The real deal, an often awkward but nonetheless terrifically compelling high-stakes human drama.

The best armchair holiday going - the cast is lovely to behold and the plot dips in and out of the arrondissements with panache. You almost don’t mind that none of it adds up to terribly much.

Seeing Superman save, and work with, more than just white people is refreshing, but it really struck a nerve with fans who rely only on hearsay. Gunn doesn’t care if you’re offended; he’s too busy showing us a good time. “Superman” is a surprisingly entertaining reboot.

The movie dreamily conjures up the outlaw's last months, and it's gorgeous, but long, cumbersome, and slightly shallow.

You needn’t actually see Fracture to know that if the charge is acting that winks, these two are guilty.

This is the kind of tastefully poignant drama that asks its audience to confront taboos and then pats them on the back for doing so.

Over-stylized and overly re-enacted documentary.

Another problem with “Inequality” is that it offers nothing new or surprising.

This is challenging, almost cerebral horror, infrequently indulging obvious scares when deeper-set ones lurk below.

If anyone is capable of pulling off a deviled screwball with cheeky panache, it's de la Iglesia, who's one of the world's great nutty directors yet to find the American following he so richly deserves.

The idea that documentarian Jeffrey Radice would make the episode both the hook and the opener for his film is to be expected — it’s an attention-grabbing story. But a hook is all it is.

The new movie is tart and weightless, and it entertains without leaving a mark. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but at 85 minutes, The Valet at times feels like a blueprint for a farce rather than the farce itself.

As a depiction of extralegal activity, 12 O’Clock Boys is eye-opening but sometimes needlessly ambiguous.

It's raucous and loud as hell; the hyperactive editing could trigger grand mal seizures.

Norton is unapologetic and unflappable in his part. Slimy and vaguely nerdy, he's become the thinking man's thug, even if this character's Armani-wear is better tailored than his psychology.

The actors give it their best, Thomsen and Werlinder in particular.

Achingly slow, at times bleak and, in the end, frustratingly and regrettably, rather pointless.

Amazingly, no one seems steeped in the salubrious self-explication of therapy. They just sound like very good storytellers.

Above all, it’s a meditation on art and creativity that’s by turns earnest, troubled, sentimental, and middlebrow. It’s a big, glossy affair that somehow feels rather small.

The crassly funny, not entirely irrelevant comedy Neighbors represents something of a watershed: the moment when all those Judd Apatow bad boys tremble on the edge of maturity, look back, and see the soulless face of a younger generation gaining on them. The face belongs to Zac Efron.

This War/Dance is among the most affecting films I've seen all year; it cuts to the core of being and gives individual faces to sorrow and to hope.

Jude is a modernized version of Hardy, but a handsome, fluid and red-blooded one that has no difficulty finding correlatives to the prejudice and hatred of wit and spirit against which Hardy, in his gimlet-eyed way, so passionately attacked. [25 Oct 1996]

Noah is equal parts ridiculous and magnificent, a showman’s folly and a madman’s epic.

Crimes of the Future works better as sort-of treatise than sort-of thriller. It’s a paradoxical thing to say about a filmmaker as intensely visual as Cronenberg, but his ideas are even more shocking than his images.

Nicolas Cage has had one of the stranger careers in Hollywood history. Considering Hollywood history, that’s saying something. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, with its splendidly winking title, trades on that strangeness.

Less a straight doc than a psycho-cinematic inquiry into unknown territory, it’s really something to see. Whether it’s something to believe is another matter.

It’s fiery. It’s big. It’s deafening. It’s dull.

Most crucially, Barrymore encourages Page to just let herself go. The sight of her making her way up residential streets in a pair of Barbie roller skates or screaming “Marco’’ in a game of Marco Polo is simply joyful.

Far from contrived, the triangle that “Zachariah” sketches among the last three folks on earth is all too human.

There's an honest, unfiltered quality to what you see and hear.

Gorgeously shot (by Lee Hyung Duk) and well worth seeing for Jeon's deceptively simple performance. Unlike its heroine, though, it gets away without a scratch.

Writer-director Im Sang Soo's coolly stylized political satire doesn't provide a lot of answers, unfortunately, but it does show how the future of a nation might turn on a few drunken insults thrown around at a high-level dinner party.

The movie doesn't exactly argue anything. It's mostly a collection of scenes and footage, directed by Losier in plumes of abstraction and unified by Megson's voice-over.

Shane Carruth's extraordinary work of shoestring speculation throws you into a deep ocean of techno-jargon and lets you dog-paddle or sink like a stone.

