action sequences.

Luca has energy to spare and it’s certainly easy on the eyes, if not as visually outrageous as, say, the recent Coco. The moral lessons — be true to your friends, overcome your fears — are tidy and shopworn, fresh to young audiences but lacking the jolts of originality that make classic Pixar films an all-ages proposition.

Everyone Else is not about hurricanes and earthquakes and knives in the back. It's about private, emotional phenomena: the tiny tremors and imperceptible shifts that bring a couple closer together or drive them apart, almost without their noticing.

The movie clips are luscious, as you'd expect, and Cardiff's own "home movies," shot on various movie sets with a 16mm camera, catch the gods during downtime.

Comes on as both a rebuke to male vanity and a chic metaphor for midlife panic.

The Menu might make you crave a hamburger or think twice before boarding a ferry to a private island with no cell service. But once the loose ends are tied up and the credits roll, it leaves you less than satisfied.

Holes functions as a film, but just barely: Readers familiar with the book may negotiate the film's antic crosscutting, but newbies will need to pop a Dramamine before the lights dim.

As ridiculous German suspense dramas go, you could do worse than Jerichow.

Just as Anspaugh and Pizzo pushed all the obvious buttons with their high school basketballers in "Hoosiers," so they turn Rudy into the "Rocky" of South Bend. It may be that Rudy's crowning piece of perseverance consisted of his dogging Anspaugh and Pizzo to film his story. It must be a comfort to Hoosiers Larry Bird and Don Mattingly to know that when the time comes for their biofilms, Anspaugh and Pizzo are in the phone book. [13 Oct 1993, p.75]

The Big Lebowski isn't quite up to the level of the Coen brothers' best films - "Miller's Crossing," "Fargo" and "Barton Fink." But second-level Coen brothers can be funnier than first-level almost everybody else. [6 March 1998, p.D5]

Like its protagonist, the movie is smart, soulless, glib, and utterly charming -- just the thing to warm up a movie season that's been late to bloom.

Though the plot gets a tad thin toward the end, “Heretic” does a good job of pelting us with uncomfortable questions.

Lowery’s update turns out to be one of the summer’s best surprises, a gorgeous, magical reworking that deftly strikes that once-elusive balance between contemporary and quaint.

This is a movie from the past that's also eerily of a piece with the film culture of now and tomorrow.

Drawing on the memories of family members, friends, and collaborators, and tapping into a trove of archival material, including tapes of James’s raucous, raunchy live shows, Jenkins keeps pace with his subject’s breakneck progress. Along the way James encounters opportunities that are missed or exploited and tragedies that are averted or courted. He transforms hard times into artistic success, and squanders success in debauchery.

The script, by JT Mollner, does an excellent job streamlining King’s book.

Looks steam-cleaned, and that can't be right.

Despite Aniston's hard work, Good Girl could be better.

The film is often at odds with itself as a sincere work of romantic comedy, as Wilder's sometimes were, too. Nonetheless, it's determined to keep Clooney's considerable comedic skills front and center. He's never been looser, sexier, or more antic.

There's a thin line between the subtle and the dramatically inert, and Intimate Strangers pitches a tent on it.

Despite its contradictions, the film stayed with me after I left the theater. It's frivolous. But it's also powerfully surreal.

It’s a harsh experience, at times engrossing, at other times stiff and unconvincing, but it asks a necessary question: What happens to the country’s whites after white rule is gone?

The documentary nicely mixes vintage news footage and photographs, talking-head interviews with journalists and Koch associates, and lots (and lots) of Koch.

First and foremost, Good Will Hunting is a film riding young, exuberant energies.

No Way Home is overlong and its various temporal loop-the-loops start to wear out their welcome...All that said, there’s an imaginativeness to No Way Home, along with a ton of energy, that makes the viewer cut it a lot of slack.

The imaginative, touching, and dizzyingly animated Ralph Breaks the Internet is a sequel with a rich, broad vision that addresses all of these issues faster than you can say Fix-It Felix.

It's a lovely dream that, in the end, feels too dreamlike. The director coaxes an intentionally passive performance from his daughter Marie, so that Nannerl's eventual waking to cold patriarchal reality doesn't sting as it might.

Mad Dog and Glory is the funniest and most original studio comedy since "White Men Can't Jump." What makes it fun is its ability to find new ways to do old things. [5 Mar 1993, p.61]

A one-trick action thriller that feels like a poor cousin of an episode of ''24." Call it ''12."

Trumbo never wavered in his belief that his persecution was only a horrible symptom. He understood the real victim of blacklist America was America itself.

Anyone interested in Buddhism and the chance to see the high-altitude, deep-spirited landscapes of Bhutan from a movie theater seat is herewith directed to Travellers and Magicians.

Ripe, ferociously acted comic drama.

Dolls is an art film, and a languid, inexplicably haunting one at that.

The movie has a field day with thousands of airborne lanterns, a troop of Neanderthal thugs (one is a mime), some surprisingly fleet camerawork, and good editing. I can't think of a cartoon more confident about how to use jump cuts for comedy. Those senses of cleverness and innovation merely underscore how shopworn the rest of this movie is.

The images are meant to accumulate shame, and they do. But they also might be too much.

The fact is that this is a pretty good summer-kablooie movie, and Cruise is better than pretty good in it.