Duvauchelle is actually the best thing in the movie.

Real satire must be savage, and Four Lions, for all its daring, finally doesn't dare enough.

Despite the fine acting, Rustin is still a standard-issue biopic that traffics in the expected tropes. It’s the film’s perspective that elevates it, as no major movie has witnessed this era through the eyes of a gay man. I did find myself wishing it were a bit grittier; there’s a level of optimism flowing through the film that threatens to dilute some of its darker elements.

The actor is magnificent -- ravaged, desperate, aware -- and no more so than in a scene toward the end when Bob's cardsharp cool finally breaks. It's a risky scene, the one note of corn, but Nolte brings it home. Too bad the movie doesn't.

It epitomizes the kind of high-profile bloodshed we now expect to herald the hazy, lazy, blockbuster-fixated days of summer.

The chief weakness in the movement, and in the film as well, is Nora herself. Played sweetly by Leuenberger, Nora is endearing but hardly embodies the spirit of her Ibsen namesake.

Moon might be a once-in-a-lifetime experience for fans of Sam Rockwell. Will there ever be more of him in one movie than there is here?

A clever and heartfelt comedy-drama that remains aloft as long as it retains its sense of humor; when the going gets serious, the dialogue turns therapeutic and heavy. Still, it’s a decent debut and an ambitious attempt to juggle tones.

The Captain pretends to be a serious movie about the banality of evil; sometimes, despite itself, it is.

Predictable but still keeps you laughing along the way.

Meier’s soft touch with the offbeat material is surprisingly mature, to the point of maybe being a bit too reserved.

The result is an extended home movie that is also a sociological experiment.

The film is a shrine to a hardy subculture, its people, and the animals they love. Long may they run.

Cameron’s staging of action sequences remains unparalleled, and that buys some goodwill, but by the end of the movie, I was left with Peggy’s Lee’s immortal question: “Is that all there is?”

I left as frustrated as that band teacher is at the beginning of the movie. Enough with these meek, banal exercises, David Gordon Green. Hit me with the sledgehammer in your heart.

Cronenberg hasn't so much filmed Naked Lunch as tamed it, turned it into entertainment, with oozy rubber bugs, big and little, that look left over from David Lynch's movie of "Dune," or the intergalactic dive from "Star Wars." [10 Jan 1992]

It turns the nerve-fraying Cuban missile crisis into a big pop myth with the grip of a vise.

Juxtaposes slice-of-life tales with hints of worldly conflict to delightfully comic effect.

It's a unique trip that flirts with hokeyness at the surface but that grows more compelling, awe-inspiring, and tragic the deeper you go.

It's still Black's franchise, though. And part of the problem with this sequel is how little it lets its star just riff with silly abandon, as he did throughout the original.

The first step in getting beyond preaching to the converted is letting the other side show how wrong it might be.

Robot & Frank isn't sure whether it's a comedy or drama, buddy movie or sci-fi fantasy, family melodrama or social satire.

The acting is playful aces all around: Fillion gives good exhausted incredulity, Banks gives good virginal idiocy, and Rooker gives great conflicted monster arrogance even before the aliens get him.

Lisa Krueger's "Manny & Lo" is the most original and unexpected family-values film of the year. [09 Aug 1996, p.C8]

After a point, we’re left wondering whether we’re watching a character study or caricature. Either way, the portrait gradually morphs from intriguing to tedious.

This is not “Death of a Salesman’’ or “Save the Tiger’’ (in the case of the latter, thank God). But how refreshing to see a movie about a mother’s struggles that doesn’t culminate in her lying on her back to make ends meet.

Fiennes's energy gets the film over the finish line.

The new film is a return to form after that sagging midsection, and the coterie of Hartley admirers still paying attention will find frustrations, rewards, a few darkly intelligent laughs, and an ending that unexpectedly haunts.

Sincerity turns out to be the default tone for Brigsby Bear, making this indie’s odd concept of an accidental man-child wrapped up in a Teddy Ruxpin fantasy world feel odder still in the execution.

At first glance, Running on Empty seems a humane, if rickety, left-wing tearjerker, with strong acting propping up a weak script. It takes a second glance to get at what's really interesting about the film - its subtext. [30 Sep 1988, p.33]

A so-so documentary about another fascinating, underreported piece of Harlem history.

I don’t mean it as a cheap shot, but Nocturnal Animals is very like an exquisitely rendered window display. It’s something at which you pause and peer into and catch your breath — and then move on.

The film isn't especially deep, but it's mostly delightful.

Argott and Joyce subordinate these more pressing political questions to a mirror-box exploration of the nature of truth and the unfathomable secrets of the soul. As such it is thoughtful, sometimes ingenious, but you can’t help thinking that they missed the real story.

This stuff is clever, in the reflexively satirical, self-aware way that many animated films are. It's not until the dog is accidentally shipped off to New York City that the movie lets you in on an altogether more interesting idea: It doesn't want to be that cool.

Most of the color and zest among the movie's many talking heads comes from the refreshingly irreverent opera director Jonathan Miller.

Say this for Auteuil: He has a sense of movie history. The closing credits include the equivalent of an Easter egg for lovers of film and especially for lovers of French film.

T2 Trainspotting wears out its welcome slowly, like a group of old men running out of stories to tell in an afternoon pub.

[A] crass, patchy, often shamelessly funny farce.

Cumming’s performance, or presentation, is at once casual and assured, which makes it all the more compelling.

A stunningly well-acted drama for grown-ups.

It's as much a satire as a mystery, a film as much about art as it is about faith.

The movie makes the case that the best American filmmakers may be the uncelebrated ones who helplessly turn life into art simply as a means to get out of bed every day.

Adrian Lyne pulls out more manipulative nonsense than Machiavelli ever thought of. Lyne stops at nothing to provoke artificial sentimental feelings from the audience. Like the movie itself, the audience's reaction is only skin deep. [18 Sep 1987, p.58]

Steel City may be the only movie released this year that's so observant you can hear what the characters AREN'T saying.

The movie feels incomplete and uncentered. It's like a grand magazine profile that's all reportage and absolutely no prose.

Only loosely concerned with behind-the-scenes gossip and is squarely focused on the nature of Fellini's insatiability.

Needs less down-to-earth flavor and more unearthly force.

One last thought: Fahrenheit 9/11 is many things, but for pity's sake let's not call it a documentary.

It's not quite as jolting as the high-impact original, but it's got enough explosiveness to blow away the other sequels in this summer's parade of high-body-count blockbusters. [4 July 1990, p.29]

If Blaze is a bit mushy, it's also more than skin deep. It's the kind of film whose shortcomings are easy to minimize. It's a muted last hurrah for a departed and worthy brand of populism, but a hurrah all the same. [13 Dec 1989, p.66P]

Bleak and beautiful, harrowing yet also curiously stirring, The Wall (“Die Wand”) is a stunning tale of isolation and survival that unfolds in a wild and silent world.

At a time when financial regulations have been gutted, stock market indexes reel, and trade wars threaten, Jed Rothstein’s slick and revealing documentary The China Hustle should only add to the anxiety and gloom.

There are unexpected things in “Magician,” such as Puck’s presence. Welles’s first screen test, from 1937, and an appearance on “I Love Lucy” are others. But even the expected things, such as the numerous Welles clips, are consistently unexpected.

As franchise reboots go, the new Halloween is top shelf. Jamie Lee Curtis returns with a vengeance to the role of Laurie Strode.

I can't pretend to know fully what Charlie Kaufman is up to in Synecdoche, New York, with all the doubled characters, dreamy reenactments, comical minutiae, and personal unhappiness. But I got a great deal of pleasure out of watching him mount his fantasia about an artist suffering not simply for his art, but because of it.

More than any other teen movie of recent memory, Edge of Seventeen captures the uncertainty, awkwardness, and pains of adolescence, further complicated when grappling with questions of sexual identity. [02 Jul 1999]

Is, in its way, an apolitical comedy about politics. Or at least a naïve one, since those weapons likely eventually made their way into the hands of Al Qaeda.

Unfortunately, though, Rossato-Bennett and Cohen seem to think that the technique is a panacea. In fact, it is not even original, as music therapy in nursing homes has been around for some time.

This adaptation feels like a soap opera made by someone who has seen too much late-stage Woody Allen and flounders with the self-importance of a director unable to read either text or city.

Wilson gives a performance that in its own way is as striking as Gleeson’s.

The whole thing ends with an urgent plea to visit the movie's site, which is partially devoted to The Issues, which involve such topics as "overmedication," "overtreatment," and "reimbursement."

The Armstrong Lie is one for the time capsule, because it preserves for future generations a very particular modern response to scandal: confession without remorse.

A sociopolitical prankumentary in which the prank blows up in the filmmaker's face, exploding-cigar style.